This article was downloaded by: [90.178.132.210]
On: 02 September 2012, At: 23:03
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
National Identities
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnid20
National sports and national
landscapes: In defence of primordialism
Alan Bairner
a
a
Loughborough University, UK
Version of record first published: 06 Aug 2009
To cite this article: Alan Bairner (2009): National sports and national landscapes: In defence of
primordialism, National Identities, 11:3, 223-239
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608940903081101
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation
that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any
instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary
sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
National Identities
Vol. 11, No. 3, September 2009, 223239
National sports and national landscapes: In defence of primordialism
Alan Bairner*
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
Loughborough University, UK
This article explores the relationship between landscape, sport and the formation
and reproduction of national identities. Central to this discussion is the concept
of national sports with evidence being taken from various genres of sports-related
literature and from a variety of nations. Just as the landscape provides the context
in which national sports are played and watched, it is the playing and watching of
these sports which in turn give the landscape added meaning As a consequence of
this, the nation, sport and landscape come to be recognised as interconnected
texts which taken as whole offer significant insights into the primordial formation
of national identities.
Keywords: national sports; landscapes; national anthems; primordialism
sports writing
Introduction
In compliance with the advice of Henri Lefebvre (1991, p. 404) who commented that
‘social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and
through space’, this paper examines the concept of national sports not only in
relation to theoretical debates on nations and nationalisms but within the context of
a particular understanding of space. Indeed, following Lefebvre, the article sets out
from the position that interpretations of nationalism that fail to incorporate the
significance of space in their analyses are flawed (Lefebvre, 1991; Fulton & Bairner,
2007). The specific aim of the article is to explore the relationship between landscape,
sport and the formation and reproduction of national identities. Central to this
discussion is the concept of national sports with evidence being taken from various
genres of sports-related literature.
It is relatively standard practice in sociological and political studies of nations
and nationalisms to differentiate between primordialist (or ethno-symbolist) and
modernist perspectives (Smith, 1998). Central to the former is the belief that
primordial attachments or relations are a matter of the significance attributed to
criteria that are perceived to be objective language, ethnicity, geography, religion and which are almost certain to predate the emergence of the modern nation state
and of nationalism as a modern political ideology. As Machin (2007, pp. 123) notes,
‘today, this idea is considered deeply suspect’. The modernist perspective, on the
other hand, focuses on nations and nationalisms as modern inventions which emerge
in response to new social and economic challenges. However, as Machin (2007, p. 13)
observes, this rationalist account ‘reveals the contingency of the nation but struggles
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1460-8944 print/ISSN 1469-9907 online
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14608940903081101
http://www.informaworld.com
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
224
A. Bairner
to understand its apparent inevitability and its common potency’. Somewhere
between those two extreme positions are various assertions that, whilst nations and
nationalism may indeed be modern and nation states most certainly are, their
existence and resilience rely heavily on the presence of certain historic criteria, both
real and imagined, upon which nationalists themselves consistently draw. In relation
to the primordialism-modernism debate, Lefebvre (1991, p. 112) asserts, ‘both of
these approaches to the question of the nation, the argument from nature and the
argument from ideology, leave space out of the picture’. However, this is less true of
the primordialist or ethno-symbolist position than of that of the modernist
perspective. Thus, Grosby (2007, p. 110) refers to the importance of ‘a bounded,
territorial focus that distinguishes the collective consciousness of a nation from that
of other social relations’. It is on that basis that this article argues that the claim that
a discussion of modern sports can generate support for a qualified primordial
perspective is far less absurd or irrational than initial reactions might suppose. More
specifically, it is argued here that the relationship between national sports and the
landscapes with which they are commonly associated assists greatly in helping us to
understand the reproduction of certain readings of the nation.
On nations, nationalisms and landscapes
According to Hechter (2000, p. 14), ‘territoriality is one objective criterion that does
seem to be a necessary characteristic of the nation’. Certainly ‘blood and soil’ motifs
are commonly thought of as the key ingredients of aggressive, xenophobic
nationalism. For example, as Vejdovsky (2004, p. 10) notes, ‘Nazi propaganda
would use the aesthetics of the pastoral to illustrate the necessity and the ethical
justification of a garden like Lebensraum (vital space) where the germ of virtue of the
Aryan race could be planted, and where it could grow to subdue and fill the earth’.
Even at a less polemical level of discourse, ‘the presence of a real or putative
homeland is properly regarded as a defining feature of the nation’ (Hechter, 2000, p.
14). Relatively seldom though is the actual physical character of the nation invoked
by primordialists, compared with the frequent invocations of blood ties and
language.
However, Anthony D. Smith (1995, p. 56), more sympathetic than most academic
commentators to the merits of primordialism (or ethno-symbolism), notes the
territorial ‘homeland’ component of nations and suggests that ‘the landscapes of the
nation define and characterise the identity of its people’. Thus, ‘homeland
psychology’ (Connor, 1994) and the ‘charismatic’ quality of land, country and
nation (Grosby, 1995) are set against more secular, rational and voluntaristic modes
of thought.
This line of argument is, of course, mocked by those who prefer the modernist
interpretation. For example, Ernest Gellner (1987, p. 1) satirises the mythical nation
of Vodkobuzia, writing that ‘it is a breathtakingly beautiful country. In the autumn,
the wooded slopes of the Manich Depression are ablaze with a colour not even
Hampshire or Liguria can match’. Warming to his theme, he continues, ‘it is also
from this area that the most plaintive, most moving folk songs come, commemorating as they do the devastation wrought by the invasion of the Rockingchair
Mongols’ (p. 1). In such ways does the advocacy of primordial categories stand
condemned by the modernists, supported to a large extent, in my opinion, by some
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
National Identities
225
of the upholders of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined political community’ thesis
(Anderson, 2006). Anderson is regularly invoked in discussions on the relationship
between sport and national identity formation (Blain, Boyle & O’Donnell, 1993;
Smith and Porter, 2004; Silk and Falcous, 2005; Starc, 2006). One wonders in this
regard to what extent the thesis is in danger of becoming overused such that it comes
to represent nothing other than the claim that national identity is all in the mind with
no material basis whereas it was initially intended to help us understand the complex
nature of national identity formation, weaving together as it does both objective and
subjective factors. Hargreaves (2000), for example, equates the ‘imagined community’ with the idea of ‘invention’, thereby potentially obscuring the fact that whilst
the formation of a nation necessarily involves the imagination, the nation cannot be
dismissed as imaginary. Even when the word ‘invention’ is used, as Anderson (2006,
p. 6) points out, it should not be assimilated to ‘fabrication’ or ‘falsity’. The nation
has material substance. In the wrong hands, however, the ‘imagined community’
approach can be used to serve an agenda which seeks to deny the structural or
material basis of everything.
For Smith (1995, p. 41), ‘the myth of the modern nation has to be recognized for
what it is: a semi-ideological account of nations and nationalism, one that chimes
with modern preconceptions and needs, especially those of a mobile, universalist
intelligentsia, for whom the nation-state is only a staging-post in humanity’s ascent
to a global society and culture’. In fact, according to Machin (2007, p. 13), ‘the
rationalist account reveals the contingency of the nation but struggles to understand
its apparent inevitability and its common potency’. Thus, as Hearn (2006) has
argued, in the course of rethinking the primordialist position, more attention needs
to be paid to the emotions in this regard. He writes, ‘to understand better the
importance of human sentiments in the formation of nationalism, what is needed is
detailed case and comparative studies that look at the actual interface of primordial
discourses of kinship, territory and language, and primary groups in specific social
structures, and the workings of national discourses in those contexts, whether
playing upon primordialist themes or not’ (pp. 656). ‘Only in this way’, he
concludes, ‘can we really understand the interactions of reason and passion in
nationalism’ (p. 66). In this respect, the fact that nations are defined territorially
(although in relation to diasporic national belonging they can also transcend spatial
boundaries) is an important factor in their emotional appeal not least when one
considers the importance of landscape for any territorial entity is its landscape.
Rival perspectives on nations are in a certain sense replicated in debates about
the understanding of landscapes. As Richard Muir (1999, p. 2) notes, ‘‘‘landscape’’
has several aspects and many nuances of meaning’. More specifically, ‘in experiencing places, we simultaneously encounter two closely related but different landscapes’
(Muir, 1999, p. 115). First, ‘the one lying beneath our feet and extending to the far
horizon is a real landscape; it is composed of rock, soil, vegetation and water, is
home to an abundance of creatures and has objective past and present existences’ (p.
115). The other, however, ‘is a perceived landscape, consisting of sensed and
remembered accounts and hypotheses about the real landscape’ (p. 115). This
underlines the extent to which national iconographies of landscape are closely linked
to the wider debates about national identities and nationalisms which were
commented on earlier. On one hand, there are the supposedly objective criteria
put forward in primordialist explanations of the rise of nations. On the other, we
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
226
A. Bairner
have the modernisation thesis and indeed the concept of ‘imagined communities’
which, when taken to its logical, but arguably misleading, extreme posits the view
that nations, national identities and nationalisms are largely the products of the
imagination. What remains undeniable, however, is that ‘landscapes play an integral
role in the (re)construction of ‘‘nation’’ and, relatedly, ‘‘national identity’’’ (Kong
and Yeoh, 2003, p. 2). Moreover, as Kong and Yeoh (2003, p. 3) argue, ‘the power
relations that define and contest the ‘‘nation’’ are therefore often played out in and
through landscapes’.
Whilst identified most strongly with cultural geography, the importance of place,
including landscape, has increasingly been recognised in literary studies (Smyth,
2001). As Thacker (2005, p. 56) notes, ‘the ‘‘where’’ of literature has come to occupy
a central place for many critics over recent years’. For Thacker (p. 73), ‘fundamental
to a critical literary geography, as to the engagement with representations of space
and the impact of lived places upon writers, is the following question: how do all of
these spatial dimensions affect what the text means, and how we interpret it?’ In
many respects, what follows in this article is an attempt to approach national sports
as texts, albeit viewed through a primarily sociological as opposed to a literary lens,
which are undeniably affected by spatiality, specifically landscape, and which can
only be fully understood by taking account of this spatial dimension. But let us
briefly turn our attention to a rather different form of national text.
The significance of landscape in relation to the representation of nations is
seldom more apparent than in the lyrics of national anthems. Whilst some national
songs refer to former battles, to leaders and to heroes, and even to the nation as a
largely abstract entity, many focus on a national landscape, with Croats celebrating
their ‘beautiful homeland’, Danes, their ‘lovely land’ and Swedes their ‘loveliest land
on earth’. Even at a sub-national level, the anthem of Cape Breton in Canada is a
paean to landscape identifying both the land itself and also its people as ‘an island, a
rock in the stream’.
Given that major international sporting events have become amongst the most
regular and prominent settings for renditions of such anthems, the relationship
between sport, nation and landscape already begins to emerge. But, there is more to
this relationship than a coincidental coming together of related phenomena. The
process of unravelling this complex relationship begins with a short examination of
the interaction between sport, nation and national identity.
Sport and national identity
In recent years, there has emerged a considerable and growing literature on the
relationship between sport, nations and national identities (Cronin, 1999; Cronin &
Mayall, 1998; Hargreaves, 2000; Bairner, 2001; Porter & Smith, 2004; Silk, Andrews
& Cole, 2005). At times, there is some terminological and conceptual slippage as seen
in the interchangeable use of the concepts of nation state and nation and of
nationality and national identity, a confusion which this article will address. For the
time being though, as Allison (2000, p. 345) argues, ‘whether we are talking about
nationalism or patriotism or the development and expression of national identity . . .
it is clear that a national dimension is an important part of sport’. For Miller,
Lawrence, McKay & Rowe (2001, p. 31), ‘the sporting body bears triumphant
national mythologies in a double way, extending the body to encompass the nation
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
National Identities
227
and compressing it to obscure the social divisions that threaten national unity’.
These claims can be amply supported by evidence drawn from a wide variety of
countries and an array of different sporting contexts. For most sportsmen and
women, even in an era when money is a major incentive for sporting success,
representing the nation still matters. Of course, it is not inconceivable, and is
becoming more common, that athletes might represent more than one nation with
neither ethnic origins nor even well established civic connections being necessary for
a move from one to another. Thus, Ticher (1994, p. 75) refers to ‘an increasing
number of international players, across a whole range of sports, whose apparently
‘‘obvious’’ nationality conflicts with the country they represent’. For the overwhelming majority of athletes engaged in international sport though the matter is
still relatively clear cut. For fans, things are arguably even more simple. Following
one’s ‘proxy warriors’ (Hoberman, 1984) into international competition is one of the
easiest and most passionate ways of underlining one’s sense of national identity,
one’s nationality or both in the modern era.
George Orwell’s reputed claim that international sport approximates to war
minus the shooting has been the subject of both misrepresentation and misinterpretation. What Orwell (1945/1970, p. 62) actually wrote was that ‘at the
international level sport is frankly mimic warfare’. He was writing in the wake of
a recent tour of Britain by the Moscow Dynamo football team and observed that
‘sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at
all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than
before’ (p. 61). Nor, according to Orwell, could it have been otherwise. He writes that
‘even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for
instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could
deduce it from general principles’ (pp. 612). Sporting competition can lead to
obsessive behaviour. According to Orwell, ‘the whole thing is bound up with the rise
of nationalism that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with
large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige’ (p. 63).
Needless to say, not everyone wishes to celebrate their national affiliation in such
ways, in most instances for the simple reason that they are simply not interested in
sport, the nation or the relationship between the two. But even more so than for most
active participants, for the majority of sports fans the choice is relatively
straightforward. This is not to deny of course that in certain circumstances athletes
and fans alike may well understand their nations in different ways. Furthermore it is
not only sporting individuals who demonstrate the contested character of most, if
not all, nations. As we will see later, sports themselves also do so to the extent that
they become ‘national’ in the popular imagination for a variety of reasons.
At the most basic level of analysis, it is easy to see the extent to which sport,
arguably more than any other form of social activity in the modern world, facilitates
flag waving and the playing of national anthems, both formally at moments such as
medal ceremonies and informally through the activities of fans. Indeed there are
many political nationalists who fear that by acting as such a visible medium for overt
displays of national sentiment, sport can actually blunt the edge of serious political
debate through the behaviour and attitudes of so-called 90 minute patriots (Jarvie &
Walker, 1994). No matter how one views the grotesque caricatures of national modes
of behaviour and dress that so often provide the colourful backdrop to major
sporting events, one cannot escape the fact that nationalism, in some form or
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
228
A. Bairner
another, and sport are closely linked. It is important to appreciate, however, that the
precise nature of their relationship varies dramatically from one political setting to
another and that, as a consequence, it is vital that we are alert to a range of different
conceptual issues.
For example, like the United Nations, sport’s global governing bodies, such as the
International Olympic Committee or the Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA), particularly the former, consist, for the most part, of
representatives not of nations but rather of sovereign nation states. It is also worth
noting that pioneering figures in the organization of international sport, such as
Baron Pierre de Coubertin who established the modern Olympics in 1896, commonly
revealed a commitment to both internationalism and the interests of their own
nation states. Thus, whilst de Coubertin could write enthusiastically about a sporting
event that would bring together young (male) athletes from across the globe, he was
also specifically concerned with the physical well-being of young French men in the
wake of a demoralizing defeat in the Franco-German War (Hill, 1992).
Whilst in most cases, those nation states that constitute international sporting
bodies are coterminous with nations, the fact remains that numerous nations
throughout the world, as well as other forms of collective belonging, are stateless and
are consequently often denied representation in international sporting competition
just as they are in the corridors of global political power. Exceptions are to be found
in sports such as association football where national sides represent England,
Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and a handful of others, regardless of the fact that
none of these countries enjoys nation statehood in their own right (Moorhouse,
1996), and it is doubtful if Northern Ireland even satisfies most of the criteria
necessary to bestow nationhood (Nairn, 1981). When considering the relationship
between sports and nationalism, therefore, it is important to think in terms both of
nation states and of nations. This also provides the means whereby sport’s
connection with nationality and also with national identity can be separately
explored.
It is equally useful to bear in mind that sport often acts as a window through
which we are able to examine a whole range of social developments and to test a
variety of theoretical concepts and perspectives. With specific reference to the
relationship between sports and nationalism, observing the world of sport offers
insights into the relevance and reliability of such concepts as ethnic (linked to the
existence of an exclusive ethic group) and civic (linked to the existence of a nation
state) nationalism and the validity of explanatory approaches to the rise of nations
and nationalism, primordialism and modernism included. Sport can also provide
important insights into varieties of imperialism, the cultural politics of antiimperialist struggle and postcolonial legacies. In virtually all of these contexts, it is
worth considering the explanatory power of the concept of national sports.
National sports
A discussion of the concept of national sports has particular value for the study of
nationalism more generally inasmuch as it necessitates some reference to the main
debates in this area (Morgan, 1997; Goksøyr, 1998; Bairner, 2001). For example, a
primordialist interpretation of the origins of nations would allow for the possibility
that national sports are bound up with the various criteria which are perceived to
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
National Identities
229
legitimate historic nationhood blood ties, language, topography, the soil and so on.
According to theories linking the rise of nationalism to the exigencies of
modernization, on the other hand, national sports are simply part of a panoply of
elements that serve to legitimize the nation state. In addition, concepts such as
‘imagined community’ and ‘invented tradition’ can then be invoked in an attempt to
explain how efforts are made to bestow some historic legitimacy on what are
essentially modern responses to particular political and socio-economic exigencies.
Furthermore, the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism may also be
invoked in order to advance the case that the national sport is about true belonging
whereas other sports that are played within the nation can be linked to what
constitutes the civic nation, or more properly, the nation state, but lack the stamp of
authenticity. In reality, however, no single approach can fully explain how specific
sports acquire national significance.
Adopting a quantitative approach, the first criterion commonly invoked when
seeking to establish that a sport is national is popularity. Although not without some
merit, this approach is rendered problematic by the fact that activities which attract
large numbers of participants, such as angling, walking and jogging, even if defined
as sports, are largely unconnected to the nation. High participation rates combined
with mass spectatorship figures in sports in which have national representative teams
is another matter altogether which accounts for the fact that, according to this
criterion at least, association football is the national sport of the overwhelming
majority of countries in the world. This in itself however makes it difficult to make
any meaningful pronouncements on the relationship between the national sport and
any given nation.
A second criterion is that of priority or invention. A sport may be described as
national for the simple reason that it was first played in a particular nation.
Historians of sport will attest to the fact that it is notoriously difficult to identify the
precise place of origin of many modern sports. For that reason alone one might wish
to add the category of uniqueness with a sport being regarded as national precisely
because it is played exclusively within a specific nation, the boundaries of the latter
being extended in this instance to incorporate diaspora communities. One problem
with the criterion of invention is that fact that few nations would claim to be the
place of origin of any modern sports whereas Britain, and more specifically, England
can legitimately represent itself as the birthplace of so many sports, in their regulated
and bureaucratised form, that describing each of them as an English national sport
would once more render the concept meaningless.
Other criteria also exist. For example, countries which were not initially
responsible for the invention of a particular sport may well have enjoyed great
success in that sport and/or may have exerted considerable influence on the sport’s
subsequent development. Both of these, often mutually dependent, factors, can serve
to ensure a sport’s national status in a particular country. Here one thinks of rugby
union in New Zealand (Patterson, 1999) and soccer in Brazil (Bellos, 2002). As will
be argued in this article, there are also at least two more interrelated criteria that can
be adopted, the first linked to the manner in which certain nations are presented for
the purposes of marketing domestic produce and promoting tourism, the second
referring to the ways in which specific sports are closely associated with national
landscapes.
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
230
A. Bairner
For the purposes of this article, by far the most interesting category of ‘national’
sports consists of those activities that are peculiar to specific nations or are thought
to have been invented in those nations. But what makes such sports interesting in
relation to our understanding of nations and nationalism? The ‘national’ status of
these sports is ring fenced by their exclusivity and their priority echoes here of
ethnic nationalism. National sports and games of this type are in some sense linked
to what is thought to be the essence of the nations in question even though their
actual origins may be pre-national or at least prior to the emergence of nation states.
They represent the nation symbolically despite the fact that they may well have
demonstrably failed to capture the interest of most of the people who constitute the
civic nation and/or the nation state. They are played and watched by people who, in
the eyes of nationalists, truly belong rather than by those whose authenticity as
national beings is open to question. In addition, and of most immediate relevance,
activities of this type may well be used by those whose role it is to promote the
nation, its products and its tourism industry precisely because these national sports
testify to what are projected as unique characteristics of the nation.
In fact, the tourist arguably plays a key role in helping nations to protect and
promote certain national sports. As Urry (2002, p. 3) notes, ‘the tourist gaze is
directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from
everyday experience’. Whilst commonly desirous of home comforts and the familiar,
in terms of food, drink, television and the like, seeing something strange and exotic is
almost certainly part of the holiday experience. Whether what is gazed upon is
authentic or not (always supposing we can ever be certain of authenticity in any case)
is a matter of little or no concern to most tourists or indeed to most tourist agencies.
In Spain (as Douglass, 1997, p. 29) reports, partly in response to European tourism,
the number of bullfights almost tripled from 145 in 1970 to 645 in 1970 and
‘bullfights were given in small tourist towns all along the Mediterranean coasts,
where they had never before been celebrated’. For the holidaymakers who attended,
this no doubt was the ‘real Spain’ and who can deny that the corrida undeniably
became part of their Spanish experience regardless of the widespread opposition to
bullfighting amongst substantial sections of the Spanish population.
This particular view of national sport has long been advanced by Ireland’s largest
sporting organisation, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), formed in 1884 with a
specific remit to preserve the nation’s traditional games and pastimes including
hurling and Gaelic football. Hurling is frequently the sport of choice in the eyes of
Bord Fáilte (the Irish Tourist Board) or the advertising executives responsible for
selling a variety of Irish products, including stout and whiskey. Yet, the hurling’s
popularity varies considerably from one county, and even one parish, to another
whereas the pattern of Gaelic football is more even in terms of its presence
throughout the 32 counties (King, 1998; Humphries, 1996). That said, there are
isolated pockets of the country where it loses out to hurling. Furthermore, the right
of any Gaelic game to be assigned ‘national status’ is considerably weakened not
only because some Irish nationalists opt for other sports, such as rugby union and
soccer, but also because the overwhelming majority of the Protestant community in
the north of Ireland have resolutely set their faces against the whole Gaelic games
movement. It might seem easy to dismiss this difficulty by simply taking these people
at their word and accepting that since they do not consider themselves to be truly
Irish, their sporting preferences need have no impact on what does or does not
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
National Identities
231
constitute an Irish national sport. But this would be to ignore the basic precepts of
Irish republican ideology that has consistently sought to embrace not only Catholics
but Protestants and Dissenters as well (English, 2007).
In any case, games such as rugby union and association football also have some
claim on the right to be called ‘national’ in the Irish context. Despite their British
origins, they are played throughout the island. Moreover, although rugby tends to be
played by Protestants rather than Catholics in Northern Ireland, both football codes
enjoy considerable support from both traditions on the island as a whole. They offer
Irish sportsmen and sportswomen the opportunity to represent the nation at
international level. Indeed, rugby, unlike football, allows northern unionists the
chance to acknowledge their sporting Irishness whilst retaining a political allegiance
to the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Bairner, 2005). It should
be noted, however, that regardless of any claims that either sport may have to be
recognized as ‘national’, neither has escaped the influence of globalization. The two
Irish ‘national’ football teams have both fielded players whose ethnic ‘right’ to
belong has been relatively weak. The same thing has happened in rugby union, which
in recent years has witnessed a flood of antipodean coaches and players, some of
whom have qualified to play for Ireland despite having accents that conjure up
images of Dunedin or Durban, not Dublin or Dungannon.
In both Scotland and England, there are the same compelling reasons as in
Ireland why association football and rugby union might be regarded as national
sports. However, when I asked my students in 2006 what they believed to be the
national sports of these particular nations, they suggested golf in the case of
Scotland. For England, on the other hand, the majority opted for football whilst a
significant minority, not without good some justification as I shall go on to argue,
chose cricket.
The United States and Canada also provide interesting food for thought in
relation to definitions of national sports. One could plausibly argue that the various
games and pastimes engaged in by the continent’s aboriginal peoples are the true
national sports of what became known as North America. Of these, however, only
lacrosse has acquired a wider popularity (and that fairly minimal) whilst baseball has
achieved the status of ‘the national pastime’ in the US and ice hockey has been
similarly elevated in Canada. In the former, however, it would be foolish to ignore
the rival claims of football and basketball.
One could develop these arguments further with reference to virtually every
nation in the world. However, using examples primarily from the English-speaking
world, one can make an additional claim concerning the explanatory value of the
concept of national sports. This involves relating such sports to the idea of national
landscapes and thereby bringing together each of the main elements of this article sport, nation and landscape. Certain sports are identifiable not only as national
treasures per se but also as important resources for both marketing national products
and selling the nation to tourists. The latter are in search of the ‘authentic’, whether
real or constructed and as consequence, the landscape becomes an important tourist
resource (Kneafsey, 1995; Smyth, 2001). In Ireland, this commonly involves elevating
the rural above the urban (Smyth, 2001). This is perhaps because, although we
understand that the rural landscape is in large part manufactured not least because
of industrial farming techniques, the pace of change is slower than in urban areas.
232
A. Bairner
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
Thus even in societies that are far more urbanised than Ireland, the appeal of the
rural and the great outdoors remains strong.
This is not to suggest, of course, all sports are played outside. A fairly traditional
definition informs us that ‘sports are institutionalized competitive activities that
involve rigorous physical exertion or the use of relatively complex physical skills by
participants motivated by internal and external rewards’ (Coakley, 2003, p. 21).
There is no mention here of the great outdoors, although the definition almost
certainly excludes some indoor activities such as chess and, one would suggest,
snooker and darts. In the next section of the article, however, it will be argued that
the overwhelming majority of national sports commonly possess some relationship
to the outdoors.
National sports and national landscapes
According to Duffy (1997, p. 64), ‘the ‘‘sense of place’’ accruing from the ways in
which people experience representations of present and past landscapes is a
fundamental part of territorial identity and of geographical understanding’. Simon
Schama (1996, p. 7) has argued that ‘landscape is the work of mind’. A similar point
is made by Margaret Atwood (2004, p. 59) when she writes, ‘landscapes in poems are
often interior landscapes; they are maps of a state of mind’. But although the
landscapes in the films of such directors as Andrzej Wajda and Ingmar Bergman and
in various types of creative writing are in part artistic reconstructions, they
nevertheless depict real places. So it is with much writing on sport, both fiction
and non-fiction, particularly when the precise subject matter is a sport that is fairly
widely regarded as ‘national’. Indeed, it is from writing of this sort that we get the
clearest indication of the close links between sport, landscape and the formation and
reproduction of national identities.
According to de Búrca (1999, p. 110), the GAA ‘helped to regenerate Irish rural
life and gave rural Ireland a separate, defiant, self-reliant and democratic culture
with a strong nationalist boas’. The legacy remains. A sense of place, and more
particularly of small towns and rural communities, is common to the majority of
evocations of Gaelic games in Ireland even today. As King (1998, p. 241) points out,
‘predominantly a rural game, hurling has not transplanted to the cities. Indeed,
amongst Ireland’s cities, hurling has found a home only in Cork and Waterford. But
what about Gaelic football? Again it is the rural landscapes that dominates the
narratives. ‘You could nearly miss Bellaghy altogether on a night like this, shooting
through the place on the way to somewhere bigger. From the main street though, you
can just about see 30 footballers chuntering around in their muddy floodlit field.
That’s the only sign that this is the epicentre of Derry [Gaelic] football’ (Humphries,
1996, p. 52). Or, ‘19 August 1998. A cold day for the middle of August. We had been
to another funeral in Beragh that morning and when we arrived at the parish church
in Drumquin we had to stand outside in the mizzling rain because there were already
so many people crammed inside. As echoed snatches of Philomena Skelton’s funeral
mass drifted from the makeshift tannoy through the late-summer Tyrone air, we
stood together in small clusters and made uneasy, half-whispered small talk. This
was GAA country and this was unmistakably a GAA funeral’ (Fahy, 2001, p. 7). In
fact Gaelic games are played in urban settings as well as in rural villages. But there
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
National Identities
233
persists a public image of Gaelic football and especially of hurling as rural hence
the attraction of these games to the Irish tourist industry.
Ruralism is also at the heart of cricket’s claim to be England’s national sport. As
with Gaelic games, cricket is by no means confined to rural settings indeed, the
main venues for international cricket are nearly all located in major cities, including
London, Birmingham and Manchester. However, as Johnes (2005, p. 44), observes
with reference to the development of the sport in Wales, ‘cricket may not have strictly
been a rural sport but it had the image of one’. Those who comment on cricket are
commonly drawn to the sport’s rural roots. Former British Prime Minister, John
Major, evoked both sport and landscape in seeking to define the essential
characteristics of ‘Englishness’, asserting that England would remain ‘the country
of long shadows on county (cricket) grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs,
dog lovers and pools fillers’ (Maguire, 1994, p. 414). There was nothing new in this
for as Williams (1999, p. 8) reports, ‘exultations of cricket were often embedded in
discourses of English pastoralism’. More specifically, ‘the pastoral dimension of
cricket was very much associated with how the countryside in the south of England
was imagined’ (1999, pp. 910). This is true even when the actual venue for a specific
game of cricket is urban hence Stephen Chalke’s description of the setting for a
game played in Cheltenham:
A gentle breeze accompanies the morning sunshine as, all round the ground, chairs are
unfolded and picnic baskets placed carefully on the grass. In marquees wine glasses are
polished, beer kegs are set up, and caterers deliver trays of food.
In the case of golf’s proposed status as Scotland’s national sport the association with
sport, nation and rural landscape is even more obvious. It is true that golf courses
exist within the boundaries or on the immediate outskirts of major cities and towns.
Most however are situated some way distant from the major conurbations and in fact
many of Scotland’s best known courses are located along the nation’s coastline. To
travel by train from Stranraer in the south west of the country to Glasgow by way of
the Ayrshire coast, for example, is to pass through what seems at times to be a single,
never-ending golf course.
Michael Murphy (1994, p. 3) begins his mystical paean to the game of golf with a
description of what might be regarded as an archetypal Scottish course. ‘There, on
the shore of the North Sea’, he writes, ‘lies a golfing links that shimmers in my
memory an innocent stretch of heather and grassy dunes that cradled the unlikely
events which grew into this book’ (p. 3). In contrast with the manufactured courses
which have long been the norm in the United States, Japan and increasingly in the
United Kingdom as well, the Old Course in St Andrews, upon which Murphy’s
Burningbush Links could easily have been based, was, in the words of James Dodson
(1997, p. 211), built by no man, ‘shaped only a bit by Old Tom Morris and others,
and it therefore abounds in eccentricity: massive double greens, crisscrossing
fairways, target lines that seem to shift with the ever-shifting sea winds or don’t
exist at all’. A similar almost prehistoric vision of a Scottish golfing landscape is
conjured up by Andrew Greig (2006, p. 7) when he describes the North Ronaldsay
course:
Scanning the course against the needle-bright light, I begin to understand there are no
‘greens’ as such, no ‘fairway’, no ‘rough’. It’s all an undifferentiated one, like the original
234
A. Bairner
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
world, the world before language. There is only undulating links turf, bounded by the
ocean on one side and a great stone dyke on the other.
Turning to the United States and again recognising in passing the competing claims
of American football and basketball in terms of their national popularity and
origins, one simply cannot ignore the description of baseball as the national pastime.
One of the reasons behind this may well be the extent to which the game, even when
played in urban settings, is evocative of a rural past. Certainly, far more than most
sports, baseball has inspired creative writers, most of whom have made much of the
sport’s relationship to what one could best be described as a partly real and partly
imagined American pastoral landscape.
Thus, in W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, the basis for the screenplay of Field of
Dreams, the film starring Kevin Costner, the narrator rejoices in the Iowa landscape
where he builds his ballpark in readiness for the return of the disgraced Chicago
White Sox players charged with throwing the 1919 World Series. ‘Keeping my hands
buried’, Ray tells the reader, ‘I stirred the earth with my fingers and I knew I loved
Iowa as a man could love a piece of earth’ (Kinsella, 1988, p. 16). In his love of the
land the soil upon which baseball will be played Ray is by no means alone for, as
Guttmann (1988, p. 69) has argued, ‘many Americans desire nothing better than to
dream of a pastoral world where the grass is green, the sun is bright, and the crisp
spring air carries the delightful sound of bats and balls’. Indeed, even the urban
ballpark can be re-imagined as a rural landscape, hence Mickey Rawlins’s initial
impression of the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field in Troy Soos’s novel, Murder at
Wrigley Field. ‘The field itself was splendid. The turf, a lush mixture of bluegrass and
clover, shimmered with life, and the dark earth of the base paths looked fertile
enough to grow crops’ (Soos, 1996, p. 4).
Taking some examples from the non English speaking world, in Spain
bullfighting allows the smells sounds and sights of the countryside to enter the
heart of such thriving cities as Seville and Valencia and even the capital, Madrid. The
moment one passes through the entrance gate, one becomes just one step removed
from the ranches of rural Spain. The corrida is largely an urban phenomenon
(Douglass, 1997) but the bulls, the horses, the breeders and most of the toreros are
the products of rural, village Spain. The relationship between nature, skiing and
national identity in the Nordic region has been well established (Sörlin, 1996;
Goksøyr, 1998). As Sörlin (1996, p. 160) comments, ‘nature became a primary
national symbol in Sweden, to an extent probably matched only in Finland and
Norway’. One should add also though the more general emphasis on outdoor
recreational activities (friluftsliv) which is shared equally by Danes (Andkjær, 2007).
Surfing as a signifier of sub-national entities such as southern California and Hawaii
also relies heavily, one might say exclusively, on landscape or, to be more precise,
seascape. Elsewhere what prevents an event such as the Tour de France from
becoming a global mega event is that unlike the Olympic Games, football’s World
Cup and various world championships, it cannot move around from one place to
another for the simple reason that place is so important to its cultural significance.
Although stages can be contested in other countries (England in 2007, for example),
the race itself, whatever the future holds for it, is unimaginable set entirely against a
different landscape.
National Identities
235
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
Nowhere though is the relationship between sport, nation and landscape more
apparent than in the case of Canada. Beardsley (1987, p. 31) writes, ‘if truth be
known, we delight in winter. In the season in which bears hibernate, and death is
everywhere, Canadians come alive . . . Winter is vitality and energy to us; to come
through is an exhilarating experience’. The relationship between Canada’s winter
landscape and sport is then made apparent. Beardsley (1987, p. 32) continues, ‘as
boys, it often seemed to us that the coming of winter had but one purpose: hockey’.
The point is reinforced in John B. Lee’s poem, When I Was a Boy and the Farm Pond
Froze:
When I was a boy
Once every winter the farm pond froze
Wide as a field from fence to fence
We’d go down with skates, puck and stick
And play in the burning wind for days . . .
(Kennedy, 2005, p. 59)
The frozen pond, albeit this time in the USA, also features in a collection of short
stories about hockey written by Peter LaSalle (1996, pp. 1756):
And to see Whittaker’s Pond then was to come upon it the next afternoon after the last
buzzing school bell had finally sounded at three, to hike the half-mile or so off the state
two-lane and over the dun-colored knolls, then into the shadowy woods proper with the
crunching leaves and the minty pines and the bunches of white birches, to finally spot it
below, Whittaker’s Pond.
Similar descriptions can no doubt be found in all of the world’s leading hockeyplaying countries. But it is only in Canada that the game and its landscape are so
dominant in discourses on nation and nationhood. According to Dryden and
McGregor (1989, p. 13), ‘somewhere in our souls is a spiritual Canada. Most
probably, its bedrock is of snow and ice, winter and the land. And if we were to
penetrate it a little deeper, chances are we would find a game’. ‘Puck sense’, writes
Mordecai Richler (2002, p. 143), at the expense of causing great offence to many, is
‘something red-blooded Canadians are born with’. This attitude of mind can be
linked to broader debates about Canadian identity grounded in landscape, most
notably concerned with the work of the Group of Seven who, in the words of Erin
Manning (2000, p. 6), ‘sought through art to create a vision of Canada that would be
a departure from their colonial (British) roots, claiming that it was only through a
relationship to the land that Canadians could become acquainted with their ‘‘true’’
nature’.
Conclusion
The landscapes that are intimately bound up with defining certain sports as
‘national’ are real enough. They are not the idealised products of some fertile
nationalist imagination. At the same time, however, they are only on rare occasions
unique to any particular nation and hardly ever typical of the nation in its entirety.
These are real landscapes which become inscribed in the imagination of many,
perhaps most, members of the national community. At least two generations of
British children grew up in the post World War Two era intuiting in some sense that
236
A. Bairner
the landscape described in the Famous Five novels of Enid Blyton was their
landscape.
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
After ten minutes’ rest they all set off again, feeling nice and cool inside.
It really was lovely cycling through the June countryside the
trees so fresh and green still, and the fields they passed were golden
with buttercups thousands and thousands of them, nodding
their polished heads in the wind.
(Blyton, 1957, p. 12)
Yet many of them had never set foot in the southern English counties which Blyton
idealised in her children’s books. It was a landscape though that could inspire degrees
of anglophilia amongst those growing up at that time in the so-called Celtic nations
of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, just as patriotic wartime songs, such as The White
Cliffs of Dover, had done for a previous generation.
The rural landscape most commonly associated with Gaelic games is not what
the children of Belfast, Dublin or Limerick grow up with and their holidays are more
likely to involve flights to Turkey or Spain than journeys into the rural hinterland of
their own country. Yet, growing up playing these games is inevitably linked in the
imagination with ruralism. The same is true of the pastoral associations of cricket
and baseball and of the windswept coastline so often invoked in relation to golf in
Scotland. I suspect that one would look in vain for a frozen farm pond in downtown
Toronto. Yet here too the link with a rural (and in this case a winter) landscape is
inescapable even though hockey is now played professionally in indoor arenas in Los
Angeles, Atlanta and Tampa Bay where frozen ponds are even more elusive.
The relationship of certain landscapes with what have come to be seen as national
sports is a hugely influential factor in ensuring the significance of landscape in terms
of the reproduction of specific readings of the nation. Space, in this sense, becomes
what de Certeau (1988, p. 117) describes as ‘a practiced place’. Just as the landscape,
whether real or, perhaps, half imagined, provides the context in which national sports
are played and watched, it is the playing and watching of these sports which in turn
give the landscape added meaning. As a consequence of this, the nation, sport and
landscape come to be recognised as interconnected texts which taken as whole offer
important insights into the formation of national identities.
Notes on contributor
Alan Bairner is Professor of Sport and Social Theory at Loughborough University (UK). He
is the author of Sport, Nationalism and Globalization: European and North American
Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2001) and editor of Sport and the Irish: Histories, Identities, Issues
(University College Dublin Press, 2005). He serves on the editorial boards of the Sociology of
Sport Journal and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport.
References
Allison, L. (2000). Sport and nationalism. In J. Coakley & E. Dunning (Eds.), Handbook of
Sports Studies (pp. 34455). London: Sage.
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.
New edition. London: Verso.
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
National Identities
237
Andkjær, S. (2007). Adventure in Denmark ‘Friluftsliv’ or a new sport? Paper presented at the
ISSA/ISHPES Joint World Congress, Copenhagen, 31 July5 August.
Atwood, M. (2004). Survival. A thematic guide to Canadian literature. Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart.
Bairner, A. (2001). Sport, nationalism, and globalization. European and North American
perspectives. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Bairner, A. (2005). Sport, Irishness and Ulster unionism. In A. Bairner (Ed.), Sport and the
Irish. Histories, identities, issues (pp. 15771). Dublin: University College Dublin Press.
Beardsley, D. (1987). Country on ice. Winlaw, BC: Polestar Press.
Bellos, A. (2002). Futebol. The Brazilian way of life. London: Bloomsbury.
Blain, N., Boyle, R. & O’Donnell, H. (1993). Sport and national identity in the European media.
Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Blyton, E. (1997). Five go to Billycock Hill. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Chalke, S. (2000). One more run. Bath: Fairfield Books.
Coakley, J. (2003). Sports in society. Issues and controversies. Boston: McGraw Hill.
Connor, W. (1994). Ethnonationalism: The quest for understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Cosgrove, D. & Daniels, S. (Eds). (1988). The iconography of landscape. Essays on the symbolic
representation, design and use of past environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cronin, M. (1999). Sport and nationalism in Ireland. Gaelic games, soccer and Irish identity
since 1884. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Cronin, M. & Mayall, D. (Eds). (1998). Sporting nationalisms. Identity, ethnicity, immigration
and assimilation. London: Frank Cass.
de Búrca, M (1999). The Gaelic athletic association and organized sport in Ireland. In G.
Jarvie (Ed.), Sport in the Making of Celtic Cultures (pp. 100111). Leicester: Leicester
University Press.
De Certeau, M. (1988). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dodson, J. (1997). Final Rounds. A father, a son, The golf journey of a lifetime. London:
Century.
Dryden, K. & McGregor, R. (1989). Home game. Hockey and life in Canada. Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1989.
Douglass, C. B. (1997). Bulls, bullfighting, and Spanish identities. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Duffy, P. J. (1997). Writing Ireland. Literature and art in the representation of Irish place. In B.
Graham (Ed.), In Search of Ireland, A Cultural Geography (pp. 6486). London: Routledge.
English, R. (2007). Irish freedom: a history of nationalism in Ireland. London: Macmillan.
Fahy, D. (2001). How the GAA survived the troubles. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
Fulton, G. & Bairner, A. (2007). Sport, space and national identity in Ireland: The GAA,
Croke Park and Rule 42. Space and Polity, 11(1), 5574.
Gellner, E. (1987). Culture, identity and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goksøyr, M. (1998). The popular sounding board: Nationalism, ‘the people’ and sport in
Norway in the inter-war years. In H. Meinander & J. A. Mangan (Eds), The Nordic world.
Sport in society (pp. 100114). London: Frank Cass.
Greig, A. (2006). Preferred lies. A jouney to the heart of Scottish golf. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Grosby, S. (1995). Territoriality: The transcendental primordial feature of modern societies.
Nations and Nationalism, 1(2), 14362.
Grosby, S. (2007). The successor territory. In A. S. Leoussi & S. Grosby (Eds), Nationalism
and ethnosymbolism. History, culture and ethnicity in the formation of nations (pp. 99112).
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Guttmann, A. (1998). A whole new ball game: An interpretation of American sports. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Hargreaves, J. (2000). Freedom for Catalonia? Catalan nationalism, Spanish identity and the
Barcelona Olympic Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
238
A. Bairner
Hearn, J. (2006). Rethinking nationalism. A critical introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Hechter, M. (2000). Containing nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hill, C. R. (1992). Olympic politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hoberman, J. (1984). Sport and political ideology. London: Heinemann.
Humphries., T. (1996). Green fields. Gaelic sport in Ireland. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Jarvie, G. & Walker, G. (1994). Scottish sport in the making of the nation. Ninety-minute
patriots? Leicester Leicester University Press.
Johnes, M. (2005). A history of sport in Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Kennedy, M. P. J. (2005). Going top shelf. An Anthology of Canadian hockey poetry. Surrey, BC:
Heritage House Publishing.
King, S. J. (1998). A history of hurling. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Kinsella, W. P. (1988). Shoeless Joe. London: Allison and Busby.
Kneafsey, M. (1995). A landscape of memories: Heritage and tourism in Mayo. In U. Kockel
(Ed.), Landscape, heritage and identity: Case studies in Irish ethnography (pp. 13553).
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Kong, L. & Yeoh, S. A. (2003). The politics of landscapes in Singapore. Constructions of
‘‘nation’’. New York: Syracuse University Press.
LaSalle, P. (1996). Van Arsdale’s pond. In P. LaSalle (Ed.), Hockey Sur Glace (pp. 17389).
New York: Breakaway Books.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Machin, A. (2007). Language-games of the nation. The CSD Bulletin, 14(1/2), 124.
Maguire, J. (1994). Sport, identity politics, and globalization: Diminishing contrasts and
increasing varieties. Sociology of Sport Journal, 11(4), 398427.
Manning, E. (2000). I am Canadian. Identity, territory and the Canadian national landscape.
Theory and Event, 4. (http://www.ubcinternational.ubc.ca/downloads/Canadian.pdf) (acces
sed 3 August 2006).
Miller, T., Lawrence, G., McKay, J. & Rowe, D. (2001). Globalization and sport. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Moorhouse, H. F. (1996). One state, several countries: Soccer and nationality in a ‘United’
Kingdom. In J. A. Mangan (Ed.), Tribal identities. nationalism, Europe, sport (pp. 5574).
London: Frank Cass.
Morgan, W. J. (1997). Sports and the making of national identities: A moral view. Journal of
the Philosophy of Sport, 24(1), 120.
Muir, R. (1999). Approaches to landscape. London: Macmillan Press.
Murphy, M. (1994). Golf in the kingdom. New York: Arkana.
Nairn, T. (1981). The break up of Britain. Second, expanded edition. London: Verso.
Orwell, G. (1945/1970). The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell. Volume
IV. In front of your nose, 19451950, (eds) S. Orwell and I. Angus. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin. (First published, Tribune, 14 December 1945).
Patterson, B. (Ed.). (1999). Sport, society and culture in New Zealand. Wellington: Stout
Research Centre, Victoria University.
Porter, D. & Smith, A. (Eds). (2004). Sport and national identity in the post-war world. London:
Routledge.
Richler, M. (2002). Cheap skates. In M. Richler (Ed.), Dispatches from the sporting life (pp.
141147). Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
Schama, S. (1996). Landscape and memory. New York: HarperCollins.
Silk, M. L., Andrews, D. L. & Cole, C. L. (Eds). (2005). Sport and corporate nationalisms.
Oxford: Berg.
Silk, M. & Falcous, M. (2005). One day in September/A week in February: Mobilizing
American (sporting) nationalisms. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(4), 44771.
Smith, A. & Porter, D. (2004). Introduction. In A. Smith & D. Porter (Eds.), Sport and national
identity in the post-war world (pp. 19). London: Routledge.
Smith, A. D. (1995). Nations and nationalism in a global era. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Smith, A. D. (1998). Nationalism and modernism. London: Routledge.
Smyth, G. (2001). Space and the Irish cultural imagination. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave.
Soos, T. (1996). Murder at Wrigley Field. New York: Kensington Books.
National Identities
239
Downloaded by [90.178.132.210] at 23:03 02 September 2012
Sörlin, S. (1996). Nature, Skiing and Swedish nationalism. In J. A. Mangan (Ed.), Tribal
Identities. Nationalism, Europe, Sport (pp. 147163). London: Frank Cass.
Starc, G. (2006). Remembering skiing and football in Slovenia: Making a national mnemonic
scheme. Acta Universitatis Carolinae Kinanthropologica, 42(2), 3749.
Thacker, A. (2005). The idea of a critical literary geography. New Formations, 57, 5673.
Ticher, M. (1994). Notional Englishmen, black Irishmen and multicultural Australians:
Ambiguities in national sporting identity. Sporting Traditions, 11(1), 7591.
Urry, J. (2002). The tourist gaze. Second edition. London: Sage.
Vejdovsky, B. (2004). Strange fruit: The violent beauty of the American pastoral now and then.
New Formations, 52, 1026.
Williams, J. (1999). Cricket and England. A cultural and social history of the inter-war years.
London: Frank Cass, 1999.