This article highlights the importance of humour and laughter in analyses of ethnicity and race in everyday life, and contributes to the growing anthropological engagement with the role of the ludic in social life. Focusing on pupil interaction in an ethnically and racially diverse London school, it argues that while peer classification practices can lead to reification of ethnic and racial differences, ludic interactions have cross-cutting, counter-balancing or liquefying effects. In interactions of humour, ethnic and racial differences can become the very material from which banter and laughter are created, constituting a convivial sociality that manifests closeness at the same time as difference. Such interactions enable peers to address their racial and ethnic differences, and a wider context of prejudice and racism, lightly, 'making fun out of' what could potentially divide and distance them.
Focusing on pupils in the run up to their GCSEs exams, this article examines notions of success, worth and ‘doing your best’ as they emerge in everyday life in a London secondary school. This discussion is in critical dialogue with debates on neoliberalism and the particular interdisciplinary relations they entail. Whilst recognising that neoliberalism represents an important arena of shared exchange, the author also argues that we need to be wary of writing out the complexities of lived experience as we utilise these analytical framings. Drawing from 14 months’ ethnographic fieldwork, the author highlights how performance and audit shape everyday life in school. Whilst these practices rest on processes of commensuration – the production of equivalence – a focus on the emergence of different forms of value and worth draws attention to the incommensurable dimensions of selves also in circulation within school. Furthermore, a focus on the care extended by teachers to all their pupils, not just the ones defined as ‘successful’ within the terms of audit and performance, highlights the importance of an ordinary ethics within school that cannot necessarily be analysed in terms of broader political projects of inequality.
This article explores the relationship between friendship, personhood, and ethics among girls in a London school. While a Western ideal of friendship is posited as a personal, private, and spontaneous relationship between autonomous individuals, I argue that girls’ friendships are a complex entanglement and interaction between forensic and mimetic dimensions of the self. Girls’ ideals of friendship, and practices of making friends, suggest forensic pre‐constituted selves acting with volition in order to become closer to other selves. However, bitching, exclusion, and breaking friendships foreground mimetic dimensions as girls shape each other and themselves according to gendered ethical criteria. Examining these analytical strands offers insight into how individuality is produced through sociality in everyday life.
IntroductionEntering Collingson School past the original 1920s building, and into the complex of squat, modern buildings, the "It Girls" were hard to miss. They sat arranged like a tableau on the elevated platform that skirts the main school building. This friendship group territory, where they spent all their lunch-times and break-times (recess), reflected their highly visible position within the Year. As the highest status girl group in Year 11 (aged 15 -16), the girls were described by their peers as the most "good looking" and as such the most "seen and known". But the girls were also looking; their position was a good one for observing pupils walking past, and comments were often evaluations of other girls' appearance. These critiques could be highly specific, concerning details such as eyebrow shape ("look at her eye brows today, they look like McDonald's arches"); make-up choice ("she's quite pretty actually, she wears red lip-liner though"), or evaluations of body shape ("she's so skinny") and attractiveness ("I think she's really pretty"). In this London secondary school in which I did my fieldwork, an intensity of looking and seeing was a pervasive feature of peer relations and facilitated the frequent evaluations between peers. For girls particularly, these evaluations often concerned physical appearance and body shape.Bodily dissatisfaction and negative body image among teenage girls are causes of great concern in contemporary Euro-America, and increasingly globally (Anderson-Fye 2012; Becker 2004; Holmqvist and Frisén 2010). The proliferation of media images of thin fashion models or celebrities in contemporary society is frequently identified as a key cause of this dissatisfaction (Coleman 2009; Liimakka 2008). Reading straight from these cultural forms, it is clear to see a pervasive body ideal at work. As Susan Bordo (1993) influentiallyIn the context of everyday life in Collingson School, this perspective enables us to recognize the particular ways pupils were "learning to see" in relation to local, as well as global, aesthetic ideals and regimes of value. The perceptual activities of looking and seeing were interwoven in their discourses of visibility, as part of which "being seen" was evidence of status. From this perspective, "good looking" and "looking good" were two aspects of the same processes of peer evaluation, which emerged as part of co-participation in peer communities of practice, which also included shared (although disputed) gendered notions of appropriateness and acceptability. For the girls, evaluations of looking good were often expressed through the idiom of physical appearance. Through compliments and bitching (talking badly about someone behind their back), girls made each other aware they were being seen. Both success ("looking good") and failure ("looking bad") were often crystallized in terms of physical appearance. These processes were structured according to dominant ideals of slenderness, body and beauty (Bordo 2003), but cannot be reduced to them. I conclude by highlig...
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