FOOTBALL, MEMORY AND HERITAGE: THE STORY OF DJALMA SANTOS

Authors

  • Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda Getúlio Vargas Foundation Social Science School

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2309-5792/1598

Abstract

The article aims at showing results from the project ‘Football, Memory and Heritage: a Collection of Oral History Interviews for the Football Museum’. The research was performed at the Center for Research and Documentation on Contemporary History of Brazil (FGV, Rio de Janeiro) in partnership with the Football Museum (São Paulo, Brazil). The article shows, on the one hand, how the interest in soccer and its patrimonial and institutional aspects in Brazilian society has been increasing since the creation of collections of testimonies by institutions such as the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro (1965) and in São Paulo (1970), and the Football Museum, opened in 2008, which follows the latest world expographic standards. On the other hand, the article seeks to explore the raw material of testimonies collected from former players of the Brazilian team, who played in the 1958, 1962 and 1970 World Cups, the years the team were champions of the world, in order to put up for discussion how the complex relationships between history and national memory operate in the sports universe. The central argument to be raised in the article is that, in the discourse of former players such as Djalma Santos and others still living, the nostalgia for a bygone era of victories rekindles an important discussion for the collective imagination. The demarcation of boundaries between a glorious past – close to national roots – and a present of defeats or failures marked by ‘forgetting’ the true form of national play, activates a rhetoric built not only by the athletes but by an expressive fraction of the sporting press and the more general public opinion in which the national sporting memory is seen as impregnated with representations associated with nostalgia, loss and alienation from a ‘golden age’ of authentic Brazilian football.

References

Alberti, V. 2006. Manual de história oral. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getulio Vargas.

Alfonsi, D. and Azevedo, C. Musealizing football: the Brazilian Football Reference Center. In:

Vibrant – Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, v. 10, n. 1. January to June 2013. Retrieved from

at http://www.vibrant.org.br/issues/v10n1/daniela-alfonsi-clara-azevedo-musealizing-football/.

Helal, R. & Soares, A.J. & Lovisolo, H. (ed.). 2001. A invenção do país do futebol: mídia, raça e idolatria. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad.

Lopes, J.S.L. ‘The People’s Joy’ vanishes: Considerations on the Death of a soccer player. In: Vibrant – Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 6(2) Retrieved from http://www.vibrant.org.br/issues/v6n2/

jose-sergio-leite-lopes-the-peoples-joy-vanishes/.

Mills, J. 2005. Charles Miller: o pai do futebol brasileiro. São Paulo: Panda Books.

Ribeiro, A. 2000. O diamante eterno: biografia de Leônidas da Silva. Rio de Janeiro: Gryphus.

Toledo, L.H. de. 2004 Didi, a trajetória da folha-seca no futebol de marca brasileiro. In: Silva V. G. Da. (ed.). Artes do corpo. São Paulo: Selo Negro.

Downloads

Published

2016-09-23

Issue

Section

Articles