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One year ago on Round and Square (11 February 2013)—China's Lunar Calendar 2013 02-01
Two years ago on Round and Square (11 February 2012)—Beginnings: The Footnote
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| [a] There is no "I" in "Team"—except...RL |
Well, the other day in Kafuland—my local supermarket in Erlangen (91052)—I finally broke down and tossed a little book about the 2014 Sochi (Sotschi) Olympics into my shopping cart. I had been passing by the light blue, cardboard advertising stand for weeks, pausing, thinking, deciding. It was all about nostalgia (and personal historiography).
You see, I enjoy the Olympic Games, and have admired the wondrous rainbow-inclusive spirit since I was a child. And a powerful thing it is, bowling over narrow thinkers since at least 1936...
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| [b] Sochi 2014 RF |
In fact, the reason that I could not resist the little book is that it is an overview of the German Winter Olympic team, complete with descriptions of each sport and the nation's participants in them (Eishockey, Curling, Skispringen, und Eiskunstlauf, among more than a dozen others). I laid down a modest €1,5 (about $2.20) for the slender volume—and precisely because it reminded me of a little book I saw in Madison, Wisconsin, when I was just a wee lad, more than forty years ago.
I begged my mom to buy it for me.
Unsere Olympiamannschaften—Sotschi 2014 is really a "collector's" sticker book (it is "the" "Offizielles Sammelalbum"—official collector's album). It is geared to Kinder (think about it, English speakers) of about ten years, from the looks of it, and it reminded me of that summer in 19~~ in Madison when, suddenly, the Badgers and their 0-30 record over several seasons...didn't matter as much anymore. In an instant, the Olympics grew bigger than NCAA sports. Mom bought me the book back then, and I would venture to say that the title was something like "Our Olympic Team."
I don't remember if I collected any stickers, and the book is lost to (personal) history.
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| [c] Team RL |
Yet the key challenge, then and now, is how to interpret that little word—our, unser(~), 我們的, notre, 私たちの, and so forth.
There's a whole lot of "culture" packed into those little clusters of phonemes.
And that is what I have been thinking about lately (that about which I have been thinking...lately). What does "our" Olympic Team "mean" in the context of the Games in particular (medal counts, limited number of entries per country/team) and, more broadly, the place(s) we find ourselves in the world?
And the inclusive spirit of the Games.
Although a pre-(modern) Olympic version of the question could be asked at least back to the bustling traffic on the Silk Road (and, indeed, much further back than that), the strange concatenation of "us" and "all of us" that is the Olympic Games is a fascinating window onto globalization, commodification, and (in order to compete the contemporary anthropological triumvirate of "slap-down" words), intersubjectivity.
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| [d] Mascots RL |
We cheer for "our" (German) Olympic team, but at the same time we can't help but admire the Dutch 5,000-meter skating sweep on the first full day of competition. I do think that this admiration occurs in a somewhat different fashion than we might admire the NFL team that just crushed our Super Bowl dreams, or the persistence and fervor with which Man City just dismantled Man U.
And that is what I took away from my own ten-year old American Olympic team collector's album many years ago. This is not cheering (or, more often, soaking in a brine of morose reflection) for my Minnesota Vikings, Minnesota Twins, or even Wisconsin Badgers (or North Dakota State Bison of an earlier era). No, it just never feels as intense as that with the multi-wonderful and inclusive Olympics. For all of the "team" talk, it really only appears in any serious fashion when they walk in together during the Opening Ceremony—which is a realm for theoretical analysis of its own, and will be the topic of my autumn 2016 advanced history and anthropology seminar (and probably a blog topic, too).
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| [e] Snow Mammals RL |
And that is where I will leave it for today. You see, the German Olympic team marched proudly into the Olympic stadium in Sochi last night, and—in a way that just screams "You asked for it Vladimir"—made a wide-ranging and inclusive rainbow-statement of togetherness.* Worldwide. If you didn't see it, you really need to take a look.
*You can't spell "Puritan" without p-u-t-i-n.
And that is why it is hard to reconcile the beautiful, Durkheimian spirit of social gathering under the Olympic flame with a sticker book that states Our Olympic Team. Or, on second (final) thought...maybe that's the whole point. Life is complicated, nuanced, and, undoubtedly multi-vocal.
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| [e] Effervescence RF |
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