ABSTRACT
For many, sports can serve as a lens with which to gain useful insight into issues related to identity.1 From an analytical and practical standpoint, they ‘provide people with a sense of difference and a way of classifying themselves and others, whether latitudinally or hierarchically.’2 This is particularly true with respect to Argentina as soccer, or fútbol, has consistently been a focus of popular public discourse with respect to national identity since the first quarter of the twentieth century.3 Perhaps the prevailing dominant work on fútbol and identity politics in Argentina is the scholarship of the late anthropologist Eduardo Archetti, which emphasizes how the sport emerged as a cultural representation and an embodied expression of a hybrid national identity.4 His work, along with that of historian Julio Frydenberg, emphasizes football’s role in the construction of national and local identities during the first three decades of the twentieth century.5 Others have noted the emergence of competing
Rwany Sibaja and Charles Parrish*
Introduction
For many, sports can serve as a lens with which to gain useful insight into issues related to identity.1 From an analytical and practical standpoint, they ‘provide people with a sense of difference and a way of classifying themselves and others, whether latitudinally or hierarchically.’2 This is particularly true with respect to Argentina as soccer, or fútbol, has consistently been a focus of popular public discourse with respect to national identity since the first quarter of the twentieth century.3 Perhaps the prevailing dominant work on fútbol and identity politics in Argentina is the scholarship of the late anthropologist Eduardo Archetti, which emphasizes how the sport emerged as a cultural representation and an embodied expression of a hybrid national identity.4 His work, along with that of historian Julio Frydenberg, emphasizes football’s role in the construction of national and local identities during the first three decades of the twentieth century.5 Others have noted the emergence of competing
philosophies of the creative and spontaneous fútbol criollo and the physical, methodical and defensive-minded anti-fútbol during the 1960s and into the 1980s.6
The former embodied a traditional and authentic version of national identity while the latter represented a more liberal and progressive notion of nationalism modelled after European styles associated with modernity.7 The manner in which the national team, players and coaches have been the focus of intense politicized debates reveals how the discourse over Argentine identity remains unsettled in the twenty-first century.
