Text:
“Anytime ACFC is playing I have to wear my ACFC hoodie or else it’s a guaranteed loss.”
Context:
The informant started doing this in freshman year because nobody cared about women’s soccer and they wanted to market for it. They state that it’s important to them to encourage people to watch women’s soccer and also believed in doing this after wearing it watching their first game and their team won because of it.
Analysis:
This idea marks magical superstition as a ritual behavior is performed with the hopes of influencing the game. More specifically, this acts as sympathetic magic, where the action of wearing the hoodie will influence and help boost the chances of the team winning, and apotropaic magic with the idea of warding off bad luck. In addition, if the person fails to wear the hoodie then the game would be doomed from the start, creating a sense of avoidance ritual by continuously wearing the hoodie so there will be a chance for a victory. Besides representing magical superstition, this also emphasizes material culture with the hoodie. Some people, most that are outside of the sports community, would believe this to be a normal hoodie that one wears with market value, but the informant has a deeper connection to the material. They find it to have a deep personal meaning to the object that makes it invaluable and even giving power to the hoodie, which now acts as a talisman associated with good luck. This ritual behavior establishes identity with the sports folk group as well as acting as a tool that eases anxiety towards a game. It might also act as an explanation as to why a game won or failed with whether or not the hoodie was worn. Because there was a correlation between the object and the victory, the object then develops more power and is seen as something that influences the outcome of a game.