Paper Presentation III:
Identities
Friday, April 9, 10.30–12.30

Diana Mendes Machado Da Silva, João Paulo França Streapco & Paulo Nascimento
Departments of History and Pedagogy, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

In the second semester of 2005, at the Postgraduate Syllabus of the Social History Department of the School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at University of São Paulo, Brazil, it was given, in its third edition, the discipline “Sociocultural History of Football”. Students of many different areas of Human Sciences had been congregated and had the idea to constitute a group of studies. Considering the plurality of the areas represented by each participant, the collective option was to guaranteeing its interdisciplinary character with the name Interdisciplinary Group of Studies on Football (GIEF, the acronym in Portuguese). The group initiated its meetings in March 2006 and worked, since the beginning, with the premise that football is a “total social phenomenon”, like the general meaning of Mauss (2003), Bourdieu (1983; 1990) and DaMatta (1982). In this direction, the group had separated itself from perspectives that understand the soccer like an ideologies’ vehicle, as “opium of the people” or just one “phenomenon of the cultural industry”.

The interdisciplinary and the diversity of research present at the group had been translated by two central lines of work.  The first one was to trace a chronological panorama of the main quarrels produced on the football inside and outside Brazil, since the 30’s of 20th century, decisivous time for the consolidation of this sport in the country.  This is also an important period for understanding the association between football and national identity, in the context of the authoritarian state under Getúlio Vargas, as well as the birth of chronicle sports. In the second line, we chose subjects in a thematic perspective, that all the members of the group deal in its individual researches, such as: techniques of the body; sport and modernity; the press and Brazilian national identity; culture, race and racism; gift; daily life and sociability. These lines have helped out us work with questions about centrality of football at Brazil in cultural, social and political aspects.