Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events by Rodanthi Tzanelli

Author:Rodanthi Tzanelli [Tzanelli, Rodanthi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317508038
Google: 0H4GCAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-04-10T02:47:05+00:00

Figure 4.2 The closing ceremony’s Carnaval atmosphere: samba schools and foliões

Source Jimmy Balkovicius (Flickr), Creative Commons 2.0. Licence: www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

As is the case with most South and Latin American contexts, samba’s halfdressed female dancers can assume the aura of cultural values without losing their materiality as embodied commodities (Sánchez Taylor 2000). Because samba has been earmarked as part of Brazil’s heritage kinaesthetics, its mega-event commoditisation in the form of a tourist spectacle allows for the style’s global mobility also in legacy domains, where serious national rituals are replaced by liminoid tourist pleasure (Turner 1974b). To throw a provocative suggestion on the table, in this ceremony, female sambistas both disrupt and reinforce the neat Brazilian distinction between doing (an embodied subject’s performative privilege, a worker’s activity) and seeing (a disembodied gaze(r)’s role, an employer’s supervision privilege) through globally intelligible conceptions of sexuality. Like the lucky football player’s mastery of jôgo do bicho, they are modernity’s quintessential fantasies that successfully deceive spectators – in opposition to the Brazilian working animal or besta, the fool pretending to be something he is not (DaMatta 1991: 145; Herzfeld 2004: 28).

Attended by former Brazil international Kaka, Brazil legend Pelé and ex-England midfielder David Beckham, amongst other football celebrities (Gill 2014), the closing ceremony was divided into two acts, with the first focusing on harmonisations of Brazilian and global heritage kinaesthetics (national ceremony and football rituals and rules), and the second on transnational musical articulations (hybrid music genres performed by foreign and Brazilian singers and composers). Set to a soundtrack of samba music, incorporating a cast of 400 people and featuring GRES Academicos do Grande Rio, the ceremonial script was intended as a unique tribute to football, as it symbolically brought together the two sides battling to be crowned winners when the full-time whistle was blown in Rio. The second musical act complemented the first because it affectively enhanced the symbolic battle’s core with blends of appropriate melody and lyrics.

Act one

The first act opens with an on-pitch expression of the sport’s values through four characters – freedom, solidarity, passion and diversity – and subsequently includes representations of all 32 teams (FIFA.com 2014d). FIFA’s peaceful message is mediated by eight-metre-high giants with a big red heart in the middle of their lattice sternum, who are accompanied by 22 samba dancers from the Lapa district of Rio. What is hidden from FIFA’s cognitive scope connects to the international regulator’s current concerns about domestic disorder, which could mar the mega-event’s safe delivery. More correctly, one may argue that in calamitous social wars’ stead (protests) (Veloso 2003), the ceremonial connoisseurs train body and soul to ‘peacefully compensate thymotic urge through the consumption of the arts as well as sports’ (Wenning 2009: 93). For this reason, the whole closing ceremony’s plot proffers balancing combinations between affect (turned into emotion), reason and bodily desire.

Lapa’s embodied appearance is such a civilising experiment for the domestic cosmopolitan tourist gaze: its whitewashed bohemian outpost of Santa Teresa stands apart from Rio’s tourist mythology, as it offers to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.