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Intimacy, sport and young refugee men
Emotion, Space and Society 3 (2010) 56e61
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Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
Intimacy, sport and young refugee men Clifton Evers* Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 11 March 2009 Received in revised form 15 December 2009 Accepted 27 January 2010
This article is about research with a group of young refugee men from Sudan and their relationship to football (soccer) as they resettle in Australia. It provides evidence of the resilience, independence and autonomy that such young refugees possess and what these young men's intimate knowledge of these qualities can teach us. In other words, how can we as researchers learn from these young refugees about how they perform these qualities and how may we accommodate this during ethnographic research and in sports-based intervention programs aimed at empowering such young people? Further, the article explores the role of intimacy in this process by accounting for the role of affective connections on and off the sporting field. The argument is that intimacy can help those involved negotiate the power inequities present in sports-based intervention programs and in associated research. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Refugees Masculinity Sport Intimacy Ethnography Development
“Football is not a matter of life and death, its much more important than that”. Bill Shankly, in Sunday Times (UK) Oct. 4 1981
1. Introduction This article is based on ethnographic work that I am doing as part of an Australian Research Council funded project: “The Well Rounded: the role of sport in shaping physical, emotional and social development”. Since 2007 this project has been investigating the impact that participating in sport has on the physical, emotional and social development of young people living in Australia. In Australia there has been a boom in sports-based intervention programs aimed at developing the capabilities of young people from disenfranchised communities and challenging socioeconomic backgrounds. There continues to be a prevailing assumption made by the hosts of these sports-based intervention programs that they need to define and teach qualities such as independence, resourcefulness, resilience, adaptability and competency to young people so that they can cope with everything from violence, school dropout, drug use, unequal access to education, limited employment opportunities, sexism, racism and other structural inequities (Gatz et al., 2002). The initial research findings of the Well-Rounded Person project indicate that it is worth paying
* Tel.: þ61 2 9385 8531\0415 325 453(mobile); fax: þ61 2 9385 8528. E-mail address: [email protected] 1755-4586/$ e see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2010.01.011
closer attention to that which is possible to learn from young people about how they already do, understand and modify these attributes as they negotiate the vagaries of everyday life. This article addresses a concern that has come up during the ethnographic research arm of this project, particularly with a cohort of young refugee men who participate in a sports-based intervention program aimed at helping them resettle in Australia. The concern relates to how sports-based intervention programs and our concomitant research can reproduce unequal power relations. The argument I present here is that intimacy can provide a pathway to cope with these unequal power relations and produce a more equitable research exchange and involvement in a sportsbased intervention program. By intimacy I am referring to a social, biological and psychological mediation, where authorial and hierarchical order can be scrambled. 2. Concerning sports A popular assumption is that sport has positive impacts on physical health and fitness, on self-esteem, offers access to positive adult role models for teenagers and young adults living in disadvantaged communities, and fosters the capacity to build relationships across religious, ethnic and economic lines (Cameron and MacDougall, 2001; Collins and Kay, 2003; Morris et al., 2003; Olds et al., 2004). In a study by The Australian Institute of Criminology on sport, physical activity and antisocial behaviour in youth it is claimed that participation in sports programs “reduce boredom in youth; and decreases the amount of unsupervised leisure . there is
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consensus that if youth lack stimulation and have little to do they will seek their own, often antisocial, activities” (Morris et al., 2003: 48). What qualifies as ‘antisocial’ is not explained. It seems it is not what young people do, but what they might do that props up concerns. This discourse perpetuates a stereotype of young people as “threatening, at risk, vulnerable and in need of control, curbing, fixing, developing or cultivating” (Westoby and Ingamells, 2007: 54). American sociologist Jay Coakley (2002) mounts a critique of using sports to help e read control e young people. Coakley explains that young people are identified as being possible ‘problems’ or even ‘threats’ to society and there is a perceived need to change their personal characteristics and behaviours “so that they can escape their immediate environments and become productive citizens in the very same social and economic system that gave rise to the conditions that limited their lives in the first place” (16). Sport rarely enables young people to escape their place in the political, legal, economic and social system. Sporting success does not end the challenges being faced. These challenges can include chronic ill-health, lack of housing and sanitation, unemployment, less than adequate education, social breakdown in many communities, substance abuse, a general feeling of purposelessness about life and high rates of suicide. Rather than address the social justice and the resource-needs that young people require to politicise and empower themselves what we end up with programs that focus on teaching ‘approved’ attributes that tell young people to “pull themselves up by their athletic shoelaces” (16). The young people most in need of ‘fixing’ usually come from socio-economically challenged and disenfranchised backgrounds. While the benefits of sport are often espoused sport can also promote rigid gender stereotypes, class divisions, sexism, homophobia, aggression and even physical and sexual assault (Messner, 2002; Miller et al., 2001; Zakus et al., 2009). Racism and cultural intolerance are also within its ranks (Garland and Rowe, 2001; Woodward, 2007). Simon Darnell is a critic of sports-based intervention programs, particularly those that target cross-cultural dialogue, because of the power inequalities they perpetuate. Darnell argues that The [international] development through sport movement, a well-intentioned and benevolent ‘mission’ of training, empowering and assisting is not only based upon, but to an extent requires, the establishment of a dichotomy between the empowered and disempowered, the vocal and the silent, the ‘knowers’ and the known (Darnell, 2007: 561)[original italics]. Participants are required to learn the ways of the hosts and what the hosts qualify as worth knowing. Rarely is the reverse true. This is not a new situation. Sport has long been used to serve imperialist agendas and inculcate people into regulatory frameworks that give rise to the social and economic conditions that limit their lives in the first place (Coakley and Dunning, 2000). Darnell argues that the act of doing good through sports-based intervention programs is always tinged by inequitable power relations that are inherent when conditions of possibility such as class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and dis/ability come together. According to Darnell the abilities of sport to promote cross-cultural dialogue and to serve developmental needs should be met with a healthy scepticism. 3. Football united During my ethnography I have been working with a cohort of young football players who have a refugee background. In 2007 I became involved with a program called “Football United” as a volunteer driver, coach, facilitator and mentor. The Football United program assists recently-arrived humanitarian refugee
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young people and their families during their transition into Australian society. A shared love of football (soccer) is used to present opportunities for mentoring, community integration, and sharing cultural capital and resources.1 The Football United program runs throughout Sydney, Australia particularly in areas of high recent migrant settlement and those that experience socioeconomic disadvantage. The largest group of young people I have been working with through the program are young men less than twenty years of age and from Africa, particularly Sudan.2 Many young migrant women from the same background experience cultural barriers to participation, such as the gendered expectation to be the primary person to do the housework and care for siblings.3 As a result, my interaction with the young men has been by and large homosocial.4 It has become evident that male homosocial relationships are remarkably transversal and resilient, and can persevere over ethnic, cultural and economic lines. Many of the young men I interact with have fled from civil conflicts, and the trauma of loss, separation, as well as family and community breakdown. On top of “adjusting to life in a new country, recovering from trauma, and navigating education, employment and complex bureaucratic systems, refugee young people must also negotiate family, peer, individual and community expectations within the context of adolescence” (Olliff, 2008: 53). The Football United sports-based intervention program aims to make facing these challenges a little easier. There has been no analysis in Australia of football programs targeting social and human development that provide evidence of whether they have any useful impact or outcomes. Measurements of impact tend to be based on anecdotal evidence, such as testimonials. It is quite possible that any positive effects resulting from sports-based intervention programs are actually the intervention coinciding with broader economic and social gains (Tacon, 2005). Isolating benefits to the sport is far too simplistic and ignores the complexity of people's engagement with their conditions of possibility when they are participating and when they are not. Given this, Football United and the University of New South Wales are currently undertaking a three-year study to evaluate this particular sports-based intervention program. What I take from Darnell and Coakley is an awareness of the ethics of my research and volunteer encounter, an obligation to become intimate with the young people's perspectives to the point of finding out not what the young people ‘need’ to know but what these young people's skills at life, settlement and well-being may teach us as researchers, as sports facilitators, as youth workers, as community development officers, volunteers, and the like. And how this knowledge can politicise and empower them to be effective change agents working on behalf of their communities” (Coakley, 2002: 16). It is not a case of simply giving the young
1
www.footballunitedprogram.org. According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship database 52% of settlers are between 0 and 19 years old, and 28% of these are men. Information from http://www.immi.gov.au/living-in-australia/delivering-assistance/settlementdatabase. 3 When they do participate the young women favour forming friendships with the women volunteers in the program. 4 In her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) literary theorist Eve Sedgwick calls the whole spectrum of social bonds e friendship, mentorship, camaraderie, brotherly unity, rivalry, economic exchange e between men as ‘male homosocial desire’ (1e3). This homosocial ordering of men's lives means that for some men male-to-male relationships take priority over male-to-female relations. This male homosocial desire may be the desire for the company of other men, but it is meant to be a strictly platonic and asexual desire rooted strongly within ‘the patriarchal structure . of obligatory heterosexuality’ (3) of which ‘homophobia [becomes] a necessary consequence’ (3). 2
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people a voice, but learning how to listen to their agency as it is expressed though their bodies and voices (Bickford, 1996; Wise and Velayutham, 2009). Jen Couch explains in her work on the participation of refugee young people in Australian society [R]efugee young people are rarely constructed as actors in the public sphere. Instead, the public discourse about all young people reflect an image of a disengaged group “at risk” of “becoming” problems . This is even more the case for refugee young people who are labelled “minorities” and “victims” at best, and thugs and gang members with no ambitions or academic ability, at worst (Couch, 2007: 40). In Australia young African men like those I work with have been framed as gang members and sexual predators, and become folk devils and so the target of moral panics (Kerbaj, 2006).5 Being a kid is traumatic enough without being constantly reminded of one's difference in such a negative way (Couch, 2007; Westoby and Ingamells, 2007). I have never come across any reporting of the remarkable progress and wealth of resources and strengths that young refugees bring to the communities. The refugee experience can produce qualities such as resilience and resourcefulness, adaptability, a strong commitment to family and community, and a strong desire to achieve educationally. Newly arrived young people often have broad international knowledge, multilingual skills and awareness of many cultures and communities (Olliff, 2008: 53). The young men I work with certainly don't think they need “fixing”. They already feel as if they have the qualities and skills that they are supposed to ‘learn from us’. This has been clear during any ‘life skills workshops’ run before football games. Disinterest is always high. Bodies sag and slouch. Eyes look away. Questions go unanswered. When I ask the young men about why they do not pay attention or get involved the common response is that “it's boring” and “I already know this stuff”. 4. Intimacy and trust What do the young men think sport and the sports-based intervention programs give them? I sit down with a few of the younger boys one day and ask. N. (age 8) gave an interesting response: “ Football gives you powers”. When I ask what those powers are he says, “fun and making friends”. The key reasons for playing sport amongst the young men are friendship (acute), fun (acute), to be healthy and fit (moderate), and to win (least). Overwhelmingly, the young men play sport to build networks e make friends and to test those friendships. It's why hanging out before and after games is so important. Some explanations include:
5 The term ‘moral panic’ was first coined by Jock Young in Stanley Cohen's essay Images of Deviance (1971) and developed in Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) when analysing the media representations of these subcultures, and the political actions towards them. Cohen's understanding of a ‘moral panic’ had exposed the intensity of public anxiety. In the case of a moral panic the perceived threat is deemed either false or amplified for television ratings, media sensationalism or political interest. In moral panic literature ‘folk devils’ are the source of perceived threats towards the mainstream or dominant social groups. The ‘folk devil’ is a reference to the common outsider or out group, blamed by the mainstream or dominant groups for the breakdown in societal values, In a moral panic, the presence of an unrestrained, untamed menacing folk devil is equivalent to the destruction of existing social norms and even the national well-being. For this reason, folk devils are “stripped of all favourable characteristics and imparted with exclusively negative ones” (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994: 28) and become visible reminders of what we should not be.
“It makes you feel better that you are not alone” “you get all these like friends that you could be with for years and they have your back” The young men do not think you need sport to make friends, but that it does help. At this early part of the research the young men do not want to be friends with me e volunteer and researcher. I am a means to an end, a resource they can use to get equipment (however meagre or second-rate) and secure space to play football to pursue their friendships, set up their networks and hone their skills (both football and life) (Cuskelly et al., 2006). Over twelve months later during an interview with M. (17) at the local public library I try to get him to tell me more about what sport means for him. I push too hard when I ask him about his feelings about sport, his resettlement experience and his friends. He is happy talking in the abstract about football but now the discussion got too intimate. M. gets angry and yells, ‘You're not my friend’. M. goes on to let me know in no uncertain terms that he has dealt with lots of ‘researchers’ but they always just leave in the end. My body is shaking by the end of the tirade. M. storms out of the room. Establishing cross-cultural intimacy requires trust. M. didn't trust me. Cross-cultural trust is hard to arrive at, as it requires arbitration between deeply embedded historical legacies, contemporary tensions and varying societal protocols (Johnson-Bailey and Cervero, 2004). For M. there was also the issue of the inequitable power relation whereby I could just walk away while he would remain facing his challenges once I got what I had come for e a part of him. A hierarchical model of authoritative superior and deferential subordinate was in place and M. knew it. Trust and intimacy are sites of political struggle. 5. Hanging out and doing nothing The following afternoon while riding a pushbike I tell I. (14) about what happened with M. He tells me that if the boys are going to “open up” to me they expect me to “hang out” more. I. warns me that this means a lot of time “doing nothing” with them. Awad Ibrahim, in his study of migrant African youth in Canada, stresses the importance of “hanging out” with young people, as opposed to an interview-based approach within institutional spaces like schools and libraries. He argues that the hanging out accommodates the fact that young people's “identity is multiple and performed in multiple ways and sites”, and so requires “multiple observations, in different sites and over an extended period of time” (Ibrahim, 2008: 244). Ibrahim has found that this “hanging out” provides the opportunity to note verbal and nonverbal performance (Ibrahim, 2008). However, Ibrahim argues that the researcher needs to be aware of embodied distinctions, for example gender, race, ethnicity, dis/ability and class, all of which are constitutive elements in the research process. At first the “doing nothing” involves convincing the boys' parents to allow them to play football. Many of the parents do not see the benefits of sport and prefer their boys to study or work. For example, at the onset of puberty many young refugee men are considered “adults”, the concepts of “youth” or “adolescence” are foreign to their families. The hopes of the family rest on their shoulders. Some of these young men play sport to provide a little respite from employment, schooling, domestic or familial responsibilities and an expectation that they help extended family members remaining in Africa (Gow, 2002; Kirk and Cassity, 2007). Also, the culture of sport in Australia can be confronting and parents worry about what their young men might get up to Some Australian sporting environments (such as club competition) may involve a culture of drinking alcohol after/during
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games, swearing, sledging or aggressive competition. To some young people who are unfamiliar with the cultural nuances of sporting environments, such behavious may not only be culturally inappropriate, but also may be perceived as insulting and/or threatening (Olliff, 2008: 58). The more we hang out the more the “doing nothing” evolves into going shopping, catching trains and buses together, cruising around the shopping mall, reasoning with police who regularly hassle the boys, writing letters and filling out official forms in English, minding the younger children, raising money to pay for football gear and club registration fees, nursing injuries, tending the chickens in the backyard, homework support, and so on. I. is right. M. changes his relationship with me. The interviews I am doing are over for the day. The Police Citizen Youth Club where the interviews have taken place is buzzing with young people boxing, playing basketball, kicking footballs, dancing, and hanging out after attending interviews. On the way home I recognise one of the young men who had been in an interview that day. It's M. and he has already walked 2 km. I drive my car up to M., wind down my window, and ask him how far he has to go. “Not far, my house is just over there”. “Hop in”. We drive . another 4 km. M. explains that his parents do shift work and do not have a car so they cannot drive him to sport. He walks to football training three times a week at the Police Citizen Youth Club. When I ask M. how come he bothered to walk so far just for the interview his response is “I walk that far for all my friends”. This event is an important learning encounter for me. M. changes the register of our relationship. This reference to ‘friendship’ contradicts the feeling of being a resource I have been experiencing, and happy with. I talk to M. about this ‘friend thing’. M. explains that he calls me a friend because I now hang out on and off the field. “We don't just play football anymore”, M. says. A zone of ‘cultural intimacy’ begins to emerge (Herzfield, 2009). This does not simply mean close acquaintance with a culture but, rather, the zone of internal knowledge whereby we recognise each other through our details e intimacy e rather than through some typicality. Acknowledging this zone of cultural intimacy as friendship means that M. also refuses me the ability to keep my distance as researcher and volunteer. By drawing on our intimacy he produces an obligation in me to continue to provide resources e money, transport, opportunities and contacts. Perhaps he sees such a relationship as more binding and harder for me to ‘get out of’ once the research has ended. It becomes clear that what is coming out in the wash is a push for this research to be done with the young men and not about them. New “modes of being together” and “belonging” play out (Rabinow, 1997). It's a model of researching that reminds me of Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet's collaboration Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987). In this book Deleuze and his student Parnet turn a set of question/answer interviews into a discussion where authorial command is lost. The voices of each interlocutor blur and blend. Charles Stivale argues that what emerges from this “in-between” scrambles “hierarchical rapport”. This creates an encounter that is “productive for both interlocutors” but is not locatable with either (Albrecht-Crane, 2005). Charles Stivale calls this the “intimacy of mediation” (Stivale, 2003). As Deleuze and Parnet (1987) write, “in these conditions, as soon as there is this type of multiplicity, there is politics, micro-politics” (17).
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6. Feeling intimate During the course of this ethnography I hang out more and become involved myself in the mediations of their everyday life, and them in mine. It's a two way street. An immersive productive, contagious, and affective exchange takes place. The hanging out we experience is a mixed assortment of touch, smell, sight, sound, and taste that spill all over each other e an affective assemblage. The politics here is the ability to affect and be affected which undermines expectations and their attendant value systems. Affective assemblages are radical in that they are unpredictable. Any codification, such as some clear-cut demarcation between researched participant and researcher, has to play catch up. The way such affective assemblages work is clearly evident through the ‘erotics’ of sporting bodies e their dynamic viscerality, leakiness, sensuality, imagination, movement, affects, energy, and so on (Miller, 2001). One need only glance around the indoor soccer hall when the young men are playing with the researchers conducting research. A player makes a break and interrupts the discussion. Attention shifts. Energy builds. Eyes blink and eyebrows arch in surprise. But these features quickly become a sneer of disgust on seeing someone hack at the breakaway player's shins. A body hits the floor. Thud. Fear of injury is the player's first reaction. This turns into anger. He attacks the player who brought him down. Others join in the melee. Anger leaps about and is intensified. I rush in to try to break the fight up. I am punched in the face. Now I am angry too. The research is not as expected and is propelled in new directions. It's become a familiar state of affairs for me. When researching young men they often expect me to be emotionally and affectively involved (Evers, 2004, 2006, 2009). My body is expected to be part of the action not only to just get a feel for what the young men are experiencing but to build trust. Trust is a felt quality (Lingis, 2002). Young men grow up as part of masculine relationships built with intimacy, contrary to popular opinion about them eschewing it (Evers, 2004, 2006, 2009; Lilleaas, 2007; Seidler 2006). Not that they would call it “intimacy” due to the prevalence of homophobia in masculine discourse. Nevertheless, shared affective experiences with other bodies leads to a process of bonding and sharing details about one's life. The intimacy that bodies can draw me into helps the research. This was brought home to me during an experience of shame. The importance of shame was brought to my attention through the work of Elspeth Probyn (2000, 2005). Probyn writes that shame is productive in that it is meant to make you think about who or what you care about and notice. The training drills roll out. At the end we play a fun game where everyone is involved. The rules are loose and not strictly enforced. A bunch of the young men surround me. T. leads them and is very angry. “When do we get to play real football?” T. and his friends are close-knit because they rely on and trust each other. They are also dedicated to the program and always turn up at the football to train and help out. They have groaned through the sit-ups, push-ups and leg lifts together. I do not understand the anger. Are we not playing a game of football? I know that I have modified the game to fit into the space (trapazoid) and circumstances (many different age groups). As such, the rules and pitch differ from an officially established and sanctioned set of rules and pitch. But I do not think that this modification is such a big deal. The modifications feel comfortable for me because they are based on feedback where other young people had told me that they like to play modified sports that allow them to “mess with the rules”.
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Why the anger? I get angry in response and become autocratic, and dismissively tell the group to “get back to the game and stop whinging”. The anger is contagious.6 T. and his friends swear at me, kick the balls away and harass other young people. Later I feel ashamed for so easily slipping into being autocratic, but also for not understanding what T. and his friends had been trying to tell me. The shame unsettles my body and lets me know that this situation matters. I get to thinking about the fact that when these young men arrive in Australia and get to play on a “real” football field with goals at either end of the pitch it induces the directional movement and marks the outside limits (literally, the end-sides of the pitch, but also winning and losing). The rules formalise the pitch and provides players with a familiarity wherever they play. Given this, it might seem that football is quite contained and regimented. However, Brain Massumi (2002) explains in a discussion of football that while the rules and pitch formalise a soccer game they do not animate it. The ball does this, and it bounces all over the place addressing a player's sensory channels (eyes, ears, touch, proprioception etc.) that are needed to play football. To be effective the player mobilizes into a state of “reflex” response for what is actually a space of potential and creativity, in spite of the rules and pitch that provide familiarity. It is similar to when the young men first arrive in Australia, their proprioceptic, kinesthetic and sensual awareness cannot settle even though there are all sorts of parameters in place. But slowly the new place forces its way into their embodied memories, enthusiasms, gestures, and imagination by way of sight, taste, smell, touch, hearing, and balance. The boys become intimate with their own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves (Lefebvre, 2004). Experienced players fall short of explicit calculations when it is time to decide what to do when the ball gets to them. It becomes a case of decision-making borne of an embodied learning that not only accommodates what is happening but what could happen, namely the potential. The more inexperienced players will try to follow some plan, based on their experience from a previous game. But any game is contingent and fast moving. It simply becomes impossible to follow a plan because of changing moods, running bodies of other players, inconsistent referees, weather, circumstances, including what is happening in your life off the pitch. The most experienced players on a particular pitch know how to move with the contingencies and their decisions are made on what are sometimes called “knacks” or “hunches” that feed off a non-rational and non-cognitive learning. The best players make it all look effortless. The even better players can take their act and travel with it. They are adaptable and can adjust quickly to familiar pitches and games, but nonetheless contingent ones full of unseen potentials. T. and his friends, all very skilled football players, have had to develop their creativity, independence, resourcefulness, resilience, adaptability, competency and the like to get by in the camps and now in their resettlement country, as well as to continue to play football as they traverse countries, homes, communities, oceans, and continents. They manage to adapt and identify potentials time and again within structures, codes and rules repeatedly forced upon them and that authorities have a habit of changing about according to political needs.
6 Anna Gibbs writes that bodies can catch feelings as easily as objects catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting feardin short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable type of passion (2001: 1).
For the young men football has become a space where they do not “learn” but rather “hone” their attributes. “Real” football is appealing precisely because of its formalising rules and pitch. The formalised rules, pitch and codes of football are not something to overcome for these young men but a thread of familiarity in a world of strangeness, and a tool they have come to rely on to hone their senses and attributes to get by when structures, codes and sets of rules are foisted upon them. But here I was “moving the goal posts”, so to speak, and taking away that familiarity and the benefits of their sensory learning skills. I also took away the chance to show me what they could do. There is a politics in what they know. Just as on a football pitch, even though we operate within conditions of possibility that attempt to regulate and condition our actions, there is always the potential for getting by or doing otherwise. The autocratic dismissal of these young men perpetuates the stereotype of these young men as only forever at risk, vulnerable and in need of control, curbing, fixing, developing or cultivating. The young men had been treated as passive rather than as friends who wanted to enhance the program by sharing their competencies and skills. In other words, the young men had tried to give me the gift of their knowledge and I had turned them away. It was even more offensive from me because the young men had given me the gift of their friendship by simply turning up and also by participating in the research. How could a friend treat them like this? They had tested me and I had failed. In her work on sensuous multiculturalism Amanda Wise frames her research as just such a gift exchange. Drawing on the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Wise and Velayutham (2009) explain that a gift is a relationship and what is important in such exchanges is how the people, objects and social relations are made and remade, understood and re-understood. An ethics of encounter is paramount because these gifts are to some extent part of persons. With this in mind I had rejected their gift because I could, due to my position of privilege, and this was not lost on them. The passing and receiving of any gift exchange reminds me of Bill Shankly's explanation of football: “Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass”. My lack of ability to receive a pass let the team down. Fortunately for me T. knows the game better than me. I go to T.s house to apologise and explain how I blew it. T. sees how upset I am. He takes the time to put his hand on my shoulder. It was another gift saying “It's OK Clif, don't worry. We get this shit all the time”. At least, that what was what the touch conveyed to me. 7. Conclusion Intimacy has confirmed for me how it enables me to do research with these young men. As I have argued elsewhere the ethnographer's body is an instrument for recording sensual data (Evers, 2006). That is, inter-affective experiences embed themselves in my body and the participant's bodies as the research emerges e bodies remember. The affective register determines the conditions for research and makes particular performances matter. This means that my ethnography happens through an intimacy with the young men that produces a pathway to listen well to them in a way that scrambles authority and hierarchical rapport. What the ethnography with these young refugee men has shown is that Stivale is spot on, the “in-between of thought comes to the fore through the folds of friendship, that is, through the resonances, differences, and repetitions available only within the intimacy of the mediation” (Stivale, 2003: 29) [original italics]. Following this, it can be argued that it is only when sports-based
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intervention programs grasp that this intimacy is a gift that the importance of the emotional and affective encounters it puts into motion will be revealed as that which can leap across economic, ethnic and cultural divides, and not sport. Sport-based intervention programs being mobilized to “fix” young people is a misplaced agenda. We need to be cautious of using sport-based intervention programs to address broad social challenges young people face. Sport cannot provide over-arching answers or solve their problems. However, a mobilization of sport that eschews large-scale developmental outcomes can be a useful path through which to work on a joint project with young people to produce an intimacy of mediation that accommodates their agency and works with them to face the challenges that come up as they actively remake their lives as they move forward. Acknowledgments Thanks to the Football United Program, the young people who are part of this study for their insight and generosity, and to the reviewers for their helpful comments and advice. References Albrecht-Crane, C., 2005. Pedagogy as friendship: identity and affect in the conservative classroom. Cultural Studies 19 (4), 491e514. Bickford, S., 1996. The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, Ithaca. Cameron, M., MacDougall, C., 2001. Crime Prevention Through Sport and Physical Activity. Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 165. Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra. Coakley, J., Dunning, E., 2000. Handbook of Sports Studies. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA. Coakley, J., 2002. Using sports to control deviance among youths: lets be critical and cautious. In: Gatz, M., Messner, M., Ball-Rokeach, S. (Eds.), Paradoxes of Youth and Sport. SUNY, New York. Cohen, S., 1971. Images of Deviance. Penguin Books, London. Cohen, S., 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Martin Robertson, Oxford. Collins, M., Kay, T., 2003. Sport and Social Exclusion. Routledge, London. Couch, J., 2007. Mind the gap: considering the participation of refugee young people. Youth Studies Australia 26 (4), 37e44. Cuskelly, G., Hoye, R., Auld, C., 2006. Working with Volunteers in Sport: Theory and Practice. Routledge, London. Darnell, S., 2007. Playing with race: right to play and the production of whiteness in ‘development through sport’. Sport in Society 10 (4), 460e579. Deleuze, G., Parnet, C., 1987. Dialogues. University of Minnesota Press, New York. Evers, C., 2004. Men who surf. Cultural Studies Review 10 (1), 27e41. Evers, C., 2006. How to surf. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 30 (3), 229e243. Evers, C., 2009. The point: surfing, geography and a sensual life of men and masculinity on the Gold Coast, Australia. Social and Cultural Geography 10 (8), 893e908. Garland, J., Rowe, M., 2001. Racism and Anti-Racism in Football. Palgrave, Basingstoke. Gatz, M., Messner, M., Ball-Rokeach, J. (Eds.), 2002. Paradoxes of Youth and Sport. SUNY, New York.
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Gibbs, A., 2001. Contagious feelings: Pauline Hanson and the epidemiology of affect. Australian Humanities Review. http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/ Issue-December-2001/gibbs.html (accessed 03. 03. 07.). Goode, E., Ben-Yehuda, N., 1994. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Blackwell Publishing, London. Gow, G., 2002. The Oromo in Exile: From the Horn of Africa to the Suburbs of Australia. Melbourne University Press, Carlton. Herzfield, M., 2009. The cultural politics of gesture: reflections on the embodiment of ethnographic practice. Ethnography 10 (2), 131e152. Ibrahim, A., 2008. The new flaneur: subaltern cultural studies, African youth in Canada and the semiology of in-betweenness. Cultural Studies 22 (2), 234e253. Johnson-Bailey, J., Cervero, R., 2004. Mentoring in black and white: the intricacies of cross-cultural mentoring. Mentoring and Tutoring 12 (1), 7e21. Kerbaj, R., 2006. Warning on African refugee gangs. The Australian December 26. Kirk, J., Cassity, E., 2007. Minimum standards for quality education for refugee youth. Youth Studies Australia 26 (1), 50e56. Lefebvre, H., 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Continuum, London. Lilleaas, U., 2007. Masculinities, sport and emotion. Men and Masculinities 10 (1), 39e53. Lingis, A., 2002. Typhoons. Cultural Studies Review 8 (1), 95. Massumi, B., 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, Durham. Messner, M., 2002. Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sport. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Miller, T., Lawrence, G., McKay, J., Rowe, D., 2001. Globalization and Sport. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA. Miller, T., 2001. Sportsex. Temple University Press, Philadelphia. Morris, L., Sallybanks, J., Willis, K., Makkai, T., 2003. Sport, Physical Activity and Antisocial Behaviour in Youth. Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra. Olds, T., Dollman, J., Ridley, K., Boshoff, K., Hartshorne, S., Kennaugh, S., 2004. Children and Sport: A Research Report by the University of South Australia. Australian Sports Commission, Canberra. Olliff, L., 2008. Playing for the future: the role of sport and recreation in supporting refugee young people to ‘settle well’ in Australia. Youth Studies Australia 27 (1), 52e60. Probyn, E., 2000. Sporting bodies: dynamics of shame and pride. Body and Society 6 (1), 13e28. Probyn, E., 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Rabinow, P., 1997. Introduction: the history of systems of thought. In: Rabinow, P. (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, vol. 1. The New Press, New York, xiexlv. Sedgwick, E., 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, New York. Seidler, V., 2006. Young Men and Masculinities: Global Cultures and Intimate Lives. Zed Book, New York. Stivale, C., 2003. Deleuze and Parnet in dialogues: the folds of post-identity. The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Society 36 (1), 25e37. Tacon, R., 2005. Football and social inclusion: evaluating social policy. Managing Leisure 12 (1), 1e23. Westoby, P., Ingamells, A., 2007. Youth work: a deconstructive approach for those who work with young refugees. Youth Studies Australia 26 (3), 52e59. Wise, A., Velayutham, S., 2009. Everyday Multiculturalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Woodward, K., 2007. On and off the pitch: diversity policies and transforming identities. Cultural Studies 21 (4), 758e778. Zakus, D., Skinner, J., Edwards, A., 2009. Social capital in Australian sport. Sport in Society 12 (7), 986e998.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
Intimacy, sport and young refugee men Clifton Evers* Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 11 March 2009 Received in revised form 15 December 2009 Accepted 27 January 2010
This article is about research with a group of young refugee men from Sudan and their relationship to football (soccer) as they resettle in Australia. It provides evidence of the resilience, independence and autonomy that such young refugees possess and what these young men's intimate knowledge of these qualities can teach us. In other words, how can we as researchers learn from these young refugees about how they perform these qualities and how may we accommodate this during ethnographic research and in sports-based intervention programs aimed at empowering such young people? Further, the article explores the role of intimacy in this process by accounting for the role of affective connections on and off the sporting field. The argument is that intimacy can help those involved negotiate the power inequities present in sports-based intervention programs and in associated research. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Refugees Masculinity Sport Intimacy Ethnography Development
“Football is not a matter of life and death, its much more important than that”. Bill Shankly, in Sunday Times (UK) Oct. 4 1981
1. Introduction This article is based on ethnographic work that I am doing as part of an Australian Research Council funded project: “The Well Rounded: the role of sport in shaping physical, emotional and social development”. Since 2007 this project has been investigating the impact that participating in sport has on the physical, emotional and social development of young people living in Australia. In Australia there has been a boom in sports-based intervention programs aimed at developing the capabilities of young people from disenfranchised communities and challenging socioeconomic backgrounds. There continues to be a prevailing assumption made by the hosts of these sports-based intervention programs that they need to define and teach qualities such as independence, resourcefulness, resilience, adaptability and competency to young people so that they can cope with everything from violence, school dropout, drug use, unequal access to education, limited employment opportunities, sexism, racism and other structural inequities (Gatz et al., 2002). The initial research findings of the Well-Rounded Person project indicate that it is worth paying
* Tel.: þ61 2 9385 8531\0415 325 453(mobile); fax: þ61 2 9385 8528. E-mail address: [email protected] 1755-4586/$ e see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2010.01.011
closer attention to that which is possible to learn from young people about how they already do, understand and modify these attributes as they negotiate the vagaries of everyday life. This article addresses a concern that has come up during the ethnographic research arm of this project, particularly with a cohort of young refugee men who participate in a sports-based intervention program aimed at helping them resettle in Australia. The concern relates to how sports-based intervention programs and our concomitant research can reproduce unequal power relations. The argument I present here is that intimacy can provide a pathway to cope with these unequal power relations and produce a more equitable research exchange and involvement in a sportsbased intervention program. By intimacy I am referring to a social, biological and psychological mediation, where authorial and hierarchical order can be scrambled. 2. Concerning sports A popular assumption is that sport has positive impacts on physical health and fitness, on self-esteem, offers access to positive adult role models for teenagers and young adults living in disadvantaged communities, and fosters the capacity to build relationships across religious, ethnic and economic lines (Cameron and MacDougall, 2001; Collins and Kay, 2003; Morris et al., 2003; Olds et al., 2004). In a study by The Australian Institute of Criminology on sport, physical activity and antisocial behaviour in youth it is claimed that participation in sports programs “reduce boredom in youth; and decreases the amount of unsupervised leisure . there is
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consensus that if youth lack stimulation and have little to do they will seek their own, often antisocial, activities” (Morris et al., 2003: 48). What qualifies as ‘antisocial’ is not explained. It seems it is not what young people do, but what they might do that props up concerns. This discourse perpetuates a stereotype of young people as “threatening, at risk, vulnerable and in need of control, curbing, fixing, developing or cultivating” (Westoby and Ingamells, 2007: 54). American sociologist Jay Coakley (2002) mounts a critique of using sports to help e read control e young people. Coakley explains that young people are identified as being possible ‘problems’ or even ‘threats’ to society and there is a perceived need to change their personal characteristics and behaviours “so that they can escape their immediate environments and become productive citizens in the very same social and economic system that gave rise to the conditions that limited their lives in the first place” (16). Sport rarely enables young people to escape their place in the political, legal, economic and social system. Sporting success does not end the challenges being faced. These challenges can include chronic ill-health, lack of housing and sanitation, unemployment, less than adequate education, social breakdown in many communities, substance abuse, a general feeling of purposelessness about life and high rates of suicide. Rather than address the social justice and the resource-needs that young people require to politicise and empower themselves what we end up with programs that focus on teaching ‘approved’ attributes that tell young people to “pull themselves up by their athletic shoelaces” (16). The young people most in need of ‘fixing’ usually come from socio-economically challenged and disenfranchised backgrounds. While the benefits of sport are often espoused sport can also promote rigid gender stereotypes, class divisions, sexism, homophobia, aggression and even physical and sexual assault (Messner, 2002; Miller et al., 2001; Zakus et al., 2009). Racism and cultural intolerance are also within its ranks (Garland and Rowe, 2001; Woodward, 2007). Simon Darnell is a critic of sports-based intervention programs, particularly those that target cross-cultural dialogue, because of the power inequalities they perpetuate. Darnell argues that The [international] development through sport movement, a well-intentioned and benevolent ‘mission’ of training, empowering and assisting is not only based upon, but to an extent requires, the establishment of a dichotomy between the empowered and disempowered, the vocal and the silent, the ‘knowers’ and the known (Darnell, 2007: 561)[original italics]. Participants are required to learn the ways of the hosts and what the hosts qualify as worth knowing. Rarely is the reverse true. This is not a new situation. Sport has long been used to serve imperialist agendas and inculcate people into regulatory frameworks that give rise to the social and economic conditions that limit their lives in the first place (Coakley and Dunning, 2000). Darnell argues that the act of doing good through sports-based intervention programs is always tinged by inequitable power relations that are inherent when conditions of possibility such as class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and dis/ability come together. According to Darnell the abilities of sport to promote cross-cultural dialogue and to serve developmental needs should be met with a healthy scepticism. 3. Football united During my ethnography I have been working with a cohort of young football players who have a refugee background. In 2007 I became involved with a program called “Football United” as a volunteer driver, coach, facilitator and mentor. The Football United program assists recently-arrived humanitarian refugee
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young people and their families during their transition into Australian society. A shared love of football (soccer) is used to present opportunities for mentoring, community integration, and sharing cultural capital and resources.1 The Football United program runs throughout Sydney, Australia particularly in areas of high recent migrant settlement and those that experience socioeconomic disadvantage. The largest group of young people I have been working with through the program are young men less than twenty years of age and from Africa, particularly Sudan.2 Many young migrant women from the same background experience cultural barriers to participation, such as the gendered expectation to be the primary person to do the housework and care for siblings.3 As a result, my interaction with the young men has been by and large homosocial.4 It has become evident that male homosocial relationships are remarkably transversal and resilient, and can persevere over ethnic, cultural and economic lines. Many of the young men I interact with have fled from civil conflicts, and the trauma of loss, separation, as well as family and community breakdown. On top of “adjusting to life in a new country, recovering from trauma, and navigating education, employment and complex bureaucratic systems, refugee young people must also negotiate family, peer, individual and community expectations within the context of adolescence” (Olliff, 2008: 53). The Football United sports-based intervention program aims to make facing these challenges a little easier. There has been no analysis in Australia of football programs targeting social and human development that provide evidence of whether they have any useful impact or outcomes. Measurements of impact tend to be based on anecdotal evidence, such as testimonials. It is quite possible that any positive effects resulting from sports-based intervention programs are actually the intervention coinciding with broader economic and social gains (Tacon, 2005). Isolating benefits to the sport is far too simplistic and ignores the complexity of people's engagement with their conditions of possibility when they are participating and when they are not. Given this, Football United and the University of New South Wales are currently undertaking a three-year study to evaluate this particular sports-based intervention program. What I take from Darnell and Coakley is an awareness of the ethics of my research and volunteer encounter, an obligation to become intimate with the young people's perspectives to the point of finding out not what the young people ‘need’ to know but what these young people's skills at life, settlement and well-being may teach us as researchers, as sports facilitators, as youth workers, as community development officers, volunteers, and the like. And how this knowledge can politicise and empower them to be effective change agents working on behalf of their communities” (Coakley, 2002: 16). It is not a case of simply giving the young
1
www.footballunitedprogram.org. According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship database 52% of settlers are between 0 and 19 years old, and 28% of these are men. Information from http://www.immi.gov.au/living-in-australia/delivering-assistance/settlementdatabase. 3 When they do participate the young women favour forming friendships with the women volunteers in the program. 4 In her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) literary theorist Eve Sedgwick calls the whole spectrum of social bonds e friendship, mentorship, camaraderie, brotherly unity, rivalry, economic exchange e between men as ‘male homosocial desire’ (1e3). This homosocial ordering of men's lives means that for some men male-to-male relationships take priority over male-to-female relations. This male homosocial desire may be the desire for the company of other men, but it is meant to be a strictly platonic and asexual desire rooted strongly within ‘the patriarchal structure . of obligatory heterosexuality’ (3) of which ‘homophobia [becomes] a necessary consequence’ (3). 2
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people a voice, but learning how to listen to their agency as it is expressed though their bodies and voices (Bickford, 1996; Wise and Velayutham, 2009). Jen Couch explains in her work on the participation of refugee young people in Australian society [R]efugee young people are rarely constructed as actors in the public sphere. Instead, the public discourse about all young people reflect an image of a disengaged group “at risk” of “becoming” problems . This is even more the case for refugee young people who are labelled “minorities” and “victims” at best, and thugs and gang members with no ambitions or academic ability, at worst (Couch, 2007: 40). In Australia young African men like those I work with have been framed as gang members and sexual predators, and become folk devils and so the target of moral panics (Kerbaj, 2006).5 Being a kid is traumatic enough without being constantly reminded of one's difference in such a negative way (Couch, 2007; Westoby and Ingamells, 2007). I have never come across any reporting of the remarkable progress and wealth of resources and strengths that young refugees bring to the communities. The refugee experience can produce qualities such as resilience and resourcefulness, adaptability, a strong commitment to family and community, and a strong desire to achieve educationally. Newly arrived young people often have broad international knowledge, multilingual skills and awareness of many cultures and communities (Olliff, 2008: 53). The young men I work with certainly don't think they need “fixing”. They already feel as if they have the qualities and skills that they are supposed to ‘learn from us’. This has been clear during any ‘life skills workshops’ run before football games. Disinterest is always high. Bodies sag and slouch. Eyes look away. Questions go unanswered. When I ask the young men about why they do not pay attention or get involved the common response is that “it's boring” and “I already know this stuff”. 4. Intimacy and trust What do the young men think sport and the sports-based intervention programs give them? I sit down with a few of the younger boys one day and ask. N. (age 8) gave an interesting response: “ Football gives you powers”. When I ask what those powers are he says, “fun and making friends”. The key reasons for playing sport amongst the young men are friendship (acute), fun (acute), to be healthy and fit (moderate), and to win (least). Overwhelmingly, the young men play sport to build networks e make friends and to test those friendships. It's why hanging out before and after games is so important. Some explanations include:
5 The term ‘moral panic’ was first coined by Jock Young in Stanley Cohen's essay Images of Deviance (1971) and developed in Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) when analysing the media representations of these subcultures, and the political actions towards them. Cohen's understanding of a ‘moral panic’ had exposed the intensity of public anxiety. In the case of a moral panic the perceived threat is deemed either false or amplified for television ratings, media sensationalism or political interest. In moral panic literature ‘folk devils’ are the source of perceived threats towards the mainstream or dominant social groups. The ‘folk devil’ is a reference to the common outsider or out group, blamed by the mainstream or dominant groups for the breakdown in societal values, In a moral panic, the presence of an unrestrained, untamed menacing folk devil is equivalent to the destruction of existing social norms and even the national well-being. For this reason, folk devils are “stripped of all favourable characteristics and imparted with exclusively negative ones” (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994: 28) and become visible reminders of what we should not be.
“It makes you feel better that you are not alone” “you get all these like friends that you could be with for years and they have your back” The young men do not think you need sport to make friends, but that it does help. At this early part of the research the young men do not want to be friends with me e volunteer and researcher. I am a means to an end, a resource they can use to get equipment (however meagre or second-rate) and secure space to play football to pursue their friendships, set up their networks and hone their skills (both football and life) (Cuskelly et al., 2006). Over twelve months later during an interview with M. (17) at the local public library I try to get him to tell me more about what sport means for him. I push too hard when I ask him about his feelings about sport, his resettlement experience and his friends. He is happy talking in the abstract about football but now the discussion got too intimate. M. gets angry and yells, ‘You're not my friend’. M. goes on to let me know in no uncertain terms that he has dealt with lots of ‘researchers’ but they always just leave in the end. My body is shaking by the end of the tirade. M. storms out of the room. Establishing cross-cultural intimacy requires trust. M. didn't trust me. Cross-cultural trust is hard to arrive at, as it requires arbitration between deeply embedded historical legacies, contemporary tensions and varying societal protocols (Johnson-Bailey and Cervero, 2004). For M. there was also the issue of the inequitable power relation whereby I could just walk away while he would remain facing his challenges once I got what I had come for e a part of him. A hierarchical model of authoritative superior and deferential subordinate was in place and M. knew it. Trust and intimacy are sites of political struggle. 5. Hanging out and doing nothing The following afternoon while riding a pushbike I tell I. (14) about what happened with M. He tells me that if the boys are going to “open up” to me they expect me to “hang out” more. I. warns me that this means a lot of time “doing nothing” with them. Awad Ibrahim, in his study of migrant African youth in Canada, stresses the importance of “hanging out” with young people, as opposed to an interview-based approach within institutional spaces like schools and libraries. He argues that the hanging out accommodates the fact that young people's “identity is multiple and performed in multiple ways and sites”, and so requires “multiple observations, in different sites and over an extended period of time” (Ibrahim, 2008: 244). Ibrahim has found that this “hanging out” provides the opportunity to note verbal and nonverbal performance (Ibrahim, 2008). However, Ibrahim argues that the researcher needs to be aware of embodied distinctions, for example gender, race, ethnicity, dis/ability and class, all of which are constitutive elements in the research process. At first the “doing nothing” involves convincing the boys' parents to allow them to play football. Many of the parents do not see the benefits of sport and prefer their boys to study or work. For example, at the onset of puberty many young refugee men are considered “adults”, the concepts of “youth” or “adolescence” are foreign to their families. The hopes of the family rest on their shoulders. Some of these young men play sport to provide a little respite from employment, schooling, domestic or familial responsibilities and an expectation that they help extended family members remaining in Africa (Gow, 2002; Kirk and Cassity, 2007). Also, the culture of sport in Australia can be confronting and parents worry about what their young men might get up to Some Australian sporting environments (such as club competition) may involve a culture of drinking alcohol after/during
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games, swearing, sledging or aggressive competition. To some young people who are unfamiliar with the cultural nuances of sporting environments, such behavious may not only be culturally inappropriate, but also may be perceived as insulting and/or threatening (Olliff, 2008: 58). The more we hang out the more the “doing nothing” evolves into going shopping, catching trains and buses together, cruising around the shopping mall, reasoning with police who regularly hassle the boys, writing letters and filling out official forms in English, minding the younger children, raising money to pay for football gear and club registration fees, nursing injuries, tending the chickens in the backyard, homework support, and so on. I. is right. M. changes his relationship with me. The interviews I am doing are over for the day. The Police Citizen Youth Club where the interviews have taken place is buzzing with young people boxing, playing basketball, kicking footballs, dancing, and hanging out after attending interviews. On the way home I recognise one of the young men who had been in an interview that day. It's M. and he has already walked 2 km. I drive my car up to M., wind down my window, and ask him how far he has to go. “Not far, my house is just over there”. “Hop in”. We drive . another 4 km. M. explains that his parents do shift work and do not have a car so they cannot drive him to sport. He walks to football training three times a week at the Police Citizen Youth Club. When I ask M. how come he bothered to walk so far just for the interview his response is “I walk that far for all my friends”. This event is an important learning encounter for me. M. changes the register of our relationship. This reference to ‘friendship’ contradicts the feeling of being a resource I have been experiencing, and happy with. I talk to M. about this ‘friend thing’. M. explains that he calls me a friend because I now hang out on and off the field. “We don't just play football anymore”, M. says. A zone of ‘cultural intimacy’ begins to emerge (Herzfield, 2009). This does not simply mean close acquaintance with a culture but, rather, the zone of internal knowledge whereby we recognise each other through our details e intimacy e rather than through some typicality. Acknowledging this zone of cultural intimacy as friendship means that M. also refuses me the ability to keep my distance as researcher and volunteer. By drawing on our intimacy he produces an obligation in me to continue to provide resources e money, transport, opportunities and contacts. Perhaps he sees such a relationship as more binding and harder for me to ‘get out of’ once the research has ended. It becomes clear that what is coming out in the wash is a push for this research to be done with the young men and not about them. New “modes of being together” and “belonging” play out (Rabinow, 1997). It's a model of researching that reminds me of Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet's collaboration Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987). In this book Deleuze and his student Parnet turn a set of question/answer interviews into a discussion where authorial command is lost. The voices of each interlocutor blur and blend. Charles Stivale argues that what emerges from this “in-between” scrambles “hierarchical rapport”. This creates an encounter that is “productive for both interlocutors” but is not locatable with either (Albrecht-Crane, 2005). Charles Stivale calls this the “intimacy of mediation” (Stivale, 2003). As Deleuze and Parnet (1987) write, “in these conditions, as soon as there is this type of multiplicity, there is politics, micro-politics” (17).
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6. Feeling intimate During the course of this ethnography I hang out more and become involved myself in the mediations of their everyday life, and them in mine. It's a two way street. An immersive productive, contagious, and affective exchange takes place. The hanging out we experience is a mixed assortment of touch, smell, sight, sound, and taste that spill all over each other e an affective assemblage. The politics here is the ability to affect and be affected which undermines expectations and their attendant value systems. Affective assemblages are radical in that they are unpredictable. Any codification, such as some clear-cut demarcation between researched participant and researcher, has to play catch up. The way such affective assemblages work is clearly evident through the ‘erotics’ of sporting bodies e their dynamic viscerality, leakiness, sensuality, imagination, movement, affects, energy, and so on (Miller, 2001). One need only glance around the indoor soccer hall when the young men are playing with the researchers conducting research. A player makes a break and interrupts the discussion. Attention shifts. Energy builds. Eyes blink and eyebrows arch in surprise. But these features quickly become a sneer of disgust on seeing someone hack at the breakaway player's shins. A body hits the floor. Thud. Fear of injury is the player's first reaction. This turns into anger. He attacks the player who brought him down. Others join in the melee. Anger leaps about and is intensified. I rush in to try to break the fight up. I am punched in the face. Now I am angry too. The research is not as expected and is propelled in new directions. It's become a familiar state of affairs for me. When researching young men they often expect me to be emotionally and affectively involved (Evers, 2004, 2006, 2009). My body is expected to be part of the action not only to just get a feel for what the young men are experiencing but to build trust. Trust is a felt quality (Lingis, 2002). Young men grow up as part of masculine relationships built with intimacy, contrary to popular opinion about them eschewing it (Evers, 2004, 2006, 2009; Lilleaas, 2007; Seidler 2006). Not that they would call it “intimacy” due to the prevalence of homophobia in masculine discourse. Nevertheless, shared affective experiences with other bodies leads to a process of bonding and sharing details about one's life. The intimacy that bodies can draw me into helps the research. This was brought home to me during an experience of shame. The importance of shame was brought to my attention through the work of Elspeth Probyn (2000, 2005). Probyn writes that shame is productive in that it is meant to make you think about who or what you care about and notice. The training drills roll out. At the end we play a fun game where everyone is involved. The rules are loose and not strictly enforced. A bunch of the young men surround me. T. leads them and is very angry. “When do we get to play real football?” T. and his friends are close-knit because they rely on and trust each other. They are also dedicated to the program and always turn up at the football to train and help out. They have groaned through the sit-ups, push-ups and leg lifts together. I do not understand the anger. Are we not playing a game of football? I know that I have modified the game to fit into the space (trapazoid) and circumstances (many different age groups). As such, the rules and pitch differ from an officially established and sanctioned set of rules and pitch. But I do not think that this modification is such a big deal. The modifications feel comfortable for me because they are based on feedback where other young people had told me that they like to play modified sports that allow them to “mess with the rules”.
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Why the anger? I get angry in response and become autocratic, and dismissively tell the group to “get back to the game and stop whinging”. The anger is contagious.6 T. and his friends swear at me, kick the balls away and harass other young people. Later I feel ashamed for so easily slipping into being autocratic, but also for not understanding what T. and his friends had been trying to tell me. The shame unsettles my body and lets me know that this situation matters. I get to thinking about the fact that when these young men arrive in Australia and get to play on a “real” football field with goals at either end of the pitch it induces the directional movement and marks the outside limits (literally, the end-sides of the pitch, but also winning and losing). The rules formalise the pitch and provides players with a familiarity wherever they play. Given this, it might seem that football is quite contained and regimented. However, Brain Massumi (2002) explains in a discussion of football that while the rules and pitch formalise a soccer game they do not animate it. The ball does this, and it bounces all over the place addressing a player's sensory channels (eyes, ears, touch, proprioception etc.) that are needed to play football. To be effective the player mobilizes into a state of “reflex” response for what is actually a space of potential and creativity, in spite of the rules and pitch that provide familiarity. It is similar to when the young men first arrive in Australia, their proprioceptic, kinesthetic and sensual awareness cannot settle even though there are all sorts of parameters in place. But slowly the new place forces its way into their embodied memories, enthusiasms, gestures, and imagination by way of sight, taste, smell, touch, hearing, and balance. The boys become intimate with their own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves (Lefebvre, 2004). Experienced players fall short of explicit calculations when it is time to decide what to do when the ball gets to them. It becomes a case of decision-making borne of an embodied learning that not only accommodates what is happening but what could happen, namely the potential. The more inexperienced players will try to follow some plan, based on their experience from a previous game. But any game is contingent and fast moving. It simply becomes impossible to follow a plan because of changing moods, running bodies of other players, inconsistent referees, weather, circumstances, including what is happening in your life off the pitch. The most experienced players on a particular pitch know how to move with the contingencies and their decisions are made on what are sometimes called “knacks” or “hunches” that feed off a non-rational and non-cognitive learning. The best players make it all look effortless. The even better players can take their act and travel with it. They are adaptable and can adjust quickly to familiar pitches and games, but nonetheless contingent ones full of unseen potentials. T. and his friends, all very skilled football players, have had to develop their creativity, independence, resourcefulness, resilience, adaptability, competency and the like to get by in the camps and now in their resettlement country, as well as to continue to play football as they traverse countries, homes, communities, oceans, and continents. They manage to adapt and identify potentials time and again within structures, codes and rules repeatedly forced upon them and that authorities have a habit of changing about according to political needs.
6 Anna Gibbs writes that bodies can catch feelings as easily as objects catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting feardin short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable type of passion (2001: 1).
For the young men football has become a space where they do not “learn” but rather “hone” their attributes. “Real” football is appealing precisely because of its formalising rules and pitch. The formalised rules, pitch and codes of football are not something to overcome for these young men but a thread of familiarity in a world of strangeness, and a tool they have come to rely on to hone their senses and attributes to get by when structures, codes and sets of rules are foisted upon them. But here I was “moving the goal posts”, so to speak, and taking away that familiarity and the benefits of their sensory learning skills. I also took away the chance to show me what they could do. There is a politics in what they know. Just as on a football pitch, even though we operate within conditions of possibility that attempt to regulate and condition our actions, there is always the potential for getting by or doing otherwise. The autocratic dismissal of these young men perpetuates the stereotype of these young men as only forever at risk, vulnerable and in need of control, curbing, fixing, developing or cultivating. The young men had been treated as passive rather than as friends who wanted to enhance the program by sharing their competencies and skills. In other words, the young men had tried to give me the gift of their knowledge and I had turned them away. It was even more offensive from me because the young men had given me the gift of their friendship by simply turning up and also by participating in the research. How could a friend treat them like this? They had tested me and I had failed. In her work on sensuous multiculturalism Amanda Wise frames her research as just such a gift exchange. Drawing on the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Wise and Velayutham (2009) explain that a gift is a relationship and what is important in such exchanges is how the people, objects and social relations are made and remade, understood and re-understood. An ethics of encounter is paramount because these gifts are to some extent part of persons. With this in mind I had rejected their gift because I could, due to my position of privilege, and this was not lost on them. The passing and receiving of any gift exchange reminds me of Bill Shankly's explanation of football: “Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass”. My lack of ability to receive a pass let the team down. Fortunately for me T. knows the game better than me. I go to T.s house to apologise and explain how I blew it. T. sees how upset I am. He takes the time to put his hand on my shoulder. It was another gift saying “It's OK Clif, don't worry. We get this shit all the time”. At least, that what was what the touch conveyed to me. 7. Conclusion Intimacy has confirmed for me how it enables me to do research with these young men. As I have argued elsewhere the ethnographer's body is an instrument for recording sensual data (Evers, 2006). That is, inter-affective experiences embed themselves in my body and the participant's bodies as the research emerges e bodies remember. The affective register determines the conditions for research and makes particular performances matter. This means that my ethnography happens through an intimacy with the young men that produces a pathway to listen well to them in a way that scrambles authority and hierarchical rapport. What the ethnography with these young refugee men has shown is that Stivale is spot on, the “in-between of thought comes to the fore through the folds of friendship, that is, through the resonances, differences, and repetitions available only within the intimacy of the mediation” (Stivale, 2003: 29) [original italics]. Following this, it can be argued that it is only when sports-based
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intervention programs grasp that this intimacy is a gift that the importance of the emotional and affective encounters it puts into motion will be revealed as that which can leap across economic, ethnic and cultural divides, and not sport. Sport-based intervention programs being mobilized to “fix” young people is a misplaced agenda. We need to be cautious of using sport-based intervention programs to address broad social challenges young people face. Sport cannot provide over-arching answers or solve their problems. However, a mobilization of sport that eschews large-scale developmental outcomes can be a useful path through which to work on a joint project with young people to produce an intimacy of mediation that accommodates their agency and works with them to face the challenges that come up as they actively remake their lives as they move forward. Acknowledgments Thanks to the Football United Program, the young people who are part of this study for their insight and generosity, and to the reviewers for their helpful comments and advice. References Albrecht-Crane, C., 2005. Pedagogy as friendship: identity and affect in the conservative classroom. Cultural Studies 19 (4), 491e514. Bickford, S., 1996. The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, Ithaca. Cameron, M., MacDougall, C., 2001. Crime Prevention Through Sport and Physical Activity. Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 165. Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra. Coakley, J., Dunning, E., 2000. Handbook of Sports Studies. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA. Coakley, J., 2002. Using sports to control deviance among youths: lets be critical and cautious. In: Gatz, M., Messner, M., Ball-Rokeach, S. (Eds.), Paradoxes of Youth and Sport. SUNY, New York. Cohen, S., 1971. Images of Deviance. Penguin Books, London. Cohen, S., 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Martin Robertson, Oxford. Collins, M., Kay, T., 2003. Sport and Social Exclusion. Routledge, London. Couch, J., 2007. Mind the gap: considering the participation of refugee young people. Youth Studies Australia 26 (4), 37e44. Cuskelly, G., Hoye, R., Auld, C., 2006. Working with Volunteers in Sport: Theory and Practice. Routledge, London. Darnell, S., 2007. Playing with race: right to play and the production of whiteness in ‘development through sport’. Sport in Society 10 (4), 460e579. Deleuze, G., Parnet, C., 1987. Dialogues. University of Minnesota Press, New York. Evers, C., 2004. Men who surf. Cultural Studies Review 10 (1), 27e41. Evers, C., 2006. How to surf. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 30 (3), 229e243. Evers, C., 2009. The point: surfing, geography and a sensual life of men and masculinity on the Gold Coast, Australia. Social and Cultural Geography 10 (8), 893e908. Garland, J., Rowe, M., 2001. Racism and Anti-Racism in Football. Palgrave, Basingstoke. Gatz, M., Messner, M., Ball-Rokeach, J. (Eds.), 2002. Paradoxes of Youth and Sport. SUNY, New York.
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