Abstract
Collective emotions experienced as existing objectively and widely shared challenge traditional views of emotions based on personal or private interests. This paper extends theories of group and crowd emotions focusing on social appraisal, social identity, emotional contagion, and ecstatic nationalism, and adds an interdisciplinary approach to research on international mega-sporting event impacts and legacies by examining the national-level collective emotions produced by a mega-sport event—the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The novel case study approach triangulates ethnographic observations of life in downtown Johannesburg before and during the World Cup with a critical thematic analysis of qualitative interviews of 10 South Africans and the author’s and publicly posted videorecordings of individual and collective behavior. I explore how citizen support for efforts to pursue national projects combined with international attention to generate widespread and genuinely coordinated collective emotions of euphoria and pride. The social ontology-based analysis considers bottom–up and top–down mechanisms of emotional spread and influence along with important expressive-performative contributions of culture-specific forms of group-based and collective action tendencies. Moreover, the study shows how group agency in the form of coordinated ritualistic bases realized group affects spontaneously and normatively as South Africans desired, accepted and celebrated achieving team and host-related group goals. These results provide new insights into the emotions that occur in public events in two phases, (1) creation of collective normative commitment in practice related to group ethos and national interests and goals prior to the tournament start, and (2) during the tournament when dynamic relations between group-based and collective emotions also generated feelings of unity and solidarity. Together they highlight unique predisposing cultural and historical features of the emotional and affective-discursive practices associated with the World Cup for South Africans, limits to the spread of emotions of enthusiasm from urban cities to rural areas, forms of excitement and celebration in public spaces, instances of ambivalence about efforts to enact support for the nation’s World Cup team and host role, and indicate how collective emotional experiences are internalized, embodied and reproduced in accounts of national transformation, concerns about fragile intergroup solidarity, and instances of group-based hubristic pride.
Highlights
Collective emotions experienced as existing objectively “out there in the world” and widely shared in a given group challenge traditional views of emotions as private and reflecting personal interests (Salmela, 2014; Krueger, 2016)
The following sections, analyze accounts of collective pride and related collective and group-based emotions reflecting national interests and identity positions in two key periods: before the World Cup opening and during the event. The latter included people anticipating the end of the tournament, their accounts of the long-term impact and legacy of the World Cup and their emotion-laden and evoking narratives about
The case study highlights the importance of studying megasport events as complex affective occasions in which feelings of widely shared euphoria, collective pride and a unified national identity are possible but not inevitable
Summary
Collective emotions experienced as existing objectively “out there in the world” and widely shared in a given group challenge traditional views of emotions as private and reflecting personal interests (Salmela, 2014; Krueger, 2016). 431) theory of group-based emotions focuses on individuals with a prior group connection who can be “elated when their favorite football team upsets a stronger team, saddened and angry when their team loses a game, and disgusted when the winning team’s fans drunkenly riot in the street—all without personally leaving the couch.” While in all these instances there can be fluctuations and variations in group identification within and between group members, focusing on a psychological process of identification is not sufficient to address the intensity of the feelings that can occur when a person joins with a crowd of loosely affiliated individuals (e.g., to watch a game) and is subsequently—due to the contingencies of the game—surprised to find themselves hugging, celebrating with and feeling bonded to people who were strangers just minutes before (Reicher, 2011). Because such collective emotions can occur at the level of nations, any investigation must be properly interdisciplinary and draw upon concepts and analyses developed across the social and psychological sciences and, where appropriate, the humanities
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