Socio-cultural mobility and mega-events: Ethics and aesthetics in Brazil’s 2014 World Cup

It is increasingly recognised in academia and policy circles that mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup might be implicated in several socio-cultural issues and controversies – including the uses of their ceremonies to bring together regional, national and global identities, or protests against public expenditure and human rights violations. Their scholarly analysis is always topical: reflecting the ways sports and arts globalisation functions, and cosmopolitan and national identities become intertwined or clash, each mega-events’ socio-cultural context conditions the ways culture becomes commoditised, politicised or sacralised in popular rituals and festivities. In post-colonial Brazil art and politics are kept in a productive, if confrontational, dialogue. The old division between elite and folk/pop culture informs such positional articulations, encompassing as disparate forms and styles as futebolarte (the ‘art’ of football) and mega-event ceremony. The present study examines both as an organic unity in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Drawing on the mega-event’s ceremonies as elite forms of art and football stylistics as ‘Brazilianised’ goods on the one hand, and on domestic reactions to Brazil’s humiliating defeat to Germany and loss of the desired ‘Cup’ as popular artistic parables of identity on the other, it highlights how disparate mobilities (from audio-visual and kinaesthetic performances to social movements) communicate Brazilian desire for political recognition. In a society characterised by hierarchy but aspiring to equality, the dominant mode of engagement with other polities commands appropriation of their riches in search for prestige. Protest and artistic performance in the 2014 World Cup look to these foreign riches (embodied cultures, football) as Brazilian properties appropriated by colonial and capitalist machines. Genealogical attributions of such debts to Brazilian ancestry move civility to the country’s ‘tropics’ (African slavery and Amazonian indigeneity), granting domestic visions of the world with temporal depth and magic.