The Riot and The REDBLACKS: Football's Pluralities, Football's Auralities, Power, Position, and Place

This thesis presents my personal experience and ethnographic research into some of the sounds and musics heard at soccer and Canadian football games inside of TD Place Stadium in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s field-theory and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s ideas of invented tradition, I query identity, place, and position with reference to selected social actors and institutions through case studies concerned with two different ways power can be exercised into influence: grassroots and top-down. Chapter One examines the invention(s) of supporters’ culture in Ottawa from the grassroots level through the Ottawa Fury Football Club and their official supporters’ groups: The Stony Monday Riot and the Bytown Boys Supporters Club. Chapter Two examines an invented tradition, through the reinvention of existing traditions, vis-à-vis the performance of Stompin’ Tom Connors’ folk-song, “Big Joe Mufferaw,” by famed Ottawa musician Lucky Ron at the half-time of an Ottawa REDBLACKS football game.