The Need to Believe in a Secularised World: Practises among the Basketball Fans in Lithuania

If my team is out of luck, I go away and don’t watch the game. As, if I am not there, they play better. Being born in Lithuania, I was brought up in a culture which cannot see itself without basketball. While the rest of the world watches football, Lithuanians cannot miss basketball matches. This game created some of my identity, and thus I have decided to conduct my anthropology project on the fans of “Lietuvos Rytas”, which is the main team of the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius. I started by analysing identities, but to my surprise, my encounters shifted my work towards the beliefs that fans hold. ‘The holistic, cross-cultural and ethnographic traditions that define anthropology as an endeavour have never been more pronounced than in the field of sport ’ (Sands in Palmer 2002: 254). While I had never thought about basketball as a way of analysing supernatural beliefs, superstitions or even religiosity, my encounters project has proved Sands ’ theory. This paper will therefore include reflections upon my fieldwork, ideas of my informants and also theoretical works of different authors. I will firstly argue that people in a secularised world hold beliefs which they are embarrassed of, but from which seek security. I will then propose that anthropological terminology needs a new word to describe modern beliefs, which are especially prominent among sports fans. Finally, I will try to show that a popular phrase in Lithuania, saying that basketball is ‘the second religion’, is actually far nearer to the truth than most people saying it would ever believe. I will finish with ideas about private/public space, and the importance of studying these beliefs in a modern society. I Am Not Superstitious. They Are Initially, I planned to investigate basketball fans ’ identity and therefore chose an internet forum for “Lietuvos Rytas ” fans, as this seemed the best place to speak with them. I logged in and asked questions about fandom, while from my own curiosity I also inquired about superstitions they hold for games. From fans I knew personally I was aware that most of them have some kind of superstitions. Theories also suggest that in a variety of sporting contexts, ‘chance and uncertaint