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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

"Very happy to realize that our flag, which was almost usurped, returned to us. GO BRAZIL!"

presenters

    LUIZ FERNANDO ROJO

    Nationality: Brasil

    Residence: Brazil

    Universidade Federal Fluminense

    Presence:Online

Keywords:

sport; politics; YouTube; national identity; media.

Abstract:

Since 2013 the political polarization involving Brazilian society has been reflected in sports with an intensity not yet seen in these last decades. The use of the Brazilian soccer team shirt and the national flag as appropriate symbols by the far right, which was characterized by Guedes and Silva as representing the "second kidnapping" of the green and yellow shirt, involved a fracture of the selection’s ability to act as a communitas, representing an ideal of national unity. In this paper, I will reflect on how watching the Santiago Pan American Games broadcasts in 2023, exclusively through platforms on YouTube, made it possible to identify a tipping point in that appropriation. Although these events do not have the same dimension of soccer in Brazil, the monitoring of simultaneous comments that YouTube channels allow, identified a movement of struggle for the redefinition of national symbols in relation to the sport, particularly characterized in the sentence that gives title to this work and that was expressed, in the last day of competitions, by one of the people who followed those transmissions. Thus, in a movement hitherto little seen in Brazilian society, the disputes for meaning that routinely crossed soccer as a sport that represents the national identity, seems to be spreading to other lands, such as these Olympic and Pan american events.