Abstract
In the early 2000s, parkour gained worldwide popularity. Parkour is the practice of navigating an urban landscape in an artful way and involves moving across physical space efficiently to remove obstacles and impediments. Practitioners of parkour (i.e., tracuers) must be aware of the environment, what obstacles are near, and how to navigate them based on personal skills. As parkour was gaining prominence, Marie Lindegaard began her ethnographic work in Cape Town, South Africa. In the product of this work, Surviving Gangs, Violence, and Racism in Cape Town: Ghetto Chameleons, Lindegaard explains how young people in Cape Town navigated their social worlds to avoid violence and victimization. In many ways, both Lindegaard and those she studied resemble traceurs navigating an urban environment. Like a traceur, Lindegaard adeptly traverses the world of those she studied. Similarly, her participants are like traceurs as they travel between social worlds (from ghettos to suburbs and back) and invoke various cultural repertoires to avoid threats that emerge during their travels.
Lindegaard begins by placing her study in a larger social, theoretical, and methodological context. She describes the historical legacy of apartheid and the resulting definitions and fluidity of race found in South Africa. This context provides the stage where South Africans act out race and identity using available cultural repertoires. The larger theoretical argument of the book is that people navigate their worlds by drawing on the various cultural repertoires—“tool kits that includes a range of actions, habits, skills and styles that are drawn upon in the process of social positioning” (p. 20)—at their disposal. She finds that young South Africans could call forth gang, township, suburban, and flexible cultural repertoires when making their way through ghettos, townships, and suburbs. While people are constrained by culture, they have agency in how they choose specific repertoires. People vary in their access to specific repertoires and in their adeptness at situationally using these repertoires. Those who are more flexible in drifting among cultural repertoires may have more success in traversing cultures than those who are not. In short, culture is fluid and people can pull from a variety of cultural beliefs when acting and making sense of their actions.
Those who draw on flexible cultural repertoires (i.e., ghetto chameleons) highlight the similarities shared with traceurs. That is, they show the improvisational and situational nature of switching among repertoires. They must be prepared for situations and adapt to their social surroundings based on their particular abilities. Those with more proficiency at this are more successful in navigating multiple terrains. They can move between the races and classes much like traceurs move over and around obstacles in the urban environment.
Lindegaard is able to bring the participants’ worlds to the reader when telling their stories. I especially like the inclusion of participant-driven photos in the book. By providing participants with cameras, Lindegaard was able to show aspects of participants’ lives that would otherwise remain distant to readers. We see their homes, their families, and their troubles. We see their struggles with poverty, drugs, and violence. And, we are shown all of this from the literal point of view of the participants. When one young man discusses the ways he navigates the anxiety caused by drug use, gambling, and alcoholism in and around his home, we can see, firsthand, the places he must traverse and the people he must manage.
We should not forget that research is also influenced by those who conduct it. The researcher’s personality and social position can influence data collection. Thus, we must be aware of how data are collected. It appears that Lindegaard collected the stories of her participants mindfully. That is, she took care to represent them accurately, but also to not overly romanticize them. While most of the book presents participants favorably, often praising the way they move through their worlds, she also includes stories of the violence and crime they commit. We are not shielded from their bad behaviors, which provides a more nuanced portrayal of the people she studied.
Readers also get a chance to understand Lindegaard as a researcher in her description of the methods and the roles she adopted to collect data and in a couple of short interludes. In the first interlude, she tells a story of meeting a man who has committed murder and who was murdered soon after their interaction. I enjoyed this interlude as it gave a sense of the person collecting data. This too allows us as readers to be more sympathetic to those being studied.
Lindegaard has produced a thoughtful ethnography. It is well suited for those interested in ethnographic studies of crime and those interested in cultural explanations of crime. As such, it is well suited for upper-level methods and criminological theory classes. Like other academic works, the book is not without limitations. Methodologically, Lindegaard did not go far enough in incorporating the photos into the analysis and putting herself into the book. Collecting the photos was a great decision. Not only do the photos empower participants and draw the reader in, but also they are powerful tools for data collection. Using them to stimulate interviews is an effective technique as they tap into different parts of a person’s emotions when responding to questions. The book began with 20 photos and short captions. Because of this, I expected more from the photos throughout. Lindegaard missed an opportunity by not making the photos and photo elicitation interview data more significant components of the results.
Similarly, I found the first interlude interesting because of its ability to let me feel like I was in on some backstage part of the research. This led me to look for other interludes—in fact after the first one I went to the table of contents to jump ahead and read them all. Unfortunately, there were only two. By including only two, the book left me thinking that the interludes were an afterthought and had been forced in. I had hoped for more. These interludes would have been a nice tool to allow readers to peek behind the curtain of the research.
Despite these small missteps, I believe Lindegaard can be seen as a research traceur. She navigated the social world of young people in South Africa in a way that allowed her to see the world from their eyes. She was able to see the ways that the larger structure of South Africa acted upon these people, and how they used the resources available to them to act with agency. Many practitioners of parkour believe that they should never harm, vandalize, or damage the environment they traverse. Some even advocate for being the custodians of the space they traverse. Lindegaard may be an outsider to those she studied, but the care with which she tells their stories shows she is a custodian of the space and of the people’s stories and that she has not abused this privilege.