La invención de la violencia (de las hinchadas de Buenos Aires)

This article presents and analyzes ethnographic data generated in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, among soccer fans whose conduct is supposedly violent, and their relation to the police force. Using a theoretical framework proposed by authors working in the field of Melanesian anthropology, this text suggests that the police, with their insistence on establishing order and control, project an image of soccer fans as an unruly mob that rebels against police authority, thus leading to a neurotic escalation in the use of violence by the police. The fans, on the other hand, focus on their own supposedly heroic actions and leading roles as part of a process of individualization, and consider the police force an obstacle to the achievement of their goals, which leads them to act with even greater energy, to the point of hysteria, in their customary activities. Neurosis and hysteria are terms that are defined and used in a very specific way in this text