Orange Fever: Notes on the Worldcup, football, nationalism and Deep Play in the Netherlands
Imagine this. You are a nine year old boy or girl from a happy middle class or lower class family. The one thing you love the most is to play football on the streets with your friends, day in, day out:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbf6zQnvmyI]
This may appear as football in its most authentic form. Of course as an anthropologist you know that this idea of authenticity is shaped throughout the years and has many cultural influences. What matters here is that it is experienced as the most authentic form of football. And very understandable of course. You can play football all day long with the peers you like the most or envy the most for their skills. You may get interrupted by parents who want you to be home at six for dinner or a dental appointment which is a nuisance so you try to skip that. Of course that doesn’t work, but you know you can always return to the same part of the street and play without having to worry to much about anything. Now imagine that same boy (sorry girls) 15-18 years later. You have to play not just a friendly game with your peers. No this match is about much more than that. It is about making billions of money for the organizing committee. About making millions for your own football association and for yourself. It is about giving the nation you feel you belong to, hope and optimism for the future. It even appears that a good result will give the men in that same nation more sex. The game earlier 12,5 out of 16 million people belonging to the same nation watched your performance. This game will get even higher ratings; more then 25 million eyes watching you (and that is your nation alone). And your opponent is not just an opponent. It could have been the one who occupied your country during the last major war but it turned out to be the nation that plays a fundamental role in the founding myth of your nation centuries ago during one of the longest wars ever: the 80 year long war. You are playing for a nation in distress. That has recently suffered major blows to its reputation as a friendly, funny, tolerant and permissive country. By some it is now seen as a country of intolerance, homophobia, islamophobia and anti-semitism. A victory of you could change that.
That my dear friends is a completely different game than the one you played when you were nine. The football World Cup can be seen as a ‘deep play’. Jeremy Bentham’s coined the concept of “deep play” in his The Theory of Legislation. By ‘deep play’ he means a play in which the stakes are so high that it appears to be irrational for men to engage in it at all. The famous anthropologist Clifford Geertz used the notion in his essay Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.Clifford Geertz; Altered Foundation of Anthropology – washingtonpost.com
More than a description of a cockfight and the betting that accompanied it, “Deep Play” was a wide-ranging metaphorical interpretation of how the people of Bali saw themselves in relation to violence, social status, morality and belief.
“Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence,” Dr. Geertz wrote. “The cockfight is the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination.”
The actual betting is not (just) the cocks fighting but the bets that are placed with men “com(ing) together in search of pleasure, [entering] into a relationship which will bring the participants, considered collectively, net pain rather than net pleasure”. With football it is therefore (at least) as much about the football as it is about the fans. In the Dutch case all those people dressed in orange. Orange is the color of the Dutch monarchy and used mostly on Queensday and during games of the national football team (but also for other national teams in the Netherlands).
The color Orange is much more the national color than for example the tricolor (red-white-blue) and represents a rather inclusive national identity that transcends regional but also ethnic minority identities. You just wear something orange and your part of the community. This appears to be different compared to Spain the opponent in the final. One of my students did research in Barcelona asking herself what the latest victory of Spain in the European football championship has meant for Spanish nationalism and Catalonian nationalism. While it appears that in most countries football has the capability to transcend regional identities in favor of a national identity, this is not the case in Catalonia (based upon her material and the other studies she has used). What did happen and does happen now is that people in Barcelona point to the fact that the success of the Spanish team is based upon players from Barcelona; they make from a Catalonian identity and encompassing identity that includes the Spanish national team. Although it is clear that regions in Spain are very important, this does not mean that the Spanish team is not supported at all of course. It is my impression however (mainly based upon reports in the media and my student’s research) that the situation is different in the Netherlands.
The orange carnival appeared to have emerged in the 1970s, in particular after the Dutch lost the Worldcup final in 1974 from the Germans, which still serves as a national trauma. In 1988 during the European cup it reaches next level when everything that can be made orange was turned into orange and in the last years a new hype of making the street where you live or even whole areas orange. It is in particular here that neo-capitalism plays an important role. Companies make all kinds of items from hats, to dresses and from wigs to magazines in orange; ready made for shops before the championships begin. Media play an important role here increasingly focussing on emotions of fans and players that appeal to the audience. And probably without the introduction of color tv in many families in 1974 (companies like Sony and Phillips often launch new models of tv’s right before the football championships) the color orange would not even have made it as a national color. The combination with football seems ideal: one can identity with a whole team, the game is easy to understand and played all over the world. According to David Winner football has become part of Dutch identity and people have found in football an easy and powerful way to express their national feelings and belonging during times of globalization and europeanization. The role of media, the orange campaign of companies and national identity brings us to the issue of cultural commodification and identity incorporation as explored by John and Jean Comaroff in their book Ethnicity, Inc. A recent post at Savage Minds on the Worldcup made me aware of this:Parallels of Ethnicity Inc. at the World Cup | Savage Minds
They have termed this process “Ethnicity, Inc.” at once referencing both the idea of membership in a culturally constituted “people” and the fact that this cultural identity is more frequently being objectified and marketed to a larger global economic community. Through their fieldwork and research as well as the research of others, the Comaroffs develop several key dimensions that make up the larger process including ideas inclusion and exclusion through privileged genetics, that commerce and consumption produce ethnic groups, and struggles over intellectual property for indigenous groups.
[…]
In the conclusion to the book the Comaroffs present a dynamic that is both promising and terrifying, “…we recognize, and have sought to make sense of, its appeal: of the promise of Ethnicity, Inc. to unlock new forms of self-realization, sentiment, entitlement, enrichment. This notwithstanding the fact that it carries within it a host of costs and contradictions: that it has both insurgent possibility and a tendency to deepen prevailing lines of inequality, the capacity both to enable and to disable, the power both to animate and to annihilate.” (Italics theirs) I applaud them for sticking their necks out on this one and speaking to an inherent contradiction in anthropology. But, it is the last dynamic that gives me shivers and one that some of the marketing around the World Cup has promoted in some capacity.
Football is serious business and the Orange Index (yes this does exist, it measures the commercial success of the worldcup in the Netherlands) shows a rise in sales of ‘orange products’, commercials, news and so on. That the national evening news uses almost half of its program for news on the Dutch national team (much more for example than news about the talks for a new Dutch government let alone international affaiars) is also a sign of how important it is or being made by media. And although it appears that one can find the orange houses and streets mostly in white lower class areas when the Dutch team is succesfull the orange fieber easily spreads to other etnic groups and classes. Nevertheless it also creates new fault lines in society for example between black and white (in particular after the European championship of 96 when black players had to take a lot of criticism and the entire team failed). The current is appears not to be so multicultural as in the nineties although two Moroccan-Dutch and one Moloccuan-Dutch player are part of the whole team. There are less black players compared to the nineties; Elia is the notable exception. And of course not everyone in the Netherlands loves football and some groups are very much opposed to what they call Orange Hysteria. In particular some orthodox protestant Christian groups have warned against corrupting influences on people’s morals but even those circles where many people have no television at all, a large part of the population will watch anyway as I have been told. Nevertheless on a different level football and the worldcup do have some cosmpolitian qualities as well, although they are not explored very often by research as Lorenz notes at antropologi.info (see also the interesting links there).
Orange Fever qualifies as a particular form of deep play in which the players are not just involved in a match stand stands for all those things mentioned above, but it is the game that gives people the capacity to give meaning to developments in current Dutch society. It makes the game larger than life, nurturing the already apparent Orange Fever to reach an exceptional level. Where Dutch people in times of an economic crisis, grievances about multiculturalism, racism and polarization have a strong sense of discomfort, they can lose themselves now in what appears to be a simpel game. Orange Fever is a proces that feeds itself by the success of the Dutch team, commodification of the majority ethnic color and the intense involvement of large parts of the population both in public and private. It leads to fantastic feasts but sometimes also to riots; it can unite people but it may also divide people. This makes it beautiful and scary at the same time. And we may even forget that it is about men who play with a ball.
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