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In January 2007, English international soccer star David Beckham announced to a global media that he would be leaving the Spanish giants Real Madrid to join Major League Soccer's (MLS) Los Angeles Galaxy. MLS Commissioner Don Garber feted Beckham as a global sporting icon whose presence attested to America's gradual transformation into a 'Soccer Nation.' However, following LA Galaxy's acquisition, a debate surrounding soccer's previous failure to compete at the highest echelons of American professional sport reappeared. Academic and journalistic commentators identified a number of obstacles--historical, socioeconomic and ideological--that have prevented soccer from gaining a foothold in the United States sporting market and therein becoming a credible adversary to the holy trinity of Gridiron Football, Baseball, and Basketball. This article, drawing upon Ian Hacking's prescriptions for Historical Ontology (2002) and thereby foregrounding issues of identity and power, seeks to analyse the impediments that have marked soccer's development in the United States and that led to the recruitment of Beckham as the sporting celebrity-cum-commercial juggernaut intended to bring MLS to the attention of a mass audience-variegated in terms of class, 'race,' and gender--so coveted by leaders of the organisation. Key Words: Soccer, identity, power, historical ontology, gender, ethnicity, immigration DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2010.492295

The core meaning of individual and group identities is established by sameness over time and space, sustained by ceremony and ritual. This article illustrates the complex relationship between identities, rituals, and memory by focusing on annual public spectacles in the Norwegian city of Bergen, manifestations of youthful rite de passage, expressions of local and national patriotism, and a variety of practices bound up with support for the city's largest football club. The world over the game of football generates loyalty and sentiment that vary in their consequences from mild amusement to acts of violence. Nationalistic displays abound around the game and analysts of the human condition realise that much of what we value most is embedded in the game itself and the epiphenomena around it. Football is a contrived theatre of emotions; with no universal of legal agreed--upon meaning the game becomes a receptacle for identities and loaded with significance. This article addresses to what extent the game and more specifically a football club can provide a focus for a sense of civic loyalty over and above that ideally articulated by the subjects of a modern European nation state. Employing the ethnographic method provided by participant observation, this article focusses on three locations in the collective celebration of a city. Key Words: nationalism, civic pride, ethnography, football

Most people will accept the contention that sport has an ideological site. Indeed sport might be considered as the broadest cultural denomination in many nations, capable of creating and sustaining a sense of identity and belonging crucial to national integration. Expressions around sport and, in this instance, specifically Association Football (soccer) appeal to individuals supportive of a variety of ideological perspectives. Thus, the pursuit of any understanding of the game has to be sought with reference to culturally specific power relations. The role that football can play in both the construction of national identity and the rehabilitation of the former militia in a war-damaged society, is the focus of this ethnographic inquiry. The location is Liberia, West Africa, beginning in 1998, a year after the election that marked the end of almost a decade of civil conflict. Key Words: Sport, national integration, rehabilitation, ethnographic inquiry, Liberia