G I L L I A N E VA N S

Learning, violence and the social

structure of value1

What, if anything, can the special situation of the ethnographer as a novice teach us
more generally about the way that relations between people come to be structured over
time? The question acknowledges that learning is central to the ethnographic project
and really asks whether or not the study of processes of learning can advance theory
building in anthropology more generally. Of course, the question is not a new one. The
American culture and personality school of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and socialisation
or enculturation theories of the 1960s and 1970s which aimed to move beyond the
limitations of that school, have, like the more recent cognitive anthropological work
of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond, all attempted to understand how people learn in
childhood what they later come to take for granted as cultural knowledge. In this sense
the ethnographer as novice is analogous to the child as cultural apprentice.
It is because childhood learning is central to the process of becoming a particular
kind of person that every ethnographic endeavour – designed to understand the
collective distinctiveness of specific peoples and the unique particularity of the
individuals making up the collective – must by definition rely on some notion of
learning, even when it is an assumed one. Usually, where a theory of learning is
not made explicit, it is taken for granted that children have somehow been properly
socialised and that there is no need therefore to consider such processes further because
learning is thought to pertain to children and childhood and not to adults, who are
the more typical subjects of anthropological research. The implications of challenging
anthropological assumptions about learning are two-fold: it is not just a question of
asking if an assumed model of childhood socialisation is a good enough theory of
learning, but also of whether or not there is any theoretical value in thinking about
social structure in terms of on-going processes of learning in adulthood.
Attempting to elaborate on Bourdieu’s theory of practice by going beyond
the unexamined idea of learning-as-inculcation upon which it depends, Lave and
Wenger (with their explanation of situated learning) aim like Toren (in her broadly
phenomenological and anthropological model) to give an ethnographic description of
exactly what goes on in the process of learning. Overcoming the idea of the child
or novice as a passive recipient of adult ideas and without succumbing to an overly
self-determining notion of ‘agency’, these theorists focus on learning as an active and
intrinsically social process which always takes place at the level of the person.

1 This is a version of a paper given at the EASA biennial conference in Vienna 2004 on the theme
‘Proximity and Distance’. My participation as a ‘Younger Scholar’ was made possible by the
generosity of a grant from the Marie Curie Foundation.

Social Anthropology (2006), 14, 2, 247–259. © 2006 European Association of Social Anthropologists 247
doi:10.1017/S0964028206002576 Printed in the United Kingdom
 It is not taken for granted in this kind of research that it is obvious how ‘social
construction’ works or that it can be assumed to be something to do with vaguely
conceived processes of socialisation in childhood; neither does it seek the workings of
social learning in the analysis of discourse, which exists at one or more remove from
social relations in action. Rather, it sets out to explain how the structuring of social
relations at all ages – from child to adulthood, and from birth until death – implies a
learning phenomenon at work. In this light children and novices, and by implication
persons of all kinds, are seen to be continuously making sense in practice of who they
can be in relation to other people’s historically specific ideas about who it is appropriate
for them to become.
Focusing on children and young people’s learning and comparing this with the
processes of learning which the ethnographer experiences as a novice in the field, I
aim in a forthcoming work (Evans 2006) to develop a person-centred theory of value:
one that hinges on an analysis of learning – including what and how the ethnographer
learns – as a participatory and socially situated process. I explain how becoming a
particular kind of person entails ongoing learning about the specific structure of one’s
relations with others, and propose that participation in those relations always takes
the form of an exchange relation (whether mediated or unmediated). This means, in
effect, that the value of persons, practices and things becomes mutually specified and
potentially transformed in the process of learning how to relate to others by constantly
working out what constitutes appropriate exchanges among them.

The ethnographer as novice

For the ethnographer, wanting to learn about a people whose way of life might seem
strange and observing from a peripheral position how social relations work in practice,
the challenge is to participate appropriately alongside her hosts. The legitimacy of her
position as a marginal participant is given by the permission that has been granted for
her to be there in the field to learn. From the beginning the ethnographer’s learning
is evinced in increasingly successful participation, and with this success comes gradual
incorporation into a specifically structured ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger
1991).
Through the process of learning, which in practice means making sense of the
kind of participation that is required of her and of others, the ethnographer begins to
understand the form of relations among the people she is studying, and in learning
she assumes a particular position vis-à-vis others. Part of the ethnographer’s challenge,
as I understand it, is to capture some sense of how, in structuring her relations with
others – that is, making sense of other people’s social position in relation to her own –
there is inevitably some kind of bodily accommodation to be made. In this sense social
position is perhaps better thought of as Bourdieu (1977) suggests as a disposition that
is an embodied understanding of a particular way of being among others in the world.
There is, however, always an emotional accommodation to be made. In this sense
knowledge and emotion are inseparably related through complex processes of learning
(Furth 1987; Damasio 1995). As the ethnographer attempts to make sense of a very
different way of relating to others compared to what she is used to, she feels what it
is like to desire to do in practice what is considered by others to be appropriate for
her to do in order to belong among them. This process of learning how to participate

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appropriately, and of exploring thereby what it means to become a different kind of
person, always entails for the ethnographer feelings of acquiescence or resistance. She
comes to terms with her new social position by learning how to accommodate to the
limitations that are placed on the possibilities of her participation in various spheres of
exchange over time.
The ongoing development of an appropriate disposition vis-à-vis others can be
analysed as an on-going evaluation, which is worked out in practice and depends
on emotional reasoning about the value and the goodness or rightness of what
participation and increasing incorporation into the community feels like and is worth.
Every specifically structured form of participation therefore implies an ethic which is a
continuously emerging understanding about what it is good – and by implication bad –
for people to do and, through doing, to become. Structuring one’s relations with others
is therefore always characterised by a degree of emotional tension.
A problem arises for the ethnographer when the increasing proximity that
developing empathy with her informants implies is interrupted or jeopardised because
the ethical disposition that appropriate participation among them entails is at odds with
what she feels it is right to do. The interruption of developing empathy then becomes
an act of resistance to the form that participation is assumed to take. The question then
arises whether or not the ethnographer’s only option is for her to distance herself from
what belonging among these people entails. Or perhaps, as I suggest below, the extreme
example of the ethnographer in crisis can be used to explore the question of whether or
not resistance and the possibility of conflict are, to a greater or lesser degree, intrinsic
aspects of the processes through which people learn what the specific structure of social
relations means for their own position vis-à-vis others. Take my own fieldwork, for
example.

Bermondsey

I conducted ethnographic research in Bermondsey, central south-east London, during

1999 and 2000. Occupying roughly a square mile, Bermondsey has the River Thames
between London Bridge and Tower Bridge as its northern boundary and the Old Kent
Road and Walworth Road in the south and west respectively. During the industrial
revolution Bermondsey was known as the ‘larder of London’ because of its dockside
factories processing imported foodstuffs from countries the world over. Nowadays,
despite demographic disruption after the Second World War, the influx of immigrants
and profound economic transformations arising from the closure of the docks in
the 1970s, those ex-dockers and factory workers who remain, their families and
descendants, continue to conceive the community in terms of closely knit ties of both
residence and kinship criteria: what people refer to as being born and bred Bermondsey.
The historical precedence of fierce territorial rivalry between Bermondsey people
and the ‘Roaders’ who live on the wrong side of the Old Kent and Walworth Roads
undermines any idea that the white working class in London are homogeneous and
emphasises what anyone moving through London should know: that working-class
London is divided into territorial areas (manors) about which people continue to be
fiercely proud. Apart from these territorial distinctions there are several other relevant
distinctions within Bermondsey itself. First, I discovered that class distinctions are
best understood ethnographically in terms of the difference between common and

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posh people. Further distinctions are then drawn between types of common people in
Bermondsey itself, but the differences between common people recede in the face of the
perceived threat to the basis of community belonging that is posed by the increasing
presence of non-white people, including first and second-generation immigrants of
African, Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin, who are thought of by ‘real Bermondsey
people’ as outsiders who do not belong. This perception of threat, seen as a death
knell for Bermondsey, has led to a shift in the idea of group relatedness among real
Bermondsey people away from kinship and residence criteria towards an explicit ultra-
conservative cultural nationalism, racially conceived as whiteness and reflected in (but
not represented by) the right-wing politics of the British National Party.
So, in what forms of participation are these ideas about what it means to belong
in Bermondsey substantiated in practice, and with what implications for me as an
ethnographer?

‘Kitchen germs’

I meet Lee, who is sixteen, outside a youth club on a freezing February evening in
2001; he is having a puff (smoking marijuana), waiting for the doors to be unlocked
by the youth workers. Wondering who I am he asks what I’m doing there. I introduce
myself and tell him that I’m writing a book about Bermondsey bods (bods are tough
young men with a reputation on the street). He replies, teasing me, ‘What – Kitchen
Germs?’ Not understanding what he means, I look at him askance. He explains that
Kitchen Germs is what Roaders (white working class enemies from the other side of
Bermondsey’s boundaries with Walworth) call Bermondsey bods: Berms rhymes with
Germs. I laugh at the analogy Roaders make between Bermondsey bods and infectious
germs penetrating the boundaries between them, and ask Lee if he is from Bermondsey.
He tells me he was born and grew up in Peckham (to the south) but like many Peckham
white youths he’s not proud of it. I ask him why and he replies, ‘‘Cos of all the blacks’,
and adds, ‘I never hang out down there’.
Once we are inside the club, sitting on the comfortable chairs in the warmth of
the pool-table room, I ask Lee what it is about black people he doesn’t like. He says,
‘‘Cos they’re scum, they’re thieves, muggers, murderers’. Lee’s friend Mark, who is
a born and bred Bermondsey bod, interrupts to explain his worst fear which is that
soon the whole of Bermondsey will be taken over by black people. He emphasises,
‘I hate them. They come into the housing estates and ruin them because they come
from living in mud huts, and then that’s why they don’t know how to keep their places
clean and before you know it, it’s spoiled where they can’t even put their rubbish in
the skip properly’. He continues, ‘Look at them new houses on Lynton Road that’s
full of blacks now and it’s naughty (dangerous) there now. I wouldn’t even walk down
there on my own’. Another bod comes over to ask what we’re doing, and Lee tells him,
‘We’re telling her about the blacks’, and the youth responds, ‘What niggers? Line them
all up and shoot them. Cunts. Round them up, that’s what I say.’ His friend, who is
playing pool, overhears, and agrees with Lee, Mark and the others. They all laugh while
I to try to disguise my feelings of horror.
Suddenly a young black guy walks into the club and several of the bods including
Lee check for him (greet him respectfully), asking ‘All right Vince?’ This is not a matter
of courtesy because bods don’t greet people they don’t check for. Stunned by the

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apparent paradox between the previous conversation about how much he hates black
people and the respectful greeting Lee has just extended to a black person, I resume
our conversation. I ask him, ‘How it can be that when no black people are in the room
everyone is “chatting all that”2 about niggers and then, when a black person walks in,
everyone checks for him?’ Lee explains, ‘It’s because we know him. He’s all right’. I
tell him that I don’t understand how that fits with him being so racist, and he explains,
‘I don’t think of myself as racist ‘cos I’m friends with so many black guys. It’s just that
some of them are all right’. He holds his head in his hands for a moment in confusion,
and then looks up at me, ‘I don’t even know what racism is, you know. If you want to
understand how we feel you should watch a film called American History X’. ‘Why?’ I
ask, ‘How would that help?’. And Lee replies, ‘There’s a part in it when the white guy
stamps on the black guy’s head. It makes me go crazy like I want to go out and see that
happen to all of them [black people], but then in the end of the film the white guy ends
up being friends with a black guy. That’s what it’s all about.’

American Histor y X

When I watch the film, despite the continuing horror that I feel, I appreciate what Lee
is trying to explain about how he feels. There are parallels between the English and
American cases in which dispossessed white youths struggle to overcome the differences
between them in order to compete against the influence of increasing numbers of black
gangs in the area in which they all have to live. What interests me most about the
film, however, is the moment when the protagonist, Derek, the fledgling leader of a
white-power organisation finally overcomes his refusal to engage with the young black
prisoner with whom he has been assigned to work in the prison laundry.
Derek is in prison for the manslaughter of two black men who broke into his car
one night when it was parked outside his house. One of these black guys is the one who
had his skull crushed when Derek stamped on his head after forcing him at gun point to
open his jaw over the edge of the pavement. In prison, the inmates are divided among
themselves: whites, Hispanics and blacks. Derek only manages to survive certain death
at the hands of the black inmates who know about his reputation and his crime because
he is able to ally himself with the other white-power inmates. Distinctive because of
the specific tattoos they wear on their arms, Derek takes off his shirt in the gym to
reveal to the white-power gang members the Nazi swastika that is tattooed on his chest.
The gang take him under their wing, affording him a measure of protection, but Derek
quickly becomes disillusioned with them because he witnesses the leader of these men
making surreptitious and lucrative exchanges with the Hispanics. In Derek’s eyes, this
exchange is a contradiction of the vehemently racist position that the leader espouses in
private conversation. So, behind the leader’s back Derek begins, among the other gang
members, to accuse him of hypocrisy.
Meanwhile in the prison laundry where Derek is on work duty he is forced to
work alongside a cheerful young black inmate who tries determinedly to get to know
him. Remaining silent, unforthcoming and true to the consistent prejudice that his
racist ideology requires, Derek refuses to participate in exchange of any kind with this

2 ‘Chatting all that’ means talking confidently and ‘talking big’, making bold statements.

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cheerful young black guy. In time, however, the relentless efforts of the light-hearted
young black guy begin to have an effect on Derek. The young man’s persistent banter
is based on his understanding that despite their racial differences, they do, as two
men and young American men in particular, have things in common: their passion for
competing basketball teams – the Lakers and the Celtics – for example, and a yearning
for the company of women. Finally the young guy manages to make Derek laugh and
despite his best efforts the cold war that Derek had attempted to wage against the
black man begins to thaw. Despite the weight of hatred that Derek feels towards black
people in general, a fragile and secret friendship begins to develop with this particular
young black man. As a result of the forced exchanges necessary to the tedious job they
share in the prison laundry a tiny window of opportunity is provided for the men
to find out, even in the face of all the racial conflict in the prison, what they have in
common.
Young white men in Bermondsey, like Lee, face a similarly confusing and dangerous
dilemma. Their peer group and often, for boys like Lee’s friend Mark, their families,
demand the passionate defence of a closely defined territory – the manor (territory) of
Bermondsey. Ideally the defence that is demanded of bods implies a consistently racist
ideology in which there would be no place for black people in their affections. In reality,
the wholly negative idea of black people is shattered by the history of friendships with
black guys that were formed out of the forced exchanges necessary when they all grew
up together at school. The defensive shield of hatred is penetrated with the intimacy of
personal experience. When Lee is alone among bods his generalised feelings of disgust
for black people form an acceptable part of the kind of participation that leads to the
development of the specific kind of disposition that being a bod requires. Depending
on the social situation, however, different kinds of participation become appropriate;
learning is situationally specific. The problem with a genuinely racist ideology is that
there is no allowance for the possibility that there will be situations in which white
and black youths are able to participate together. So it is that Lee can simultaneously
wish to see all black people have their heads stamped on and welcome a particular black
person as his friend.
Watching American History X confirmed what I have come to understand through
my own fieldwork: that getting to know people is all about learning how to enter into
meaningful exchange relations with them. Whether mediated or unmediated, exchange
relations are always the form that participation takes. What makes those relations
meaningful is the potential for the creation and transformation of value between persons
and things. It is our capacity for the development of empathy that is the basis of an
on-going inter-subjective, situational appraisal, which is what the evaluation of worth
depends upon. Focusing on the position of the ethnographer as novice helps us to
appreciate that all of us have had to learn – and now take for granted our disposition
towards a specific form of participation and as an on-going process of learning – our
structural position relative to others, which we are constantly working out in manifold
relations of exchange.
By implication, the structuring of social relations depends on an ongoing process
of learning as participatory practice. What the ethnographer experiences is a special case
of what everyone is going through all the time: the continuous, mostly unconscious
act of making sense of what being in the world among others means; accommodating,
in the sense of acquiescing or resisting, to the form of participation that substantiates
what are considered to be appropriate relations between persons over time.

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C o m m o n a l i t y, c o n f l i c t a n d v i o l e n c e

A problem arises for the ethnographer when a form of participation which she finds
morally repugnant – like racist violence – comes to be held up as the moral good
among her informants. Should she, as an act of protest, refuse to enter into exchange
relations with them, and in so doing deny the validity of their idea of the person, just
as Derek the nascent leader of the white power gang attempted to do to black people
in American History X? Or should she continue with her fieldwork, even when she
feels she can no longer do what she needs to do to belong and when the joy of the
other becomes, through revulsion and fear, the reason for empathetic rejection and a
new desire for distance. Taking a position of moral outrage, easy as it is, is arguably to
suspend intellectually valuable endeavour. Some people routinely make meaning out
of violence, so it is worth trying to understand how a potential for violence can be
implicit in the structuring of social relations. The only way to approach the problem is
therefore to make an historical analysis of it, not just in the sense of trying to portray
the broader, more conventional historical perspective, but also of trying to understand
how a particular disposition has developed over time, at the level of the child and later
the adult (Toren 1990; 1999).
Ethnographically this enables me to understand how young people in Bermondsey
are making sense of, and constitute as a contemporary concern, the racist xenophobia
that is in truth the transformation of a much older historical precedent – the territorial
rivalry between white working class people across the wrong side of Bermondsey’s
boundaries on the Old Kent and Walworth Road. In any social situation the question
of who is admitted as a legitimate participant always simultaneously raises the question
of who (including the ethnographer) might in the end be excluded. The structural
distinctiveness of the group depends as much on processes of inclusion as it does on
processes of resistance within the group as well as exclusion from it; the potential for
conflict to greater or lesser degrees will always therefore be present.
In the youth club, because I don’t participate in the exchange of vehemently racist
conversation, remaining silent and probably looking scared, Lee becomes suspicious
of me. My refusal to participate, even if borne of fear, is in itself an act of resistance;
observation alone is insufficient to participate effectively. Watching me carefully, Lee
asks, ‘Where does the father of your children come from?’ I answer calmly, knowing
that I am going to tell him because he suspects it, that my partner is black. Not to tell
him this, or to try to conceal if from him would be to betray the empathy that was
developing between us, so I answer as matter of factly as I can: ‘He’s a black guy. He
grew up in the East End of London and his parents are from Nigeria’. Instantly Lee
stands up, pushes his chair back abruptly and recoils in disgust. Moving away from me,
putting distance between us, he says, ‘That’s not right. How can you do that? How can
you sit here and listen to us talking rash [in a racist way] like that and not say anything?
I think it’s wrong what you’ve done. People should stick to their own kind. White
people should have babies with white people. That’s how it is.’
In a single instant then, I am transformed in Lee’s eyes from a person of potential
value to an object of disgust. What I betray about my disposition in confessing that
I desire a black man as my partner excludes me instantaneously from the kind of
participation that would be required to belong, to be valued and, in being valued, to be
desired. On my way home from the youth club that evening, reflecting as I drive on
everything that happened and all that was said, I am unable to subsume my own feelings

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of fear and revulsion any longer. I am forced to pull over and get out of car to vomit by
the side of the road. I don’t tell my partner what happened because I’m worried that he
won’t want me to go back to the youth club, but I mention it here because my physical
reaction was theoretically revealing. My argument is that a person-centred theory of
value, to be of any use to us, must aim towards an explanation of the development
of empathy as a historical specific, deeply felt and embodied disposition. Only this
kind of theory would allow us to understand, first, how a young man in becoming a
Bermondsey bod comes to find the idea of the murder of black people enjoyable and,
second, why this literally makes me sick.

The difference between what people say and what

they do

The ethnographer’s desire to learn thus legitimates the mastery that people have over
her. She is the perpetual novice, forever at everyone’s mercy, and yet as people endeavour
either to show her how to participate more effectively or to limit the possibilities of her
participation, they are learning too. They want to put to the test their ideas about what
kind of person they think she is, and what that might mean for their own positions
relative to her and vis-à-vis each other. Peoples’ ideas about who the ethnographer is
when she is not in the field place a limit on whom, and what, she can become among them
and also how far she can accept what becoming a viable person among them entails. In
the end my continuing fieldwork in the youth club was only possible because, despite
everything that had happened between us, the bods respected me because I was writing a
book about them. What bods want more than anything is to be known, to be recognised
and respected; their worst fear is to become a ‘nobody’, someone that no one ‘checks
for’. When he sees me again, Lee asks me, ‘Are you going to put down in your book
everything that we said [about blacks]?’ I reply, ‘Yes, I am, but don’t worry, I won’t
use anyone’s real names’. Lee, irritated now, responds, ‘What’s the point of that? We’re
trying to make a name for ourselves’.
Having heard what Lee and the other bods had to say about black people, it would
have been easy for me to jump to conclusions and to accept what they said as self-evident
substantiation of what such young men in Bermondsey are likely to do in practice. I
could have assumed that in their late teenage years they form white-only peer groups on
the basis of vehemently racist exchanges in language, and in some cases violent assaults
on black people. There is no doubt that the incidence of racial violence in Bermondsey
is one of the highest in the country. Further ethnography in the youth club proved,
however, how short-sighted it would have been to assume that what people say is the
same as what they do.
Because learning is situational, and social constraints vary widely from one situation
to another, it is essential to compare and contrast how youths like Lee are continuously
making sense of who they can become in relation to what others expect of them in
a range of often very different situations. What is crucial about Lee getting to know
and like a black person like Vince, is that it recognises the common ground between
them. This common ground is created out of specific kinds of exchanges in which
boys, usually at school, discover that they share an interest in similar kinds of physical
competence such as playing football, fighting, playing computer games, and so on.
However, the racial prejudice that bods begin to emphasise during their territorial

254 G I L L I A N E VA N S
teenage years requires that they start to limit or resist participation in the kinds of
exchanges in which friendship with black boys is constituted, though this is easier said
than done.

British Garage music3

Youth clubs occupy an intermediate position between the constraints of the household
and the freedom of the street. In winter months they provide respite from the freezing
cold and dark and a place to hang out in relative safety. In line with the youths’ own
interests, the clubs provide amenities such as table tennis, pool and snooker tables,
indoor and outdoor football pitches, computing facilities and, in some places, training
for boxing. During my fieldwork the most recent addition to the range of facilities
clubs used to entice youths in from the streets where trouble usually starts were DJ
(disc jockey) decks – turntables on which youths can practise ‘spinning tracks’, ‘chatting
on the mic’ [microphone] and dream of becoming famous Garage DJs, with a dedicated
following and a spot on one of the pirate radio stations.
In the youth club I see the decks working for the first time and observe the youths’
passionate preoccupation with the music. There are two turntables, with a DJ operating
the sound system, including a sampler, a mixer and a microphone, but I notice that none
of the youths dares to take the more charismatic risk of picking up the mic to chat some
lyrics over the DJ’s mixes. The DJ mixes the track from one deck into the beat of the
track on the other (spinning tracks), adding personalised sound effects from the sampler.
I look over the turntable to see what tracks he is spinning. On the first turntable there
is no mistaking the trade mark names of the legendary Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg – icons
of Black American urban rap music – printed on the label of the shiny black vinyl. The
track is a Garage re-mix of a rap track called ‘Next episode’.
I watch the young DJ, quietly confident in front of admiring eyes, deftly managing
the decks. While he presses the head phones to his ear with one hand he uses the other
to mix the Snoop track on one deck into the sound of the track on the other. Familiar
by now with the atmosphere of sulky intimidation among the youths, I am aware of
the volatile tension created by the need for the young men to be constantly attentive
to the changing pecking order, depending on who is coming and going in the club. The
possibility of verbal and physical conflict is constant, and respect for the authority of
the youth workers is virtually non-existent. All the youth workers explained to me
how, at the beginning of their employment, they had to endure the humiliating and
frightening experience of being terrorised by the bods. The bods only afford respect
after a youth worker has proved his or her staying power in the face of abuse or
actual physical intimidation. Male youth workers who are weak and unassertive are
continuously harassed, and one in particular is periodically hit on the back of the head
as bods slap him as they walk by, laughing at his inability to stick up for himself.
Added to the palpable tension in the room is the excitement created by the DJ on
the decks: music pumps loudly from the speakers and bods gather at the front of the

3 Garage is a descriptive term for a particular kind of underground music that became popular in
Britain at the end of the 1990s. It is differentiated from other forms such as hip-hop or house by
the distinctive relation between the lyrics, melody, vocal presentation and beat, as well as the radical
innovation in production techniques which made it more widely accessible as a musical form.

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sound system. Most just watch in silent admiration, taking in the skill of the DJ, but
every now and then a youth will step forward to dare to try and win the respect of the
DJ and his peers by chatting on the mic. If he fails to impress he risks being laughed off
the mic and humiliated. Via the medium of these highly specific exchanges the rivalry
between those who can spin tunes and or chat on the mic unfolds, and the peer group
is integrated in a high adrenaline atmosphere of competitive equality.
Seeing the decks in operation I begin to learn about the special talent of the DJ and
appreciate something of the phenomenal popularity of Garage among young people in
London and beyond. The excitement is muted, in part because all the youths are stoned
(high on marijuana), but also because of the necessity for reserved cool. Nevertheless
the enthusiasm and preoccupation of these youths is complete. The social process of
learning how to participate appropriately in the Garage music phenomenon depends on
a finely differentiated mastery over specific objects of shared significance. DJs and MCs
spin and chat a new dynamic, creating in the youth clubs a limited sphere of exchange
with decks, mics and tracks. The possibility of youths creating and transforming their
personal values by gaining respect and winning prestige is made in the moment out of
Garage music.
‘Everyone wants to be a famous DJ now,’ a bod tells me. ‘Everyone wants to
be famous because then you’ve got respect, and everyone talks about you using your
name. There’s even respect in having someone give you a shout on one of the pirate radio
stations. Your name is heard, you are known and checked for. You’re not a nobody.’
DJs are the new heroes in Bermondsey, and what matters to bods above all is that
they make a name for themselves. Whether it is through territorial and racist hatred,
violent street battles with other Bermondsey youths or outsiders from across the wrong
side of the Walworth Road, or by way of tense exchanges at the mic, what matters it that
bods have got a reputation to keep up. Making Garage music becomes just one means
among others for a bod to win respect from his peers. A passion for making music is
certainly new for young people in Bermondsey, but it is extraordinarily productive be-
cause it redefines in more creative terms what hanging out on the street implies for tough
young men with reputations to forge. One youth explains to me, ‘Garage music has
done more than anything else to bring black and white people together in Bermondsey’.

Garage music is for ever yone

As I watch the young white DJ it strikes me as ironic that so many white youths who
pride themselves on how much they hate black people, are simultaneously captivated
by the skill of the DJ. Vehemently racist talk appears to be contradicted by bods’
participation in practices that demonstrate their increasing familiarity with what were
once thought of as the kind of thing that only black Caribbean men used to do, such as
listening to certain kinds of music, being DJs and smoking weed. The DJ, the facilitator
of black, specifically African-Caribbean and African-American music in London for
at least the past fifty years, now takes his place behind the gangster as the local hero
in Bermondsey. This surprising development reveals the extent to which the interface
between black and white youths in Bermondsey is as extraordinarily creative as it is
hostile and defensive. A closer examination reveals the deeply personal struggle of
individuals like Lee who are trying to cope with a rapidly shifting social landscape in
inner London that is exciting and threatening in equal measure.

256 G I L L I A N E VA N S
 On another night in the youth club one of the self-appointed Garage crews4 comes
in; the crew takes its name from the road where the youths in the crew grew up
together on the eastern periphery of Bermondsey. This is a mixed group of black and
white youths. Dominant among them is Winston, a young black guy who confidently
walks into the club with his crew and boldly takes up the mic. He begins to chat over
the tunes that the white DJ I observed before is spinning. No one disputes Winston’s
right to take the mic because he is known and respected; he is good enough to have a
spot on one of the local pirate radio stations.
Requiring dedicated practice and lyrical creativity, the chat is an exchange between
the DJ and the MC (Master Controller) on the mic. The MC chats a fast, syncopated
lyric rapped to the distinctive beat of the Garage track. Chatting is derived from a
combination of Black-American rap and Jamaican toasting styles. Unable to understand
the lyrics because they are chatted so fast and too closely into the mic, I ask Winston
later what he chats about and he responds matter of factly, ‘Sex, drugs and the way life
is’. Explaining to me that ‘breaking into a chat’ is about having the confidence to get
up, knowing that you can deliver and being able to lead by ‘showing people a way’,
Winston is amused when I don’t understand what he means when he says ‘showing
people a way’. Laughing, he spells it out for me, ‘Young people want to hear in music
about ways to deal with the things they have to cope with in real life. Things like money,
the opposite sex, drugs and the police’.
I tell him that it amazes me to see him and his crew in this youth club because
Bermondsey bods have such a racist reputation. I ask him if he is bothered by that.
‘No,’ he replies. ‘I know that people here talk rash [in a racist way] but that’s just
stupidness. If they don’t want to know me, that’s their loss.’ He adds, ‘Everyone here
knows me anyway’. I ask him if Garage music is black people’s music and he vehemently
denies it. ‘Garage music,’ he says, ‘is for everyone.’
Because black and white youths alike are now involved in the production and
enjoyment of Garage music and it is an on-going exchange that they participate in
together, the evolution of Garage as a musical form obscures the history of its evolution.
Because it is the means by which black and white youths are coming together and getting
to know each other, the focus on racial differences is forced, at least temporarily, into
the background.
Winston, whose parents are of Jamaican origin, explains that he moved to
Bermondsey with his family when he started secondary school at the age of eleven.
He tells me that before Garage he was only into rap music which, he says, people think
of as being more black people’s music. The white boys in Winston’s crew, who are
listening attentively, chip in then, saying ‘Look at Eminem though’. They are referring
to the white American rap star, an artist who makes satirical mileage out of his place as
a white rapper in a medium dominated by black men. Winston ignores his friends and
tells me that he used to think Garage music was ‘soft’, until someone dared him to have
a go at chatting himself and then, realising how hard it was, it became like a challenge.
He wanted to prove to himself that he could do it.
To a much greater degree than rap, then, the British Garage phenomenon enables
white and black youths to come together in mutual appreciation of music that may have

4 A crew is the name used to describe a group of boys and youths who come together to practise
spinning tracks and chatting on the mic, so creating the distinctive sound for which they become
renowned.

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its roots in what was once thought of as black people’s music, but which is no longer
understood in those terms. What is important about Garage is its accessibility in terms
of production, and the way that is has been incorporated into the prestige system of
urban youths, both black and white.

Masculinity and violence: A hierarchy of frater nity

What is significant about the white boys in Winston’s crew is that they reject the racist
hatred they feel is typical of certain kinds of Bermondsey bods, like Lee’s mates. Paul,
for example, is defiant in this respect. He explains, ‘The Blue5 is not the centre of the
world. They’re all racist cunts down there’. I ask Paul what makes him different from
them and he explains that his mum told him he should make his own mind up about
black people, and he has. ‘How can I be racist,’ he asks, motioning to Winston. ‘I’ve
grown up with him haven’t I?’ ‘Yeah,’ says Winston, as he leaps on his friend from
behind, getting his neck in a vice-like grip and wrestling him hard to the floor. Waiting
until Paul is nearly choking and I’m scared for his life but trying to remain cool, Winston
laughs long and loud at our fear and lets Paul go, looking pleased to have suffocated
any sentiment out of the moment. I am reminded then that no matter what the latest
social craze is in Bermondsey, or how racism might divide black and white youths in
certain situations, what all these young men growing up in Bermondsey share is a deeper
relationship to their developing masculinity which requires the capacity for violence
as a particular kind of participation. It is in relation to this fundamental potential that
friendship between the boys is constituted as a hierarchy of fraternity.
The experiences of Winston’s Garage crew demonstrate that at the periphery of the
territory where bods from The Blue struggle to define what belonging means, where
black and white youths are more likely to be growing up together on the same estates,
there is the permanent possibility that racist discourses will begin to break down. The
racist bods, who control the centre from The Blue, appear to be fighting a losing battle
to govern relations at the periphery of Bermondsey, where the majority of outsiders like
Winston are to be found. As attempts are made to shore up the boundaries of the actual
and ideological space, the more vociferous racist discourse among the bods becomes. It
is no surprise, therefore, that boundary issues predominate in the bods’ talk, but at the
same time, against this background, it is also clear that a history of shared experience is
gradually building up among young people in Bermondsey.
Fault lines, like those evinced by British Garage, fracture the ideal identity of a racist
ideology and mark the points at which young people break through boundaries which
can only ever be impermeable in discourse. The actual frontier between apparently
opposing groups is continuously breached by the necessity for people living in similar
conditions and under similar constraints – on low incomes in overcrowded public
housing – to negotiate what they have in common, which are the shared material
conditions of existence. The defensive desire to keep the idea of, and hatred for, racial

5 The Blue is the area at the centre of Bermondsey’s territory. It is named after the Blue Anchor pub,
and is at the heart of people’s affections because it is the location of the street market which used to
be the main shopping place before the arrival of the big supermarket chains. Because The Blue is at
the centre, it is where bods often congregate. It is the area where their dominance in the face of the
threat of outsiders is most unassailable.

258 G I L L I A N E VA N S
difference alive in Bermondsey competes on the streets, schools and the landings
of housing estates with the overwhelming likelihood that tolerance and sometimes
friendship grows out of having things like Garage music in common.

Gillian Evans
Department of Anthropology
Brunel University
Uxbridge, Middlesex
UB8 3PH, UK
astanga66@btopenworld.com

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