this context, to interact.54
The way in which these football narratives are transformed into a relational resource, facilitating participation in everyday encounters, points us toward a wider interpretation that will be critical in the history of football in Lourenço Marques. The manipulation of information in interactional situations is the ground for the formulation of arguments, the justification of opinions, the participation in debates, emotional expression and sharing and the production of moral and aesthetic judgements.55 Being in possession of football knowledge, which in the colonial city was far more democratized than other bodies of knowledge, individuals use it as a mechanism for personal and gregarious affirmation before others, which can either be part of their closest circles or socially more distant. The manipulations of football narratives, then, meets the need for differentiation that results from the urban collective dynamics itself.56 Thus a specific public space takes shape. This is critical because by means of the manipulation of a sports narrative, commentaries on other spheres of reality are being produced. These comments do not imply the manifestation of an opinion on a particular political, economic, moral or religious issue, although they may also function as a means to judge these matters. In a mediated and implicit manner, the production of aesthetic and ethical judgments on events within the sports practice itself offers a set of reference points that legitimate or invalidate forms of agency and worldviews and that manifest the strength of a reason molded by local practices.
STYLES OF PLAY
The emergence of a local style of play was an element of the construction of this specific public space in Lourenço Marques. With Craveirinha’s help, football’s language could become the foundation for a historical inquiry. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning note,
The observation of an ongoing game of football can be of considerable help as an introduction to the understanding of such terms [social configuration or social process] as interlocking plans and actions. Each team may have planned its strategy in accordance with the knowledge of their own and their opponents’ skills and foibles. However, as the game proceeds, it often produces constellations which were not intended or foreseen by either side. In fact, the flowing pattern formed by players and ball in a football game can serve as a graphic illustration not only of the concept of “figurations” but also of that of “social process.” The game-process is precisely that, a flowing figuration of human beings whose actions and experiences continuously interlock, a social process in miniature.57
The practice of football is defined by a set of elementary conditions that delimit the performance: the maneuvering of the ball and the relation established with a given space for a given period of time. The rules that organize the match, in turn, mediate the choreography of modern football. The universalization of modern sports formats, governed by preordained rules, was a fundamental element in what Elias calls “sportization process,” the phenomenon of the regulation of pastimes.58 These norms are not neutral: they convey a certain ethics. For instance, they establish a principle of universality: everyone is subject to the same law. Rules seek to curb situations deemed prejudicial to the game, such as the violent incidents that are commonplace in physical performances involving constant interaction. The elaboration of a body of rules, originally delineated in 1863 in the context of sports competitions between English public schools and overseen since 1886 by the International Football Association Board (IFAB),59 gave rise to an orthodox game model, the Football Association, distinct from a wide variety of popular versions based on unshared local conventions, which tended to disappear.60
Football rules subjected players to a code and thus constrained their individual action, and yet they did not determine the greater portion of gestures nor the general dynamics of the game. The dissemination of modern football through the world from the second half of the nineteenth century was not linear. The game established itself as a situated and historically embedded practice, producing gestures inscribed within constellations of local meanings. These performances, Elias and Dunnning have argued, were small-scale historical laboratories. From a set of homologies, the examination of sports practices allows us to discern long-term shifts in and through the players’ bodies. In turn, these allow, for instance, for an analysis of the dissemination of certain behaviors, of the individual embodiment of principles of practical action and worldviews, of the degree of tolerance toward violence and to relate this with the increased complexity of the social division of labor, growing social interdependencies, state centralization, and a greater degree of individual, externally conditioned self-restraint, as a means of curbing impulses.61 Although in a singular manner many of the modern structural changes that Elias linked to the modernization process were part of the colonial social configuration in the twentieth century, namely in major urban centers like Lourenço Marques.
Football styles of play result from a particular relation between, on the one hand, the features of an evolving language—shaped by an ethics intrinsic to the official regulations and, progressively, by a specific tendency toward body rationalization, which molds individual and collective movements with a view to achieving greater efficiency62—and, on the other hand, structural and contextual historical trends. It is also the outcome of a series of struggles between diverse agents within a specific field of activity—players, coaches, the audiences, journalists, and other intermediaries—over the definition of what would be the most “appropriate” movement, the more spectacular performance, or the most efficient route to victory.63
In the contexts where modern football was more developed, the game’s language became increasingly interpreted by professionals, because only a professional with a learned training routine and bodily grammar could interpret the match with the necessary rigor and efficacy, as well as meet the demands intrinsic to the “representation” of the will of the fans, neighborhoods, cities, and countries. The command over football’s language was obtained by means of predetermination of the individual and collective movement carried out through the progressive development of tactical thinking. Within the frame of the modern tactical rationalization, the “pass,” for example, became the center of the game’s economy, which meant a subalternization of other gestures, such as the dribble, now subject to a more calculated use. The specialization of players’ roles and positions, in turn, attributes to each position on the pitch a particular task, whereby the proportion and types of movements depend on the performance of a specific function, which is also associated with certain physical and performative traits of the athletes (tall center backs, fast wingers, etc.).
Such rationalization of football’s language, which is always contested and adjustable within the universe of professional football, imposes a bodily hexis on the professional player, or a motor habitus, defined, after Bourdieu’s conceptualization, as a specific motor translation of trained bodily disposition during performative situations.64 However, where the conditions for the constitution of a competitive body were fragile, as in the case of the Lourenço Marques’s suburbs, the specific struggles for the definition of a style of play gave rise to multiple and heterodox genres, performed by motor habitus less shaped by this hegemonic rationality. As an empirical site of historical research, the game could operate as a barometer for gauging the expansion of structural and procedural tendencies in the long term and be the observatory of the local moral aesthetics that mimicked, recreated, subverted, or resisted, and thus fostered “other footballs.”65 The movements of Lourenço Marques suburban players, whose practical and symbolic reason was described by Craveirinha as malicious, were a specific example of how the game, when locally embedded, becomes defined by local economies of symbolic exchanges66 that produce a singular, but contested, moral economy: this moral performance expresses contradictions and is a space of negotiations, challenges, and subversions that are ultimately translated into the language of the game.67
The football choreographies enacted by the players from the Lourenço Marques suburbs expressed a physical orientation that was also a social and ethical orientation put into action by a specific libido that underlay the movement.68 Filtered by a formal language, this condition and these moralities also turned into
