Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 18:13:41 +1000
Subject: AUT: Hooliganism, ritualized violence, class
From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com>


Football violence in Brazil, oddly enough, is not as subject to a discourse
of criminalization as it is in the UK, even though it exists and is, if
anything, more severe. There are efforts to control it, but pancadaria is
often taken to be just part of the high spirits of a match. Violence between
players, or between the crowd and the referee, which used to be common, is
subject to much greater scrutiny.

Part of the reason, I suspect is because there is already such a widespread
discourse about violence amongst the poor that football violence is just
subsumed to that. Once, some São Paulo supporters went to Maracanã stadium,
in Rio de Janeiro to watch a match which their team won. On the way back,
they took a wrong turn off the freeway and drove into the opposing team's
slum, their car packed with Paulista flags. They were mowed down with
machine guns and grenades. This was presented as an instance of hapless
Paulistas accidentally stumbling across a pre-existing gang battle, which it
may well have been, but it is interesting that nothing much about football
violence was hung on to the semantic hooks available.

Another reason is that violence in a football setting is ritualized - from
what I have read this is the case in the UK as well. People go to the match
to show the other team how powerful their torçida organizada - organized
support - is. Hence the flags, the blizzards of confetti, the flares and
fireworks (which are now banned). Booing the other team is bad, but silence
when they score is even more marking. Then there are the hilarious escapades
involving mascots. I can't remember the team, but its mascot was a pig.
Their opponents had a bbq. A player pulled a suckling pig's head from under
his clothes after scoring against them. Etc... When actual violence erupts
in this setting, it has a certain degree of free play to work with. For
instance, it used to be common for urine bombs and other projectiles to be
thrown during matches, without this escalating out of control. This is
interesting, particularly because there is so much paraphernalia about that
you'd expect a riot to become very serious indeed. Using flares and
fireworks against other teams, however, was pretty rare, though more than
one referee was blasted with foguetes, ie. 'rockets'. I wonder to what
extent the torçida organizadas themselves policed this, since they had very
cosy relationships with the stadium management - usually having their own
seating arrangements, free entry to some games, membership schemes. They
were, however, almost exclusively working class.

On the other hand, there is a form of violence that is no less ritualised
and no more or less lethal than football violence, which has precipitated a
specific discourse of criminality and violence, and that is the whole field
of Funk parties. These are huge parties, sometimes with upwards of ten
thousand people, which are held in the favelas or poorer suburban areas,
originally exclusively a working class and lumpen phenomenon. The music in
these parties is electronic funk, that sounds a bit like 1980's electro,
with lurid pornographic lyrics toasted over the top. This music is
considered horrible by the middle class, and one particular criticism is
that it doesn't sound Brazilian - there are no drums, there is little in the
way of melody, the sources can indeed be traced back to records smuggled
into the country during the dictatorship, etc... At these parties there is a
very extroverted (hetero)sexuality, of such a kind that it caused a moral
panic in Brazil... At these parties there was also a lot of fighting, though
most of it was very carefully choreographed. There was a lot of drug
consumption, or so it was said. This became the focus intense hysteria in
the media, tied together with 'new' forms of criminality such as 'arrastões'
- dragnet operations, where people would be robbed by huge gangs sweeping
down a beach - and marked the eruption of favela pride, in a very negative
way, into public discourse.

I am currently translating a book on the subject by Micael Hershmann, a
scholar based in the State University of Rio de Janeiro. The title in
portuguese is "Funk e Hip Hope Invadem a Cena" ie. "Funk and Hip hop take
over the scene". It's generally very good; the first chapter deals with the
mass media representation of funk, and I am happy to send that to anybody
who is interested. 

Thiago









   













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