Immigration et sport : l’impact de la pratique du soccer amateur sur l’intégration sociale des minorités à Montréal

Based on an ethnographic study of soccer amateur practice in an immigrant population politically associated with visible minorities, discernible from the majority group formed by francophone Quebecers, this thesis seeks to elucidate the practical and functional relationship between body, knowledge and society in the light of the theory of practice formulated by Bourdieu. In this way, it seeks to tackle sports practice as a social integration vector likely to shape the habitus appropriate for integration, sociability and social participation required to develop a sense of belonging to the host society in the ranks of these athletes.   In the vein of the grounded theory, and based on a systematic observation of the style of play and the social representations about integration created by a group of soccer enthusiasts in a study combining observation, video, field notes, and interviews, collected in an amateur soccer league in Montreal, the thesis aims to uncover the social logic that underlies the sport by identifying the practical sense at work in this dimension of the social space. On this basis, the study of the soccer practice and the materiality of the immigrant’s body as a “total social fact” leads us to understand the newcomer’s integration to the host society as a combination of the “exteriority” and the “inwardness” responsible of the adequate dispositions suitable for fleshing out the integration. We have good reasons to believe that sport allows its followers to engage with their partners in social relationships, giving them distinct and distinguishable positions, and leads us to understand and explain the integration process by the issues that it raises. In this regard, the ethnicization in action under the conditions given operates under the mediation of the body conceived as “knowledge vector”, “form of self-presentation” (Sayad, 1999, p. 301), and “the emblem of ethnicity” (Defrance, 2009, p. 26). The body, in the eyes of the players and fans, becomes an object of representations based on performance, judgment of physical ability and personal attitude as indicators of the player’s skills and, more generally, the symbolic elements born from social interaction at the playground and outside of it. Ultimately, soccer, by its practice acts as a mediation, even a lever that may overcome barriers to integration into the host society in the shape of acculturation.     Our thesis comes out as a contribution to enhance the sociological explanation of the integration process in a multicultural context in the light of the habitus concept to perceive theoretically the dialectic between acculturation and incorporation in the guise of a game of objective relationships whereby the participant undertakes the game on his own, without being fully aware that the practice is subject to social judgment, inculcation of culturally legitimate dispositions, etc. From this emanates the hypothesis that the soccer player shows the “knowledge by body” (to know by heart) that requires his integration to the society in which he decided to evolve and perform voluntarily (Bourdieu, 2003). Thus, sport proves to be a “synthetic identity strategy” that may enable the individual’s identity to be attuned to the “existence’s objective conditions” of the environment to which he is going to integrate (Manço, 1999).

Keyphrases: Soccer amateur, Acculturation, Habitus, Social integration, Visible minorities, Amateur soccer, Acculturation, Sociability, Sense of belonging, Social identity