Description
Book SynopsisThe Flame Relay and the Olympic Movement is the first book-length scholarly study in English of the contemporary Olympic flame relay. Reporting for the first time on years of intensive ethnographic research and organizational intervention, MacAloon literally follows the Olympic flame through twenty years of intercultural encounter, conflict, and negotiation. Focusing on the frequently harmonious, sometimes perilous encounters among Greek flame relay officials, cultural agents, and discourses, foreign Olympic Games organizing committees, and such transnational actors as the IOC and its corporate sponsors since 1984, a context is created for understanding the significance for the Olympic movement and for globalization studies of the 2004 Athens flame relay, the first to travel the entire world. Through intensive interviews and co-participations with leading Greek and American actors and the contributions of young Greek researchers who worked backstage on the relay, Bearing Li
Table of Contents
Series page -- Olympics subseries page -- Citation Information -- 1. Introduction: the Olympic Flame Relay. Local knowledges of a global ritual form /John J. MacAloon -- 2. This flame, our eyes: Greek /American /IOC relations, 1984-2002, an ethnographic memoir /John J. MacAloon -- 3. Olympic Flame Relay operations under a ‘world’s best practices’ regime: a conversation with Steven McCarthy John J. MacAloon -- 4. ‘My programme became very strict’: a conversation with Athanassios Kritsinelis /John J. MacAloon -- 5. The 2004 International Relay: a Greek around the world with the Olympic Flame /Pinelopi B. Amelidou -- 6. Struggling to celebrate: management of the 2004 Olympic Flame Relay segment in Greece /Spiros Spiropoulos -- 7. American media, intercultural stories and the 2004 Olympic flame ceremonies /Marianthi Bumbaris Thanopoulos -- 8. Hybridity and subversion: the Olympic flame in India /Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta -- Index.
