Communities The spatial dimension a group of people living in a particular location Cultural dimension a group of people sharing common cultural practices First and formost we re talking about geographical location A historical community is a geopolitical territory that has its own political economic and cultural systems A subculture of sport enthusiast such as a surfer or skier do not live in and share a community mode of production and its traditional social structure of class gender and racial dominance A subculture for the most part can be anywhere and are very mobile A community has a space and a spatial dimension a physical location that is really the anchor for everything else in the community A subculture is existing within a space Space does not define a subculture For our purposes we use the term sport subculture to refer to participatory sport cultures Sport communities refers to the social groupings or social collectives centered on a amateur collegiate professional sport entity Communities and how they are formed 2 major concepts How do we develop communities and social connection Community social groupings based on strong interpersonal relationships and commitments and shared beliefs customs and places Individuals committed to collective over personal interests Strong collective associations Gemeinschaft community being for one another Gesellschaft society civil society being for oneself There is a tendency for some critics to associate pre industrial societies with gemeinschaft and contemporary late modern post industrial societies with gesellschaft Bowling Alone This fear of degrading community Bowling teams are indicative of the strength of community ties The demise of bowling teams shows the demise of community Decline in membership of civic organizations due to individualizing of society and social life Putnam s thesis highlights the decline transformation of American community within consumer society The number of people who bowl has increased but the number of people bowling in leagues has decreased Breakdown of social capital social belonging and participatory democracy Durkheim used the term collective representation to describe the elements of life that are the commonly shared institutions or experiences through which individuals express and derive their sense of collective belonging their sense of we ness According to Durkheim collective representations can contribute to the levels of social solidarity within a society Sport as Collective Representation An object with which we identify an athlete or a sports team defines as a community all those who relate to the object cathectically or in a possessive manner our athlete our team and who introjects the representation into their self definitions Sport is often the collective flue which seemingly binds all the elements of the community together it creates communitas Variants of communitas 1 Organic face to face communitas strong associations deep communities that form over time often centered on a space Sport places often represent the focal point the symbolic and material center home of sporting communities A place is a physical space invested with understandings of behavioural appropriateness social expectations cultural meanings etc we are located in space but we learn through social and cultural experience to act in place A space is not a place that we invest with meanings Places are quite literally sites of meaning They shape the cultural experience of space Sporting Topophilia As john Bale pointed out topophilia is litertally a love of place Perhaps more than any other sporting places it is team stadia which evoke the most topophilic response in terms of stimulating feelings of affinity and affection These sporting topophilic places have emerged organically through the usage of and familiarity with a space by generations of team followers A spontaneous but ritualized expression of terp communitas Ideological Manufactured Communitas