Manufacturing "Otherness". Ethnographic notes from the football field

Abstract

This paper deals with the ethnography of football games, with a special focus on how field research intertwines with the discursively constructed image of football culture as a mechanism for the production of otherness. The ethnographic material which will be discussed was gathered in 2012 during the qualifications for the Football World Cup held in Brazil in 2014. The game in question is a match between Serbia and Croatia held in March 2013 in Zagreb. Through the discussion of the gathered ethnographic material, field reflexions and material from the media, I will attempt to shed light on the ways in which one football game can serve to homogenize as well as question identity, especially ways in which these identities are constructed through the media. The analysis of ethnographic material will serve to point out the specificity of researching a fairly visible and popular, highly mediatised phenomenon such as football, in which discourses created by the media are intertwined with the real "state of affairs in the field".