Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events

Ethics and Aesthetics in Brazil's 2014 World Cup

Rodanthi Tzanelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138860087
• eBook ISBN: 9781317508021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In June 2014, Brazil opened the twentieth FIFA World Cup with a spectacular ceremony. Hosting the World Cup was a strategic developmental priority for Brazil: mega-events such as these allow the country to be ranked amongst the world's political and economic leaders, and are supposed to propel the country to its own unique modernity. But alongside the increased media attention and publicity, came accusations of governmental 'corruption' and overspending.

In Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events, Tzanelli uses Brazil's 2014 World Cup to explore how mega-events articulate socio-cultural problems. Critically examining the aesthetics and ethics of mobilities in the mega-event, this book explores these socio-cultural issues and controversies:

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• the background of staging mega-events, including the bidding process and the host's expectations for returns;
• ceremonial staging and communications between artistic representations and national symbolism;
• the clear reaction mega-events almost always generate in national, regional and global activist circles, including accusations of overspending and human rights violations.

This interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of mobility, sociology of globalisation, cultural sociology, social and anthropological theory, as well as the sociology of sport, human and cultural geography, and leisure and tourism studies.

1 Cosmographies of riches and cosmologies of desire A cultural-as-political perspective on Brazil

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716787-1

On 12 June 2014, Brazil opened the 20th FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup with a spectacular ceremony. Framed in the colours of the Brazilian flag and with the motto ‘untos num só ritmo’ (all in one rhythm), the ‘Cup of Cups’, as President Dilma Rousseff would name it, had a logo as belo (beautiful) as its host. Created by Brazilian design agency ‘Africa’, the logo's winning design originated in the iconic photograph of three victorious hands together raising the world's most famous trophy. The design was meant as an uplifting message of humanity's interlinking and of ‘Brazil warmly welcoming the world to Brazilian shores’ (FIFA.com n.d.a). It is unfortunate that its two key emotive elements – victory and union – would crash on the same shores three weeks later, in a humiliating 7–1 loss by the national team to Germany. It was only the second time (the first being in 1950) that Brazil had hosted the competition, after an unchallenged selection in 2007, when FIFA decreed that the tournament would be staged in South America (FIFA.com2007). The country's supremacy in World Cups was epitomised in five titles (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002), and hosting the 2014 mega-event seemed like a natural development. However, things simply did not go according to plan (to host and win the event). At first, the realisation that the spectacle Brazil had staged for the 31 qualified competitors in 64 matches across 12 of its revamped cities would not be matched with such global applause induced bafflement, tears and anger amongst fans, filling the streets with mobs, and international press with unwelcome comments about the country.

Reading this disarray as a disconnected incident is, at least, unhelpful for a country that continues to invest in its past and dream of a better future for all its cultures. To do a decent job we must investigate such attitudinal fluctuations within a temporal horizon that expands and contracts so as to accommodate South America's shifting cultural politics. The politics unfold theatrically, but are not theatre for mere entertainment and ‘mere aesthetic embellishments’; they are ‘the thing itself’ (Geertz 1980: 120). To consider ceremonial performances separately from such political staging, as if art floats in an empty cultural field, is also incorrect. However, the study also takes an extra analytical step: it is my intention to examine the polished performances of the ceremonial spectacle and its political elite, and the less ‘decorous’, emotional reactions of football folk side by side, as part of narratives of Brasilidade or ‘Brazilian-ness’. The statement suggests that we deal with global phenomena, so it should not be signposted as a methodological nationalist exercise. Instead of regarding them as isolated examples of national specificity, I stress their complex positioning in moving systems of power, culture and chrono-spatiality. As a multifarious study (of art, politics, social protest and even finance-scapes), the book addresses thematic questions that fall under the ambit of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006). Having as its starting point the two social events in the duration of the Brazilian World Cup, it traces the historical and contemporary temporalities and spatialities of mobility regimes, technologies, and practices in the country, considering their place in movements for social rights and justice (Sheller 2014a).

The interrelationships of globalisation, mobility and football can be traced in the ways each country refracts its specific historical, cultural, economic, political and social conditions through global complexity systems, occasionally prompting those to adapt, but quite often adapting its own needs and planning to them (Tomlinson 1996, 2005; Tomlinson and Young 2006; Giulianotti and Robertson 2004, 2007, 2009; Urry 2003; Sheller 2014a). These needs are shaped by the inescapably political character of proximity (neighbours, friends and foes) and mobility (of the country's cultural capital), as well as their complementary nature (Adey 2006). I define the politics of mobility as part of an arts system that encompasses the art of power ‘and the possibilities to set up strategies in order to enable, constrain, or even enforce conditions of physical and virtual proximity between people, objects, and information’ (Pellegrino 2011: 2).

I will outline Brazil's socio-historical specificity in more detail later; suffice it to mention here that football is for the country an example of successful appropriation of colonial capital, both symbolic and material. Andrews and Mower (2012) also remind us that global sporting landscapes are characterised by a plethora of highly localised game forms rooted in the place's socio-cultural relations. The relative immobility of their participants and the idiosyncratic nature of localised sporting cultures are complemented by the progressive ‘sportisation’ (Maguire 1999; Walmsley 2008 in Presenza 2013: 126–7) of modern societies. Sportisation, the development ‘from local variation to international standardization’, has fundamentally transformed sport (Bottenburg 2001: 2), by establishing a modern, rationalised, and bureaucratised global sporting landscape out of the patchwork quilt of highly localised sport forms that proliferated in the pre-modern era. This progressive association between societal and sporting development made football cultures globally mobile, allowing national styles of play to join regional and global circuits of cultural mobility.

Hosting a mega-event of World Cup proportions could only activate such background processes, implicating it to regional and global competitions for economic and socio-cultural ‘progress’ (Deichmann 2007). These competitive agendas are often framed in the bifurcated language of ‘civil society’ and ‘corporate social responsibility’ in contexts of urban development (Giulianotti 2012). Such responsibilisation clashes with the cosmetic practices of mega-event management, setting agendas of housing and poverty reduction against those of media expenditure and ‘pretty’ spectacle deliverance. Mega-event management as an urban development strategy is an important element in policies of stimulating economic growth and job creation (Pillay and Bass 2008: 330). The international literature on such events is more sceptical about pronouncements of positive economic and legacy impacts: imponderables on economic expansion (Owen 2005; Humphreys and Prokopowizc 2007) and optimistic dependence on the host's various ‘attraction elements’ (Ritchie 2000; Horne and Manzenreiter 2006) often lead to disappointment for the citizens, who have to foot the bill. This leads with mathematical accuracy to complaints about displacement of public funds, and cuts that ultimately affect those least likely to enjoy benefits from mega-events (or even attend them): the urban poor, aboriginals and people in country districts a long way from the city (Whitson 2004: 1227–8).

The separation of football from the politics of leisure may also impoverish attempts to consider the norms and values of Brazilian culture in transnational spaces. For one, football's fandom enclaves, its mega-event ceremonies and audiences are quintessential ‘travelling cultures’ with socio-cultural roots and cosmopolitan routes (Clifford 1997; Hannerz 1990, 1996); while mapping post-national conditions of being and belonging, they also tell us stories about native conceptions of the good life, happiness and solidarity. Such Brazilian scriptures of harmony, in particular, in which mind, body and soul are in unity, have unprecedented historical depth (Korstanje 2011); they contain stories of coerced and free human movements from East to West, North to South, Europe and Africa to the Americas. In contexts of host-guest encounter, scriptures of harmony should be understood not within a framework rooted in history (e.g. De Kadt 1984) but of memory as a fluid precondition of historical discourse (Lash and Urry 1994: 224, 233). Brazilian cartographic imaginaries re-worked – indeed, continue to do so – imported ideas of modernity in folk, pop and elite moulds, through centuries of colonial violence and into a time in which the country emerged as a free but disorientated ‘nation’. The 2014 mega-event's opening ceremony and the Brazilian mourning of football defeat become chrono-spatial windows to the Brazilian culture's emotional and material movements in the world. Performed Brazilian-style, these movements are recorded in music, rhythm, theatrical performance and (un)choreographed protest in equally important ways for a social scientific observer.

There are good reasons why amongst the study's master terms are linguistic variations of harmony, beauty and well-being. In Chapter 2, I explain how everyday words such as belo (-a) and lindo (-a) dig up a centuries-long tunnel into the Brazilian popular psyche. Such words allow the cultural investigator to explain why deep and thick descriptions of Brazilian culture are ‘beautified’ so much in global public spaces that seem to turn into spectacular surfaces. Revising Geertzian epistemological convictions, I reconsider why Western conceptions of surface are connected to problematic depth (see Giesen 2011). Truly, however, we cannot divorce the cosmetics of current Brazilian mobilities from their past economic and social histories, as they comprise the heart of the country's current underdeveloped development.

The paradox of ‘underdeveloped development’ goes back to clashes of intimate Brazilian economic relations and external modern capitalist structures as well as with the way these subsequently conditioned social relations in urban areas. The privileged position of the city – in Brazil and other Latin American contexts largely a colonial product – continues to incorporate indigenous socio-cultures into metropolitan visions of economy and the ideas of ‘good life’, without always considering if these visions are locally compatible.

Global civilisational hierarchy and offshoring

There is a ‘deep plot’ (à la Geertz's (1973) ‘deep play’) in this instance, including practices of offshoring native socio-economic capital that would come back to haunt the World Cup's staging as a promise of national betterment (Silk 2001; Hogan 2003; Tomlinson 2005; Urry 2014: 91). As was the case with the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the government would be blamed for prioritising cosmetic appearances over human rights to bolster its international profile (Worden 2008; Tzanelli 2010). Economics, culture and politics go hand in hand in diachronic analyses of the Brazilian deep plot: the conversion of the north-east, the Minas Gerais interior, the north and the centresouth (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Paraná) into export economies and their incorporation into global developmental networks produced satellite local economies dependent on the whims of foreign markets (Gunder Frank 1966: 7–8). The focus on urban industrialisation meant that only particular cities such as the heavily industrialised São Paulo could relatively ‘progress’, especially in periods devoid of foreign influence (World War I and II), without nevertheless shaking off their intellectual and philosophical roots in Europe. As both Russell-Wood (2002b) and Cannadine (2002) explain about Portugal and Britain, respectively, although their colonies and varied populations beyond the seas were conceived of as one vast interconnected world, their cultures were earmarked as the civilisational opposites of the colonial metropoles: hierarchical, corporatist and enervated (see also Marchetti 2011: 19, for contemporary comparisons). Yet, many of these attributes were either fic-tional, or (as is the case with Brazil) the result of colonial control. The rapid post-industrialisation of some cities in South American regions, combined with the accelerated global mobility of potential consumers and capital investment also suggested their reinvention as entertainment and consumer nodes in a sustainable manner.

However, the ubiquitous shift in strategies of urban governance from civic managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism (Andrews and Mower 2012: 4) is yet to benefit Brazilian culture. Over the last few years Brazilian cities have successfully participated in inter-urban competitions (the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) for elite sporting mega-events, with the anticipation that these ‘will become motors of capital investment accumulation … anchors of urban (re)development … [and] an important component of place marketing and promotion strategies within today's globalized economy’ (ibid.; see also Ramchandani and Coleman 2012: 258). The basic four key business motives for sponsoring sport (image enhancement, increased awareness of the product and the firm, hospitality opportunities and product trial or sales opportunities; see Crompton 1995) are more or less covered by Brazil's strategic planning. Combining the Olympic Games with the World Cup bid makes sense in long-term policy planning: bundling different events in a portfolio might bring together segments of the population that might not otherwise meet; target and reach diverse market segments, hence increasing the size of a host community's events market; and respond to diverse community needs, such as improving quality of life, building identity, or promoting healthier lifestyles (Ziakas and Costa 2011: 152).

In a post-colonial federation, domestic and international recipients of rhetoric and policy have to be managed differently. Here our step back has to be complemented with a step down and into the Brazilian ‘deep plot’ of globalisation, which is still conditioned by the norms of honour and impeccable public self-presentation. If Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's successful Rio 2016 bid achieved Brazilian compliance with other organisations integral to the transnational economy (the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the G20), winning the 2014 World Cup bid confirmed the country's influence beyond and within ‘the football pitch’ (Phillips 2009). What it did not achieve was to demonstrate its ability to ameliorate internal ethno-racial and class inequalities (Vinod 2006). Our step down has to be followed by an inspection around the domestic socio-cultural environment: Lula's policy has played a significant role in post-1970s articulations of abertura, the nation-wide project of ‘opening up’ – in practice, the gradual, ten-year process of democratisation on which Brazil embarked after the end of the 1964–85 dictatorship (Valente 2012: 150).

Abertura would soon be implicated in increased open movements across open borders that are ‘often out of sight and involve elaborate forms of secrecy’ – what is commonly known as offshoring (Urry 2014: 8). Otherwise put, though Lula's policy appeared to bring mega-events ‘home’, it also enabl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Dedication
• Poem
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Cosmographies of riches and cosmologies of desire A cultural-as-political perspective on Brazil
• 2 Aesthetics and practical action Euro–Brazilian clashes and harmonisations
• 3 Complementary articulations Characterising ideal human types and communities
• 4 The ceremonial script From tropicalism and Brasilidade to cosmographic mobilities
• 5 A defeated people The loss of riches and the return of debt
• 6 The script of post-colonial desire Positive excess, negative reciprocities
• References
• Index