PLAYING WITH VIOLENCE IN LEISURE SPORT: ETHNOGRAPHIC NOTES ON THE ‘KID’ AND THE ‘OLD HAND’ IN OUTSKIRTS FOOTBALL

Abstract

This work is part of the discussions on the diversity of sports meanings in leisure situations in city contexts. It is the result of a multisite ethnographic research developed in a large circuit of ‘outskirts football’ in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, which is an important leisure setting. Its aim was to understand the dynamics of formation of the concepts of violence in leisure by focusing the analysis on two ‘empirical characters’: the ‘kid’ and the ‘old hand in outskirts football’. The enterprise is carried out within a debate with Eliasian theory on violence and the pursuit of pleasurable excitement in mimetic sporting practices. Finally, we point out two aspects as contributions to leisure studies: the existence of unpleasant types of violence that do not represent ruptures, but which ‘are part’ of that mimetic context, pointed out as disproportionalities; the experience of pleasant tension-excitement not only at an ideal level, but also in the emotional slidings between different tension balances.