Football; multiple issues of a socio-anthropological phenomenon

Abstract

The choice to focus on football, considered the most popular sport in Algeria, as the subject of this article is not accidental. This sport represents a social phenomenon, a spectacle, an economic sector, and even an arena for political confrontation. As the ethnologist Marcel Mauss would have said, it is a "total social fact," that is to say, a phenomenon with multiple political, ideological, economic, social, and cultural implications.

It is also a social phenomenon that can be classified among the ‘ordinary passions’ cited by the ethnologist Christian Bromberger (1998), who is convinced that “a society reveals much about itself through its passions” (Christian Bromberger, 1998, 37).

What we therefore propose in this article is an interpretation of our modern society through the lens of ways of being and doing related to this object (football), which embodies original forms of sociability.

Ref: Bromberger Christian, Ordinary Passions: from the football match to the dictation competition, Bayard Publishing, Paris, 1998, 544 p.

Keywords: Football. Sport. Social phenomenon