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I found the discussion today about the stadium very interesting in terms of the Elias text and the way sports/ recreation were used to pacify mass political endeavours (also love Brave New World, or love to hate it, anyway an excellent association)- but one thing I’m not sure was touched upon was the possiblity of a civilising process of mimesis itself? I had used the same Taussig text in an essay last year about the Jean Rouch documentary ‘The Mad Masters’ and how mimesis is shown/ used- basically the film focuses on an occult sect in Ghana, the Hauka, who, as a cleansing and healing ritual, ‘re-enact’ the roles of colonial figures in what was at the time seen as a barbaric ritual. This is a watered down explanation, and the film was banned when it was released in 1955 as it raises all sorts of ethical and racial issues, HOWEVER before I totally go off on one, it could be said that in Rouch’s rendering of the mimetic there is a warped civilizing process; the day after the ritual has taken place, Rouch films the same men smiling and at peace in their ‘ordinary lives’. If anyone has seen it or more of Rouch’s films, what do you think?
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1y03Ch/www.ubu.com/film/rouch_maitres.html
The point that the mimetic faculty is key to both sport and art I also found interesting, as art can clearly be seen, as Elias said for sport, to be a civilizing process- Carol Duncan’s book ‘Civilizing Rituals’ about how ritualistic art museums have become, could be a comparison here?
Finally, I also I feel that discussions of temporality, related to all the sites, are very important and it would be interesting to address this in the projects- how time is subjective but also controlled, the temporal nature of the journey in the tunnel, etc?!
Louise, thanks for making this post – I really enjoyed the Rouch doco (even with my faulty French). This was something I was a little disappointed no one ran with on Friday – the postcolonial critique which comes out of the Elias text. We circled close to it in our discussion of the globalisation of football, but it remained at the level of commerce (African nations inculcated into an economy of global western-based football) as opposed to race (when the civilising mission travels from England’s civilisation of the working class to the white man’s burdon of civilising the colonies).
Personally, I’d love to know more about Rouch, and would be really interested to read what you’ve written about him and this film in the past. But on a more general level (for everyone else reading this) I think this is an important aspect of the stadium site given precisely the discussion we (nearly) had about race and football on Friday, and the supposed bad track-record of Millwall in this regard. As the photo Omar (the owner of Sweet and Spicy) produced the other day over lunch on the bus tour indicates, there is a strong link between sport, civilising missions and racial politics. And is mimesis messed up in this politics? Well, read Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy and you’ll see that the encounter between self and other is one in which the magic of representation is thick and powerful…
That is interesting Louise- I watched the film and tried to understand it without the language! Thank you for sharing it. However, and sharing my thoughts with you, I wonder if the mimesis used in the colonized countries developed them to have their share of the colonizers’ civilization, or whether the colonized became only consumers of some aspects of it as a price for their rich resources?! Looking at these countries nowadays, it seems that the second case is the predominant one. I remember just after “freeing” Iraq from Saddam Husain, an Iraqi girl announced happily that “now” she could watch Brittney Spears freely…yeah… Never mind that till now Iraqis have no electricity nor clean water! If these countries were never occupied, wouldn’t they have become as rich and civilized as the first world? (Keeping in mind that, through history, civilizations started and developed in various parts of the world)
On the other hand if spreading and globalising sports are seen to provoke general world civilising/healing process, they obviously have their side-effects for being a huge political/capitalist’s product.
On the other hand, it does not mean that without sport we turn into wild beasts. The hooligans’ barbaric behaviour seems to show the sport system as a contra-civilizing factor! Accordingly, I believe that self-control/civilized behaviour tremendously depends on the ethics, etiquette and knowledge that individuals gain through their lives(which are general global manners). Ayat x
Sorry about the language thing, when i saw it it was on youtube with english subtitles but i couldn’t find it when I looked! the images on their own are still very powerful. But yes I agree that the ‘civilizing process’ of colonialism in the film is fraught and to me is the clear barbaric force at work- the opposite of the ‘magic’ quality of mimesis? I feel that hooliganism might be interesting to look at in terms of completely removing it from sport and dealing with the social, economic, (possibly psychological?) and territorial aspects of this phenomenon that has come to be associated with football. what do you think? x
Obviously being civilised falls under many definitions, and perhaps it differs from a country/culture to another. But if I concentrate on one aspect which is self-control (looking at it from both British and Arab perspective (since I feel that I belong to both sides))- as far as I understand- in both cultures self control is civilised behaviour, while hooliganism is considered uncivilised. Even if hooliganism is seen as a nowadays’ fashion, and as an outcome of political/economical/social or other factors, doesn’t it still reflect a counter-civilised act that shows a contradiction in how some theorists are trying to define a “civilised modern” country from another: the coloniser from the colonised? Which somehow confuses the boundaries between “civilized” and “materially powerful”?! Personally I see them as two different matters. Somehow, it is concerning if some of these theorists has a small side of the colonisers’ arrogance in somehow looking down at the countries that were/still colonised/occupied. In fact it is really such a shame if academic people try to exaggerate a positive outcome –if it exists in the first place- of political control whether by physical invasion or by some kind of “cold” intervention: “football” for instance! Conversely, I think that countries could develop far better “civilization-wise” by fair and equal interaction among the world’s different regions.
Ayat, all i can say is I completely agree! I do believe that ‘hooliganism’ can be viewed in many different ways though and this may be a point to look into with the stadium, who knows!?
David for some reason I have only just seen your post, if you do want to talk more about Rouch etc. I can summarize my essay or bring it in? the documentary also makes me think of ‘Heart of Darkness’, as the racist ‘civilizing’ process becomes even more distorted and brings out Kurtz’s own barbarism. I will check out the Nandy text you mentioned, and get back to you!
Louise – I have seen this film we actually screened it at Collective as part of Spartacus Chetwynd’s commission Call of the Wild, would love to read what you’ve written about Rouch. lots more to say here
http://contemporaryartscotland.blogspot.com/2007/11/call-of-wild-spartacus-chetwynd.html