TITLE:
Creating Deviance: Criminality and Elite Amateur Soccer in the Fiji Islands, 1975-2015
AUTHORS:
Kieran Edmond James
KEYWORDS:
Critical Criminology, Ethics of Sport, Fiji Islands, Fiji Soccer, Kant, Race and Class, Symbolic Interactionism
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Applied Sociology,
Vol.12 No.5,
May
27,
2022
ABSTRACT: This article considers criminality within elite
amateur soccer in Fiji, covering the period 1975-2015. My discussion includes
examples of on-field behaviour, which breaks codes of sportsmanship, such as
the “throwing” of games; and off-field behaviour, such as robberies of jewelry
stores committed by one prominent ex-player. This same ex-player also escapes
police while warming up for a match on the pitch. We see the ex-player involved
interpreting his own conduct, 25 - 30 years after the fact, in a way suggestive
of existentialist or Foucauldian ethics. But his now assistant village headman
status gives an implicit Kantian moral force to his arguments. Crucially, the
article emphasizes the key distinction between village and town space and
between village mores and town-based (criminal) laws.