National Feeling in Sport
in Ethnologia EuropaeaSearch for other papers by Billy Ehn in
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The sporting world is a profitable field of cultural studies, especially when it comes to such subjects as feelings and collective identity. Considering its rich social life, its emotional expressions, and its most obvious nationalistic symbolism, sport should have a central place in the general research on nationalism and national culture. In this article the author discuss Swedish sports journalism as a symbolic transformation of sporting activities into national pride and disappointment. Most of the examples are fetched from the Winter Olympic Games of 1988 in Calgary. One general observation is that nearly everything that sporting personalities do, and journalists say or write, is in some way a contribution to the construction of Swedish national feeling.