To understand society is in a sense to transcend it, for though our theoretical concepts help us understand empirical phenomena they are themselves not empirical phenomena but ideas of such phenomena. If culture consists of ideas people have about their world, an anthropological theory is our conceptual and abstract rendering of their conceptual and abstract rendering of their world.
G. Obeyesekere 1981: 10 G:(Interviewer): Homans called this ‘the familiar chaos of daily life’
E (Norbert Elias): Yes, daily and not daily. G: Don’t you like the words ‘familiar chaos’?
E: No, he means something quite different. One must clearly say that what seems most familiar to us covers our ignorance, so the question is not whether this is a chaos, but whether or not we are aware of our own not-knowing.
G: So, actually, it is not a chaos, but an unfamiliar order
E: It is unfamiliar and it is not a chaos. Quite. But in any case, unless we are able to make that which seems most familiar to us completely unfamiliar, we shall never able to find our way in it.
N. Elias 1998: 144 Unless we are able to hold our own symbols responsible for the reality we create with them, our notions of symbols and of culture in general will remain subject to the ‘masking’ by which our invention conceals its effects.
R. Wagner 1981: 144
After having waited at least six weeks to get my “approval to work with vulnerable populations” application granted by the London Police Department, I was finally able to start fieldwork in earnest. On a fairly warm day in April of 2011 I first started to build my relationship with downtown, the YAC, and the youth who made use of its services.
As I walked downtown, I was awash in memories that came flooding back, unexpectedly. Proust’s souvenir involontaire (“involuntary memory”), in all of its wild, intrusive force, marked me dazed as its temporary captive. Images rushed with
intensity against my eyes of when I used to come downtown regularly to skateboard on weekends; I was around 14 or 15. Walking down Queen’s Street, seeing familiar landmarks, and all those spaces that we used to make use of in unintended ways (like using the concrete benches outside of the London Life building as a place to do
“grinds”, “kick-flips” and “tail-slides”) reconnected me with lazy autumn Saturdays in the early 1990’s. Those were the days when I used to come down by bus with a group of five or six friends to navigate the streets and alleyways on our boards—always leery that a police officer would intercept us and ask for our ID (as commonly happened).
Photograph #6: Alleyway beside the YAC.
As I crossed Queens and got back on to Richmond, I remembered vividly when at least 15 of us (a larger than usual group) had been bombing down the street, fast and
without limit: we were expanding and contracting along the road—we took up the whole space—seemingly at random, almost like a rag-tag flock of birds moving this way and that. Each of us on our boards, overtop four sets of speeding-fast wheels, accompanied by the rush and whirl of urethane against pavement. We were headed to a parking garage to re-enact a scene from the movie Police Academy 4: Citizen’s on Patrol39.
A police paddy wagon had come out of nowhere (marking the moment with intense situational irony), and pulled up right in front of us—to try and stop us. While most of us scattered and made a run for it, five or six were intercepted—with the assistance of two security guards—and thrown in the back of the paddy wagon for questioning. There was no time to hang around; the imperative was to run, and get hell out of there—fast. None of us wanted to stick around lest we get a customary lecture by a police officer, along with the traditional $60.00 ticket. Those were the days, in the early 1990’s, when skateboarding was literally “a crime”. To be seen with a skateboard (and the typical accoutrements of baggy pants, hats, and brightly coloured t-shirts) marked one as a danger to public safety downtown.
As I walked along, Proustian memories suddenly giving way to the demands of street/body/curb navigation (I had already accidentally bumped the shoulder of an elderly woman since I was caught in my dazed reverie), I was searching anxiously, desperately for commonalities in experience that I might have with the street kids I was soon going to meet.
39 The scene we wanted to re-create was when a group of skateboarders in the aforementioned
movie skate down the main driveway from the top to the bottom of a parking garage at very high speed.
Nearing the corner of Dundas and Richmond, I feel a constraining sense of apprehension: memories in abeyance, now I’m thrown into the present in its stark immediacy. This is, after all, the corner where people were known to get stabbed, beaten up, or robbed—all the time. I cross Richmond and pull a right on Dundas, edging and inching my way through an unyielding group of really loud hip-hop oriented teenagers. I can hear bongo-drums behind me. “She’s a fucking bitch, man, don’t you get down on that ass—“. Snippets of conversation. “Where’s it at, bro”? It’s not to me, luckily. I walk on. As I stared ahead at the McDonalds on the corner (the
infamous place where dealers and “pimps” hang out, waiting for “clients”), all I could mutter to myself was “oh shit, here we go”.
I’m brushing past teen mothers with what look to be five-year-olds half-asleep in their damaged strollers, people who appear to be of First Nations descent, and people who look “down and out” waiting for the bus in the thick crush of activity, I’m
confronted by a middle-aged man with long, dark hair. He’s looking as if he’d slept in a dumpster: “Got any change? Spare some change, sir”?, he says in a gravelly, alcohol- inflected tone. “Ah, no, actually”—pointing quickly to my chest where my wallet is, but why I do this I don’t know—“I don’t, man, sorry about th…—“fuck off!”. My curt greeting was followed up with some incomprehensible muttering. “Oh well, whatever”, I say to myself. “Thick skin, man, thick skin—seriously. Looks like I’m going to have to get used to this”. I press on.
As I approach the front door of the YAC through funnel-like white-blue clouds of cigarette-infused pot-smoke, I feel myself cough lightly (almost obviously as if to make a statement) as I navigate my way through; but then I realise something: As I walked through the crowd of people just behind me, I judged them—and pretty harshly,
too. But why? What’s the point? Sure it’s because they’re poor—I think. I never grew up with money though, so what’s with the tone? Sure it’s because they’re
congregated around each other, swearing and hitting each other—some of them looking like dim-wits. But where is this coming from? My opinions, my judgments? I don’t know them. I don’t know any of these people at all. What I do know is a type, though. A “kind” or type of person that I’ve heard about before (you know, they’re depicted in movies, literature, magazines, on the ‘net), but haven’t really engaged with—ever. Before I know it, I’ve got my hand on the front door—“this must be it”—and I’m walking past the huge punched-out hole in the wall, and down the stairs in to the basement. “Shit, what if something happens down here? How the hell am I gonna get out”? I thought. “There’s only one way in and one way out, and it’s through the door I’m just about to enter”. Without any hesitation or moment of pause, I just go through and say “hi” to the first staff member I see.
After a few minutes of introductions, and making sure to sign a volunteer commitment form, I find I’m getting buffeted about back and forth—probably because I’m in the food-bank line up, and it’s getting bigger by the minute. Feeling really awkward, I sit down, look around, and realise that it’s pretty much only males in their late teens and early 20’s at this table. But I’m thirty-five. Some of the girls are
crowded over by the phone; one with a stroller and what looks to be to be a four month old little kid (boy? girl? I can’t tell). Her friend is pregnant—really pregnant; but she’s also got “meth-face40”. “Jesus”. I can’t help it. “Why the hell would you be doing
40 Those who use the drug called “crystal-meth” have a characteristic dermatological pattern
(dark red pustules that look not unlike chicken-pox) on the skin and arms usually referred to as “meth-face”. Apparently—and this is something I heard many times--once the drug gets into your body, it has to come out somewhere, so it seeps out of the skin on the face and arms.
crystal-meth if you’re bloody pregnant” I thought to myself—obviously not yet understanding the psychological, social and structural dynamics involved in addiction and the choices it hinders and affords. “Watch my shit”. She throws a white paper bag with what looks to be a prescription stick from a pharmacy on it. “Me”, I ask? “Just make sure no one takes it—I need it”. “Uh, yeah, sure, what—“. “It’s methadone”— barks a kid with bad acne in front of me. “What the fuck”—and that’s all I can mutter to myself, sotto voce. “What the fuck”.
“Move, bro”. “Uh, sorry”? Some kid with sun glasses on and a pit-bull tattoo on his neck kicks my chair. “Move, bro”. He kicks the chair—again. “Yeah, sure, man”. I nudge my chair inwards a little, and take out my field note book for some comfort—this might actually be a little harder than I thought. Maybe just a little. After a few seconds of looking over the same blank-page, I feel that I have to put myself out there. I can’t—I just take a few notes, but my handwriting is incomprehensible. I can only get the date down. Making a quick sweep of those sitting at the table, I take a risk—and for me, the way I’m feeling right now—a big risk: “You guys like metal”? The larger kid with the shaved head (whose name I find out later is “Biggie”, nods and says: “yeah, Metallica’s pretty epic. I like some Megadeth, too”. “Ah well”, I said, “it looks Iike I’m home after all these years”. Though I still don't quite know what I meant by that last remark, I think those around me understood. “Hey, my name’s Mark, actually. I’m here to do some research on street youth downtown. We’ll get to that later, though, what do you guys think of Iron Maiden and stuff like that”?
After about three hours of talking about heavy metal in all of its forms I realised I had made contact. Since I’ve loved heavy metal since I was 11 years old, this passion gave me perhaps the fastest and most natural “in” with the people around the table that
day. Near the end of the night, as my conversation with Biggie, Star Warz, Curly and Dreadz shifted from mainstream metal to extreme metal—an area wherein I have a very firm knowledge base—I noticed that a fairly quiet guy with a hat and a beard at the far end of the table kept glancing over. He didn’t give any more signals than that. I
decided to point to him and say, “hey, are you into metal, too”? I was starting to feeling more and more confident.
He looked up from his drawing and said, “oh yeah, I love metal of all kinds— black, folk, death, power and thrash”. “Holy shit, me, too”, I said excitedly. Now that’s weird. “Who are you listening to these days”, I said. “Oh, right, Amon Amarth, Blind Guardian, Suidakra, stuff like that”. “Wow, I did ever come to the right place”! I said kicking my backpack under the table. I actually just downloaded the new Blind Guardian a few weeks ago—what do you think? “Well” he said, “I haven’t had much of a chance to listen to it, but I like what I heard—it’s really melodic”. “Yeah, totally” I replied. “Hansi Kürsch still has a great, powerful voice, and he’s in his mid 40’s— realise that”! “What? Mid 40’s?—I had no idea he was that old”. “Yep, but that’s great, though”, I said. I admire people like that who carry on with their art, regardless of social norms, expectations or stuff like that”. “Oh, anyways, man, my name’s Mark”—“I’m Zane” he said, looking with slight downcast eyes to his drawing. “So”, I said, “are you staff here (and I asked this question since he looked around my age), or”—“no, I come here everyday to eat and stuff; I’m an elite artist, actually”. “Elite— uh? What do you mean”? “Yeah, I tend to carefully draw really dark things; not gory, just dark—as if the very abyss itself is influencing my art”. “That’s cool”, I said. “The abyss”? “Yeah, that’s my philosophy on life: the abyss is the plane where dark and light intermingle, but don't’ necessarily merge or cross—they exist, and they influence
us, our actions”. “Ah, very interesting”, I replied. “I’ll have to ask you more about this philosophy—which sounds like a trademark existentialism—when I know you better”! “Ha—indeed, indeed; it’s very, very personal, and means a lot to me. An existentialism it is”. I then laughed in return, and asked to see some of his work that he had in a stack beside him.
Immediately after this interaction, I remember sitting back in my seat, looking around the dark red walls of the YAC, covered both with drawings and photographs of former “YACers”, intaking the very distinct smell—a mixture of a musty basement and the lingering trace of the previous night’s dinner—and thinking: “this could be a lot more comfortable than I thought. I can’t believe I’m actually—no, finally—doing fieldwork. Real fieldwork. So what if it’s ten minutes from where I live—its worlds away. At this precise point, I faced one of those ethnographic turning points
anthropologists experience once they’ve made a break-through with one or more of their “informants”.
What made this experience quite startling to me was the speed at which this break-through took place. Within a few hours I had found several “informants”, informants, with whom I had clicked instantly, right off the bat. And meeting Zane changed my idea of what it meant to do fieldwork, how I related to the street youth at the YAC, and how I viewed myself, and my own socio-cultural and existential location in relation to these things.
Within a few weeks, I had made contacts with almost all of regulars in the YAC—some fifteen people. At this point I settled into a fairly comfortable daily
routine of just “hanging out”. What made my field site “perfect” in a way was that I did not have to engage in any form of artifice or subterfuge about my own personality, as
sometimes happens when ethnographers enter a field in which they have very little in common with their “informants”. Quite the contrary, I was able to continue with my preferred clothing style: hiking boots, jeans, and a black heavy-metal t-shirt.
On those days where there was no one to share a conversation based on heavy- metal, I would naturally turn to skateboarding—an activity that many of the youth partook in. Since I had been skateboarding since the age of eleven—carrying through to the age of twenty-four—I have a very in-depth and detailed knowledge of “skating”, running the gamut from professional skateboarders, to tricks, to skate-videos, and the industry in general. As time wore on in the YAC, I found that either heavy-metal or skateboarding were the “ultra-rich” (Labov 1984: 37) topics in which to broach a conversation either with friends I had made (we could return to these, as Labov [1984] pointed out, over and over again without exhausting interest), or new youth that I had never seen before. What I did notice, though, was that I was starting to swear—a lot.
Regardless of all of these surface commonalities, though, on any given day at the YAC I still felt the looming spectre of Otherness gently touch—and make
apparent—the almost opaque and shifting space of difference that I was convinced was shrinking and becoming more and more diaphanous with each passing day. Little did I know at that point that reflexivity is a constantly expanding and contracting affair, wherein knowledges are produced via orientations. Orientations to people and their orientations to me; and the crossings and miss-crossings that occur there between. Though I thought I was “Mark”—the guy who loved metal, skated at one point, and made people laugh— I clearly was not to everyone.
Owing to the deictic41 nature of selfhood, in the YAC my “ontological” status as a person was subject to what anthropological linguist Michael Silverstein (1976) refers to as a “shifter”—a term that was originally used to describe words, such as deictic words, that “shift” reference [i.e., from “me”, to “you”, to “him” to “he”], all depending on spatio-temporal context—I became a “shifter” (applying the term of a generalised notion of selfhood) inasmuch as I was a different person to different people. As we all are. As all words are. This is what Bakhitn understood as the heteroglossic42 nature of all language.
During my interactions with people at the YAC and throughout the downtown