The National, the Global, the Tribal - a Trialectical Approach to the Identity Question in Sports

By bodily movement, collective identities go into action and into contact with each other - sometimes also in competition with each other. Sport is a way to say "we" to each other.

But who talks about sport as being only one entity has not understood sport at all. Likewise, who treats nationalism as only one phenomenon, cannot go into depth with this subject. Only by accepting the existing multitude in social life as the starting point, can relevant knowledge be produced. In this respect, only a comparative discourse gives any meaning, and this means: the quest of otherness.

Let us, therefore, start by one concrete situation from "the other" in the North of Europe, from Denmark in the mid-1990s. The event will cast light on both: Danish practice as representing otherness (for you in Japan, but it is "the other" for the Western world, too) and the Danish meeting with otherness, the encounter between Nordic and exotic body cultures.

Capoeira in Zealand - Gesamtkunstwerk or Supermarket?

The beat of drums is booming over the warm summer fields of Zealand. The sounds are coming from the movement house of a sports academy which gives a free view towards the Great Belt on the horizon. One hundred people - young and old - are assembled in the round hall. Exciting beats of samba fill the space and make people swing in common rhythm - while some children are crawling between their legs.

For one week, these people have lived and trained together on summer courses. Now they show their results to each other. And in the evening, everything will conclude with a large feast.

The first to show their activities had been the gymnasts. They demonstrated several pieces of gymnastic choreography transcending the borders between gymnastics, new dance and body theatre. This sports academy is known for its unconventional practice in this field, experimenting with body, surprise, rhythm and feeling.

The martial arts course had followed up with a show by its teachers. Confronting and mixing taekwondo, karate and judo techniques in a joint display, they present humorous scenes of stunt-like character. But all of a sudden the atmosphere changes when a fragile Chinese woman enters the ground handling her sword in the soft way of tai chi chuan. Her movements seem to develop on their own and without force, in waves, as if the body was gliding under water. Whilst wild cries of attack and the crash of falling bodies had filled the air before, no sound can be heard now. Following the event with bated breath, the crowd seems to be captivated by a mystical fascination.

A new configuration of sound and movement arises as soon as the course of music and rhythm invades the scene, stamping a South African boots dance. Emotions are stirred up by what once had been a protest song of Black mine workers in the Apartheid state. Although their life conditions are as far from the one of the Danish dancers as their rebel temperament is, the rhythm seizes immediately. After this, the rhythm-and-movement group takes the metal drums from Rio de Janeiro to their hands and sends the roar of samba out over the Danish fields.

This is the moment of the capoeira. Sitting down in a large circle, all participants join the final event. The young Danish leader of the capoeira group starts his rhythmic song, accompanied by drum and berimbau, the Brazilian string instru-ment, and the crowd answers by repeating the refrains, thus creating a more and more intense, collective atmosphere. The first two fighters enter the circle, showing ritual gestures of reverence. Dancing around each other in low and attentive positions they try to find each other's rhythm and suddenly begin to push their legs against each other, head foremost. The dialogue of joint singing has now a complex configuration of partners, the music band, the chorus and the fighters who arrange their movements after the pattern of the song. Other fighters follow, some more dance-like, some more violent, some cunning, some just at the very beginning of their ability. Some of the fighters even begin to challenge participants who have never tried this fighting art before - and indeed, the process of bodily dialogue with the non-trained flows nevertheless, borne by the rhythm of the crowd and by encouraging laughter. Gradually, the pace of the music accelerates, the tension increases, and the crowd rises clapping more and more vividly. A trance-like mood arises by repetition after repetition, and the chorus is going on and on...

The Defeat of Dichotomisation
The described situation of a meeting in body movement gives a glimpse on the future of globalisation - but which type of globalisation? And are there others? What does the event from Zealand tell us about the relation between nationalisation and globalisation in sports in general?

On the one hand: The event takes place on a folk academy which - since its start in 1938 - has had gymnastics and sport (in Danish idræt) in its title. Especially gymnastics has been, since the late 19th century, an impor-tant part of traditional farmers' culture in Denmark. In this respect, gymnastics is part of the Danish national culture, side by side with folk dance and minstrel music. The sports academi-es, too, have their historical roots in the popular culture movement which is regarded as one of the pillars of Danishness. It is therefore not a coincidence that gymnastic performances have opened the demonstration, described above. In this respect, the event - far from being untypical in Denmark - can be placed into the context of national sport, and it expresses some actual tenden-cies of Danish national identity by sports and body culture.

But - on the other hand - the gymnastic activities of the Zealand event are followed by others which seem to be basically foreign to Danish cul-ture, by Oriental, South African and Afro-Brazilian rhythms and dances. What does this mean? Is this a contradiction against the national aspect of: "our own" vs. "the foreign"? At the first glance it seems as if we face a supermarket of folkloristic elements transported via the media cul-ture and its globalisation process. Surely, the exotic elements have also a fashionable smell, but their fascination in Denmark is at the same time marked by a strongly anti-commercial and alternative ap-proach. The multi-cultural gesamtkunstwerk has links with the anti-Apartheid movement and other solidarity movements on the grassroots level - with the implied social criticism. And this social criticism connects the actual folk academy culture with its historical precursers which had been both nationalist (Danish vs. German) and social critical (farmers' anarchism vs. the ruling class) in one.

The contradiction between the nationalist and identitary on the one hand and the fashionable and global on the other is, however, not the whole story. The described event with its typical combination of "own" and "exotic" elements is a part of what in Danish is called folkelig idræt, popular sport - and this is a third dimension. When examinating the term of folke-lig more in depth, one meets a field of activities and social relations which are neither identical with the state strategies of national identification nor with the global fashions of the market. The sports academy is one among more than one hundred Danish folkehøjskoler, popular academies, being private, free boarding-schools for liberal adult education. The folkehøjskole is regarded - together with the forening, the free voluntary association - as the fundament of folkelig oplysning, of popular enlightenment in Denmark (Eichberg 1992). Though placed on the more experimental side of the folk academies and of popular sports, the activities in the movement house of Zealand illustrate some central aspects of popular culture in Denmark and of the concept folkelig, "popular", in general. Evidently, the rela-tion between one's own folklore and foreign folklore is no either/or. But what does folk culture mean, if Danish gymnastics and Afro Brazilian capoeira can join without conflict whilst the "identitary" and the "other" in other cases clash in national cultural confrontations - in Denmark as well as in other countries?

In Quest of Critical Categories
Evidently, we are fumbling for categories, and this quest for a theoretically relevant terminology and classification leads us beyond some of the established dualistic patterns. Usually the national question is treated in dichotomious constructions, where the global confronts the natio-nal, the modern is in conflict with the traditional, and the cosmopolitan excludes the tribal. On a more abstract level this is mirrored by the alleged contra-diction between the universal and the particular.

Even some of the most diferentiated descriptions have cut through the complex contradictions of modern identity conflicts by setting up a dichotomous contradiction between modernity - Olympic sport, rationality, secularism, striving for records, quantification, specialisation - on the one hand and traditionalist "resistance" - German turn gymnastics, traditional sports, ritual, romantic values - on the other. By this dualistic model an historical one-way road from the one, the particular and traditional, to the other, the modern and universal, was suggested (Guttmann 1994, see also Pfister 1995). It is, however, impossible, in the framework of this Western dualism to categorize and analyse such a simple event as described here from Zealand which is national and global at the same time. Which is modern, but not record-minded, which is world sport, but fundamentally Danish national. Which is particular and general in one. If this is true, how should these poor categories then be adequate to understand the complex processes of future identity building?

What makes the case still more urgent for the studies of sport is, that even the basic term of "sport" is equivocal. In some cultural connections - as in classical Western Olympism - one will hesitate to classify the South African boots dance as "sport". Gymnastics, tai chi, taekwon-do and budo sports are standing nearer to "sport"; historically they have in a complicated way become pulled nearer to "sport" during the last decades, but in the Zealand case the competitive element is completely lacking. Capoeira is especially difficult to classify because basically it combines a dance-like body communication with musical expression and Afro-Brazilian spiritual mythology; in the historical process capoeira has become a sport-like activity - by the mediation of Brazilian boxing - but the Danish capoeira is marked by a deliberate lack of sportive competitivity. The classification of the activities described from Zealand - which one in Danish would call idræt, an Old Nordic word including sports and other cultural activities - is not clearly "sport" but more adequately something like body culture.

In other words, the concrete event confronts the observer with the urgency of a new critical theory and a new set of categorialisations. "Critical" means here: to split up the current self-evidencies and to confront the disparate aspects with each other - though not by simple dualist antagonisms. The method, thus, is comparative again, but now inside the phenomenon, inside the situation itself. The trialectical tension between the national, the global and the folkelig can be a starting point for our further analysis.

Folkelig - the Untranslatable
The most difficult term in this complexity is neither the national nor the global, but the third: the folkelig, the popular, the folk.

At this point we are facing a fundamental problem which is characteristical for the process of intercultural communication when people try to translate certain key notions of their cultural self-understanding. The concepts of folk (people), folkelig (popular) and folkelighed (popularity) are basic for an understanding of central phenomena and notions of cultural life in Denmark like popular enlightenment, popular academies, popular movements and popular sports. But they seem to be untranslatable.

Let us search for equivalents in other languages, in German and English for example. Since the late 18th century the German word volklich (related to the people) has covered a wide range of meanings similar to the Danish folkelig, but it has never become current usage. It remained in the shadow of the word vlkisch which spread since the late 19th century and expresses the nationalist element of the popular, but isolated from the democratic element and with racist and especially anti-Semitic connotations. (From this viewpoint, the folkelig activity of "Black" capoeira in Denmark would not at all be vlkisch, but is rather anti-vlkisch.)

Folkelig could also be translated to German by volkstmlich, but this sounds today rather out-dated, and as Bert Brecht commented ironically: "Das Volk ist niemals tmlich" (Folk is never loristic, the people is never popular). Folkloristisch tastes of the museum, giving associations of artificially reconstructed culture, of folklore as the neat academic order of a dead material. (In this perspective, the Oriental activities and African dances in Denmark - popular as they may be, but also mixed and syncretistic - are neither volkstmlich nor folkloristisch.)

Populær - from Latin populus (people, folk) - signifies the flat popular aspects of mass culture. In a more recent form as pop it refers to trivial products of the entertainment industry. This has been turned into pop art as a sophisticated play with the trivial. Yet more derogatory is what is called pøbel-haft and vulgær, the low and vulgar, the dangerous mob as seen by the social elites. (The Danish practice of tai chi may be popular, but it is not mass cultural and not at all vulgar or low.)

Populistisch is used for political and social movements which appeal to nationalist emotions, greediness or primitive, populist interests. Publik or ffentlich refers to the folk as a passive and receptive rather than an active factor in public life. In contrast both the national and the demokratisch (democratic) include active elements of the folkelig, but in a more narrow, statepolitical sense, without the human depth of folk culture; one has recently tried to overcome this by words derived from civil and civic as in Zivilgesellschaft (civil society) or civic culture. Sometimes one makes difference between national as the more moderate and nationa-listisch as the more extreme, and there are also differences between nationalist and patriotisch which has some conservative and stateaffirmative undertones but is also used on the left wing to denote a constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus). Also demago-gisch (demagogic) is derived from Greek demos (folk). (Most of these connotations are narrowly related to the state-politi-cal sphere and, thus, far from the bodily practice of dance, play and music - if not these are instrumentalized for demonstrative effects.)

In sociology, one has sometimes confronted demos, the state population, with ethnos, the ethnic and cultural signification of the people (Francis 1965). The differentiation shows further important problems of translation, but there is no dichotomy between those two. In social reality, rather a field of continuity is connecting ethnos and demos, and in many cases all over the world, ethnic and linguistic connections are conditions for an active participation in the democratic process. Therefore one has proposed the term of demotic (popular, folk) signifying a intermediary relation between the ethnic-cultural and the democratic-political community (Smith 1991). The common denominator of ethnos and demos is the ability to talk to each other, but this ability is not restric-ted to the linguistic dimension. In a larger perspective, the definition of "those who can talk to each other" includes common cultural and sport activities.

The common feature of German Volk, Danish folk, Greek ethnos and others is, thus, that it is not the same as Bevlkerung, population, i.e. not only a passive category of registration and administration. Folk is an actor in history, and folkelig-hed is the relation of this activity to collective identity. All in all, the problem to communicate the Danish folkelig culture to other societies makes the specific horizon of Danish experience - in relation to German and other history - visible.

A main point in the Danish understanding of folkelig is expressed by its composite use as mellemfolkelig, signifying something like "inter-folk", "between the peoples" or "from people to people". Mellemfolkelig idræt can mean either inter-national meeting in sport or inter-ethnic sport contact. (In German, the corresponding zwischenvlkisch does not exist and would - as "inter-racist" - be a contradiction in itself.)

The significance of folk is that there are also other folk, not only my own. And this otherness means that there are relations, that dialogue is possible, and that there is a possibility of togetherness.

It seems that what comes close to Danish folkelig, are Slavic words like narodnyi, derived from Russian narod, folk, people. This corresponds to the Hungarian npi, derived from np, folk. From India we are told that folkelighed is translated as antah shakti in the Kannada language. It would be of great interest to include here the Japanese terminologies of folk and people.

The difficulties of translating the collective subject of culture and identity arise again in the connection with sport where one finds compositions like volks-sport (German, Flemish), sport in popular culture, jeux populaires (French), giochi di tradizione popolare (Italian), folkelig idræt (Danish), folklig idrott (Swedish), Volks-spiele (Ger-man), narodnaya fizicheskaya kultura (Russian). In some countries, volkssport has designated the sport of the masses with socia-list or communist under-tones; in Italy, sport popo-are was a communist concept (in the 1990s renamed to sport per tutti, sport for all), and in Libya the official socialist concept is public sport or people's sport. In other countries as in Nazi Germany, Volkssport and vlkisches Turnen (folk gymnastics) had nationalist or even racist connotations. In Flanders, the welldeveloped volkssport is politically more neutral and describes the old games - similar to jeux populaires - whilst folkelig idræt in Denmark has an oppositional undertone and is historically derived from gymnastics. And what in English is called popular culture in relation to sports, as it is studied in the tradition of the Birmingham school, includes especially soccer fan behavior side by side with rock music.

Most, but not all of these volkssport-terms have national or ethnic undertones. At least three different levels of meaning are tied together, with varying accentuation: a natio-nal one ("our" sport vs. "the others'"), a social one (people's sport vs. the elite's culture) and a universal-psychological one (togetherness and laughter). This multi-farious pattern is true for folk in general as well.

By the diversity of the folk terminologies all over the world, it becomes still more evident that folk is the untrans-atable - and this in two directions. One is that the Nordic word folk cannot be translated exactly to other languages. The second is that the word folk designates itself what is untranslatable between the different cultures: identity by difference.

On the other hand, however, the dif-ferent languages and cultures by constructing untranslatable words have nevertheless designated something in common: a third type of social relations which is neither the same as state activities nor as transactions on the market. It seems that in all the cultures of the world, this third sector is a social base and the original collective subject of sports and games.

History: The Popular Movements
The quality of being folk, of not being translatable, has its roots in the historicity of social relations. Each social pattern or process has its specific history, and these histori-es are - though comparable - fundamentally different and in this respect "untranslatable" from culture to culture. Let us have a closer look at the Danish history giving the background to the initial case (Borish 1991, Eichberg 1996).

What is called popular movements in Denmark, started in the early nineteenth century with a religious revival among the farmers, rising in protest against the state church and its alliance with the repressive regime of absolutism and aristocracy. In pietistic forms, the "awakened" farmers tried to find their own way of religious experience. This strife found its most impressive expression in the psalms and political-philosophical writings of N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783 - 1872). It was this national romantic poet who launched the idea of popular enlightenment - folkelig oplysning, hereby combining in an original way tradi-tions of European Enlightenment with the Romantic notion of folk (Korsgaard 1997).

The religious revivals were soon followed by political movements of self-determination from below, leading to the revolution of 1848 and thereby to the formation of the modern Danish national state. At the same time, this was the starting impulse to establish a liberal associational culture. Side by side with this, free schools and academies - the folkehøjskoler - arose from the 1840s. Among the voluntary associations - folkelige foreninger - which were struggling for a renewal of culture, sport (rifle, gymnastic) associations played a prominent role. The popular sport association (forening) as a part of rural local culture corresponded, but also contrasted to the bourgeois sports club (klub) in the towns. And in bodily practice, popular sport soon became dominated by the folkelig gymnastics practiced by left-wing democratic farmers in the late nineteenth century as an alternative against militarist discipline in sport and exercises. This alternative culture was linked both to the construction of assembly halls in the villages and to the cooperatives of agrarian production, spreading at the same time over the whole country.

Since that time, the folkelig tradition has become enriched by experiences from the socialist workers' movement after 1900 and from intellectual cultural radicalism of the 1920s, though this latter one was rather elitist and in this respect non-popular. Since 1968, the grassroots move-ments have contri-buted with further elements, among these the opening towards the peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia and Latin America. (This leads more directly to the capoeira and the South Africa boots dance in Zealand.)

The result is that Denmark has always had not only one unitary sports organi-sation, but several federations. Today the two largest are the Danish Sport Confederation (DIF) modelled after the inter-national pattern of sport disciplines and record production, and the Danish Gymnastics & Sports Associations (DGI) trying to express the Danish "alternative" approach of folkelig sport and culture. In popular sports - ideally - it is the people them-selves who are organizing their transverse meetings and dialogues by bodily activity. Sport is festivity. Sport is association. The body experience of popular sport is experience of social together-ness and identity, of self-cons-ciousness and solidarity: "We do it ourselves" (Bje/Eichberg 1994).

Popular Culture as a Base of State and Market
The specific folkelig connection between sport and festivity does not mean, however, that popular culture was a luxurious superstructure which could be compared to the demonstrative consumption of the aristocratic or bourgeois leisure class. On the contrary: popular culture became an important factor in the development of the Danish model of agrarian modernization. Whilst the capitalist transformation of agrarian economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in nearly all other countries led to a marginalization of farmers to the profit of the urban bourgeoisie, Danish farmers could enter into capitalist competition through their co-operative organizations and survive, raise their productivity and contri-bute to the natio-nal identity of their country.

From the beginning of the 1880s, dairy cooperatives started and spread all over the country, soon followed by butcher cooperatives, local electric works - many of them on the base of wind power, co-operative shops, export cooperatives, foodstuff associations, cooperative banks, cooperative cement factories, fertilizer and seed purchase associations and other forms of selfhelp. With the help of this new network of associations, the farmers managed to master the market crisis during the depressions between 1876 and 1900 and to maintain their decentralized ownership structure in spite of the pressure from the great capital.

Historians have often asked themselves how this exceptional survival could be realized. How was solidarity implemented in the concrete life of the farmers (which did not succeed in many other countries)? What was the social mechanism linking the farmer's ideas and interests together with their practical economic cooperation? Here the popular culture deserves atten-tion, especially the folkelig gymnastics which spread over Denmark at the same time, and parallel to, the cooperative movement, constituting thus a bodily link between work and social identity in the individual life. When the - mostly young - farmers trained their bodies in gymnastic ranks to the accompaniment of sentimental national romantic songs and refrained from individual competition (as it was demanded by competitive sports), this expressed a peculiar social language. It contributed to their collectivity and enabled them to compete together in the capitalist market.

The Danish case shows, therefore, that gymnastics and production are not two separate spheres. Folk culture and economy are not so far from each other, as a narrow productivistic thinking would allege. And the popular movements have been fundamental for both the constitution of the modern nationstate and for the survival on the capitalist market. But in spite of this close connection, state, market and popular movements - with sport as one ground pillar - make up three fundamentally different sectors which by their contradictory combination constitute the modern society. That is why the specific historical ex-perience of Danish sports - as those of France (but also Brittany, Corsica, Elsass-Lothringen), Russia (but also Tatar-stan, Tjetjenia, Karelia), Indonesia (but also Java, Bali, Minang-kabau, Batak, Atjeh, East Timor, West Papua), Tanzania (but also Sukuma, Maasai) etc. - must be understood in a larger societal context. Here we can turn to the structural analysis of popular culture.

Structural Trialectics: State, Market, Civil Society
Recent social studies have called our attention to the fact that society and economy cannot be described sufficiently by the two sectors only which have hitherto been in the search-light of social theory: state and market.

The state or public sphere follows political decisions. Public economy is determined by political values and regulations. The public sphere has a monopolistic structure: There is only one state on a territory. This monopoly is also the source of state authority, of power and its hierarchical graduation.

The societal discourse on this level is about the relation of the state and the individual authority vs. subject, public interest vs. individual interest, power vs. liberty. This was expressed by authors like Niccol Machia-velli, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, G.W.F. Hegel and Carl Schmitt in the "tatist" tradition, and by John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rous-seau, Immanuel Kant and Jürgen Habermas in the more liberal individualist tradition.

The market, in contrast, consists of a multiplicity of competing actors. As producers or suppliers, they are in a mutual relation of contest. Their survival as market participants depends of their success and gain on the market. Their actions are not determined by political decisions, but by the expectation of profit and by the intended optimation of the profit-and-loss ratio.

The societal discourse on this level circulates around the relations of production and productivity - productive work vs. unproductive activities, producers vs. consumers. This was discussed from Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich List and Karl Marx up to the neoclassical theory.

However, the rationalities of power and the logic of produc-tivism are not only contradictory. They are also - as Michel Foucault has demonstrated - related to each other, linked by the striving for a panoptical view both by the state and by the market. They are connected by a certain abstraction from the concrete sensuality and bodily existence of the human being, by a high degree of what with Jean Baudrillard could be called simulation.

The duality of state and market is, moreover, far from sufficient to describe the totality of economic activity and of social action. Large parts of the really existing economic flows are neither subjected to monopolistic political decisions nor determined by the principle of profit. They indicate the existence of a third sector, the civil society.

The civil society consists of self-organized and volun-tary networks and associations. Typical for these are societies, clubs and free associations, all types of co-operatives and formal as well as informal collectives. The foreninger, the free associations, and the folkehøjskoler, the people's academies, which constitute the basis of popular culture in Denmark, are characteristic pillars of civil society.

The collective unities of civil society follow the principle of nearness and of temporal community. Thus, they can be compared to the social pattern of family; and indeed, the family and its - immense, but non-monetarized - inner economy can be seen as an important part of civil socie-ty, too, though it lacks some traits of voluntary union.

Under the aspect of plurality versus monopoly, the civil society with its variety of actors can be compared to the market; in contrast however, the activities of the civil society are essentially non-profit oriented. Morality and pleasure, i.e. complex motivations from social behaviour are decisive and contrast the narrow util-itarian bias of the market. Affective and normative considerations play an important role in civil society - contrasting the so-called rationality of the market subjects. And the community-oriented feelings and interests work in civil society in contrast to the (alleged) individualism of the market subject. On the other hand, by being based on political and value-oriented decisions, the actions of civil society can also be compared to those of the state; in contrast, however, they are not part of a monopolistic structure but voluntary and competing.

Civil society is, thus, not only a "rest category", nor is it the "second best solution" to imperfect market conditions, as some economists have characterized it. Civil society describes a vast part of the real existing social activity and economy.

The societal discourse on this level has sometimes been as dichotomous as in the other two traditions, Ferdinand Tnnies (1887) having pro-posed the sociological dichotomy of community vs. society and Habermas having dichotomized life-world vs. system-world. More significant have been, however, the pluralistic approaches towards folk identities, as expressed by Johann Gottfried Herder, N.F.S Grundtvig and Martin Buber. Intermediary corporations and associationalism were discovered by Alexis de Tocquevil-le (1835/40), Max Weber (1922) and Antonio Gramsci (see Kebir 1991), but also discussed in the tradition of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Charles Fourier, Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, of federalist, syndicalist and cooperationalist thinking. The recent (re-)discovery of civil society since the seventies followed very different experiences. On the one hand, it has been in economics that - since Burton A. Weisbrod (1977) - a third nonprofit sector became visible and the altruistic moral values as an economic factor in general were called to attention by Amitai Etzioni (1988). On the other hand, dissidents from Eastern Europe discovered that in a state monopolistic system, there were sources of people's resistance and self-determination which were not subjected to the laws of the market. The Solidarity union movement in Poland has been a paradigmatical example of this civil society. And a further experience have been the New Social Movements in the Western countries - peace movement, women's movement, ethnic revivals, ecologist green movements - directing the attention towards a sociality beyond state and market.

One of the most relevant recent contribu-tion of sociological theory to the dynamics of the third sector has been the dis-covery of the tribes or - more correctly - of the tribal in actual society. Michel Maffesoli (1996) has reflected about the development of neo-tribes and pseudo-tribes under post-modern circumstances. The "underground centrality" of the tribal is characterized by common ritual and habitus, by groupism and solidarity, by a certain proxemics and the participation in emotions of sometimes ecstatic character. Sports clubs and fan activities are typical references of this analysis (see also Mangan 1996). All in all this means a revival and a revi-sion of the classical sociology of Gemeins-chaf-ten, communities, under post-modern conditions. It represents a sociology of what in French - again untranslatable - is called puissance, the power of civil sociality, facing le pouvoir, the public power.

These researches altogether show that by talking about state, market and civil society one talks about concrete economic sectors, but at the same time about more than that, even more than societal sectors. Indeed, the discourse is about the trialectics of fundamentally different - but related - dimensions of social life, with roots down into three different types of psychology.

The Three Cultures
If the history of the folkelig movements in Denmark is seen in the light of this structural differentiation, the third sector of voluntary non-profit activities reveals as the place of popular associational culture. And more than this: it is not only a "third", much less a rest category. But the "tribal" people's life is the base both for the democratic state in Denmark - with its fundament in the revolution of 1848, the constitutions of 1849 and 1856, and the shift towards the rule of the elected majority in 1901 - and for co-operationalism as a means of agricultural survival on the market. The significance of the third sector can be described more precisely when comparing the societal trialectics with the structural pattern of culture. Indeed, empirical cultural sociology has thrown light on a similar three-pole differentiation of culture in Denmark (Skot-Hansen 1984).

lite culture or what in Danish is called finkulturen, refined culture, includes both the traditional educational culture of the modern bourgeoisie and the more provocative avant-garde culture. Both are in high degree linked with verbal competence and with discourses of "spirit", in Danish called nd, in German Geist. The cultural activities of this sector consist mainly of individual experiences, productions and reproductions, which are commented, reviewed and argued about; culture means intellectually to problematize the experiences of one own and and of others. Academic culture has a strong position in this pattern.

Commercial culture, in contrast, is mainly based on visuality and on the aural, on picture and sound. With technological development, this is melded together in the audiovisuality of the media industry. The addressee selects, gazes and listens, but otherwise remains mostly passive and receptive in relation to the cultural production - consumers' culture. Commercial culture offers entertainment after the criterion: What is on sale?

Popular culture, folkekultur, is strongly marked by bodily activities and body movement like sport, dance, festivity and rhythmic music. Joint experience and personal feelings have high priority. Bodily competence is based on practical knowled-ge and direct mediation here-and-now. The cultural actor is active - together with others. Popular culture in Denmark consists of two streams with different historical origins, the traditional folk culture from the nineteenth century - sport, folk dance, choir singing, amateur theatre, assembly house festivities - and the new popular culture developed since the 1970s. This grassroots culture includes rock culture and new types of festivals, island camps as alternative tourism, ecological initiatives, street and quarter festivities, the urban Whitsuntide carnival, self-organisation in youth subcultures, new games, mass marathons and other alternative movement culture.

When comparing the trialectics of state, market and civil society with the inner contradictions of elite culture, commercial culture and popular culture, some structural parallels become obvious, but also some direct links. On the one hand, the social and intellectual lites who have traditionally borne the state, have developed the educated, the academic and the avantgarde cultures with their hierarchical traits. On the other hand, the market produces commercial culture following the principles of entertainment and profit. And as a third, most of the popular culture belongs to civil society.

The three sectors do not coexist in an unproblematical way. They represent fundamentally different values which confront each other in public space. Culture means contest and struggle between - at least - these three sectors.

This cultural struggle does not mean that one of these sectors should or can extinguish the others. The attempt to create a purely state monopolistic culture - and society - in Eastern Europe during past decades had to collap-se. The hegemony of the market proposed as the only alternative by neoliberal strategists, shows clearly its limits too, and has already provoked violent reactions.

Cultural Struggle
On the other hand, as noted above, the trialectics of cultural relations does not describe an harmonious order side-by-side, but - just like the relation between state, market and civil society - processes of permanent unbalance and tension. The three cultures often compete for scarce resources, especially competing for financial means - as administrated under the departments of culture - and competing for time - as in the transmission of the public media. Last but not least they compete for the involvement and engagement of the cultural subjects.

Sport and gymnastics are characteristic fields of these struggles. Historically originated as associational activities and thus - in Denmark like in most of the other Western countries - coming from civil society and as a part of popular culture, they have been marked for the last two or three decades by strong tendencies into the two other directions. One development has been promoted by the growing state funding of sport organi-sa-tions, which was followed up by welfare state interference on the level of sport policies: making sport an instrument of public social policies. One tries to use sport as "sport for all" for the improvement of health of the population, for the integration of "marginal groups" etc. The other development is promoted by the attraction of media sports and transforms sport into a highly profitable circus event. Sponsoring establishes increasingly narrow ties between certain sport clubs and single enterprises. And more-over, commer-cial sport offers have arisen side by side with the traditional sport associations, creating a new market of fitness culture - with some remarkable suc-cess. State sports and market sports are, thus, today contesting sport as popular culture (Riiskjr 1990).

But the process should not be seen in this direction only which tends to reduce the sphere of civil society. Opposite tendencies can be observed as well. The case of the Kenyan runners is illustrative, as it recently has been described by John Bale and Joe Sang (1996). The success of Kenyan middle-distance runners which has surprised the world since the 1968 Olympics, was not achieved by the "national" unit of Kenya as such, but by certain ethnic minorities. 76 per cent of the Kenyan-held world records were held by runners originating from the province of Kalenjin, and within this group it were the Nandi people making up only 1.8 per cent of Kenya's popula-tion, who made up 42 percent of the nation's top-runners on the track. This development has its base in two social-historical processes at the same time. On the one hand, the British colonialisation of the country with its sport imports and its educational strategies turned the native body culture upside-down and is nowadays prolongated by the neocolonial world sports system. And on the other hand, the different ethnic groups reacted to this impact in very dif-ferent ways, based on their respective social patterns, ethnic characteristics and cultural traditions. Civil society in its ethnic form, thus, was a decisive source of sportive dynamics penetrating from Nandi and Kalenjin to the national state level of Kenya and further on to the global level of the world sports market.

Comparably to the initial case of Denmark, we see here the civil society with its particular historicity as a base for sport. Sport as an identitary activity - as a social practice promoting identity processes - is related to the tribal folk, to the civil society.

Identity, conflict, and laughter
The civil society as a perspective on sports has many important implications, only few of which can be hinted to here: identity, conflict and the deep human dimension.

1) Seen from the historical experience of popular movements and from the sociological view of civil society, sport is fundamentally related to cultural identity. Identity is the never-ending question: Who am I? Who are you? Who are we ourselves? - Identity means an opposition to alienation: "I don't know whom I am". And identity has always a collective dimension. There is no I without a Thou and a We. This is what Martin Buber (1923) called the dialogical principle. There is no identity without otherness, without the dialogue with other identities - without "you". And there is no personal identi-ty without cultural identity - without "we". Festivity makes this connection concrete, visible and sensible. By meeting in game and dance, the I becomes a You and enters into a We.

It is at this point that the sociology of sport as popular culture - and of civil society more generally - needs connection with the observations of psychoanalysis. In prolongation of some remarks of Sigmund Freud, Erik H. Eriksson (1950) has established the study of cultural identity. The matter of ethnicity has found some more in-depth discussion by ethno-psychoanalysis, by Mario Erdheim and others. But in all these studies, the body as an idential - as a source and reference of identity - has found very little attention; the approaches towards a psychoanalysis of the body made by Wihelm Reich and by gestalt therapy may help to some extent, but the main work has yet to be done.

One critical implication of this psychological perspective of identity for the sociology of sport is that it is not sufficient to treat sport - as it soon happens - as a part of leisure policy. The place of sport as modern tribal activity is on quite another level than the public administration of the population's reproduction. Popular culture and folkelig sport contribute to identity and togetherness and are therefore essentially more than leisure and spare time activity, more than an annex to the world of production.

2) When civil society is discovered as a third sector besides the state and the market, one may be tempted to regard it as a positive ressource only - and as harmonious. Civil society, however, is neither free from internal differences nor "civil" in the meaning of civilized and non-violent. On the contrary, civil society consists of inner tensions and conflicts - and so does sport. Racist violent hooligans are parts of the civil society as well as peaceful carnivalistic roligans (the Danish type of soccer fans). Civil society can gather around gymnastics (as in Denmark) or around record sport (as in Finland and in Nandi/Kenya), around folk games (as in Flanders) or around drum dance (as in Greenland), around fitness activities (as in China, see below) or around belt wrestling (like Japanese sumo, Breton gouren or Turkish oil wrestling yagli). Volkssport can be left-wing socialist (as Italian sport popo-lare) or right-wing conservative (as German vlkisches Turnen). And the recent religious fundamentalist tendencies in different parts of the world can only be understood as a - problematical - part of civil society. Sports, too, have always developed in a field of conflicts, not only conflicts between the people and the (state) power, but also conflicts about the internal power or hegemony inside civil society. Sport as culture in general is a cultural struggle or what we in Danish call kulturkamp.

3) By its identity-psychological qualities, there is always a deeper dimension in popular festivity and sport, deeper than politics and programmes. It is the direct human relation of life. Popular sport is displaying what is inside the individual - and what is more than the single individual: the spiritual dimension of existence, the holy. This is what - in a paradoxical way - the carnivalism of popular culture expresses. I stumble - we laugh - and by this togetherness in bodily convulsion "it" happens. What happens? The holy and the grotesque at the same time.

Life is grotesque and deserves not only to be taken seriously. Popular festivity always has features of the non-serious, of carnival. Popular sport can only be understood as part of the popular culture of laughter, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin (1968). The strong body is fascinating - but isn't it also grotesque, ridiculous, too? The winners in tug of war - are finally falling on their arse. Popular games display the stumbling and the fai-lure; the sack race, the mock tourna-ment, the fight on a swinging beam and the stilt race give occasions for laughter. The clown and the fool are important figures in popular festivity and in traditional game culture. And last but not least, this is the reason why people love sumo. The strong body of the sumo wrestler combines visually the grotesque and the holy.

Here, between the holy and the grotesque, the deep dimension of human life is to be found. The tribal folk is in contact with this dimension. And sport is its ritual.

The Folk - the Civil - the Tribal
When taking the perspective of the tribal folk, of civil society and identity into consideration, we can avoid the mistake to see history as a one-way path from the national state towards larger units and towards the global market. We would overlook the third - which is decisive.

The events in Eastern Europe and Middle Asia around 1989/1991 have been illustrative. By them, the dualist and evolutionist theories about the natural necessity of larger units were disproved by the break-down of multinational states and of powerful state sports systems. New national states and new national sport units arose, but a closer analysis reveals this as a process of new tribalisation. The road was towards smaller units, and the people's revolts had their roots in civil society which, however, had important implica-tions on the national state level.

It is therefore not enough to state the dynamics of globalisation and the crisis of the national state. It is not sufficient to confront the dyna-mics of (Olympic, media) world sport and the crisis of national sport. Without the third, no relevant knowledge can be expected.

By the attention to the third, however - the folk, the civil, the tribal - the challenges are only beginning. They lead into a - in social theory - mainly unexplored area. Even the fundamental terminologies are not easily compatible. The folk has the connotation of the untranslatable; it hints towards the cultural dimension and its worldwide Unbersichtlichkeit, the impossibility of survey. Volkssport, popular sport, cannot be trans-lated from culture to culture. The civil society, in contrast, denotes that the same relation also has a more translatable side; as a sociological universal it describes the third sector besides state and market. Civil sport is what is neither bound to a public policy of representation or health nor to the media market. The tribal has the same empirical place, but hints again into other directions: towards the psychological aspects of identity building and identity con-flicting, towards the holy and the grotesque. Tribal sports imply the uncontrollable - and it shows that the civil society is not always as "civil" as one would hope.

All in all, the third is not only a sociological rest category, nor is it only "subversive" as Allen Guttmann (1994) concedes. But it is a base of both the state and the market. Seen in this perspective, sport is a ressource of sociological knowledge in general. The theories of nationalism have hither to prevailingly been linked to the history of ideas - or even been reduced to a critique of ideologies - instead of taking the social forms of identitary practice as their base, sport being one of them. And the sociological study of sport on the other hand has remained too poor by only transferring some so-called general theories to sport and becoming thus only another applied hyphenated sociology. No, the basic point is: The body is social. And sport is a bodily ritual of civil society - with implications for the public body and the body on the market.

Disike - Old People's Disco in China
After our historical, sociological and psychological wanderings we could return to the Brazilian drums roaring from the movement house in Zealand. But, maybe, we should turn to the other end of the world where we can hear a sort of answer towards the "exotisation" of "Western" sport.

In China since the mid-eighties, a new fitness activity has emerged. "Disco" - disike - resembles aerobic dance or jazzercize by hip-swiveling and shoulder-rolling, with hand-clapping and cross steps included. The music tends to be outdated Western pop. Starting as a craze among intellectuals, it became popular among workers and peasants and seized especially also the elder people, age sixty and older. "Old people's disco" was said to be one of the "three hots" or biggest crazes in China along with billiards and qigong. It was reported that in Shanghai over 100 000 people participated in disco dancing, and in almost every Beijing park in the early morning hours people were gathering around cassette players, sometimes wearing heavy coats during the cold winter months. Old people's disco developed such a drawing power that the national television gave it a special place in its programme, showing among others the performance of a Shanghai club founded by a 70-year-old woman. Susan Brow-nell (1995) has given a detailed descrip-tion and discussed the social class, age and gender aspects of old people's disike.

What is remarkable, here, is the place of old people's disco between tradition and modernity, between the national and the global - or beyond. On the first glimpse, the activity looks like a further push of Westernisation, following the laws of the global market. And indeed, Chinese elder people think it to be "modern" and "Western". But in fact, old people's disco does not exist in the West. At a closer look, it reveals traits of Chinese traditions, of a tai chi morning gathering and of broadcasted health gymnastics. At the same time, old people's disco is not "national", not coming from the state. It arose from below, pushing away national disciplinary forms and even bearing traits of the subversive; disco had earlier been banned as bourgeois and decadent. Also in other respects it is taboo-breaking, elderly females bearing brightly colored, red, or shiny beaded or silk blouses instead of the more somber colors of the Chinese tradition. But just by this subversive element, old people's disike is deeply Chinese.

The word itself underlines the third position linguistically. Disike is on the one hand a phonetic approximation of the Western word "disco". But on the other hand, the Chinese character for di means "to enlighten or guide". So it is both something Western and somet-hing Chinese traditional - as well as something quite new. As a neologism, old people's disike marks an innov-tion coming from below, from the civil society. In Danish we would say, it is folkelig.

Old people's disco in China tells, thus - though from the other end - the same story as folkelig capoeira in Denmark. There is no one-way road of globalisation. And the national state is not the only - if any - source of resistance against the neo-colonial market and of identity building. The tribal is the joker.


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