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Jeu de Boules/Coup de Boule: On Masculinity, Postcoloniality, and Amazigh Activism
Abstract by Dr. Paul Silverstein On Session 139  (Muslim Youth and Sports)

On Friday, November 15 at 5:00 pm

2019 Annual Meeting

Abstract
In this paper, I consider how postcolonial Amazigh activism has been constituted through public performances of appropriately gendered subjects. I focus on how sporting disciplines of football and pétanque in Kabylia and southern Morocco have served as training grounds for young men to internalize and embody Amazigh pride as both a collective consciousness and individualized expression. Not only do football fields and pétanque courts serve as a spaces for activist organization and militant demonstrations, but the games themselves become occasions for meta-social reflections on the dynamics of political struggle, the fragility of group solidarity and the precarity of rural life writ large. Moreover, given their decidedly colonial and military genealogy, playing football and pétanque reflects transformations over the last century of a Berber masculinity ambivalently defined by resistance. While such a violent past might now appear institutionalized and secularized, occasional acts of unanticipated expression -- like Zinedine Zidane's famous head-butt (coup de boule) -- break the frame of play and interrupt the putatively disciplined sportization process. The paper pays particular attention to such frame violations and spectacular gestures, to the incompletion of the postcolonial peace.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Maghreb
Sub Area
Minorities