The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
Sport, Landscape, and the National Identity:
Representations of an Idealized Vision of Nationhood
in Slovenian Skiing Telecasts
Vlado Kotnik
Institute for Anthropological Research, Ljubljana
not surprising that different disciplines have incorporated
sport into their research agendas. Although anthropology
has perceived sport as a research object with a certain disciplinary
delay, today we know that it can contribute original
and insightful understanding of how the significance
of sports can be best understood when we locate them
through ethnographic enterprise. Recently, anthropological
studies on sport (Blanchard 1995; Sands 1999; special
issue “Anthropology and sport” of the The Australian
Journal of Anthropology 2002, edited by Catherine Palmer;
Moore 2004:37–46) have noticeably widened the field,
firstly, by stressing the ubiquitous nature of sport, and
secondly, by showing that sport is a culturally conditioned
imaginary or social category that, along with material artifacts,
social customs, and ideologies, is transported across
cultural lines and national identities (Lapchick 1996).
In the Alpine countries of Europe (Switzerland and
Austria particularly) and in Scandinavia, skiing has been
developed as a distinctive and tremendously significant
sport (Weiss in Müller 1997:571–579; Sörlin 1995:147–
164). Compared to these examples, Slovenia’s case, while
less-known to the broader international scene, is certainly
not insignificant or negligible. For decades, the Slovenian
public, from the cultural, political, and sports milieus
to the media, has come together in the belief that alpine
skiing had an important part in building the self-image of
the modern Slovenian nation. This text therefore intends
to reveal a brief account of how alpine skiing became
a supposedly indigenous and autochthonous national
winter practice in Slovenia through a specific aspect which
was till now more or less ignored or little expressed, i.e.,
through the television creation of a “natural” correlation
between skiing and its natural setting: the Slovenian
national landscape. Thus I will consider examples of how
mountain landscapes, but also other types of landscape
inscribed deeply into the very heart of Slovenian national
ideology, and skiing are utilized by Slovenian television to
represent and reproduce an idealized vision of nationhood
and national identity. By explicating this, I hope that the
premise of the article offers both an original and engaging
approach to understanding national identity and ways
outside the political arena in which identity is created and
contested.
Abstract
The paper explores the role of the televised landscape in
presenting alpine skiing as a Slovenian national pastime
as well as being a distinctive TV sport. Alpine skiing is one
of those sports where the Slovenian nation-imagining has
been exercised extensively throughout the last decades.
In Slovenia, alpine skiing with its related natural scenery,
sporting events and national heroes, is one of the main
sports arenas in which the recent Slovenian emancipatory
nationalism has been significantly negotiated. After
Slovenia’s political secession from Yugoslavia, with the
so called “ten-day-independence-war” in 1991, the new
nation-state also needed a new national landscape. Many
tourist resorts, natural monuments and sights and places
perceived as well-known Slovenian identification symbols
since the 19th century, were noticeably revitalized through
live sporting and cultural TV broadcasts. Our findings show
the ways in which skiing and its natural setting have been
utilized by Slovenian National Television to establish and
reproduce an idealized vision of nationhood and national
identity in past decades, but particularly in recent winter
seasons.
Key Words: alpine skiing, landscape, national identity,
sport telecast, anthropology, Slovenia.
In this article I explore a very specific and limited but
not unnoticeable aspect of the cultural construction
of national sport in Slovenia: the role of the televised
landscape in presenting alpine skiing as a Slovenian
national pastime, as well as a distinctive TV sport.1 More
concretely, I will try to reveal, by referring to my analysis
and ethnographic experiences, certain aspects of how
television has constructed the sport of skiing as a national
activity by presenting it through natural scenery which
has the strong potential of becoming established national
symbolism and able therefore to attract a powerful collective
identification among members of certain imagined
community (Anderson 1991[1983]). Given that modern
sports emerged as part of a wave of invented traditions
(Hobsbawm 1993) in Western-centered cultures associated
with nation-building at the end of the 19th century, it is
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The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
Methodological Remark
Before giving a brief account of what kind of specificity
and particularity might have been reserved for the Slovenian
construction of televised sport and national landscape,
I shall make some methodological remarks on what
is presented here and, further, elaborate a brief theoretical
framework.
This article is part of wider research (Kotnik 2001)
carried out in 1999–2003 and supplemented in 2005 and
2006. As an anthropologist, I draw the analysis from a
combination of methodological approaches and analytical
instruments belonging to different fields of social sciences
and humanities: from ethnographic method to discourse
analysis of selected TV materials and other sources. The
data collection consisted of three main components or
phases: first, readings from academic literature on the
topic of nation, sport, landscape and the media; second,
collecting TV materials as basic source to analyze; and
third, carrying out a short ethnography.
When analyzing telecasts of alpine skiing, I was, above
all, encouraged by Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse
which helped me treat TV representations as specific
discourses of particular practices that form, according
to Foucault, the objects of which someone speaks (1969,
1971). In other words, I tried to be engaged in seeing what
telecast directors actually do when telecasting alpine skiing
competitions; what commentators do when commenting
upon the TV picture of skiscapes; what their assumptions
and motivations are in saying or showing something. The
collected material comprises TV records of live TV transmissions
of the World Ski Cup races from eight winter seasons
1999/2000–2006/07. More than 400 of these telecasts
and about 50 telecasts of alpine skiing have been analyzed
in detail. The empirical material, all broadcast by the second
channel of the Slovenian National Television (TVS 2),
covers all ski disciplines for both men and women (slalom,
giant slalom, super G, downhill, and alpine combined).
The third component of data collecting, drawing upon
a short ethnography, was carried out discontinuously in
2005. When pursuing my anthropological research “at
home” (Jackson 1987; Peirano 1998:105–128) and programming
my fieldwork, I was essentially informed by the
texts of fundamental relevance in the field of methodology
and epistemology of social anthropology, such as
the studies of Sanjek (1990), James, Hockey and Dawson
(1997), Ingold (1996, sections 1–9, 99–146, 147–198)
Bernard (1988), Gupta and Ferguson (1997) and Leach
(1982:24–41). In order to add to my personal experiences
and perceptions I drew upon several sources whose common
characteristic is that they are in some way connected
with TV representations of skiing in Slovenia; whether
they are from the realm of Slovenian alpine skiing TV
broadcasting or from the realm of the TV audience or
from related sport/media domains. Among them, I interviewed
a retired TV sports broadcast director who had
specialized in skiing broadcasting; a cameramen who has
been involved in sports broadcasting, including skiing; an
editor of ski magazine; a sports journalist from a Slovenian
newspaper; and a small group of skiing fans who are also
regular consumers of sports television. On a final technical
note: to keep their identities secret I attributed their statements
by job or function.
Naturalist Origins of Slovenian Skiing Identity: Hills,
Peasants, and the Smukanje
Alpine skiing with its attractive mountainous landscape in
countries such as Austria or Switzerland or regions such as
the Italian Dolomites, the French Alps, the American and
Canadian Rockies, as well as Slovenia, addresses a collective
identity. In Slovenia, alpine skiing with its natural
scenery, tradition, rich amateur background, sporting
events, media attention and national heroes is one of the
main sports arenas in which Slovenian nationhood and
national sporting identity were imagined and negotiated.
After Slovenia’s political secession from Yugoslavia with
the so called “ten-day-independence-war” in 1991, the
new nation-state needed new symbols of national identification.
This transformative process has operated at all levels
of people’s lives: in culture, language, history, economy,
tourism, cuisine, landscape, art, and sport. Among sports
practiced on the (inter)national level in Slovenia, skiing
certainly took the most prominent role in constituting the
nation, the newly established nation-state and its symbols.
Also, many tourist resorts, natural monuments, sights and
places that had been perceived as symbols of Slovenian
identification from at least the 19th century, were now
successfully re-created or revitalized in accordance with
newly established emancipatory ideologies. For example,
Slovenian ski centers, particularly Kranjska Gora and
Maribor, internationally recognized as ski resorts hosting
World Ski Cup races, became intensively involved during
winter seasons after Slovenia’s independence in building
national sporting iconography.
The Slovenian geographic and territorial situation alone
has provoked constant national struggle since the concept
of the nation and its identity emerged in Europe in the late
18th and, especially the 19th century, and later in the 20th
century constantly reestablished (Anderson 1991[1983];
Gellner 1987; Hobsbawm 1990; Smith 2001, 1986; Thiesse
1999). In Slovenia, skiing has been represented as the
prototype of ”Slovenianness.” Skiing allegedly already
existed as early as the 16th. There is a documented story,
well-known to all Slovenians, which says that traditional
Slovenian downhill skiing was born in the region of the
Sport, Landscape, and the National Identity 21
The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
Bloke plateau, south-west of Ljubljana. Since the 19th century
the traditional Bloke skier has become the proto-skier
of Slovenian modern skiing, and has gained new meaning
and accentuation in recent media. In the 1990s in particular,
details of this story had been often referred to by TV
anchors, sports journalists, field reporters, studio commentators
and sports analysts with an obvious passion and
attention. They invoked the baron Johann Weikhard von
Valvasor (1641–1693), a Carniolian scholar, who wrote
precise reports on skiing activities in Carniola, (presentday
Slovenia) in the 17th century. Carniola (Slovenian:
Kranjska; German: Krain), a traditional and historical
region of Slovenia, became in the 19th century constitutively
important for creating the Slovenian national territory.
As part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the region
was crown land until 1918, officially known as the Duchy
of Carniola (Slovenian: Vojvodina Kranjska; German: Herzogtum
Krain). In 1689 in his nationally renowned book
Die Ehre Deß Herzogthums Crain [The Glory of the Duchy
of Carniola], Valvasor, nobleman, scholar, and polymath
and member of the London Royal Society, described skiing
by Carniolian peasants as smukanje—an archaic Slovenian
term for, literally, “downhilling.” His comprehensive book
is a description of Carniolian geography, nature, history,
customs, and language of the time. In this monumental
work he presented skiing as an “odd practice of sliding
down snow-covered slopes” by the peasants on the slopes
around Turjak, the Bloke Plateau and in surroundings
(Valvasor 1977[1689]:94; Badjura 1956). This text was,
in the past, usually perceived among Slovenian researchers
and sports journalists as a key historical document
revealing an indigenous status of skiing on Slovenian soil,
proving that skiing was an ancient Slovenian tradition. But
if we read it through the perspective of landscape, then it
can serve also as a reference to a traditional correlation
between skiing and the rural environment. In the period of
Slovenia’s integration into the Yugoslavian Socialist reality,
Slovenian skiing and its attachment to the specific natural
setting, that is the alpine landscape, was often represented
as an identification point of “Slovenianness” and was used
particularly to identify divisions between “us” and “others,”
between Slovenians and other Yugoslavs. Thus, we can see
this sport inscribed into the Slovenian national landscape
perhaps more deeply than any other sport practiced in this
country because of its attribution to naturalist agendas.
Yugoslavia as Skiing Country: Slovenian Mountains,
Skiers, and Medals
The Slovenians lived under the rule of the Habsburg
dynasty from the 14th century until 1918, with the exception
of Napoleon’s 4-year tutelage of parts of modern-day
Slovenia—the “Illyrian provinces.” While the elites of these
regions mostly became Germanized, the peasants strongly
resisted Germanization influences and retained their
unique Slavic language and culture. In 1918, after World
War I, the Slovenians joined with other southern Slav peoples
in forming the State of Slovenians, Croats and Serbs
(October 29, 1918) and then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenians (December 1, 1918) under King Peter I of
Serbia, renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. After
the World War II, the country has been part of the SFR of
Yugoslavia from 1945 until gaining independence in 1991.
In the entire Yugoslav period, skiing as a relatively
popular sporting pastime became perceived as a traditional
Slovenian sport that was revived after three centuries.
Because of its alleged long-standing tradition and
precise territorial origin, downhill skiing was presented as
an exclusively Slovenian sport, i.e., a non-hybrid, authentic
national sport. Its reputation as the Slovenian national
sport was further legitimized by the fact that it was poorly
practiced in other parts of Yugoslavia. Thus, it remained
exclusively attributed to the Slovenian people, a perception
circulated all over the Yugoslav federation. Even within
the discourse of brotherhood and unity that successfully
united the Yugoslav nations until the 1980s, skiing preserved
its “Slovenian character” and was posited as one of
the most distinctive signifiers upon which Slovenianness
was built without much objection. In late socialist Slovenia,
in the 1980s, when antagonisms between Slovenianness
and Yugoslavness arose, alpine skiing was used as a
tool of socio-political mapping between the “Slovenian
sporting identity,” showing its closeness to the “Western
European identity,” and imaginings of the Balkan communities
of the other Yugoslavs, nick-named “the Southern
Brothers.” These competing symbolic geographies noticeably
paved the way from the pre-Yugoslav and Yugoslav
sporting body to the emancipated Slovenian skiing identity
(Starc 2005: 64–88).
In a turbulent late Yugoslav political reality, skiing not
only kept a privileged position in the national imagination
of Slovenianness but growing international successes of
Slovenian skiers during the 1980s gave it epic proportions.
Alpine skiers, such as Bojan Križaj, Mateja Svet, Boris
Strel, Rok Petrovič, Jure Franko and Nataša Bokal were
the athletes who were presented with small crystal globes
for the season’s best runner in particular ski discipline on
several World Ski Cup podiums, World Championships
podiums, and titles and Olympic medals made material
the myth of skiing as the Slovenian national sport. Their
astonishing accomplishments were promptly transformed
by radio broadcasting, the press, and particularly by TV,
into a matter of national pride and symbolic of the nation’s
cohesion.
After Slovenia’s separation from Yugoslavia, skiing
immediately became a euphemism for independence and
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as an all-encompassing symbol of the Slovenian struggle
for independence. All earlier skiing victories were perceived
as Slovenian, not Yugoslav, even though they were
accomplished under the Yugoslav flag. One of my informants,
a Slovenian ski broadcaster, explained this situation
as follows:
After the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, Slovenia was
not only faced with the situation that called for a clear
definition of its identity, but also had for the first time
in history a unique opportunity to present its specifics
to the world. For example, before the world knew only
of the successes of Yugoslav skiers. But the irony of this
multinational country was that there were no Yugoslav
skiers. There were actually only Slovenian skiers who
represented abstract Yugoslav identity. Thus, Yugoslav
medals were actually Slovenian ones. Also, Yugoslavia
was often introduced as an alpine country due to its
participation at skiing competitions, but this was due to
the Slovenian Alps.
As we can see, landscape has never arisen from nothing.
On the contrary, it is a part of wider social discourses
which act as frameworks that include different combinations
of national narratives, political myths, aesthetic and
moral ideologies and signifying practices within which
the landscape is considered to be national. For example,
Boštjan Šaver in his two texts (2005a; 2005b:17–21)
meticulously analyzed the cultural and historical attachment
of Slovenian people to mountain setting. His analysis
shows that different social domains (from politics, folk
culture, religion to sport) have been intensively incorporated
into the local and national mythology of Slovenian
alpine culture. Based on evidence from those consulted,
we can conclude that mountain landscape in Slovenia is
not merely a physical environment appropriate for skiing,
but it represents a cultural text involving questions of citizenship
and experiences of national identity.
Ski Telecasts as Performances of a Nation: Slopes,
Sceneries, Sights
In the Alpine countries of Europe—principally Austria—
alpine skiing has been developed as distinctive television
sport. The purpose of television sport in general is that
it is constructed by TV producers as the only real sport.
National TV services have played a significant role in this
cultural transformation of sports, particularly of those
whose attractiveness and development was directly caused
by media and technology. Dynamics, dramaturgy, attractiveness,
tradition, and the rich amateur background of
alpine skiing were among the conditions which have made
skiing so interesting for TV broadcasting.
In Slovenia, the eminent position of alpine skiing within
the TV sports program schedule was clearly maintained
from the very early TV broadcasts of this sport in the
1960s. The process of Yugoslav disintegration at the end of
the 1980s further underlined the importance of media as
television took by far the most visible part in the cultural
transformation of skiing. In more precise terms, as well
as creating a potential TV audience, it also created an
audience of consumers (for example, greater interest in
alpine skiing; the production of national sporting heroes;
the commercialization of winter sports and the visiting
of ski resorts as a synonym for winter holidays). In Alvin
Gouldner’s (1976) words, television created a powerful
dialectic of technology and ideology.
According to a nationally inspired reading of geography,
the Slovenian landscape traditionally consists of four types:
the Alpine landscape (the Alps, the Pre-Alpine Hills, and
the Ljubljana basin), the Pannonian landscape (the Pannonian
plain), the Karstic landscape and the Mediterranean
landscape (the Adriatic coast, Littoral Slovenia). Here, the
biodiversity of the country is particularly kept in mind. A
similar proliferation of “typical Slovenian tourist attributes”
is also confirmed by Slovenian national TV each year when
the World Ski Cup visits Slovenian Kranjska Gora, for the
men’s giant slalom and slalom. These two central mediasports
events take place in the prestigious pre- or post-NewYear’s
period, i.e., the “prime time” of the ski season. In this
context, Slovenian TV viewers follow a relatively stabilized
ritual: the host broadcaster of the events is Slovenian
National TV, with many other foreign and worldwide TV
services as “client” broadcasters tuned to its output. Twenty
minutes before the start of the race, TVS 2 links to the
Eurovision program, and then immediately starts with a
promotional spot for Slovenia’s natural landmarks, beginning
with images of the prestigious tourist destination town
Bled, its lake with its island; the highest Slovenian mountain
peak of Triglav; the scenic beauties of the Julian Alps;
the town of Lipica, the home of the thoroughbred white
horses (these horses, better known under the Germanized
name “Lipizzaner,” were actually imported from Spain, and
the stables at Lipica were imperial or at least of Habsburg’s
foundation, but this fact is in Slovenia even today perceived
as the result of Austro-Hungarian imperialism); the Adriatic
coast; the Planica Valley, the very symbol of the Slovenian
ski jumping with the biggest ski jump in the world;
the alpine ski resort Kranjska Gora with the hilly ski trails
of the Vitranc Hill; the flat land of Pannonia the Postojna
Cave, one of the breathtaking Karstic wonders, etc. All
these landscapes, transformed into telescapes, represent
not only physical geography or pure nature but national
symbols with great cultural meaning. As the landscapes
of alpine skiing are particularly related to natural settings
and less urban sportscapes (Bale 1994), this set of TV shots
illustrating national landscape perfectly fit the alpine skiing
as prominent “outdoor sport.”
Sport, Landscape, and the National Identity 23
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Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
Pages 24–26 show some sequences of such “picture
postcards” by the Slovenian TV director Stane Škodlar in
1999.
These continuously alternating images presented to
viewers are combined in three pictorial phases:
• introductory or “establishment” shots: 1 live invitational
panoramic view of the site of the event (the picture
of Kranjska Gora where the ski race takes place); 2 opening
graphic announcement of the event which is underlaid
with the same panoramic picture as in the first shot;
• filling shots—pre-prepared tourist material of “picturesque
national discourse”: 3 graphic image of Europe with
the exposed silhouette of the Slovenian territory; 4 close
up of Slovenia; 5 the picturesque graphic announcement
of what you will see in the following shots, namely “the
green piece of Europe”; 6–12 visuals of typical Slovenian
spots: Planica valley as natural “temple” of Slovenia’s and
world’s ski jumping; Kranjska Gora as well known winter
resort; pastureland; the lake of Bled with its island; horses
of Lipica; the sculpture of an ibex (as symbol of mountainous
land) placed in the Triglav national park; traditional
Slovenian house;
• “familiarization” shots: 13–14 show an approach to
the ski resort of Kranjska Gora by a gradual narrowing of
perspective onto the race site; 15–18 multi-perspective
panoramic views of the ski polygon in live pictorial and
pre-prepared graphic version.
These images were sent to more than thirty TV stations
all over the world. During this demonstration of national
symbols the telecaster Igor Evgen Bergant constantly
referred to these Slovenian wonders:
I’m sure this afternoon we are going to be the witnesses
of yet another successful Slovenian day in alpine skiing.
The Slovenians can truly be proud of our beautiful
country. And not only that: we can truly be proud of our
beautiful ski centre Kranjska Gora, where the next skiing
race for the World Ski Cup is going to take place today.
(Said by Bergant commentating on the men’s slalom race
in Kranjska Gora on TVS 2, December 21, 1999)
He also stressed that “we” truly have to be proud of
“our beautiful homeland,” which represents us through
such elite sports events all over the world. He furthermore
emphasized that the Slovenian viewers were, just like Jure
Košir, Mitja Kunc, Rene Mlekuž, and other Slovenian professional
skiers, equally participating in this competition.
Consequently, the individual’s predisposition to skiing
was transformed into the typical characteristic common
to all members of the nation. This kind of commentary
invites the viewers into the presenter’s discourse, and thus
builds a nationally shared experience within the domestic
routines of the TV audience. Such a media-driven pretext
constitutes the way in which TV spectators are engaged
in constructing for themselves a solid image of a sporting
(skiing) nation and are aware of the fact that they, also,
form part of it. Or, if I quote one of my informants, a Slovenian
sports journalist:
You know, the Slovenian alpine skiing professionalism
is importantly related to the natural resources we have.
Look, the essence of the Slovenian story of skiing nation
is actually hidden in this simple sentence ‘let’s go ski on
Saturday and Sunday in Kranjska Gora or in Mariborsko
Pohorje.’ So, I’d like to say that everything began in a family
context. ‘Let’s go ski for the weekend’ was and still is a
regular family ritual during the winter season in Slovenia.
Definitely, we, the Slovenians are vitally connected with
our mountains, hills and traditional ski resorts and with
everything what is related to them. Don’t forget how
successful we are in sporting Alpine climbing. Slovenia is
an alpine country for sure. In Slovenia, there are excellent
natural conditions for alpine skiing. So, without knowing
this landscape context you can’t understand the symbolic
power of the presence or the lack of success of our skiers.
And TV has, with this natural background, significantly
helped in transforming the alpine skiing into a national
sport. When watching telecast of alpine skiing contest
of World Ski Cup from Kranjska Gora or from Maribor,
each Slovenian viewer and visitor identifies with these
places, not to mention the huge national symbolism of
another famous, almost sacred, Slovenian resort, , the
Planica valley where the ski jumpers fly the furthest in
the world; over 200 meters.
Speaking in technical terms, this “picturesque postcard”
(6–12) is a spot recorded in advance and tele-visualizes the
highly symbolic beauty spots, inviting TV viewers all over
the world to witness the national beauties of Slovenia. It is
there to take the TV audience through the ritual initiation
with the nation. The images are organized dramaturgically
from a global to the local context: it starts with the graphic
visualization of Europe (3) and then quickly focuses on the
graphic silhouette of Slovenia—reminiscent of the image
of a hen (4); gradually the graphics (5) are replaced by the
views as from a window opening onto Slovenian tourist
scenes (6–12); after that, the camera’s eye travels through
the region and the location of the ski contest and presents
the organizer’s location (13–15). At the end of this edited
journey, the picture stops at the panoramic view of the ski
polygon where the race takes place (15–18). By transforming
landscape into televised and virtual mapping, the
landscape is put in perspective on TV. It is like a tiny skin
laid over the distant spatial structures of multilayered TV
screening.
However, in analytical terms, this picturesque spot
is more than just a collage of landscape. It is there to be
considered as résumé, emblem or identity of the nation. It
tells us that national landscapes are not just natural facts
but socio-historical constructions. Numerous countries
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1 2
3 4
5 6
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7 8
9 10
11 12
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13 14
15 16
17 18
Sport, Landscape, and the National Identity 27
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maybe possess a complete or partial range of the same or
similar elements (mountains, lakes, horses, flats, slopes,
etc.) but these were imagined by Slovenian people and thus
are perceived as something culturally specific and different
from the others. This spot actually tends to be a résumé of
the cultural construction of the Slovenian national landscape
by showing it as neither as exclusively flat (like Hungary)
nor mountainous (like Austria) but as a mixture of
everything. This gives us an impression that the Slovenian
landscape is not homogenous but regionally heterogeneous.
Historically, it is probably the second half of the 19th
and the first half of the 20th century which puts on a
pedestal the conception of the Slovenian landscape based
on the variety of natural resources of the country. But it
was after Slovenia’s independence in 1991 that the national
character of its territory and landscape was abundantly
revitalized with a new political rhetoric showing the country
as “the heart of Europe,” “Europe in small,” an “ideal
résumé of natural sights” where one can find in a such
small place so many different aspects (for example, the
Alps, the Pannonian flatland, the viniferous regions, the
hilly land, the Karstic region with caves, the littoral region
along the North Adriatic sea, etc.) that elsewhere exist
only separately or in a large territory. During the period
of preparation for Slovenia’s accession to the European
Union, the concept of Slovenia as a harmonious synthesis
of contrasting landscape, as a country of moderation,
as a country with a unique strategic territorial position
(the crossroad of Romance, Slavic and Germanic cultures
and bridging the gap between developed Europe and
the unstable Balkans) became increasingly negotiated as
political, tourist, promotional and symbolic topos.
Television Grounding of Skiing: Mountains,
Ideologies, Identities
Television is today probably one of the most effective sites
where mediated ideologies and identities of all kinds are
imposed, contested and negotiated.2 Or, if I paraphrase
Louis Althusser’s (1993 [1976]) writings on ideology a
canonical text for cultural studies: in order to become
or stay real, a live TV sports event has to be represented
by institutions or mechanisms of cultural transformation
(such as the TV screen, TV technology;3 further, the
instance of the commentator, anchor person or reporter
recognized as legitimized or authoritative) and consumed
by the audience (as virtual members) of the media event.4
In other words, what the sports telecast discourse produces
is an ideology in which TV viewers are urged to live
in an imaginary social relation to that televised reality, and
which is in sharp contrast with their real conditions of
existence. That is how ideology operates and how televised
sport goes real.5
The sports telecast is a form of television representation
inevitably creating different constructions of a national
community, of other nations and of “typical” national
images. So it contributes to local histories and the perspectives
of how we look at them and understand them. Sports
telecasts reproduce national landscapes, symbolic geographies,
territorialities, social boundaries, national mythologies,
legends, famous traditions, sharing histories, established
successes, common legacy and sport heroes through
the production of the TV picture as a starting point of all
televised constructions.
As discussed, telecasts of alpine skiing have been of
significant importance in building the Slovenian nation
through sports media narration from the very early TV
broadcastings of this sport. The mediatory function of live
TV alpine skiing events as transmitters of a kind of collective
memory (Halbwachs 1968), i.e., national, cultural, historical,
as well as sport memory, was clearly present from
at least the 1970s onwards. When interviewing people
from the realm of Slovenian alpine skiing TV broadcasting,
many of them agreed that alpine skiing telecasts
occupied a special position, not only in the history of the
Slovenian television sports broadcasting, but in the entire
history of Slovenian live TV broadcasting. Roughly, alpine
skiing telecasts in general are about the very basic human
intention of how to frame the widespread space and the
extensive ski action. More precisely, they are about the way
television technology is able to subdue the physical nature;
the dispersed environment or the external world.
Since the plebiscite for Slovenia’s independence from
Yugoslavia, the media embarked on an extensive recounting
of the story “of how Slovenians became the Slovenians.”
In this context, telecasts of alpine skiing were a
good opportunity to remind the national TV audience
of how skiing became an “autonomous” and “authentic
Slovenian tradition” and the “Slovenian identity” a skiing
identity. The new country needed a positive self-image and
positive national story. The successes of racers in alpine
skiing became a significant catalyst in constructing the
national identity. Successful individuals had become the
symbols of the nation-state.
The independence of Slovenia activated some old traditions
and symbols. The highest Slovenian mountain Triglav
was one of them. The following example confirms the
constant presence of the symbol of “mountain” in Slovenian
skiing imaginary, and also in commentary discourse:
Unbelievably, our Kunc and Schönfelder are sharing
first place at the moment. There is no difference between
them … they are separated only by the Peca Mountain.
(Said by Bergant commentating men’s night slalom race
in Schladming, January 22, 2002)
Peca Mountain is the border line mountain between
Austria and Slovenia and has also many literary (Lovšin,
28 Vlado Kotnik
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Hribar, and Potočnik 1979; Strojin 1980) and photographic
(Stele 2003) instrumentalizations in Slovenian
literary history, as well as in mountain and travel literature.
The mountain reference here is interesting because the Slovenian
skier lives on the Slovenian side and Rainer Schönfelder
(the Austrian skier) on the Austrian side of the Peca.
What is especially worthy of attention is that this sentence
shows a multiple building of nationhood between both
skiers by means of a natural sign symbolizing different
cultural meanings (for example, the mountain as a natural
barrier, border line, etc.). Briefly, separating them is truly
nothing but the “mountain.” Or yet another example:
Drago Grubelnik is taking the lead at the moment …
he is truly the right son of the Pohorje. (Said by Bergant
commentating men’s night slalom race in Schladming,
January 22, 2002)
Grubelnik is another Slovenian skier from the hilly
Pohorje region of the Styria (Eastern Slovenia). In the
1990s the meaning of the ‘mountain’ became connected
with the national political and tourism discourse in
Slovenia when building its base on the materialization of
natural monuments. The presence of these two discourses
makes natural monuments more important and important
monuments more national. Tourist slogans such as
“Slovenia—my homeland,” “Slovenia—the country on
the sunny side of the Alps” behaved as eminent political
paroles for Slovenia’s emancipation from other parts of the
former Yugoslavia. Additionally, in Slovenian society there
exists a very deep-rooted imagination of a traditional correlation
between mountains and national symbolism. The
highest Slovenian mountain Triglav is intensively involved
in formal state iconography, not only in sport issues and
sport-related purposes, but above all as the most useful
and appropriate symbol of Slovenianness (Šaver 2005). The
image of the Triglav (which in the Slovenian language signifies
the mountain with three “heads”/peaks) is also portrayed
on the Slovenian national flag, important accompanying
requisite of the Slovenian sporting heroes (beside
the national anthem). This national instrumentalization of
the Triglav Mountain as the very symbol of the Slovenian
collective self-consciousness was taken even further in the
media. In the last decade it has been the media which has
spread the message: “Each Slovenian should conquer the
top of the Triglav at least once in his/her lifetime” (in order
to prove their Slovenianness). So the Triglav Mountain is
mobilized as the national identity signifier. In the case of
alpine skiing broadcasting, the Triglav represents a cultural
text conveying a TV materialization of the mountain, both
visually and verbally.
When the World Ski Cup visits the Slovenian Kranjska
Gora or Maribor, the two regular skiing polygons for men’s
and women’s giant slalom and slalom, the Triglav Mountain
is often part of the Slovenian ski telecasts. Such takes,
pre-planned prime positions, television’s looking for aesthetical
or visually attractive shots, etc., play the role of the
so-called filling event which indicates that these images are
far from being created by accident. On the contrary, they
are intentionally inserted in order to address the collective
identification of domestic TV audiences.
The alpine skiing broadcasts are thus increasingly strong
reproducers of such domestic symbolism, ensuring a more
collective representation of the mountain. The mountain
is represented as something that has been “eternally there,”
that could be perceived as being deeply and naturally
rooted, physically static or geographically immovable,
and even culturally stable; it thus serves as an orientation
point.6
Boštjan Šaver’s (2005) extensive research on the presence
and symbolism of alpine culture in Slovenia shows
that the lives of Slovenians are so mountain-oriented
because mountains are eminent natural monuments of
the national space and place. Indeed, the place Slovenians
occupy has much to do with alpine topophilia and mountainous
perceptions, attitudes and values. Roughly, the
centrality of mountainous landscape in Slovenia is strongly
determined by naturalist ideology and topophilic identity.
The role of mountains in human experience is centered
on the elusive meaning of a home-place. Therefore, we
could assert the pervasiveness of mountainous places in
constructing Slovenian culture and national identity. Our
case study is maybe not the most explicit one, but it can
support the argument that the construction of alpine skiing
TV broadcast in a pervasive way penetrates into the
imaginary of Slovenized mountainous landscape.
As Šaver showed, the Triglav Mountain is first and
foremost a construct of the predominant state ideology,
which erupted from different national discourses of media,
sport, tourism, folk culture, politics, and religion (Šaver
2005). Thus the Triglav can be understood as the cultural
text and can confirm the link between the imaginary of
mountainous landscape, skiing and the national imagination
(Mal 1983). As Slovenian anthropologist Starc claims,
the media, and particularly telecast directors and TV
commentators (as the influential controllers of national
sporting identifications and reproducers of popular symbolism)
project national features into the sports because
they automatically assume that the TV viewers perceive
themselves in terms of national affiliation (Starc 2005).
Contests between Skiers as Competitions between
Nations: Landscapes, Aesthetics, Shots
The 1992 Winter Olympics were the first at which the Slovenian
skiers competed as a team of independent Slovenia
(Klausen 1999). The presence of the Slovenian skiers at
this highly recognizable international sporting event was,
Sport, Landscape, and the National Identity 29
The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
in the Slovenian press as well as in TV sports broadcasts,
exposed as Slovenia’s journey from “the Balkans” into
“Europe.” Live participation of Slovenian audiences in this
giant televised sporting event enabled national imagining
to an enormous degree. After the overwhelmingly glorified
skiing story in the 1980s, Urška Hrovat, Špela Pretnar,
Alenka Dovžan, Jure Košir, Mitja Kunc, Katja Koren and
many other professional skiers represented a new wave of
“Slovenian hope and success” in the 1990s. Their achievements
reminded crowds and audiences and individuals
that they were all members of a particular nation-state.
Television sports broadcasts enabled the transmission
of sporting idols, spectacles, and sportsmen’s “battles for
homeland” into people’s homes. In accordance with state
ideology, the media did not only represent sport as a game
between individuals or groups but also as a competition
between nations. And this competition could be found
even at the level of broadcasting. One of my informants,
the director of ski telecasts on TVS 2 indicated yet another
“tacit competition”; the one between different national TV
services:
I can tell you from my own career as the director of ski
telecasts that each and every national telecaster wants to
present his own country in the best way. When the World
Ski Cup races took place in Slovenia, our national television
was responsible for covering this sport event. And of
course, I wanted to present to domestic and foreign TV
audiences not only the sporting competition between skiers
on a ski polygon, but also, through this competition,
promote our country, our nature, and our beauty spots.
To do this, it is necessary to select and insert attractive
shots presenting typical Slovenian natural monuments,
such as the Triglav Mountain, or well framed shots
of alpine valleys, and so on. Also, when I directed ski
telecasts I always wanted to see what other directors, particularly
from Austrian National Television [ÖRF] which
is still the leading one in the field of ski telecasting, do
and therefore I also wanted to compare my visions and
work with their achievements. When Austrian and German
telecasters began inserting attractive and aesthetically
interesting, almost picturesque shots onto alpine
landscape symbolizing their country, we [Slovenian
telecasters] immediately started following this model, as
Slovenia has had a lot to offer, in terms of natural beauty,
to the foreign TV audience.
So we can roughly establish that ski telecasts do not represent
only a sporting competition between skiers, but also
a symbolic competition between nations, between national
telecasters, between national landscapes and their value,
etc. If the skiers compete for podiums and medals, then
the directors of the ski telecasts compete with each other
by looking for aesthetic and visually attractive filling shots,
as is shown in our comparative case, produced by Slovenian
and German telecasters. Their common characteristic
lies in extraordinarily distinctive shots (see below and page
30) representing typicality in national landscape: 1 the
kozolec, Carniolian freestanding vertical drying racks as
symbol of traditional Slovenian rural landscape; 2 the Slovenian
Julian Alps as the symbol of Slovenian alpine landscape;
3 the splendid view of the Bavarian Alps, capturing
a flying bird in the shot; 4 an idyllic German mountain
village near the winter resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
The technical and symbolic similarity of these shots
produced by different national TV services (1–2 produced
by Slovenian Television; 3–4 produced by Bavarian Television)
indicate the assumption that there is a shared technical
and even aesthetic codification according to which the
screening is mutually negotiated among telecasters. As
these shots do not show the action or stadium event but a
filling spot (pre-planned prime positions, etc.), the following
examples indicate that images of landscapes are not an
arbitrary substitute for the absence of skiing action, but
1 2
30 Vlado Kotnik
The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
an intentionally inserted filling element which fulfils the
function of aesthetic background. Furthermore, landscape
frames are always culturally constructed, even if they are
of pure physical nature (Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995; Low
& Zúñiga 2003). In addition, the TV rhetoric and technical
production have the power to re-define and set up
the representation of a particular sport through a specific
ideology which transforms natural monuments into eminent
cultural texts. We could say that television transforms
landscape into telescape. To sum up, ideology is not explicated
only on the verbal level (through the commentary)
but also on the visual level of skiing telecasts (namely, in
the selection of TV pictures, in the reduction of televised
space and place, in the selection of the visual material by
the director, in the way the TV picture is addressed by the
commentator, in the visual representation of results etc).
When dealing with televised national landscape through
a national sport, the key word is visibility. For TV sport
everything turns around how to make something not
only visible but also televisible, that means that the way
of TV presenting is always culturally constructed and
never neutral. Television has enormous power to re-create
image of landscapes of sport and to transform them into a
new reality called mediascape. My ethnography confirms
that ski telecasters created the attachment of this sport to
landscape on the basis of a complex set of evidences and
descriptions which already existed in a community and
were given by literary reproductions, geographical mappings,
archaeological, historical, folkloristic and ethnological
sources, etc. Because of this, TV presentation of the
Slovenian national landscape through alpine skiing is an
integral component of processes of constant re-creation
and re-definition of Slovenian national identity.
The description and analysis of how TV landscape
constructions function in telecasts of alpine skiing point to
the fact that the relationship between landscape and skiing
is predominantly perceived as an interactive social process
between the people, including the ski telecasters, and the
environment or national community in which they live.
A wider overview of the process, which shapes popular
alpine symbolism, related to the presence of naturalist
ideologies in skiing, signal that TV creation of alpine
national landscape through ski telecasts is actually mostly
concentrated on visual comprehension of alpine landscape
as home, native country, domestic place, and homeland.
When telecasters take concrete skiing competition into the
field of the national spatial context in which the race takes
place, they actually pay attention to emotional and symbolic
modalities of national landscape and to the relations
between TV audience and the place they inhabit.
National landscapes are invented as naturally given
and collectively imagined. Natural objects and monuments
(mountain, rock, cliff, steep, lake or waterfall) can
also create and stimulate aesthetic landscape sensations,
primarily because they are beautiful and not because they
belong to certain people or nation. However, the notions
such as “homeland,” “motherland” and “homescape”
create the feelings of a people’s natural and fundamental
attachment to their land (Buttimer 1980:166–187), and
therefore perfectly serve a nationalistic rhetoric. In our
case, it can be confirmed that the alpine skiing telecasts
significantly implant the feelings of attachment in the
Slovenian national TV audience to the televised skiing
landscape by showing it as national. But the gist of the
linkage between the landscape, skiing and the TV audience
is related to specific values which are taken as entirely
Slovenian. Among such values inspired by the strong
national symbolism, the skill in alpine skiing (like mountaineering)
takes a position of civic virtue in a nation. One
of my informants, a regular consumer of sports television,
illustrates the domestication of skiing in Slovenian landscape
like this:
3 4
Sport, Landscape, and the National Identity 31
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Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
I could hardly imagine practicing skiing without its
specific domestic spatial context. Alpine skiing and a
specific rural landscape are deeply intertwined in the Slovenian
collective memory. To my mind, this is the only
sport whose attractiveness and authenticity—in its pure,
traditional and non-competitive version—is importantly
related to undamaged nature and virgin white slopes.
Traditional alpine skiing was really about an idyllic
winter life. However, modern competitive skiing is just a
bad substitute entirely subordinated to the principles of
media and ski industry.
Both, skiing (as national sport) and its alpine environment
(as national landscape), serve as the most proper,
indigenous, autochthonous, authentic and natural thing
in Slovenian nation. Additionally, my informant stressed
some exploited starting-points for identification of nationalistic
populism prevailing in Slovenia and in its region
(for example, “intact,” “virgin” or “undamaged” nature,
mountains, winter landscape, idyllic life, soil, continuity,
etc.) which are not very different from those of “romantic”
cultural constitution that was implicated in all major
conflicts and repressive acts of great extent in the region
(from Hitler’s Nationalsozialismus in Germany of 1930s7 to
Milošević’s national communism in Serbia of 1990s). From
the point of view of nationalist ideologies, national sports
appear as indigenous practices within the nation. From
the point of view of naturalist ideologies, national landscapes
appear as primordial representations of the image
or the picture of the nation. The shift that could be made
from the Slovenian skiing imaginary to the Nazi glorification
of nature meaningfully supports the thesis of French
ethnologist Anne-Marie Thiesse who wrote: “Rien de plus
international que la formation des identités nationales”
[Nothing is more international than the formation of
national identities.] (Thiesse 2001:11).
Television Domestication of Space: National Places,
Ski Polygons, Skills
The magic of televised skiing lies in the cultural transformation
of the space where the alpine skiing competition
takes place. Thus, the TV coverage of a sporting event
represents a specific mutuality of action between television
technology and ideology. On one hand, the ideology
is pre-encoded into the usages of technology, on the other
the TV screening of sporting event is always culturally
standardized for appropriate decoding of televised images.
The TV picture is far from being socially or ideologically
neutral because it is constituted by a subject, namely
by a director or national TV presenter, who is the main
source of all kinds of ideological messages. As we could see
previously in the Slovenian case, ski telecasters are keen
to visualize and consequently promote alpine skiing as a
national sport and its scenes as places of national importance.
Often mountains, white slopes, winter scenery, ski
polygons, resorts of contests, and other natural monuments
or spatial representations of ski races are represented
as visualizations of national character or as parameters
which indicate differences between “us” and “others.” For
example: slalom trails are usually represented as lighter,
more controllable, more televisible, while downhill trails
are often shown as more difficult, more dangerous (some of
them even deadly), more extensive and far more complex
and problematic when transforming them into TV pictures.
Slovenian TV presenters like to glorify difficult men’s
downhill races such as those two “classical” and legendary
examples from Swiss Wengen and Austrian Kitzbühl. However,
as Slovenian telecasters are intensively involved in
making a symbolic hierarchy of national ski polygons, they
tend to compensate for “our ski disadvantages” concerning
ski polygons by making quick comparisons between the
slalom track in Slovenian Kranjska Gora with, for example,
those in the prestigious Austrian Schladming or Italian
Sestriere. They immediately stress the extreme difficulty
of Kranjska Gora’s track by placing it among the steepest
slopes in the entire World Ski Cup, while some other slopes
abroad are perceived as gentle or even artificial. And telecasters
like to visualize this by using extreme camera angles
(the framing of many cameras set at different locations
which produce presences and absences; the expansion of
angle variation; the use of fascinating perspective achieved
from a helicopter or side-moving camera; the fragmentation
of shots in order to suggest the unity of skiing action
and its environment; a selection of different takes and
shots, particularly of mid-shots, close-ups and cuts which
create the aesthetic and ideological effect of maximum
action in minimum space) in order to illustrate the real difficulty
and steepness of the domestic ski polygon.
By showing or commenting on the difference between
“our ski polygon” and “other ski trails,” TV presenters tend
to produce, implicitly or explicitly, positive self-images
and negative representations of “others.” It can be argued
that telecasters and commentators usually privilege the
“authenticity” of the national lands they come from and
put them above the foreign ones. Ski polygons are sometimes
visualized as wide-open scenery and at other times
as limited region or territory. In the case of alpine skiing
telecasts, the space—in terms of openfield, natural scenery
or landscape background—and the territory—represented
as ski terrain or polygon—stay co-existent and undivided
till the very moment when the television approaches them
and makes the extraction of the territory from the space.
Accordingly, the ski polygon is a new or reorganized and
remodeled form of the space. TV technology splits or cuts
the integral natural co-existence of the landscape and the
polygon. In other words, the landscape and the polygon
32 Vlado Kotnik
The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
are one in nature but they inter-mingle coherently only
in the perspective employed on the site of the ski event.
When watching the same event on TV, the correlation
between the landscape and the polygon becomes considerably
changed and reorganized in favor of ski polygon and
to the detriment of that what is beyond. In spite of the
fact, that the TV image of the space in many cases remains
extensible, flexible, ubiquitous, and made for signaling its
continuity with the winter landscape, it is also an indisputable
fact that certain territorialization is the constituent
element and the inevitable by-product of cultural transformation
of sporting event.
Commentators and telecasters create—on a visual as
well as on a verbal level—many national characterizations
of ski resorts, skiers and their skills and, by doing that,
they not only set out the connection of national affiliation,
popular symbolism, Blut und Boden ideology, and tourist
propaganda in the broadcasting of sport performance, but
also construct differences between “us” and “others.” When
analyzing telecasts on the discursive level, I discovered a
surprising number of references to positive signifiers of
the Slovenian skiers, skills and nature as opposed to negative
signifiers of others (table 1).
Examples of slalom ski polygon and surroundings, broadcast by TVS (Kranjska Gora, Slovenia)
Parameter Skiing“Our-ness” Skiing“Other-ness”
Reference to Landscape Slovenian Snowy Mountains Croatian Snowless Hills
Reference to Territory Slovenian Sunny Side of the Alps Austrian Shady Side of the Alps
Reference to Space “Our” Skiing as Part of European One “Southern Balkan Brothers Non-Skiers”
Reference to Dimension Small Nation vs Great Ski Stories Great Nations vs Negligible Ski Issues
Reference to Place Engaging Organizer of Ski Races Wan Organizer of Ski Races
Reference to Field Slalom Field as One of the Steepest Italian Slalom Field as Almost Flat
Reference to Terrain Complex Ski Trail in Kranjska Gora Unexacting Finnish Ski Polygon
Reference to Urbanity Modern Slovenian Ski Slope Underdeveloped Czech Winter Resort
Reference to Origin Slovenian Autochthon Tradition Croatian Skiing Hybridism
Reference to Culture Slovenian Established Skiing School “Exotic Countries” in Skiing Circus
Reference to Nature Slovenian Innate Talent for Skiing Forcibly Learned Skills of Croats
Reference to Blood/Ground Skiing as Genetic Feature of Nation Skiing by Training, not by Nature
Reference to Morality Slovenian Sporting Fairness Italian Sporting Opportunism
Reference to Character Slovenian Warmth German Coolness
Reference to Aesthetics Refined Technique of Slovenian Skier Robust Run of Swedish Skier
Reference to Maturity “Our” Well-Experienced Matador Unknown Young Japanese Contestant
Table 1 Skiing“Our-ness”and“Other-ness”through Parameters of Landscape and Skills
Sport, Landscape, and the National Identity 33
The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
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Television already limits the spectator’s view by the
physical dimensions of the camera and the screen. A
limited choice of views is down to the predominance of
the director’s perspective: the viewer sees only what he is
allowed to see. Television manipulates the spectator’s view.
For the spectator, the reality of the picture is the result of
the normative process of the internalization of the values
and beliefs of the cultural system. As claimed by Dayan
and Katz, the sporting TV broadcast is the end product
of political, cultural, aesthetic, and financial bargaining
between three partners: the organizers (organization of
the sports event), the broadcasters (re-production of the
event) and the TV audience (consumption of the event)
(Dayan & Katz 1992:54–55). As the table presented above
indicates, the landscape of skiing telecast is always a negotiated
construction within a community or society.
Conclusions
This article has provided data that can be summarized
in a few final thoughts. First, it concentrates on a postsocialist
nation that is seldom featured in international
anthropological literature, and is also under-represented
in international academic debates. Second, alpine skiing
as a national sport has become a vehicle for the creation
of meaningful discourse about national identity, predominantly
through the purist and naturalist ideologies
which presented skiing as a most autochthonous and
natural Slovenian sport and as the cultural extension of the
Slovenian national landscape. Alpine skiing has played a
distinctive role in the Slovenian nation-imagining process,
all the more because it was strongly regulated by the denial
of hybridism. Downhill skiing has tended to be perceived
as pure, authentic, and indigenous Slovenian sporting
practice. Third, direct telecasts have played a crucial role
in transforming Slovenian traditional skiing through its
modern competitive televised version into the national
sport. Therefore, alpine skiing became perceived as distinctively
TV sport. In telecasts, Slovenian skiers’ successes
have figured mostly around the national performative discourse
about Slovenia as a “young, little and independent
country” which has achieved success. As Ginsburg & Larkin
(2002) point out, media worlds open up an extremely
widespread place where anthropologists can find numerous
new terrains. Fourth, televised skiing, imbued with
enormous national symbolism, also played a kind of role
in the processes of Slovenian separation from Yugoslavia.
While perhaps not crucial—as, with all kinds of sports
and cultural emissions, ski transmissions have a seasonal
nature—it was not negligible. Certainly, it was a kind of
identification point which helped in creating difference
from others. Additionally, the successes of Slovenian skiers
as points of collective identification were promptly incorporated
into the national landscape iconography. Ski telecasts
have confirmed the placement of skiing imaginary in
the symbolism of national landscape and by tele-visualizing
they have also re-created the spectators’ identification
with it. Furthermore, ski telecasters help the stylizing and
idealizing of both skiing and its attachment to the natural
setting in accordance with the predominant national ideology.
Because of this, both televised sport and the televised
landscape appear as socio-historical constructions and cultural
processes between people (TV audience as national
community) and place (point of national experience).
If, in accordance with the Lévi-Straussian famous yet
stereotypically antagonistic distinction, cultura vs natura,
we see skiing on the side of culture, and landscape on the
side of nature, then we can conclude that ski telecasts have
shown a great potential, with their mechanisms of cultural
transformation, to enable and build a symbolic correlation
of this traditionally established distinction exactly at the
point of national symbolization and identification. More
precisely, ski telecasts are not only technically constructed
products but also culturally standardized channels for
mediating national identity. Maybe they are not a central
element in the entire enterprise of Slovenian nation-building,
but they contribute, in a visceral and penetrating way,
to the idea of nationhood and to the broader story of a
certain national identity.
Endnotes
1 This contribution has been made on the basis of my
research project “Skiing as Slovenian National Sport:
Socio-Historical Constructions and Contemporary Media
Narrations” (2006-08), which is being carried out at the
Institute for Anthropological Research in Ljubljana. For
more about this project see the bilingual (Slovenian-English)
publication Outline of Anthropological Projects (Bulletin
IAR 1), edited by Martin Žužek Kres.
2 On television as a particular technology, transmitter of
ideology, cultural form and producer of nationwide audiences
see Fiske & Hartley 1978; Williams 1990.
3 On the ideology of TV technology in the case of
alpine skiing broadcasts see Kotnik 2001.
4 Here I prefer Daniel Dayan’s and Elihu Katz’s study on
media events, particularly sections on sports events (1992,
pages 66–68, 126–127, 130–133, 141–143, 206–207).
5 On the relationships between media, particularly television
and sports see the following works: Goldlust 1987;
Rowe 1999; Whannel 1992; Wenner 1989, 1998; Rader
1984.
6 For more abut how the mountains are instrumentalized
among people and create an important part of folk
landscape in the mountainous region of Utah see Charles
S. Peterson, Look to the Mountains: Southeastern Utah and
34 Vlado Kotnik
The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 7 • Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2007
the La Sal National Forest (Provo: Brigham Young University
Press, 1975).
7 For the ideological overlap between Nazi ideas and
environmental agendas, and particularly for the Nazis’
glorification of nature see the landmark book How Green
Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in
the Third Reich (2005), edited by Bruggemeier & Cioc &
Zeller.
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