University of Cambridge
"We don't know what we're saying": Politics and subjects among the ultras of Centro Storico Lebowski football club in Florence, Italy
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis dissertation offers an ethnographic account of Centro Storico Lebowski (CSL), a semi-professional football club in Florence, Italy, and of the community that supports and manages it. I argue that CSL showcases the fraught and sometimes ambiguous labour of ‘refiguration’ of pre-existent cultural forms that underlies projects of ‘prefigurative’ politics, where the means of political action are supposed to offer a figuration of its ends. Through an examination of the material culture, organisational forms and language ideologies espoused and refigured by members of CSL, this dissertation thus provides a contribution to anthropological understandings of personal and collective projects of reflexive self-transformation, at the intersection of the anthropology of ethics and political anthropology. CSL was established, and is still to a great extent run, by the Ultimi Rimasti, a group of ultras, football fans who commit to an organized, spectacular style of support for their team, and who compete with other such groups in terms of style and physical courage. The club is collectively owned and run horizontally on the basis of volunteer labour, inclusivity, and militancy, following a leftist agenda of critique of the commodification and securitization of contemporary football, couched within a wider critique of capitalistic society; in this sense, I argue, it constitutes an instance of prefigurative politics. However, I show that this prefigurative project is premised on the ‘refiguration’ of certain existing characteristics of the football club and the ultras group as cultural forms. The complex baggage of these cultural forms – including potentially politically problematic elements such as ultras masculinism, irreverent humour, and elitism – means that this refiguration is far from straightforward and entangles CSL members in complex and ambiguous forms of ongoing moral and political subject-formation. Each chapter in this dissertation deals with one of the problematics engaged with by the members of Centro Storico Lebowski in the process of refiguration, and relates them further to specific discussions in anthropology: what kind of collective the members of the club are, whether of friends, ultras, or militants (chapter 1); how, as ultras, friends, and militants, they perform labour and use objects in a way that aspires to be autonomous from the logics of capitalism (chapters 2 and 3); how their different linguistic ideologies create tensions between their humour as ultras and their commitment to politics (chapter 4); and finally, how CSL, in order to realise its prefigurative aspirations, needs to become embedded in the wider urban society of Florence (chapter 5). The approach prevalent in the literature on prefigurative politics frequently presents the forms (meetings and demonstrations) that frame these politics as already appropriately political, and as open to further indeterminate transformation. What this approach lacks is a sustained analysis of how these forms may be instead culturally valued in and of themselves, and attention to the multiple commitments of militant subjects that might produce ambiguities and tensions in need of resolution in their projects of political self-formation. This dissertation thus focuses on more unwieldy framings for prefiguration, and suggests that studies of prefigurative politics should attend more closely to the ethical and political complexities of personal and collective refiguration.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2020
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Ginsborg, David
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Candea, Matei
Subjects
dc:subject × 11Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.65234
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/318120