Duszący dym odpalonych rac. O wyzwaniach w etnografii subkultury kibiców piłkarskich
Choking Smoke of Burning Flares. On Challenges to Ethnography of Football Fans Subculture

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores a wide range of ethnographic challenges – risky situations, methodological dilemmas, ethical and logistic problems that we encountered in our field research on most devoted fans of FC Twente Enschede. The analysis is focused on the variety of issues that come along with the process of exploration of largely closed communities of hardcore fans. By doing so, we want to provide some guidelines for those researchers who would want to undertake similar adventures ethnographic tasks in the future. The paper is centered around four major issues. The first one refers to the access to the hermetic world of football fans, while the second section is devoted to the different types of dangers that are linked with experiencing football fandom in the match day. The third one are the consequences of such radical ethnography for the identity of the researcher, resulting from carrying out the research in the mode of “complete immersion.” The fourth issue is the influence of the first three problems (gaining access to a closed group, dangers of full involvement in the actions of a group and changes within the identity of the “immersed one”) on the inner accuracy and outer integrity of the ethnographic description.

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