Abstract
In the summers of 2009 and 2011, I holidayed for seven nights on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza and stayed in the resort of San Antonio. On both occasions I travelled with large groups of young men, all from working-class backgrounds, and stayed in what can only be described as sub-standard accommodation. One member of our group, who had served a prison sentence several years previously, upon seeing his hotel room, exclaimed that his prison cell was better. The specific purpose of both holidays was to spend all seven nights consuming enormous quantities of alcohol and partying. On both holidays I spent in the region of one thousand pounds and made myself physically ill through exhaustion, poor diet and alcohol abuse. The friends who I holidayed with experienced the same, and worse: some were involved in violence, engaged in drug use, one had his phone and some money stolen, and another suffered from extreme anxiety and sought medical treatment upon his return to the UK. But, despite our various pains, we’d all had the ‘time of our lives’ … or so we told ourselves, and each other. Deviance and Risk on Holiday explores in depth why so many young people are engaging in such excessive consumption and risk-taking, often to their own detriment.
The book provides an in-depth ethnographic account of both the rapid commercial development of Ibiza, and the holidays of the young Brits who flock there during the summer months seeking fun, hedonism and escapism in the island’s balmy climate and world-renowned night-time economy. Much of the text centres on the resort of San Antonio, home of the famous, or perhaps more accurately infamous, ‘West End’ – an intersection of streets containing an abundance of pubs, bars, night clubs, lap-dancing clubs and takeaways, colonised every evening by large crowds of young, intoxicated Brits. Into this milieu of unrestrained excess, deviance and hyperconsumption steps the book’s intrepid author Daniel Briggs, who takes a critical ethnographic approach to his field of study.
The book comprises twelve chapters. In the early chapters Briggs provides a rationale for his research and the book; part of which involves a discussion of his methodology and theoretical framework. His methodology is clear and well justified. Briggs utilises a combination of focus groups, interviews and observations with an array of groups that consume, work in and police the formal and informal economies of Ibiza. He also makes regular use of social networking sites, in particular Facebook. He is diligent to the ethical implications of his research, and makes a solid, well-founded justification for his choice of methods. His theoretical framework is clear and highly relevant to the topics researched. Briggs fuses perspectives from critical sociology and criminology, with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capital, and recent critical continental philosophy to understanding postmodern subjectivities, predominantly Žižek. This framework envelops Briggs’s analysis of the precarious lives of his young working-class respondents, their risk-taking, and the voracious commodification and consumption of Ibiza.
Far from pathologising, moralising or vilifying the sometimes excessive behaviour of his young participants, Briggs sets his analytical sights on the forces of consumer capitalism that operate as a structural backcloth to hyperconsumption and risk-taking. He argues that these have shaped the habitus of young British tourists, their desires, as well as the inclination to consume and engage in deviant activities excessively while abroad; and which keeps them wanting to come back, year after year, with yet more cultural and economic capital, in order to ‘do it properly’. He introduces the reader to concepts of the ‘holiday career’ and ‘holiday capital’, which Briggs argues are sources of status that young people seek to acquire to generate a sense of individuality and inspire envy in others. Through rich case studies, field notes and interviews that unfold over the course of the chapters, the many voices and actions of his young respondents reveal so poignantly their utter desperation to ‘seize the moment’ and to create cherished and lasting memories of a time when they had ‘been there and done it’. A picture emerges of a generation of young people who display an unwavering commitment to consumption and to maximising the little time they have available to enjoy themselves, before they return to what they perceive are mundane home and working lives, made bearable only by brief punctuations of excessive bouts of hedonism at the weekends. Much of the rhetoric and discourse here is around ‘living the dream’, ‘being free’, and the sun-soaked Spanish island as the place where these desires can be realised – a pinnacle of experience and enjoyment, where one can get a sweet taste of the ‘high life’.
But Briggs’ analysis gets behind this ultimately hollow rhetoric. It reveals the ‘unfreedom’ of consumer capitalism that operates in the background of the island’s tourist and political economy, which has become heavily commercialised. Briggs unpicks the connections between this commercialisation and marketing of Ibiza with broader popular cultural currents and the powerful ideology this generates. This ideological impetus and the threat of humiliation and social insignificance from non-participation leaves these young people believing that drinking excessively, taking drugs, having casual sexual encounters, visiting the island’s super clubs, and engaging in other risk-taking behaviours are what they should be doing on holiday in order to live a fulfilling and worthwhile existence. Yet, in reality, these are a narrow set of ultimately unfulfilling experiences that merely mirror their consumption practices at home. This leaves them at best only wanting more and feeling they have to come back for more, and at worst, financially, psychologically and physically damaged. Not that this seems to bother Briggs’s young respondents much, who view this as simply part of the experience and yet another tale to tell in the quest for individuality and social distinction.
Briggs’s clear and ‘to the point’ style of writing makes this book extremely readable, to such an extent one could imagine his participants picking up a copy and not feeling alienated by a complex array of terminology and jargon that bedevils some academic texts; although in places I do feel that Briggs does repeat or overemphasise certain points a little more than is necessary. His humorous tone is engaging and had me smiling throughout; but at no point does he descend into condescension to the young people he is researching. Briggs remains empathetic and understanding, even in the face of the putrid sexism, arrogance, ignorance, aggression and sheer recklessness displayed by some of those he encounters. He captures beautifully the peculiar, yet highly frustrating, condition of postmodern youth cultures: self-awareness with stasis. At times they display a glimmer of an acknowledgement and grasp of their lowly social positioning, their exploitation, and the drudgery of their repetitive bouts of unbridled and painfully predictable hedonism. Yet, juxtaposed against this is a firm and unwavering commitment to continue blindly to ‘chase the dream’, consume and ‘get on it’. Briggs’s text reveals a cohort of young people whose hearts and minds have been captured and enslaved by capitalist consumer ideology.
Overall, Briggs has produced a marvellous text. I couldn’t help but bring to my reading and review of the book a pinch of personal perspective and experience from my time in San Antonio. In academic terms, I felt there was the potential for Briggs to develop his gendered analysis of his findings further; particularly given the extensive data around sex, promiscuity and the objectification of women. As is the trend within patterns of offending and deviant behaviour more broadly (see Wykes and Welsh, 2009), the deviance and risk-taking of Briggs’s male respondents tended to be far more extreme and grotesque in nature than that of their female counterparts. A greater utilisation of masculinities theories would have helped here, I feel. These small quibbles aside, and returning to the ‘personal’ in this review, I find it incredibly hard to disagree with much of what Briggs says, as it very much mirrors my own experiences. Throughout I found myself repeatedly nodding my head in agreement. For me, he provides a highly accurate, nuanced description and analysis of what is going on in Europe’s party capital; and no doubt in countless other similar holiday resorts across Europe and possibly the globe. His fascinatingly rich and penetrative ethnography gets beneath the glossy sheen of ‘harmless fun in the sun’. Peeling back this façade, it reveals the brutal requirements and demands of day-to-day life for young people (at home and abroad) in advanced market societies. It exposes the sheer violence of capitalism in its most extreme incarnation – capitalismo extremo – as it continues to blindly chew up everything in its path, excreting its soulless, monotonous and ultimately unfulfilling spaces of liminal consumption at the other end. In its wake poorly resourced and under-developed public services, which tend to the various casualties, struggle to keep pace.
Above all, this book represents an account of a truly critical ethnography that has values and a strong moral compass. It provides a refreshing and much needed tonic to the current liberal impasse of minimal intervention in capitalism’s worst, and downright unethical, extremes. I thoroughly recommend Deviance and Risk on Holiday.