The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.
~Eduardo Galeano
The first lecture of Anthropology of the Body course ended with this quote by Eduardo Galeano. While reading this, the third line reminded me of a great article written by Paul Silverstein named ‘Sporting Faith: Islam, Soccer, and the French Nation-State (2000). He examines the practices of the paradoxical alliance between the French nation-state and multinational organisations (mnos) like Nike, Adidas and Reebok, to control Islamic immigrants’ masculinized bodily practices. In this blog, I try to understand how this alliance plays a role in the construction of football identities among Islamic youth in the banlieues in France and how they perform this identity as a global youth culture.
Islam and the French nation-state
Islamic bodily adornment is a subject of debate in France and other countries in Europe. Policymakers and the media debate about how to interpret bodily adornments like headscarves and the burqua: is it ‘an “ostentatious” or “demanding” (and therefore “threatening”) symbol — or a “private” sign of individual religious belonging’ (Silverstein 2000: 26). With the increase of the right-wing ideologies in policies in France, those bodily adornments are framed as disintegrated and opposites of the secular French nation-state and citizenship and are therefore a threat to the society. In this discourse, the body of Islamic citizens is understood ‘to stand in for the transcendental individual subject, and the subject for the society as a whole’ (Silverstein 2000: 27). Therefore, the French government wants to control the bodies of Islamic citizens to aim for integration and secularisation.
One of the government projects to realize those goals are the build of several sports facilities and complex’ for Islamic immigrant youth in the banlieues. So in the 1990’s a lot of football courts and basketball fields were build to entertain Islamic youth and to prevent violence and riots. Those were not the only aims, the projects also focused on keeping away Islamic youth from (extremist) religious and communitarian organisations. Sports, in this case, are used as a ‘privileged remedy for contemporary social dysfunction’ (Silverstein 2000: 34) to construct new moral subjects which embrace secular and therefore French attitudes, like cooperation, fair play, strong work ethic and also individualism and capitalism. ‘Football, in this discourse, is a symbol of France’s “republican” ideology of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” of individualism, democracy, and solidarity‘(Silverstein 2000:36).
Paradoxical alliance
Those government projects were noticed by big multinational organisations like Nike, Adidas and Reebok. Like the French government, the mnos appropriate the bodies and bodily adornment of Islamic youth. For example, a poster in metro stations in Paris shows the Paris Saint Germain football team with the slogan ‘ “Il n’y a pas qu’un Dieu; il y’en a onze” (There is not but one God; there are eleven)’ (Silverstein 2000: 35). On the poster, the ethnic diverse PSG is framed as ‘a team entity rather than individual players, thus seeming to reiterate the organic solidarity deemed necessary for victory in both the spheres of football and society in general’ (Silverstein 2000: 36). Nike’s advertisement is in line with the discourse of the French government; both have opposed Islam to the French society. However, it is incorrect to state that the interests of the governments and the mnos are the same. The mnos sell Paris Saint-Germain as a whole, so sportswear included. In this way, Nike, Adidas or Reebok, transform a conflictual discourse about nationalism and subnational identity — about Islam in France — into a global aesthetic to be written — in the form of PSG jerseys — on (male) immigrant bodies’ (Silverstein 2000: 38).
From Muslim towards world citizen
Despite the effort the nation-state and the mnos put in, the desired integration in the national and global spheres was not fully realized. The banlieuesards were aware of the duplicity in the policies and therefore they often destroyed sports facilities (Silverstein 2000: 43). However, there was not only violent resistance; some juveniles made use of the facilities, but they gave it their own twist. The youth appropriated the sports facilities in the public sphere for their own rules and games, which some policymakers defined as ‘ghetto sports’. More important, ‘the appropriation of public sports spaces involves the demarcation of categories of belonging and local identity’ (Silverstein 2000: 43). Islamic immigrants protect the sport facilities and are hostile against outsiders. Furthermore, the juveniles used the facilities for ethnic or religious purposes which the government tried to prevent, for example the teams were decided by ethnic background or Islamic organisations incorporated the facilities in their practices to foster loyalty for religious or political purposes (Silverstein 2000: 44).
So how about the sportswear the mnos try to promote? According to Silverstein (2000: 45) the clothing style of those juveniles is sportswear. He analyses this by quoting Dick Hebdige (1979) ‘le look Beure (the beur look) borrows from mainstream consumerism and a generalized global youth culture, allying its wearers with contemporary American inner-city gangsters and marking their separation from — if not outright “hate” (haine) for- a republican system that they condemn (in speeches, graffiti, and rap lyrics) as repressive and racist’ (2000: 45). In fact, Islamic youth perform resistance against the French nation-state by wearing sports clothes. We can conclude that the government attempts to control the bodily adornments from Islamic youth in the banlieues have created new forms of belonging at subnational level and the level of global youth culture.
Performance
The overall topic of my blogs is ‘performance of football identity’. How can we understand the case-study by Paul Silverstein in terms of performance? I like to use theories of Bettie (2014) who explains class ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ based on the thoughts of Judith Butler. Bettie (2014: 52) states that there is no such thing as ‘an identity’ or ‘a self’: she states that the self or identity is not natural, it is always constructed and performed. The performance is the identity. However, people have a sense of identity that is fixed and static. Betties explains by stating that constructed identities are institutionalized; there is a fixed element of identity what makes people think they have a fixed ‘identity’ (Bettie 2014: 53).
Bettie distinguishes ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’. Performance, according to Bettie, ‘refers to agency and a conscious attempt at passing’ (2014:52) and performativity ‘on the other hand, refers to the fact that class subjects are the effects of the social structure of class inequality, caught in unconscious displays of cultural capital that are a consequence of class origin or habitus’ (ibid). Identity is never performed or performative; it is always a dual process.
So performance is about agency and performativity about structure and both are important to understand ‘identity’. Now I would like to apply those thoughts on the football identities of Islamic youth in France. Islamic immigrants actively express and therefore perform new categories of belonging and subnational identity in reaction to the government and commercial practices. They oppose against a discourse which portrays them as communitarian, threatening and therefore disintegrated. This discourse frames and constructs ‘the Islamic immigrant’ and has therefore performative influences on identity processes. Both processes come together in Islamic bodily adornments; the sportswear. Islamic youth become, by wearing sportswear, part of a broader, global youth culture which resists mainstream, republican ideologies. The ‘football identity’ of Islamic youth is thus a performance of categories of belonging on local, national and global level and an expression of resistance against mainstream, secular and republic ideologies.
References:
- Bettie, J. (2014) Women without Class- Girls, Race, Identity Oakland, University of California Press.
- Silverstein, P. (2000) ‘Sporting Faith: Islam, Soccer, and the French Nation-State’ Social Text, 18(4), 25-53.
Performances of sport identities 