Recreation

Insiders and Outsiders: Competition, Identity, and Membership

Recreation figures centrally in the (re)creation of community because both recreation and community are informed by the twin processes of social affinity and social differentiation. Through competitive games and sports in particular, participants and onlookers enact both social ties and social differences. The structure of many competitive games, with their opposing sides, makes explicit the insider-outsider dynamic that comprises an important basis of social membership: the dichotomy between us and them, between “our” similarities and “their” differences from us. In the United States, school competitions, Little Leagues, citywide high school leagues as well as city, regional, collegiate, and professional sports teams give fans and boosters opportunities to identify with and participate in various degrees or levels of community. Soccer clubs in Europe and South America serve similar functions. These kinds of affinities activate social differentiation by enabling fans, players and onlookers to discern the appropriate level of their opposition. A high school sports rivalry, for instance, can dissipate when both sides come together to support the local college or professional team. An entire country is expected to set aside local and regional differences and unify on the side of the national Olympic or World Cup team. In the taking up of sides, each one understands itself in terms of the negation of the other: We are not them, and they are not us. Furthermore, not only are we not them and they not us, but also we are not who they say we are.

Community identity takes shape in an analogous manner. As the sociologist Gerald Suttles pointed out in the 1970s, a community does not grow from the ground up in a self-generating manner. Rather, factors and actors considered external to the bounded community—such as the image of the community expressed by those in nearby towns or neighborhoods, by the press, and by developers and realtors—play a central role in its ongoing definition. Fighting against or reacting to an imposed definition by outsiders becomes part of a community's self-identity. Community identity thus resides in a contrastive structure of relative differences. In Suttles's words, “neighborhoods seem to acquire their identity through an ongoing commentary between themselves and outsiders … [which] includes imputations and allegations of adjacent residential groups as well as the coverage given by the mass media” (Suttles 1972, p. 51). Suttles notes that rather than trying to say what is typical of their community, residents tend to stress what is distinctive about it.

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