Sport In Society

This article focuses on the phenomenon of hooligans' setup fights (abbr. as 'the setups'), a modern form of prearranged (planned) hooligan confrontations. The setups require arrangements including deciding on a secluded place and time, as well as a set of rules predefined by the participants, including their number, age and mutual consent not to use any weapons. Despite the media spotlight and massive body of knowledge on football hooliganism and its prominence, the issue of the setups has failed to attract greater analytical attention. This empirically informed conceptual study fills that void by (a) introducing the term 'hooligans' setup fights' to conceptualize the self-ruled, prearranged model of fights typical of modern hooliganism; (b) assessing the current geographical range of the setups in Europe; and (c) discussing the social and cultural conditions that contribute to their growing popularity as the most current way of hooligans' competitive violence across Europe.

This article considers the conceptual ambiguity of skateboarding, a phenomenon that has undergone a process of globalization over the past twenty years, redefining itself in peripheral regions worldwide. I address this trend by focussing on material culture in my anthropolog-ical research on skateboarding at the México-U.S. border. The liberalization of this border over the past three decades has led to the relocation of the global skateboard production to Mexico's industria maquiladora. Through an ethnographic case, I show how this external-ization in the so-called Global South of Tijuana has triggered an informal local culture representative of a transborder scene. By approaching the border as a 'contact zone' , and skateboards' biographies as one of its material manifestations, I reflect on both the asymmetries underlaying the contemporary neoliberal sports and the grassroots creative domes-tications of their scripts, artifacts, and imaginaries by local actors; eventually rethinking where the West of global skateboarding is located.