Collective Representations and the Sacred in Sport

Abstract

This paper explores in particular the source of the feelings expressed in sport contexts and the processes of their amplification. Sport activities acquire their significance as collective representations through which people represent to themselves in symbolic form the power of the social groups in which they live, their structures and their moral codes. In so doing, they help to create and sustain and, at the same time, become subject to the influence of the social arrangements to which such symbolic structures relate. The emotions engendered may be amplified through processes of ritual and taboo and the excitement generated by sport encounters, thus leading to an experience of sport as sacred and radically separate from the flow of profane or'normal' life.