Contested Choreographies of the Slopes - Taylor & Francis Online

Leisure Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, 97–114, January 2007

Snowboarders vs Skiers: Contested Choreographies of the Slopes TIM EDENSOR and SOPHIA RICHARDS Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Taylor and Francis Ltd RLST_A_137205.sgm

(Received January 2005; revised July 2005; accepted September 2005) [email protected] Department 0161 247 6284 of Environmental(online) and Geographical SciencesManchester Metropolitan UniversityJohn Dalton Extension, Chester StreetManchesterM1 5GDUK Leisure 10.1080/02614360500372224 0261-4367 Original Taylor 02006 00 TimEdensor 000002006 &Studies Article Francis (print)/1466-4496

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ways in which leisure spaces are increasingly contested, leading to greater pressure on a growing range of rural environments. We explore the tension between different groups of lifestyle sports enthusiasts (snowboarders and skiers) at one Alpine resort. We investigate the hybrid youth/lifestyle sport of snowboarding and show how it challenges the purpose and meanings of space in the previously exclusive winter sports resorts. The key metaphor of performance is utilised to show the pre-eminence of style and movement to achieving distinction and marking difference between the two groups. We particularly focus upon differences communicated through clothing, skilful performance and sensual experience. Accordingly, we contribute to recent work that highlights the embodied nature of leisure and the increasing centrality of the body and somatic experience. KEYWORDS: snowboarding, skiing, lifestyle sport, embodied performance, distinction, style, sensual experience

Introduction In this paper, we show how the dress styles, embodied performances and sensual experience of snowboarders express and transmit their identities, contest space and contribute to the mobilisation of a rhetoric of class identity. This is partly to counter the over-emphasis on the discursive constructions, resistant ideologies, class role and spectacle of youth cultures through which members have been somewhat disembodied. Similarly, as Atkinson and Wilson (2002) point out, discussions about bodies and sport have focused upon body image, disciplined bodies, biomedical bodies and the cybernetic body. As we will see, the snowboarding body foregrounds skilful performance and sensual pleasure, reflexively presenting itself as the antithesis of the disciplined sporting body, although the skills used require practice; neither is it technologically modified or concerned with the display of an athletic body. Correspondence Address: Tim Edensor, Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Manchester Metropolitan University, John Dalton Extension, Chester Street, Manchester M1 5GD, UK. Email: [email protected] ISSN 0261-4367 (print)/ISSN 1466-4496 (online)/07/010097–18 © 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/02614360500372224

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More broadly, along with other recent work (Veijola & Jokinen, 1994; Saldanha, 2002; Edensor, 2006b), we contribute to putting the body back into leisure and tourist studies. Accounts (such as Urry, 2002) suggest that tourists are disembodied, detached from their surroundings through the mobilisation of a scopic gaze, an over-emphasis which has neglected the importance of fuller sensual and bodily engagements with space, engagements that are particularly pertinent to the lifestyle sports discussed here as well as to other somatic and sensual practices in dance, sex and beach tourisms. The snowboarding performances discussed here, like those of other leisure pursuits, ‘fold nature into, and through, the body’, moving between ‘direct sensations of the physical world and discursively mediated sensescapes that signify taste and distinction, ideology and meaning’ (Macnaghten & Urry, 2000: p. 8). Neglected until recently as an object of sociological concern, as Shilling (2003: p. ix) asserts, the body is ‘central to our ability to “make a difference to”, to intervene in, or to exercise agency in the world’, with its adornment, practices, styles of movement and sensory capacities integral to formations of individual and collective identities. In contemporary times, the body has become enmeshed in the heightened sense of reflexivity that monitors identity under conditions of uncertainty. Partly, this involves resistance to the operations of modern, bourgeois forms of control, self-care, rationalisation and training, a search for modes of expression and sensuality, and a pushing of the limits of what the body is capable. With the demise of dominant standards of bodily comportment, practice, expression and experience, the body has become an important site from which to mark distinction and difference from other individuals and groups. This contestation is further fostered by ‘the massive rise of the body in consumer culture as a bearer of symbolic value’ (Shilling, 2003: p. 2), wherein media representations, advertising and specialist magazines produce new niches for distinction through which fashionable, performative and experiential bodies symbolise street style, youth and coolness. Allied to the ‘subcultural’ allure of that which is deemed ‘cool’, rebellious and youthful, identities increasingly constellate around leisure and lifestyles rather than work. Always enmeshed with social and cultural meanings, the body is not an essential biological entity. However, it is not merely socially and culturally inscribed with meaning but is also a material organism and sensually experiential. Because we focus on the reflexive body here, we show how skilful performance and sensory experience is reclaimed as a means for maintaining distinction and informing an oppositional rhetoric in a process of othering. Accordingly, embodied identities should be conceptualised as constituted through internalised cultural conventions, phenomenological experience and performative disposition, in order to insist upon the multidimensionality of the body, its propensity to change and the constraints under which it operates (Shilling, 2003: pp. 206–211). Reflecting this multidimensionality, we explore the contesting dress codes, bodily performances and experiential focus of lifestyle sports enthusiasts in shared space. There have been numerous studies of conflicts between leisure enthusiasts who share the same spatial resource (see Vaske et al., 2004 for examples of competing groups). Most accounts follow Jacob and Schreyer’s (1980) contribution, continuing to refer to ‘goal interference’ or conflict over the meanings participants assign

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to the pursuit, the significance for them of the resource they use, the depth of their experience and their relative tolerance for the lifestyles of other users. These studies are typically informed by behavioural, attitudinal and psychological models that seek to ‘measure’ conflict. Moreover, contesting performances, sensual experiences and expressive styles are typically neglected in favour of rather shallow quantitative analysis. Such under-theorised accounts remain within a ghetto of leisure studies, searching for statistical regularities, seemingly untouched by theoretical developments outside, and failing to relate observations to wider social and cultural processes (for instance, see Vaske et al., 2004). Occasionally such studies suggest there may be other avenues for exploration. For instance, Vittersø and Chipeniuk (2004) show that embodied affect and emotion can be useful in identifying responses to conflict but acknowledge that it is difficult to ‘measure’. However, other recent accounts have foregrounded the somatic expression of identity and experience. Lewis (2004) demonstrates how the ‘adventure’ climber’s improvised, adaptable and sinuous engagement with the rock face contrasts with the more controlled practices of ‘bolt-protected climbers’ whose risk-free encounter with rock minimises contact with the affordances of nature and limits corporeal potentialities (also see Kiewa, 2002). The hedonism and countercultural ‘irreverence’ of surfing (Booth, 2004) has similarly been challenged by the competitions and commodification of surfing culture, in which the hard, disciplined body of the ‘sportsman’ performs rigidly and inexpressively. In a different vein, Gilroy (1997: p. 24) compares the spectacular, expressive and politicised break-dancing displays of black urban youth with basketball, a more organised, disciplined, heroic, hyper-masculine bodily performance which incorporates movements that are ‘always purposive, strongly directional and precisely goaloriented’. In this article we look at how snowboarding identity is performed and how this involves a fierce competition with skiers who occupy the same spaces. In doing so, we explore the wider context through which space is contested by increasingly varied groups. We show how different users reproduce relationships between space and identity through transmitting meaning about performing in and experiencing space. These contestations are particularly pertinent in the case of those ‘lifestyle’ sports enthusiasts who perform a sensual and expressive relationship with the ‘natural’ spaces they are colonising. With the growing popularity of lifestyle sports, these battles have become more widespread, ranging over a variety of spaces and highlighting the increasing centrality of leisure and lifestyle to identities. Large areas of the countryside are increasingly territorialised by leisure seekers, and following the decentring of agriculture, certain symbolic landscapes have become stages for an extensive cast of actors, ranging from commuters, environmentalists, farmers, weekenders, festival-goers, hunters, tourists, and birdwatchers to a host of practitioners of ‘lifestyle’ sports, including windsurfers, climbers, mountain-bikers, hang-gliders, quad bikers, body boarders, abseilers, canoeists and white water rafters, bungee jumpers and fell runners. These sporting ventures involve competing ways of engaging with, and conceiving of, the ‘natural’, understandings and practices that can lead to heated contestation over space and resources (Edensor, 2006a). For instance, the Cairngorm Mountains in North-East

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Scotland have become the site for a controversy-ridden battle between botanists and birdwatchers, walkers, skiers and mountain-bikers, who mobilise different symbolic conceptions of the area and attendant notions about what practices are ‘appropriate’; debating, for instance, whether activities should be tranquil or enervating, involve slow or fast movement, a distanced, romantic appreciation or sensual immersion. Competing ideas about how to walk (Edensor, 2000) or whether or not to hunt foxes, for example, continue to preoccupy different groups of countryside users. These contested spaces are not only constituted at a local, regional or national level but are incorporated into the increasingly global itineraries of highly mobile enthusiasts who are drawn to an increasing global-wide assortment of specialist sites where they seek surf, the right snow, challenging cliff faces and rich diving realms. In the following account, we examine the contestations between skiers and snowboarders at Les Deux Alpes, a large winter sports resort situated in the French Alps south of Grenoble with over 35,000 guest beds, more than 200 shops and 40 restaurants. Participant observation was carried out on the slopes and in resort environs over a two-week period in Easter of 2004. In addition, interviews were recorded with 20 snowboarders aged between 20 and 27 (18 male, two female) and 20 skiers aged from early 20s to mid-50s (15 male, five female). Most of these were carried out in après ski settings – mainly in bars – and were recorded on a small cassette recorder. Not organised formally, the interviews were loosely structured around small focus groups in these relaxed contexts, although a few quotes are taken from impromptu remarks recorded in a notebook whilst out on the slopes. There were three evident groups of snowboarders who were approached and were all willing to discuss issues about which many had strong opinions, and whilst skiers seemed less group-oriented, they too were more than happy to talk about snowboarder–skier rivalries. First, we will trace the prevalent characteristics of the snowboarding subculture, and then focus upon the exclusionary battles, conflicts over style and contesting forms of movement that take place between snowboarders and their ‘other’, namely, skiers. Snowboarding Culture Although Heino refers to the ‘still contestable history of snowboarding’ (2000: p. 177), the pursuit is most evidently an adaptation of skateboarding culture, which in turn, evolved out of surfing culture. It is, according to Kevin Taylor, the director of the Tamworth Snow Dome, ‘an easy conversion from skateboarding to snowboarding… a natural progression, because the equipment and manoeuvres were already familiar to kids on the street’. However, the rather multi-ethnic, multiclass, primarily urban skateboarding culture has not been duplicated within snowboarding, which is overwhelmingly white and middle class, and primarily pursued by males, although according to Heino (2000), less so than other lifestyle sports. Yet like many lifestyle sports, snowboarding is also a hybrid culture which combines aspects of grunge, punk, and hippy cultures and more latterly hip-hop and dance, amongst others. In this sense, it is exemplary of the intensified fragmentation of contemporary youth cultures and their tendency to adopt numerous styles and bring them together through bricolage (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004). For


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instance, Borden (2001: p. 152) describes how skateboarding culture has ‘developed through a series of complementary but unconsciously co-ordinated internalised worlds, composed of clothes, music, stickers, board design, language and other forms of communication’. Snowboarding is similarly constituted out of a complex stylistic bricolage of changing cultural forms and practices. Similarly, it is now typical of lifestyle sports cultures to utilise a certain intertextuality and shared performativity by drawing upon the favoured musical, fashion and attitudinal styles of other youth and sports cultures, as well as adopting particular manoeuvres and terminologies. As romantic images of such cultures flow through global ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) with increasing velocity, notions of rebellion, unconventional style and the transgression of cultural norms are globally transmitted and adopted, confirming Doreen Massey’s (1998: pp. 124–125) assertion that contemporary youth cultures tend to be ‘a particular articulation of contacts and influences drawn from a variety of places scattered, according to power-relations, fashion and habit, across many different parts of the globe’. In ‘constellations of temporary coherence’ snowboarding, like other lifestyle sports, is played out ‘across different “local” and trans-local subcultural spaces’ (Wheaton, 2004: p. 20). As Wheaton contends (2004: pp. 4–5), these tendencies highlight wider processes of identity formation, notably, the fluidity and fragmentation of stable, ‘traditional’ social identities, the importance of ‘lifestyle’ and the increasing centrality of leisure as opposed to work, the rise of self-reflexivity and self-expression, and the tendency to congregate in affective ‘tribes’ (Maffesoli, 1996). Also pertinent to our discussion here is the growing importance of style, fitness, skill and fashion, their inscription on the body and expression in performance, signs of identity that are not transparent but possess ‘a certain ambience, a state of mind’ which are expressive of ‘lifestyles that favour appearance and form’ (Maffesoli, 1996: p. 98). This accords with Giddens’ (1991) notion of the reflexive self that continually partakes in an ongoing project of identity, choosing lifestyles that often put great emphasis on the body, and hence includes sports such as snowboarding, which as ‘lifestyle’ sports (they are alternatively called ‘extreme’ or ‘adventure’ sports) have grown enormously in popularity. Although snowboarding does not broadcast any coherent ideological position, it nonetheless – like skateboarding culture – ‘attempts to separate itself from groups such as the family’ (Borden, 2001: p. 137) and other institutions that are regarded as part of established or ‘straight’ society, primarily through expressive performances and a rhetoric of dissidence. For the snowboarder lifestyle is conceived as the antithesis of the mundane worlds of domesticity, shopping and work, realms that are believed to be transcended through the expressive, affective and sensual engagement with space. Rather than via cogent diatribes, the ‘straight’ world is rejected through the adoption of oppositional attitudes and behaviour and the conspicuous ‘dissing’ of those considered to be more conventional or authoritarian. As we will discuss, notions about snowboarders’ alterity to the ‘uncool’ world are epitomised in their conflicts with skiers, whom they regard as conformist, overcautious and inexpressive. In this, snowboarding parallels other youth cultures, which Muggleton (2000) identifies as concerned with distinguishing themselves

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from the ‘mainstream’ and informed by libertarian notions of ‘individuality’, rather than overt rebellion. This absence of objective class or other oppositional identity, together with its dynamic cultural hybridity, mean that snowboarding culture is best understood as ‘post-subcultural’, although the concept remains loose, variegated and contested, as Weinzierl and Muggleton (2003) admit. However, despite the diversity of influences, it is vital to avoid notions that snowboarders possess wholly free-floating, fluid identities, for the need to be recognisable is governed by the central requirement to convey ‘coolness’, which rules out certain clothes, musical forms and dispositions. For instance, when snowboarders were asked about their musical preferences, nu-metal, punk and rap were most commonly cited, whilst grunge, hardcore and particular forms of dance music were also championed. However, styles of music should not be mainstream or overtly ‘commercial’, for as with most youth cultures, the essence of musical style lies in its oppositional style and its ability to be utilised to gain ‘subcultural capital’ (Thornton, 1997). As we will see, the choice of clothing is similarly constrained. Despite its oppositional rhetoric and performance, over the past decade, like many other youth and sports cultures, snowboarding has been increasingly drawn into a process of commodification. Consequently, snowboarders have had to face the demands of fashion, growing cost and the extensive mediatisation of the sport, processes which question whether it can any longer be seen as ‘alternative’ and ‘cool’. Accordingly, snowboarders tend to fret about ‘selling out’ or becoming ‘inauthentic’, part of the ‘straight’ world they construct as other to themselves (Humphreys, 1997; Heino, 2000). For instance, an exclusionary aspect to snowboarding is indicated by the high cost of lessons required to meet a ‘recreational standard’ before boarders are considered safe to go out on the slopes. Moreover, at resorts, they must pay for passes to the slopes, insurance and equipment hire. Furthermore, whereas formerly snowboarders typically wore the clothes they used for skateboarding, often wearing double the layers required on the street, they now generally purchase corporate brand clothing. As Rebecca Heino (2000: p. 178) describes, ‘snowboard companies began to produce winter clothing with the same out-of-the closet look. The irony became that snowboarders paid just as much for the grunge/hip-hop/gangsta look as the skiers paid for their outfits’. Likewise, whereas the first snowboards tended to be home-made, the development of commercially-driven snowboard technologies has refined snowboards, replacing the customised equipment of yesteryear with costly models. In addition, the presumed ‘coolness’ of snowboarding has proved to be an image coveted by advertising corporations who may endow their products with the cachet provided by a supposedly ‘rebellious’ or ‘streetwise’ style, as with the highly successful Sprite advert of the 1990s. The sport itself has also been intensively mediatised with the emergence of a number of magazines catering exclusively for the growing snowboarding market, including Whitelines, Snowboard, Onboard and Snowboard UK, publications that are stocked with advertisements for gear. The extension of snowboarding culture into internet, video, magazine and advertising formats globally transmits and popularises an imagery which foregrounds spectacular manoeuvres, specific ‘cool’ rhetoric and language, and iconic styles.


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‘Post-subcultural’ youth and lifestyle sports cultures continually utilise consumer and media cultures in the construction of identity, rather than ‘subverting’ or standing in romantic opposition to them (Muggleton & Weinzierl, 2000: pp. 7–8), for such cultures are ‘produced within the context and discourse of consumerism’ (Wheaton & Beal, 2003: p. 173). As Wheaton and Beal contend (2003: p. 156), ‘media and cultural representations have become pivotal to how our cultural identities are defined, constructed, contested and reconstituted’. Yet it is wise to be wary of assumptions that snowboarders or other cultural groups uncritically consume and passively interpret these commercial effects, for enthusiasts continually rework the images and meanings circulated by commodification and mediatisation in their practices of bricolage and appropriation. Contested Resort Space In most snow resorts, the monopoly of skiers has been challenged by a large influx of snowboarders. Snowboarding has moved away from the margins of the winter sports industry, utilising existing space and expanding the geographies within which it is performed. Snowboarders may soon constitute half of all resort habitués. Moreover, there are presently 78 artificial arenas open for snowboarding in the UK, with 17 more planned in the next few years (http:// www.theboarder.co.uk/slopes/), and similar facilities can be found across Europe, Australasia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands and the USA (http:// www.goski.com/experts/snowdomes/1snowdomes.htm). Skiing has long been characterised by an elitist, exclusionary identity. The cost of lessons, clothing, equipment hire and skiing holidays has limited participation to an affluent elite, for whom it has become a fixture in the social calendar, part of a broader strategy that displays status through an association with particular practices and places. To confirm that skiing is the preserve of the select few and emphasise their disapproval of this exclusivity, snowboarders frequently cite the Royal family’s patronage of elite skiing venues. As a form of ‘conspicuous leisure’ (Corrigan, 1998: p. 17), skiing produces ‘gains in distinction’ (Bourdieu, 1991: p. 362), and has physically and through ‘techniques of sociability’ (Heino, 2000: p. 177) excluded snowboarders as inappropriate members of the snow resort community. Whilst these strategies are mobilised to maintain a class-specific ‘cultural capital’ within the field of (winter) sports, snowboarding mobilises its own forms of distinction, better typified as ‘subcultural capital’, wherein distinction is achieved and maintained through displaying performative skill, authenticity and ‘cool’ (Thornton, 1995). In the USA of the late 1960s, snowboarding was viewed as ‘subversive’ by the dominant skiing community, held to have overstepped the bounds of decency (Humphreys, 1997), and banned for 20 years. Perpetrating an ‘exclusive appropriation of scenery inaccessible to the vulgar’ (Bourdieu, 1991: p. 372), resorts became ‘purified’ spaces (Sibley, 1988), isolating snowboarders, reinforcing their sense of themselves as oppositional and entrenching the enmity between the two groups. Many skiers continue to believe that snowboarders and skiers should be separated, one experienced skier at Les Deux Alpes arguing that ‘for a place this size there should be dedicated snowboard pistes’ (James, 47, stockbroker). Others

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maintain that their longstanding pre-eminence still earns them a right to exclusive access to the slopes: ‘skiing has been around much longer than snowboarding and I think they are encroaching on it’ (Richard, businessman, 34). Whilst few resorts continue to exclude boarders, the persistent dominance of skiing still influences the organisation of space in ways that cause tension between skiers and snowboarders. At Les Deux Alpes the failure to consider the requirements of boarders is illustrated in the forms of transport that convey participants up the slopes, for the chair lifts, t-bars and gondolas are awkward for snowboarders to utilise. Four-seater ‘bubble lifts’, enclosed lifts that ascend to the piste, have pockets on the outside in which skis are placed yet there is only one such slot for boards, often forcing snowboarders to hold their boards within the rather cramped lift. T-bars are designed for straddling and are similarly awkward for the conveyance of boarders. The sentiment is shared by boarders that ‘someone has got to invent a new lift’ (Jonas, 21, trainee chef). A further cause of conflict lies in the architectural style of the recreational and residential quarters designed for skiers, often themed in a ‘log cabin style’, with balconies and pine trees, to create a space somewhat akin to suburbia in its materialisation of nostalgic forms, a mock-archaic veneer encoded with specific cultural values of order and respectability (Chaney, 1997; Silverstone, 1997). These themed spaces are reviled by many snowboarders who scorn what they regard as their pretentious falsity, a disparagement that derives from imagined geographies of belonging, in which snowboarders inhabit an urban street culture whereas skiers inhabit suburbia. In marking their distinction from skiers, snowboarders assert that whereas skiers typically utilise expensive forms of transport and accommodation, they undertake lengthy coach journeys to and from snow resorts and sleep four-toa-room in hostels. Yet many resorts have changed to reflect their more diverse clientele. At Les Deux Alpes, a board park has been constructed, replete with ramps, half pipes, a carving area, spine jumps, a table top jump, rails, weekly contests and regular live music. Due to their positioning on the edge of resort space, these board parks can be conceptualised as places that were initially ‘on the margin’ (Shields, 1991), and are claimed to be antithesis of hegemonic skiing space. For instance, board parks continue to permit certain mildly carnivalesque practices: as one boarder related, ‘if you want to buy drugs in a resort, just go to the boardpark and shout “Hashish! Hashish!”’ (Geoff, 20, student). Preliminary research at the Tamworth Snow Dome also revealed tension between boarders and skiers, where rather than different spaces being demarcated for the two groups, separate nights have been organised to minimise tension between them. Either way, both strategies seem to aim for the ‘purification’ of space borne out of ‘hostility towards the mixing of unlike categories, an urge to keep things apart’ (Sibley, 1988: p. 409), a characteristic attitude of both groups. However, demarcating spatial identities is not an option on shared slopes. Contested Performances in Snowy Space We now turn to the metaphor of performance in order to develop the notion that, as in other youth cultures and lifestyle sports, embodied style, expressive movement


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and sensual experience is central to snowboarding. It has been argued that in postmodern culture, the body has become ‘primarily a performing self of appearance, display and impression management’ (Csordas, 1994: p. 2). Certain writers (Goffman, 1959; Geertz, 1993) state that social life is thoroughly dramaturgical, and that we are constantly playing roles according to the social contexts in which we find ourselves. Thus, social action is inevitably stylised, and aims for coherence and consistency. Goffman identifies how individuals coordinate their behaviour through shared ‘etiquette, dress, deportment, gesture, intonation, dialect, vocabulary, small bodily movements and automatically expressed evaluations concerning both the substance and details of life’ (1951: p. 300). More specifically, Desmond argues that social identities are ‘signalled, formed and negotiated through bodily movement’ (1994: p. 34), communicated via rhythms and gestures which act as markers for gender, ethnic, class, and other cultural allegiances. These performative patterns are informed by, and reproduce, shared forms of understanding, and are thus a ‘discrete concretisation of cultural assumptions’ (Carlson, 1996: p. 16). At regular venues, such shared performances produce ‘place ballets’, a compendium of regular practices inscribed upon locales that forge a relationship with space and a produce a sense of place (Seamon, 1979: pp. 58–59). Performance is rarely rigid and repetitive. Instead it is interactive and contingent, and tends to shift between reflexive and unreflexive states (Edensor, 2001). The success of a performance also depends upon a rehearsed skilfulness and its reception by others. As we see here, particular stages might be the site for competing performances that follow very different roles, scripts, choreographies and conventions. Such contests are becoming more frequent because of the ways in which in a global, mobile culture, ‘people constantly meet otherness, habits are brought to the surface, becoming manifest and thereby challenged’ (Frykman & Löfgren, 1996: p. 14) and can lead to a dilemma about ‘whether to kick the habit or to stick tenaciously to it’ (p. 14). In tourist and leisure space, as we have already argued, such ‘performative and counter performative cultures abound’ (Rojek, 2000: p. 17). Snowy space is conceptualised and reproduced through the contesting performative norms of snowboarders and skiers, which we now explore by looking at the contests over clothing style, ways of moving down the slopes and sensual experience. The Clothed Snowboarding Body Snowboarding is not just a technique, it’s a style… with snowboarders, the style comes with the sport. (Charlotte, snowboarder, student, 21)

This style typically includes baggy trousers, beanie hats and jackets. Like the hairstyles and ‘goatie’ beards, motifs printed on t-shirts, embossed on boards, featured in flyers and in equipment advertisements, these designs are redolent of those in comics and other paraphernalia adopted by skateboarding and other youth culture. Crucially, athleticism is not written on the body of the snowboarder, for body shape is disguised under baggy clothes, but clothes communicate that of which the snowboarding body is capable. Associated with widely understood and internalised stylistic values, clothing styles assume great prominence in achieving distinction amongst members of the snowboarding community:

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Looking good is important in snowboarding, it’s all about personal statement. (Geoff, 20, student)

Clothing and equipment indicates what one boarder referred to as a ‘hierarchy of skill’ (Esther, 20, student): the degree of ability that is marked on the body of the snowboarder which is read by fellow participants as a form of cultural capital – an exclusionary, embodied sign available to those in the know: You can look at a boarder, straight up, from what they are wearing, you see them walking around and you are like… man he’s good! (Jonas, 21, trainee chef)

Specific styles and brands have become particularly important for these codes of display and ‘authenticity’ (Muggleton, 2000). Baggy trousers, for example, are a symbol of ‘skill’, because loose clothes are required for manoeuvrability when doing tricks and turns on the snowboard: Snowboarders wear baggy clothes because you have to move your legs a lot, and the better you get, the baggier the trousers … these ones I’m wearing are three times bigger than my first set of trousers. (Ben, 22, trainee journalist)

As we have mentioned, the intensified commodification of the sport now means that brands of goggles, boots and boards similarly broadcast the status of the boarder. The Oakley brand has been particularly important in goggle design, the ‘O’ on the elasticated strap that holds the goggles to the head, acting as a readable code of ‘skill’, as one boarder related: Oakley’s goggles man, it’s all about the Oakley’s goggles … They cost like 120 quid, and they’ve got a mirrored front, it’s bad! If you see someone with those, he’s gotta be good! (Peter, 25, ‘in advertising’)

Although the ubiquity of Oakley’s has eroded their cachet, ‘subcultural’ capital is acquired through the acquisition of clothing that ‘objectifies’ the requisite qualities of what Thornton (1997) refers to as the esteemed value of ‘hipness’. However, crucially, this display of ‘hipness’ – or more contemporaneously, ‘cool’ – must appear unforced since ‘(N)othing depletes capital more than the sight of someone trying too hard’ (1997: p. 202). For snowboarders, cool can only be maintained if the level of performance on the slopes matches the clothing: He could come out with this brand new board and his Oakley’s, he could walk out and you’d be like, ‘Man he looks good!’ He gets on his board, falls over, you’d be like, ‘Go home man!’ (Jonas, 21, trainee chef) It’s a status symbol, they want to be noticed, but you have to be good (on the slopes) to pull off the clothes. Why would you bother spending that much money on the gear when you can’t even look that great in it? You just look like shit! (Esther, 20, student)

Stylish clothing is thus not sufficient by itself to gain distinction but depends upon the ability to perform well whilst clothed in stylish apparel. In this sense, the clothes are subordinate to the performance, although they are intimately linked to the degree of skill of the wearer. In addition to this self-aware, embodied display of proficiency, the centrality of clothing style to snowboarding identity is manifest in the delight in mockery towards what are understood as the contrastingly ‘uncool’ fashions of skiers. Traditional ski-wear takes the form of an all-in-one body suit, often designed in bright fluorescent colours and somewhat homogenous in style, shape and design,


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a stylish conformity further entrenched by the habit of many couples to wear matching ski suits. Snowboarders’ typically muted colours of green and brown provide a dramatic contrast to these brighter colours. With their intense awareness of ‘style’, one-piece ski suits are completely bereft of any fashion sense, the antithesis of ‘coolness’ and a cause of great hilarity and ridicule amongst boarders: Old people with no fashion sense wear tight spandex… It’s not on! (David, 26, motorcycle courier) The posh skiers, they want to get dressed up in their one-piece suits and they think they are trendy! (Geoff, 20, student)

The subcultural capital mobilised through stylistic quotations of other youth cultures, the display of brand-name goods and the signifying of skill through clothing all mark out a snowboarding identity as distinct from what is regarded as the unfashionable, ‘uncool’, straight identity of skiers. Crucially, these expressions are sustained and validated by the performances of snowboarding as we now discuss. Expressive Movement As Rebecca Heino observes, At first glance the practice of snowboarding does not seem that different from skiing. Both activities require their participants to bind their feet on to Plexiglas technologies, ride a lift up the mountain together, and then proceed down the same snow-covered slopes while turning to control speed. One person has two boards on their feet and the other has one, with slightly different turning techniques because of that. (2000: p. 177)

Yet the comportment of skiers and snowboarders is very different: skiers carry their skis and sticks up high on their shoulders whereas snowboarders hold their boards under their arms. Styles of movement are therefore habitually embodied in the practicalities of carrying equipment that coerce the body to perform in particular ways. However, the rather rigid position utilised by skiers, according to snowboarders, is characteristic of, and commensurate with, their stiffer physical and social disposition, an inhibited comportment which contrasts with the supposedly more casual disposition of boarders. Beyond these performative movements, participant observation at Les Deux Alpes reveals how the two groups differently utilise snowy ‘affordances’ (Gibson, 1987) and equipment to produce contrasting ways of moving down the slopes. Most obviously, snowboarders move from side to side in wide arcs while skiers’ lateral movements carve much shallower curves. Because skiers’ movements are enacted at a slower pace, snowboarders frequently overtake them, taking up more space and swooping across the paths of several skiers, and whilst skiers stick to their own more limited routes, they also occasionally cut through the paths of boarders. If there are several skiers on the piste, snowboarders must carve between them whilst allowing sufficient room to minimise disruption. Skiers frequently complain that snowboarders’ sweeping movements in front of them is unnerving, an irritation exacerbated by the fact that as boarders descend in their lateral fashion, there are blind-spots behind them. This is also the case for skiers but because their movement is primarily vertical, they can see to the left and right and in front, and are therefore aware of those descending who are parallel to

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them. Accordingly, as snowboarders traverse down the slope, moving from one side to the other, they are apt to occasionally collide with skiers who are out of vision. Such incidents fuel opinions amongst skiers that snowboarders are uncontrolled and perform with insufficient skill, imperilling others on the slopes: Skiers can just control themselves a lot more and snowboarders have no control whatsoever! A snowboarder just cuts in front of everyone… they’re out of control and dangerous. (Matthew, 29, schoolteacher)

These collisions, maintain skiers – although this is disputed – are solely perpetrated by snowboarders: If we came down next to them they can smack into us, we don’t smack into them, ever. (Alan, 33, salesman)

Snowboarders’ performances are frequently regarded by skiers as ‘reckless’ and too boisterous, and accordingly violate the ‘ski way code’, a series of conventions that regulate movement and space. Their tendency to collide with skiers is regarded as emblematic of snowboarders’ disrespect for others using the slopes, and it embodies wider failings that reveal the characteristic inappropriateness of their behaviour in contrast to the more ‘civilised’ attitudes of skiers who opine that: Boarders think they are cooler than skiers so they can just do what they want. They always barge in front and spray you, but they never say sorry. They are never as polite as skiers. (Mary, 35, local government worker) Snowboarders are the hooligans of the snow, they think there are no rules. They just enjoy themselves with no respect for others. (Richard, 41, schoolteacher)

On the other hand, snowboarders critique skiers’ sedate passage as an encumbrance to their enjoyment of the slopes: Skiers are annoying on the slopes. They block off pathways… I’d like to take them out but unfortunately I wouldn’t be allowed to. (Stuart, 23, student)

Disrespect for the space and movement of others is also referred to by snowboarders who complain that while waiting for lifts, skiers pay them undue regard; in the words of Jonas, they ‘walk all over the back of your board and fuck it up’. In contrast to their own passage across snowy space, understood as more physically engaged and adventurous, far more casual and communal, and constituted by various practices which make the wintry environs homely, the limited physical operations afforded to skiers confirm boarders’ judgements about their social inflexibility and conservative disposition: They can’t sit down. How annoying is that? They’ve got to stand up all day, legs burning, absolutely bollocked. We can just drift along, have a little sit down, have a chill out, have a smoke, have a picnic. (Mick, 24, ‘in between jobs’)

According to such assertions, the rigid, conformist and staid physical and social practices of skiers contrast with snowboarders who ‘go out, have a laugh and get drunk’ (Stuart, 23, student). The centrality of expressiveness in snowboarding performance, the showing off of skills to peers, indulgence in mockery and praise, and focus upon stylishness in movement and appearance, clashes with the apparently more quiescent performance of skiers and foregrounds the more informal and


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expressive values of snowboarding in contradistinction to skiers, who are accordingly constructed as part of an imaginary ‘traditional’ middle class. In their interaction with snowy space, skiers and snowboarders literally inscribe their presence, for the different technologies leave distinctive markings that record the movements that they make. With snowboarders, there are parallels with the territorial marking by skateboarders on urban space who, in improvising manoeuvres on handrails, kerbs and other fixtures, leave scratches, streaks and chipped surfaces (Borden, 2001: p. 253). Similarly, snowboarders write on the snow with their boards, ‘defacing’ the piste for the skiers. Whereas skiers tend not to displace snow, because of the ways in which they laterally veer and come to a halt, boarders carve away areas of snow in explosions of spray, manoeuvres that can diminish the cover on slopes. One interviewee accused boarders of ‘messing up’ the slopes, further detailing how skiers hate to ride over the carvings made in the snow by snowboarders because they disrupt the preferred smooth surfaces, changing the aesthetics of space and the skiing performances enacted upon them. Beside these divergent ways of descending, snowboarding is more concerned with the performing of tricks, individual manoeuvres and improvised enactions. An array of specialist, gymnastic moves are endowed with a particular terminology and mean little to non-boarders. These exploits – the ‘backside bluntslide’, ‘full cab stepdown’, ‘chicken salad’ and ‘indie nosebone’ – are performed by boarders to impress fellow participants: ‘I threw a backside five followed by a frontside nine and planned to finish with a crippler’ (Dave, 23, marketer). Such actions and terminologies tactically exclude skiers and distinguish them from boarders who are again endowed with an illusory, ‘authentic’ identity suggestive of the ‘street’ and the lower classes. Sensual Experience Boarders just want to have fun, do something that is a bit more exciting. Skiing is for boring people who just ski down a hill slowly. (Jonas, 21, trainee chef)

In addition to marking their distinction from skiers through their embodied performance, snowboarders reflexively draw attention to the somatic, sensual experience of the slopes that are generated by such styles of movement. There are resonances with Borden’s (2001: p. 28) depiction of the skateboard, which becomes ‘a lived component of the body, its actions and its self-image in relation to the terrain’. The fluid movement down slope interspersed with flamboyant gestures and explosive manoeuvres is a particularly sensual and immanent engagement, more abandoned and decontrolled, and more improvisational in the ways in which participants interact with the snowy environment. As one boarder asserts, drawing out the comparison with skiing, ‘it’s the whole scare factor that makes snowboarding such fun!’ (Esther, 20, student). Here again, snowboarders do not articulate a cogent ideological position but trade on immediacy and sensual immersion which, they assert, contrast with the over-regulated bodies and confined sensuality of skiers. Implicitly, snowboarding embraces and changes the spatial through momentary engagement, and tends to be more concerned with aesthetics and the flow of immanent experience than a carefully replicated enaction. This ecstatic and intense engagement with the material

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world, like other action sports, involves a ‘switch from cognitive to sub-cognitive thought’ (Franklin, 2003: p. 231). Accordingly, snowboarders enact an instinctive and improvisational response to snowy space, in which instant decisions are called for in rapid movement, involving a deep engagement with the qualities of snow and gradient. Like surfing, snowboarding foregrounds ‘ecstatic feelings of oneness with the environment, the loss of self in the activity and an intense awareness of the moment’ (Stranger, 1999: p. 268). The recouping of expressive, improvisational and sensual experience into the articulation of snowboarding identity exemplifies what Lash (1999) calls ‘aesthetic reflexivity’. Here bodily sensation and affect is central to identity formation and transmission, and this also implies the development of a performative sensibility that accepts indeterminacy, in contradistinction to a controlled, self-reflexive embodied disposition. Sensations can only indicate potential meaning and are therefore ‘not graspable by concepts, but only via feeling, only via the imagination’ (Lash, 1999: p. 200). Snowboarders’ critique of skiers seems to bear parallels with Elias’s (1994) notion of the ‘civilised body’ wherein a series of bodily techniques, a disposition and ideas appropriate to comportment epitomise propriety. Despite the difficulty of expressing and capturing stylistic, performative and experiential distinctions, snowboarders tend to utilise two distinct tropes for accounting for the contrast between themselves and skiers. Rhetorics of Class and Coolness We argue that the conflict between snowboarders and skiers is that between middle class groups, embodied struggles which mobilise different corporeal dispositions and techniques of the body in displaying clothing style, moving down slopes and experiencing action. Bourdieu astutely observes that ‘orientations to the body become more finely differentiated within the dominant classes’ (Shilling, 2003: p. 115). Indeed, as we have seen, for skiers, social distinction has been achieved through exclusion and the performance of the ‘correct’ social attributes and conduct. In contrast, snowboarders – theoretically more inclusive in terms of who may participate – are more concerned with the acquisition of cultural capital through drawing upon imaginaries of ‘class’ and ‘cool’: It’s a lot about class and about money and that’s the way it has always been … All they saw was: we used to have nice pretty little runs, it was easy and no one ever cut us up. (Esther, 20, student)

Snowboarders claim that they belong to a lower class than skiers yet this emphasis is illusory and exists only at the level of rhetoric. Instead, as exemplified by the cost of pursuing the sport, snowboarders largely belong to a different middle class fraction within a more decentred field of identity. Featherstone (1991) shows how new middle class groups have mobilised a knowledge of popular culture in their battles for distinction with older, more ‘respectable’, middle class consumers of and authorities about ‘high culture’. Bridge (2001) has described similar strategies adopted by new middle class groups moving into gentrified inner city areas to distinguish themselves from what they perceive as the ‘suburban middle class’.


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Similarly, snowboarders bring to the slopes an embodied, performative disposition associated with urban youth cultures, and a taste for and knowledge of popular culture that contrasts with the bodily conventions and cultural capital typically utilised by skiers. Snowboarders draw upon new libertarian and pleasure-centred middle class identities in contradistinction to the traditional bourgeois mores and dispositions that they conceive as being embodied by skiers. Van Eijck and Mommaas (2004: p. 373) argue that in terms of ‘existing cultural hierarchies, the field of leisure has become polycentric’. Similarly Savage et al. (1992) identified different middle class lifestyles as ‘ascetic, postmodern and undistinctive’, while Wynne and O’Connor (1995) go further in suggesting that traditional modes of maintaining distinction and boundaries of identity through leisure are increasingly unimportant with new pleasure-seeking taste cultures more open to difference and prepared to experiment and sample. Whilst it is undoubtedly important, as Weinzierl and Muggleton (2003: p. 7) argue, that theories about youth cultures are not over-determined by class, which ‘assume a homological unity of class-based practices’, snowboarders nevertheless persistently use class distinctions as a rhetorical and performative tactic to distinguish themselves from their ‘other’, the ‘bourgeois’ skier: Skiing is from the past. Look at their clothes! Look how boring and uptight they are! (Ben, 24, snowboarder, schoolteacher)

Borden maintains that for skaters, the ‘opposite of skateboarding is golf’ (2001: p. 137), which in its style, conservatism and fashion sense is deemed to be in complete contrast to the rebellious aesthetics of skateboarding. Similarly, snowboarders also draw upon their stylistic, performative and experiential differences by asserting that they are ‘cooler’ than skiers, not part of that which is imagined as the ‘straight’ world with its moral and performative conventions. The exclusions perpetrated by skiers upon snowboarders have been reversed, with the deployment of argot, bodily comportment, physical skills, sensual experience, clothing and musical tastes to highlight the irredeemable conservativeness of skiers, who are forever excluded from the realm of the ‘cool’, a form of ‘subcultural’ capital that is part of a broader global process (Pountain & Robins, 2000). Despite this rhetoric to distinguish and exclude, identities, modes of performance and embodied experience on the slopes are not static. For despite the apparently total opposition between snowboarders and skiers, there has been some rapprochement with the evolution of a new form of skiing that is closer in form to snowboarding. Freestyle skiing, which utilises much shorter ‘carver’ skis, is preoccupied with performing a range of movements and tricks that are more attuned to the style, attitudes and expressive performances of snowboarders than to the mono-directional enactions of other skiers. Making use of the snowboarder terminology to perform the ‘helicopter’, ‘doggy’, ‘ollie’, ‘Swedish jump’ and other, more specific manoeuvres, these youthful free skiers are apt to ask boarders for tips on tricks and gravitate to the board parks at resorts. Distinctions based on class towards this new syncretic form are still articulated, for instance, as one snowboarder exclaimed, freestyle skiers are: ‘crazy posh kids who are trying to be slightly rebellious but they don’t want to take up snowboarding because it’s too beneath them’ (Rob, 24, musician). However, the two groups

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largely treat each other with mutual respect given the adoption by freestyle skiers of the performative and experiential codes favoured by snowboarders. ‘Subcultural’ boundaries are more fluid than it may appear because of the cultural and performative cross-fertilisations which are inevitable in shared space, blurring assertions that skiers are invariably the antithesis of snowboarding culture. Conclusion Like many other forms of identity based upon lifestyle, snowboarding identity is increasingly constituted at a global scale through mediascapes, and through collective and individual performances. We have pointed out the intertextualities between youth and lifestyle sports cultures, which rather than constituting selfcontained cultural identities promiscuously borrow from numerous sources, adopting and adapting clothes, musical forms, argot and actions from a heterodox range of other cultural formations. We have shown how, in common with many other contestations over space, embodied performance is used to gain status amongst snowboarders and mark the difference between what is perceived as the staid, ‘middle class’, conservative pursuit of skiing with the expressive, sensually engaged, rebellious, ‘cool’ performance of snowboarding. As in other contests between lifestyle sports groups, the performance of contrasting identities and competing choreographies invest space with different symbolic and sensual qualities. The conflicts between skiers and snowboarders are part of a broader, uneven process in which the competing performances of diverse styles of movement attempt to claim space, most notably in the sphere of leisure, within what Borden (2001: p. 126) calls the fluid ‘emerging meta-space of global mobility’ in which identity is located locally and globally and Franklin (2003: p. 225) refers to as the ‘wider geography of muscular tourism’. Within these symbolic leisure spaces there are ongoing battles to territorialise space, to claim it from other users and from those who have controlled space by establishing rules and conventions about what constitute ‘appropriate’ embodied functions, performances and symbolic meanings. Acknowledgements Thanks to Julian Holloway, Ben Wells and the reviewers who offered constructive and helpful suggestions. References Appadurai, A. (1990) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy, in: M. Featherstone (Ed.) Global Culture, pp. 295–310 (London: Sage). Atkinson, M. & Wilson, B. (2002) Bodies, subcultures and sports, in: J. Maguire & K. Young (Eds) Theory, Sport and Society, pp. 375–395 (London: JAI Press). Bennett, A. & Kahn-Harris, K. (2004) Introduction, in: A. Bennett & K. Kahn-Harris (Eds) After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, pp. 1–18 (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Booth, D. (2004) Surfing: from one (cultural) extreme to another, in: B. Wheaton (Ed.) Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity and Difference, pp. 94–109 (London: Routledge).


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