Efectes de l’acceptació pura i simple de l’herència sobre el deutor

“[Y]ou damned well better not pretend to be one of them, because they will test this out and one of two things will happen: either you will…get sucked into ‘participant’ observation’ of the sort you do not wish to undertake, or you will be exposed, with still greater negative consequences” (Polsky, 1971: 124)

122 Authors Fieldnotes Standing atop a ledge trying to figure out a line to do, I feel frozen. I feel like I’m in Sonic’s way as he’s below me and directly across from me. I stand to one side as a gesture for him to do the line he wants while I figure out what to do. He gestures back with his palms up as if to say ‘No, go ahead’. It appears that his positioning there is not to do a line, but to watch me. I’ve felt slightly tentative all day after recovering from three broken toes on a jump gone very wrong only a couple of weeks before. For most of the traceurs, though, this is no excuse. Sonic merely does it more passive-aggressively. I can’t figure out something to do from this particular spot. He notices my reluctance and for some reason seems to revel in it. He smiles at me with a smug grin: “Go on. Do something”, he says in a daring tone.

This isn’t playful banter. It’s more of a test. I’ve only been out with the traceurs a half- dozen times and my technical abilities are far from solid. They’re likely to be even less so under pressure. I feel his distaste for me. I feel it deep in my body and I feel my chest and legs tighten with a reciprocated anger that’s more out of feeling threatened than it is offended. ‘Fuck you’, I think to myself. This is certainly not the best example of the welcoming, inclusive and supportive community they all claim it to be. I feel panicked, pressured and uncomfortable. My mind locks up. I can’t see. I can’t see what to do, can’t see any good line of structures and movements. I know they’re there, but I can’t see them. “Come on then! Don’t be soft.” He continues to jeer.

He suggests a particular line that is way beyond my current abilities and he knows it. He does the line himself smoothly and effortlessly as a bit of ‘show and tell’, although he himself nearly slips on a slightly wet rail. The rail he wants me to ‘precision’ onto first is still slightly damp and slippery after a down-pour the night before, and there’s a wall directly behind it just waiting to bludgeon me if I were to misjudge the line and fall into it face-first. I’m not losing any teeth for this bloke. I want off this ledge. I want no part of it. But I can’t just drop down off it without doing anything. There’s a narrow wall off to the side and just below me with a rail beyond it. I dive towards it hands-first and do a simple dive-kong over it, lazy vaulting over the rail in feeble retreat. I feel stupid. I feel humiliated and soft. What’s worse is that I feel like a bad

123

researcher. I’ve pissed off one of the participants and made it pretty clear I can’t stand him. I’m clearly angry and I’ve failed to do the line and instead brought attention to my temporary inability to immerse myself in the ways of parkour. This in itself feels like a failure. I overhear him moan to TK, “May as well get back behind his desk and read some books”. Realising I can hear him, he turns to me: “You’re a fit, healthy bloke. Look at you. You’re a bloke who’s in as good a shape as any of us and you won’t do ‘owt. It’s not like you haven’t trained with us before”. He shakes his head, emphasising the ‘bloke’ both times. TK tells him to shut up, and reminds Sonic that he only felt comfortable doing that line on this spot six months ago, and he’d been doing parkour for three years. September, 2013. The fieldnotes above would appear to be a confirmation of Ned Polsky’s (1971) warning that “you damned well better not pretend to be one of them”. As the following pages will reveal this is a warning which, when applied to this research and this researcher, simply does not apply. When reading criminology and sociology, ethnographic studies captured my imagination most and appeared to reveal the greatest depth of understanding, texture and nuance of the relationship between macro socio-economic structures and their manifestation in the micro-context of everyday life (Adler, 1993; Armstrong, 1998; Bourgois and Schoenberg, 2009; Contreras, 2013; Corrigan, 1979; Ditton, 1977; Ferrell, 1996; 2006; Hobbs, 1988; Parker, 1974; Winlow, 2001). Moreover, the ethnographic method held the greatest ‘logic of appropriateness’ for achieving the objective of this research (Greener, 2011). This immersive approach gave me the opportunity to feel parkour in an embodied sense, but it also gave me the opportunity to speak to security guards and observe how the traceurs were inconsistently tolerated and excluded from urban space. In the words of Whyte (1959), it revealed insights and lines of questioning that “I would not have had the sense to ask if I had been getting my information solely on an interview basis.” Insights into the lived spatial dynamics of parkour’s practice and control, how the flow of a parkour jam interacts with the ‘rhythms’ of the city, dancing around its ever-shifting and ‘alive’ consumer economy, contributing to its spatially and

124

temporally negotiated legitimacy and illegitimacy (see chapters 7 and 8). As Pink (2008: 193) writes:

“Following Casey’s (1996) argument that place is central to our way of being in the world and that we are thus always ‘emplaced’, the task of the reflexive ethnographer would be to consider how she or he is emplaced, and her or his role in the constitution of that place…By attending to the sensoriality and materiality of other people’s ways of being in the world, we cannot directly access their ‘collective’ memories, experiences or imaginations. However we can, by following their routes and attuning our bodies, rhythms, tastes, ways of seeing and more to theirs, begin to make places that are similar to theirs, and thus feel that we are similarly emplaced” (Pink, 2008: 193).

In the early autumn of 2013 I gained access to the NEPK parkour community not as a researcher but as a budding traceur. A complete novice to parkour and its community, my desire to get involved with parkour was initially undertaken purely as a leisure interest, a new sport which was engaging, different, relatively free of expense and a seemingly excellent way to stay in shape and socialise as my time demands and the cost of gym membership both increased. At the time I had no idea that it would be the sole focus of my doctoral thesis, but I quickly discovered that it could be. I initially began doctoral study with a view of pursuing a more policy-oriented thesis. My broad focus has always been upon young people, crime and deviance, with the initial intention to offer a critical appraisal of issues of crime and risk in the youth justice system. In some of my initial conversations with my fellow traceurs about what I ‘do’, I had mentioned that I was a doctoral student doing research on young people and risk. These discussions were brief and deliberately vague—at the time even I wasn’t sure of what I was ‘doing’. Nevertheless, many of them seemed intrigued by having a ‘researcher’ in their midst and they suggested that if I wanted to study young people and risk I was in the perfect place to do so. With this level of pre-existing access, a participatory ethnography was overwhelmingly the most sensible option. Therefore, the ‘choice’ of research method was never open to much debate. As a matter of fact it was never much of a choice at all. Despite all of the academic arguments in favour of ethnography and my own epistemological leanings, the decision to engage in an ever-shifting role of total researcher, researcher participant

125

and total participant (Gans, 1967) was actually dictated to me by the traceurs themselves.

For example, ‘Ziplock’ (henceforth known as ZPK) was a senior figure within the NEPK community who warmed to me earliest and with whom I became closest throughout the ethnography. When I first discussed the possibility of doing research on parkour and freerunning he was enthusiastic and eager, prompting discussions while we were out on jams and engaging the other traceurs in discussion. In many ways his actions took a lot of pressure off me as the ethnographer in that I didn’t have to be as conscious of negotiating that fine line between getting meaningful data and worrying about disillusioning the traceurs by asking a curiously high-volume of questions. How much of this was due to his general excitement to talk about parkour, and how much of it was a conscious effort to help me out, I’ll never know. What I do know is that despite his warmth and generosity, his conditions were clear and uncompromising from my first outing with the traceurs as ‘a researcher’: “We don’t carry any passengers”, he told me. “You’ve got to do what we do and train as we train. You don’t get to just stand around and watch now that you’re doing research. You’ve got to be a traceur, a freerunner”. This was a view firmly held by the rest of the NEPK community as well. When I first met Franny, a Yorkshireman, in October of 2013, he was astounded that a sociologist would be alongside him atop a building doing a ‘roof mission’. After a moment’s consideration, however, he saw the basic sense in the method, albeit without any discussion of epistemology or methodology: "I guess you can’t know ‘owt about it unless you’ve done it though can yer? How can you write about it and understand it if you don’t know what it feels like?” Moreover, everything about me and my own ‘social script’ (Coffey, 1999) demanded this total participant approach to my ethnography of parkour. To refer back to the fieldnotes that opened this chapter, on the day in question I was wearing shorts, trainers and a loose-fitting vest. Putting it as modestly as possible, as someone who still goes to the gym, works-out and lifts weights regularly, I possess a muscular physique which, in this attire, is observable to all. To Sonic, like the other traceurs I am clearly equipped with the physical tools to do the line and the hardened body capable of absorbing any physical punishment. The characteristics Sonic pulled out are notable: young, male and

126

in-shape. At this early stage of the research, I was still attempting to follow the orthodox lessons of methodological how-to textbooks which imbue ethnography with a warning toward that unfortunate phrase of ‘going native’ in reverence of the myth of ‘objectivity’ (Hammersley, 1992; see Ancrum, 2012 for a critique). In my mind I was the researcher- traceur, but certainly researcher first. While I was figuring out how to navigate the messy array of participatory roles (Adler and Adler, 1987; Gans, 1967), I came to realise that the traceurs did not care about my professional or research identity one bit. Nor would they give me the time to figure it out. When I was out with them, I was out as one of them. Contradicting Polsky (1971) and drawing on the words of Winlow (2001:17), if I wanted the research to have any chance of success “I damned well did have to pretend to be one of them”. This precise statement was expressed by Winlow when considering the methodological quandaries of his research on crime, bouncers and his use of violence. Ferrell (1996; 1998) found it necessary to avoid hiding behind the label of researcher when confronted with arrest with other graffiti writers in a back-alley, spray paint in-hand. In Treadwell’s ethnography into football hooliganism he had to draw upon his natural physical and cultural capital and respond to situations of confrontation just as any participant would (Williams and Treadwell, 2008: 64-65). Similarly, Wacquant (2004) discovered that in order to develop any respect and gain analytical depth to his study of a Southside Chicago boxing gym, he had to get in and ‘glove up’ amongst the other fighters. It would appear that the immersive participation and willingness to sacrifice one’s body and safety is a fairly common necessity for researchers studying hyper- masculine environments. This seems to particularly be the case for those involving risk and significant amounts of ‘bodily capital’ (Wacquant, 2004), especially among young male researchers who share a certain amount of biographical and physical congruence with their participants. The willingness to fully participate was vital for the ongoing viability of the research and, as we shall see in later chapters, its epistemological value was significant. Notwithstanding these methodological positives, it was also important for my ongoing health and safety. The research was always going to demand a certain level of participation and as any traceur will tell you, to practice parkour half-heartedly is the quickest way to serious injury.

127