Santiago 2023 opening ceremony: from the “end” to the “beginning” of the world
Keywords:
Pan American Games, Santiago 2023, Ceremony, EthnographyAbstract
Sporting events opening ceremonies are forms of cultural communication and juxtapose several dimensions, with ritual, festive, and spectacular aspects. The Pan American Games (Pan) are the largest multi-sport event in the Americas, endorsed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the supreme authority of the Olympic Movement in the Americas. Pan offers a unique stage to examine Latin American sporting cultures and expressions. The objective of this study was to analyze discourses and representations of identity, values and sociopolitical issues at the opening ceremony of the Santiago 2023 Games. The research is qualitative and used ethnography to produce data. Field notes were used for analysis. As supplementary data, we added details from the coverage of the Pan American Games ceremony from a Brazilian YouTube channel. Chile hosted Pan for the first time in history. More than 35 thousand spectators attended the National Stadium, with the presence of Thomas Bach, IOC president. The spectacle was called "The Land and its People" and portrayed the historical formation of Chile in ten acts, with representation of indigenous peoples and territorial and colonial disputes. The ritual and festive dimensions emphasized values of resilience and discipline linked to sport and the Chilean people in front of the Olympic and Pan-American flags. The central element of the ceremonial ritual emphasized the geographical and territorial complexities of Chile, demanding a change in the narrative about Chile being the "end of the world" to being understood as the "beginning of the world" based on this sporting event. The Pan in Santiago 2023 showcased a sense of identity through unique cultural expressions and the appropriation of symbols, protocols and values of Olympism to make visible the heterogeneity of the Chilean peoples in a dialectic with a claimed unification of the Americas.
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