Though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I recognized the loss of a deific figure, an idol even, who symbolized a collective desire for unifying, transcendent ideals like Beauty and Goodness. *Though I was only five years old when Princess Diana died, I remember the visceral feeling of collective mourning as I saw clips of her funeral on T.V. World Cup LARPing: Watching Soccer as Anthropological Research Were we to take a step back and look more closely, we would see that events like the World Cup are pregnant with cosmic forces that have the power to uplift and imbue a deeper meaning on our everyday routines. Rather than recognizing and actively upholding the transformative capacity of events like the World Cup, most of us will slip back into living our humdrum lives…the momentary feeling of transcendence it provided us dissipating into the flatness of our hollow daily existence. But the signs embedded in such symbolic moments are quickly collapsed into the atomizing vacuum of global homogenization at the hands of corporate, technocratic elites. In the past, events like the royal funeral and the World Cup might have pointed more explicitly to something transcendent in our midst. These communal gatherings like Carnival or saint feasts put the “natural” in tension with the “supernatural” forces and serve to unify people across social statuses. Taylor argues that events like Princess Di’s funeral, rock concerts, or the Olympics that garner the world’s attention are secular counterparts to these moments of anti-structure, which contain muted vestiges of cosmic symbolism. *Pre-modern societies permitted these breaks from “profane, ordinary” life and served as “kairotic knots,” reminding the public that “chronos” (temporal or secular time) is perforated by sacred time. Follow up to Notes on Anti-Structure with some excerpts from old articles.
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