Nuno Domingos

Building a motor habitus: Physical education in the Portuguese Estado Novo

The physical education model implemented by the Portuguese Estado Novo regime (1933—74), a specific adaptation of European models of physical education, aimed to train the ‘body’ and oversee the movements of athletes and students. This model intended to impose, through the action of state institutions, a practice that led to the creation of what is referred to in this article as an official motor habitus. Founded on an ideological basis, this state-controlled ideal type of bodily performance aspired ultimately to regulate all social phenomena that influence the production of sporting movements. Based on the works of the most relevant theoreticians of the Portuguese physical education model in this period, this article will analyse the ideological conception of an orthodox model of physical education that was a particular product of ‘state reasoning’.

Urban football narratives and the colonial process in Lourenço Marques

Support for Portuguese football teams, in Mozambique as well as in other former Portuguese colonies, could be interpreted either as a sign of the importance of a cultural colonial heritage in Africa or as a symbol of a perverse and neo-colonial acculturation. This article, focused on Maputo, the capital of Mozambique – formerly called Lourenço Marques – argues that in order to understand contemporary social bonds, it is crucial to research the connection between the colonial process of urbanisation and the rise of urban popular cultures. Despite the existence of social discrimination in colonial Lourenço Marques, deeply present in the spatial organisation of a city divided between a ‘concrete’ centre and the immense periphery, the consumption of football, as part of an emergent popular culture, crossed segregation lines. I argue that football narratives, locally appropriated, became the basis of daily social rituals and encounters, an element of urban sociability and the content of increasingly larger social networks. Therefore, the fact that a Portuguese narrative emerged as the dominant form of popular culture is deeply connected to the growth of an urban community.

Nações e nacionalismos (a teoria, a história, a moral)

O artigo aborda a contribuicao de Benedict Anderson para os estudos da nacao e do nacionalismo nas ciencias sociais e humanas, tendo como pretexto a reedicao, em lingua portuguesa, da sua mais conhecida obra, Comunidades imaginadas. Num primeiro momento, procede-se a um breve inventario genealogico dos estudos sobre a nacao e sobre o nacionalismo, que visa sublinhar e interrogar o relativo desinteresse que as teorias sociais classicas devotaram a ideia de nacao e as suas formas especificas de incorporacao politica, economica e sociocultural. Num segundo momento, reflete-se sobre o percurso intelectual e civico do autor, contextualizando os seus interesses e as suas propostas analiticas, nomeadamente no que diz respeito a imaginacao das identidades e comunidades nacionais e a sua organizacao em movimentos nacionalistas, mas tambem as nocoes de poder e as virtualidades e limites do metodo comparativo, ao papel das ideias e dos fenomenos culturais. Num terceiro momento, explora-se, de um ponto de vista critico e reflexivo, as nocoes de imaginacao e de comunidade na sua obra, articulando os seus sentidos e os seus usos e apropriacoes com os contextos historicos, academicos e politicos, do seu percurso intelectual.

As políticas desportivas do estado colonial em Moçambique

Este artigo procura efectuar uma abordagem introdutoria as politicas do estado colonial em Mocambique no que concerne as actividades desportivas, centrando-se no periodo do Estado Novo. O regime colonial procurou instrumentalizar a educacao-fisica no quadro de uma politica educativa mais ampla, estruturada na metropole durante a decada de 1930.Em Mocambique, o braco institucional desta politica, a Mocidade Portuguesa de Mocambique, reificava o regime de segregacao imposto pelo sistema de indigenato. As politicas desportivas oficiais concorriam num espaco de praticas desportivas vasto, cuja dinâmica, de natureza associativa, e dominada pelo futebol, respondia tambem a um principio de divisao racial. Neste artigo, procurar-se-a avaliar os efeitos das politicas desportivas coloniais e a sua transformacao, decorrente da propria evolucao das formas de poder colonial bem como do desenvolvimento relativamente autonomo de um campo de praticas desportivas local.

The Malicious Football Game: Urban Interactions and Power Relations in Lourenço Marques, Capital of Colonial Mozambique

Focusing on the game of football performed in the outskirts of Lourenço Marques, the capital of colonial Mozambique, todays Maputo, the present article aims to demonstrate how the colonial situation in Mozambique during the last decades of Portuguese rule could be interpreted through the social and moral values that emerged from the dominant interactions in football matches. Association football is the grammatical basis for the construction of a particular language, which is the outcome of a contextual and porous adaptation to the surrounding colonial world, and is translated into the gestures and movements of football players, the individual cells of this shared idiom. In seeking to recover the contextual meaning of this language, this article will argue that the space of play, initially idealised as a locus of education by local African elites in the 1920s and 1930s, and afterwards criticised by colonial modernisers as a symptom of degeneration, possible political subversion and lack of economic productivity, was ultimately a field where the truth of the economy of symbolic practices and exchanges, which characterised everyday life in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques in the final stages of Portuguese rule in Mozambique, reigned.