The imagined nation in sports key: Anthropological notes of the colombian case

Abstract

The sport has been a leading luxury of the past six decades of national history. The creation of Professional Football Championship and the “Vuelta a Colombia”, averaging the last century, pose a different role than Norbert Elias (1992) attributes the modern sport when presented as a result of the pacification of the elites and ersatz violence: in Colombia happened almost upside down, football and cycling as popular practice and entertainment, develop in the fierce era of bipartisan struggle and notarial function of the liberated territories of political violence. If football established the “civilized” cities to expel violence, cycling traced -through the stages- the perimeter of the nation thought by national elites from the center. Boxing, as socio-body practice that is nestled on the Atlantic coast, tercia in the process of “imagining the nation” with its incomplete sublimation of real violence, which contrasts with the almost absence of political violence in its territory. That way challenges the center and forces the nation include the three pearls of the Caribbean, which are the land of their best fighters: Barranquilla, Cartagena and Santa Marta. In that imagined map of the country, the cycling it is conceived of mountain and farmer, boxing as coastal and black and football as a place for everyone.