Football Disasters and Pilgrimage: Commemoration through Religious and Non-Religious Ritual and Materiality (original) (raw)
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The modern era can be called «the age of sports», because the latter has taken a prominent place in society. It is no accident that it is a phenomenon of civilized life, one of the important elements of the system of values of modern culture, and in some cases even a mirror of social life. Sports and physical culture are important elements of modern society, which have enormous potential for a positive impact not only on health, physical perfection, but also on the spiritual world, on human culture, on its outlook, emotions, moral principles, aesthetic preferences. as well as relationships between people, because sport is a cultural practice. According to Fed' V.A.,-«cultural practices express worldview traditions in such modes of being as space, time, movement, becoming, and verify cultural creativity in materialization, material subjectivity, artifacts as the object and spiritual» body «of culture» [3, pp. 10-16]. After the last elections to the Ukrainian Parliament, Volodymyr Borodyanskyi, Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports of Ukraine, said: «We are accustomed to regard sport as a sport, but it is part of the culture, a model of behavior and an element of inclusion in society» [1]. This thesis clearly emphasizes the above. In the study of sports, the analytical focus is on symbols. Both athletes and spectators express some symbolism, hold beliefs, and practice sports-related rituals [4]. In the XX century. There was considerable support for the claim that the sport was at least quasi-religious. It is often associated with certain rites or rituals. There are even theories that propose ritual as the basis of the origin of physical culture and sport-in particular, Reynack's theory or A. Gutt-Man's concept is outlined in his book, «From Ritual to Record.» We will not go into the archives of historical details, but let us recall that the Olympic competitions (games) of Ancient Greece were also part of religious activities. But in the subject of this report, we would like to focus on one of the most popular sports-soccer (soccer). Football is the second most popular sport in the world after athletics (Association for the promotion of the international movement «Sport for All»). With more than three billion followers in the world, it has more followers than Christianity-the largest religion in the world with 2.2 billion followers (according to recent data, there are now 2.1 billion Christians in the world (World Popula tion Clock)). This stunning statistic justifies the assumption that football has a huge impact on people's social life. If one researched thoroughly, or at least closely followed, football, he would have to draw an analogy with religion or ask the question: «is football at least a quasi
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On March 11, 2012, Japan remembered the great suffering of the tsunami disaster that struck Tohoku district (northeastern area) a year before. Over one hundred memorial events were conducted by various groups: local communities, churches, temples, and volunteer groups as well as by the government. The nation stopped to observe minutes of silence at 2:46 pm, the time that the earthquake occurred off the Tohoku coastal area. It seemed that a sense of a community that shared particular social norms and values had appeared through these collective symbolic actions and narratives toward the dead. However, such rituals and narratives have not been given much attention as a subject of both disaster and ritual studies. Therefore, this paper attempts to depict the characteristics of post--disaster rituals including both natural and man--made disaster by using data collected from fieldwork and media coverage. As Fukuda (2011) have suggested from the diachronic observation of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Memorial Ceremonies, post--disaster rituals play crucial roles to reconstruct social meanings and collective memories of the catastrophic experience, by creating a sense of communality on local, national, and global levels. From the qualitative data of post--disaster rituals of major disasters in contemporary Japan, I would like to propose it as an important subject for interdisciplinary studies including disaster and religious studies that gives a sense of meaning and direction to our social life.
Sport and Religion: Rituals of Everyday Life
in Richard D. Hecht Vincent Biondo III (eds), Religion & Everyday Life and Culture, Praeger, 2010, Vol. 3, pp. 915-943. Reprinted in in Richard D. Hecht and Vincent F. Biondo III (eds), Religion and Culture: Contemporary Practices and Perspectives, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2012, pp. 307-326.
At first glance sport and religion appear to have little in common, apart from being perennial human activities. Yet there are at least five ways in which sport and religion are deeply interrelated: first, it can be demonstrated that in pre-modern societies ritualized sport was very often part of worship of the gods; second, altered states of consciousness attained during sport have frequently been compared to religious or mystical experiences (for example, where a sense of oneness with the universe is felt, or a loss of ego-consciousness); third, some modern sporting champions have professed religious faith and attributed their success to divine power; fourth, the devotion of fans to sporting teams and individual “stars” resembles religious fervour; fifth and final, in the modern West sport has become a functional equivalent of religion (or an actual religion) for some people. The academic study of sport and religion has focused on the centrality of ritual in both phenomena for multiple reasons. Sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that religion was, at a fundamental level, concerned with the classification of the world into two categories, the sacred and the profane. Rituals enacted these categories and revealed the deepest concerns of the community. Further, ritual (both traditional and modern) may involve apparently profane activities from everyday life, such as tea-drinking and cleaning. It is clear that Durkheim’s interpretation of religion, and the categories of sacred and profane, can be applied to phenomena other than religion. Before considering the relationship between sport and religion in two case studies, the ancient Olympic Games and Japanese sumo wrestling, it is necessary to observe that the modern West acknowledges a diversity of “ultimate concerns” among its citizens. In a variegated culture without a unifying religious, civil, or cultural metanarrative, individuals are free to attribute absolute significance to a range of activities, including sport, rock music, film and television, art, family, and politics. Sport is religion for some, but not for others.
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