Visions of a better world: Football in the Cameroonian social imagination.
Item
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Title
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Visions of a better world: Football in the Cameroonian social imagination.
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Identifier
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AAI3047272
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identifier
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3047272
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Creator
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Vidacs, Beata.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Vincent Crapanzano
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural
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Abstract
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This is a study of aspects of the postcolonial Cameroonian social imagination focusing on the practice of and discourses surrounding football (soccer). Although football reflects and reproduces the country's historically conditioned social realities, imbuing it with symbolic meanings its practitioners and spectators also posit it as an ethos, and articulate moral visions of a better world where justice, equity and merit prevail. The dissertation examines Cameroonian ideas about the possibilities for efficacious action, nationalism and ethnicity, the nature of good government, and Cameroon's relationship to France, the former colonizer and ultimately to the West.;An ethnography of the daily struggles of a Third Division team to overcome the quotidian realities of life in the postcolony suggests that these efforts are driven by the game's ethos and its perceived transformative potential, and that by insisting on a proper way of doing things, football people uphold the ethos of the sport and in the very negation of the realities people face create hope.;On the level of international competitions Cameroonians challenge the government in the name of the nation expressing popular nationalist sentiments, which reject the government's, official nationalist rhetoric, but affirm Cameroon as an entity. Ethnic and nationalist identifications along with pan-Africanist ones constitute a continuum of identities, rather than mutually exclusive categories, that may be situationally invoked.;An analysis of the commentary relating to the French in connection with football shows that Cameroonians often articulate their attitudes to the colonial past through talking about football and these discourses point to past and present constraints that this history imposes on them. At times these discourses are extended to whites in general and, taken as symbolic statements, they bespeak of a larger set of issues concerning worldwide racism and the unequal nature of the world as it is.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
