Co-Ethnic in Private, Multicultural in Public: Group-Making Practices and Normative Multiculturalism in a Community Sports Club

Abstract

This paper explores how multiculturalism is enacted and negotiated among Brazilian and Portuguese migrants at a football (soccer) club in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The authors use the lens of everyday multiculturalism to analyse the tension between public expectations about intercultural 'mixing' and actual intercultural engagement in practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss how club members negotiate the national discourse that recognises cultural differences yet prescribes intercultural mixing in the public sphere. The findings show that meeting co-ethnics is one of the club members' primary motivations for participating in the football club, whereas interacting with people with culturally diverse backgrounds is not a leitmotif. Everyday group-making practices among Portuguese and Brazilian players reinforce group boundaries and constrain intercultural interaction, thereby challenging normative multiculturalism that prescribes ethnic mixing. The paper concludes that members' multicultural presentation of their club provides a socially accepted environment for ethnically concentrated sport participation.

The Role of Atmosphere in Negotiations of Groupness: A Study of a Meeting Place for Older Russian-speaking Migrants

“…This article takes a spatial (see Broerse and Spaaij 2019, Fortier 1999Fuller and Löw 2017;Rowles and Bernard 2013) approach, as these negotiations happen within a particular space. Groupness is of use analytically, but I argue that adding the notion of atmosphere as an additional lens through which to theorise the spatial dimensions of groupness allows for a more nuanced understanding of how a sense of groupness is established and sustained.…”