(Auto)Ethnography Underground: Some French “Fibrils” and “Scratches”

Notes From the Ethnographer’s Underground

Venturing into the underground of the field means attempting to penetrate the researcher’s unconscious and beginning to follow Georges Devereux’s (1967) recommendation for observers of human behavior: to try to understand ourselves to better understand what we then transfer onto our subjects and objects of knowledge. This effort is personal and so therefore is the material it uses. The focus, however, is less on ourselves than on the things and people composing us. This is the aim of this essay, in which I show my “underground” as a foundational research space at the intersection of different biographical fragments, lacking in light: the light that comes from being fully aware of our motives (in some ways impossible to achieve) and from illuminating the “lack” that leads us to look for something in others, who then become the human instruments of our research. Before Devereux, this analytical act was central to the aim pursued by Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris when they founded their ephemeral Collège de Sociologie (1937-1939). Writing about this Collège, Jean Duvignaud (1979) noted that it was a space where “for the first time in France, we saw the beginnings of a connection between mankind’s knowledge of mankind and the trajectory of the individual person uncovering it” (p. 91).

In this text, I wish to return to this avant-garde perspective on what some call the “ethnographic I” (Ellis, 2004). I do so less as a historian than as a practitioner of a reflexive form of writing rooted in little-known and underused French (re)sources. These nevertheless seem to have been pioneering when it comes to questioning research subjects—the combination of who (the subject doing the research) and what (the subject, or topic, been researched)—something that, in the wake of the “reflexive turn” of the 1980s (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986), no ethnographer today would consider failing to undertake. The members of the Collège de Sociologie largely paved the way to this “ethnographic I”: Rather than bringing it out into the open light, they left it in a sort of chiaroscuro, thus preserving the shadows in which writing takes on its turbulence. In this regard, the French novelist and researcher Michel Leiris was a precursor to the autoethnographic approach currently so in vogue, to put it mildly (e.g., Denshire, 2014; Lapadat, 2017). More than anyone else in his time, he situated the ethnographer’s “I” at the intersection of multiple perspectives: those of a form of research in which something resembling the “self” only emerges through our experiences of others, which transform us irrevocably. Already in the 1930s, Leiris had made the impulses of this ethnographic “I” into the epicenter of a form of writing in which descriptions of others are the result of what we ourselves see—or are capable of seeing—through the lens of our own perception of the world, a perception that is less stabilized than it is destabilized by experiences of Otherness (Hand, 2002; Hollier & Jamin, 2017; Riley, 2015).

Toward a Leirisian Autoethnography

Much of Leiris’s work is composed of existential fragments inspired by both surrealism and psychoanalysis: Further detail is impossible here, but key examples include Phantom Africa (Leiris, 1934/2017), Manhood. A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility (Leiris, 1939/1992), and the various volumes of The Rules of the Game (Leiris, 1948-1975/2017). Michel Butor (1960) described this fragmented writing as “dialectical autobiography.” I suggest, instead, broaching it as an ensemble forming not an autobiography but a precursory form of autoethnography where the dialectic consists in the author observing himself through others while, at the same time, observing others through himself. This reflexive sensibility places the existential dimension of the relationship to others at the very foundation of the ethnographic narrative, including the accounts that authors provide of their own engagement. From this perspective, autoethnography appears less as a genre of writing than as a constituent of both research and the ethnographic text. The subjective foundations of the latter—the researcher’s outlook and sensibility, along with their biases—are thus openly avowed as a guiding presence that shapes the investigative approach as a whole (on this point, see, in particular, Denzin, 2003, p. 259). Leiris establishes this very particular kind of (counter)transferential reflexivity as a literary device that is never simply an excuse to return to the self: We might instead talk of a detour to the self. Following the paths taken by various others, into whom the figures of the observer and the author project themselves through a mechanism of transference, we are never returned to something that resembles “ourselves” in the sense of a sameness or a permanence—this is irrevocably lost thanks to its continuous transformations through contact with others, what Devereux (1967, pp. xvi-xx) refers to as countertransference. Identifying this original “lack” in the search for a “self,” framed by the autoethnographic text as an illusion or a foundational erasure (Leiris’s “scratches”), becomes not what we research but the reason why we research . . .

The following pages attempt to identify this erasure, or at least part of this original lack, in my own work. To do so, I take up the fragmented writing of Leiris’s “fibrils” in my own way—by which I mean in an autoethnographic style that is necessarily personal to me—and I offer two forays into my own underground. The first relates to my childhood, whereas the second sees that childhood pattern repeated in adulthood, as a variant of the reason why I research. There is no rationale behind their linkage other than the freedom to link them as two biographical ruptures of an extra-ordinary nature—Norman Denzin (2014) would call them “epiphanies” (p. 28ff)—able to shed light on things that, ordinarily, remain latent or hidden. It is hopefully already clear that what’s important here is not talking about myself; what matters are the paths taken by an autoethnography that, more than a simple return to the self, is above all a detour via others. This is what I shall try to reveal, along with the basso continuo that, thanks to its existential resonances, allows us to hear the sound of the ties binding those who do research to their ghosts: Leiris’s present–absent African or childhood figures, no doubt less exotic in my own particular case (although . . .). My main hypothesis is that these figures point to a lack that is not something to be filled, because filling it would mean eliminating the very reason why we research. However, delineating its contours and comprehending it, in the initial sense of the word, containing and inscribing within ourselves a lack that we therefore no longer completely ignore or repress, seems to me the necessary prerequisite to embarking on the understanding of the ego that Devereux recommended for all researchers whose selves are human tools for understanding others. For my part, achieving this knowledge meant overcoming various forms of resistance: my own, as well as those observed in the field. For a long time, I remained unconscious of the former, which relate to my own life story, a few fragments of which will appear here. Progressively identifying them no doubt led me to question where resistance lies for others, without my being entirely unaware of such a transference. Far from it. However, I would not go so far as to suggest it was perfectly controlled either. Once again, it’s not a matter of giving in to the self-analytical delusion that it is possible to shine a full light on oneself. The (counter)transference dynamic upon which this text casts some light is more of a hesitant observation in which the ethnographic “I” appears to me through all the others who have made me. And it is now time to introduce them.

“I Won’t Be a Negro Anymore”

Our zones were divided into two clearly hierarchically ranked spaces. One comprised the working-class families belonging to the new middle classes, thanks to the socioeconomic effects of the post-World War II boom. According to French sociologist Henri Mendras (1988/1991), this broad expansion of the middle classes consisted particularly in absorbing the former working classes whose living conditions and lifestyles were entirely redefined by their increased economic resources and the concomitant decline in social or cultural inequality. However, the optimistic picture painted of this “new civilization” (p. 197ff) tended to mask the flip side of this progress and its tableaus. In the banlieue of my childhood, this other side—the side of the others—was embodied a few streets away from my building. As with the spatial divisions in Winston Parva, which Norbert Elias described so well (Elias & Scotson, 1976/1994), these streets served as a physical and symbolic border between French and immigrant workers, that is, between the old and the new working classes, or between people from “here” and from “over there,” an opposition that so rarely went beyond the opposition between “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “bad.” Teddy was from over there and black to boot, while I was a little white boy properly from here. He therefore came from the bad side, whereas I represented what was good. Or at least this was the inevitable outside perspective on our friendship. As, for example, on this summer’s afternoon of our childhood when we were about to experience one of those moments of play that absorbed us fully in its illusion—or in lusio, to use Roger Caillois’s (1958/2001, p. 19) expressive formula.

On that particular day, we intended to be absorbed playfully by bicycles. However, Teddy did not have one. Sometimes children from a neighboring building would lend him one that was no longer of any use to them. As for me, I was waiting in the sunshine, expecting to see my friend appear from one moment to the next, perched on this rickety old bike, sufficiently battered to have been handed over to him without its condition taking the shine off his childish delight at riding it wherever he liked. After what seemed like an interminable wait, Teddy finally arrived. But he was on foot and in tears. Between sobs, he gave a spluttering account of the abuse to which he’d been subjected: He’d been called a “filthy negro” and badly beaten, before being refused the bike for which he had made his foray into what was clearly hostile territory. Very quickly, I think, we thought up some form of revenge. Despite our young age, we went to find the kids who had started a fight with Teddy and chased him from our streets. There were a lot of them and they were older than us, so they soon got the upper hand and gave us a real hiding. My memory is less of the altercation than of my escape, though. The fear generated by the strength of these others made me abandon Teddy.

The next scene that I am able to remember, via a confused mental image, shows me searching the area for my friend, making myself hoarse by calling out his name. Finally, his own tiny voice reached me from behind a cypress hedge where, at first, I had to go to great pains to locate him. Great pains are more than just an expression, for what I subsequently witnessed profoundly scarred the children that we were. Before it was etched forever in my memory, this scar was inscribed in Teddy’s black skin, which he was scratching so hard that it was flayed. As he was ripping out whiteness from his skin, he called out to me: “If I do this all over, I’ll be white. I won’t be a Negro anymore.” His red blood was gathering in drops among the white scratch marks, each tracing a border on his black skin. Long afterwards, I understood that they had embodied the arbitrary nature of the boundaries that cross physical spaces and that circumscribe the latter based on mental categories of perception and never the reverse.

The Social Dynamics of Disrespect

Cypress hedges often border cemeteries. The hedge behind which Teddy had taken refuge no doubt marked the place where part of our childhood was laid to rest. My friend’s suffering was mixed up with a nauseating stench. I could not understand where it was coming from, any more than what was happening. But we both very clearly noticed the terrible smell. In his panic at the urgent need to hide somewhere to escape his pursuers, Teddy hadn’t noticed the dog turd in which he’d lain down. That’s where the fetid miasma was coming from, while he continued frenziedly flaying his skin as a means of escaping himself. Such a scene would no doubt have turned the most settled stomach. As for us, we decided to wash off the indignity as best we could. We therefore headed to the apartment block next to mine where the hosepipe from the garbage storage area washed away the stains except those that no water could ever remove.

Although the ambient smell of the garbage replaced that of the excrement, we remained scared throughout that the concierge who so detested Teddy might arrive unexpectedly. His mission was to watch over the square of buildings entrusted to him by keeping them clean. This included protecting them from any undesirables and their forays. And according to the categories of this servile sense, entirely devoted to the middle classes, Teddy was an embodiment of the “outsider” in the eyes of respectable people. Whether inopportune or an intruder, he came from the wrong side of the street. The color of his skin testified to this, evidencing his strange foreignness. And as Teddy increasingly spent time in “proper people’s” homes rather than simply continuing on his way, his presence was too frequent and clearly beginning to worry the concierge. ¹ He found this so problematic that he had even spoken about it to my mother, setting out his astonishment at her bizarre and brazen tolerance toward this little Negro boy whom she welcomed into her home, thereby showing that she considered him to be an acceptable acquaintance for her son. What was she thinking?

I couldn’t tell you. Nor can I remember what she retorted to the concierge whose “concern” consisted in cloaking his xenophobia in a form of virtue that appealed to the need to maintain “good” order. What I do remember, however, is that she sent him packing, along with his “good” sentiments. That does not mean, though, that she herself was beyond right and wrong, beyond good and bad. She too had her conception of virtue. She was convinced that Teddy’s mother was on the game and so she looked after the child at lunchtime assuming that his unworthy mother was resting after her nights spent working as a prostitute. As was often the case, I had been made half party to this secret, which I did not fully understand except that it widened the gap between my friend and I, a gap made up of all the things left unsaid, and that it made me look at his mother oddly, not that I saw her very often. I think I learned later that she was in fact a nurse’s aide in a nearby hospital and mainly worked the night shift, while trying to bring up her son alone. Then Teddy disappeared from my daily life. I don’t remember how or why. All that was left was his black skin and white scratches. And the hole left by a life and the things it lacks. Through my contact with him, I formed an initial idea, both embodied and instinctive, of the effects produced by the “social dynamics of disrespect.” ² I also learnt about the dynamics of racism and its prejudiced categorizations. And I retained an obsession with a founding question that I discovered much later, taken out of its biblical context and rewritten in the pages of a book by John Edgar Wideman (1984/2005): “am I my brother’s keeper?” or how can I be when I feel as though I disqualified myself by my failure?

The Enfants Terribles

Accepted by both parties as a diplomat of the infrapolitics of the street, one of our friends had conducted this negotiation process between more or less self-identifying anarchists and firmly declared fascists. The former had agreed to refrain from any provocation and to remain relatively sober during the ceremony. Because they refused to enter religious buildings, some had chosen to wait in the adjoining cemetery. As for the latter, their charismatic leader was there to ensure the status quo was preserved. There’s no need to worry about trouble: The Duce has spoken, with the authority of his 10 years in prison and the urban legend surrounding him. He sits there, as though made rigid by his excessive muscles, bulging and flexing in a sign of his tension. I think of the “white power” inked in enormous letters on his forearms. Today, he’s keeping them hidden. We share our first name: Jérôme. We also share a stocky build and an air of mistrust turning our appearance and the first impressions we make into a discouraging fortress. We are opposites, but within that something makes us similar.

Like most of the people brought together here by the death of a friend, we come from the working-class base of the middle classes and share whole stretches of family histories, intertwined with the destiny of a social group that has also more or less died a death through its very transformation. On this point, Henri Mendras was right: the end of the 20th century and the “second French revolution”—a revolution of lifestyles and the expansion of the service sector—left little behind of the former factory workers, farmers, and their world (Mendras, 1988/1991). Dissolved within the notion of a certain form of social progress, their spaces and lives seem to have reformed in other spaces: the “in-between”/“intermediate” city or Zwischenstadt described by Thomas Sieverts (2003) at the intersection of the urban and the rural, where indistinct zoning has captured class exiles in a string of houses and (upscale) apartment blocks. Yvan came from there, just like Jérôme and all the others I see around me: the sons and daughters of the families that took possession of these nonspaces and set up a society of small freeholders where people live together but apart, a society founded on an ideal that has swept away what was left of the old communities with their shared destinies.

Viewed from this angle of the generalization of the new middle classes born from the former working classes, the skinhead, punks, and zonards I see before me seem symptomatic of a certain sense of excessiveness. As I look around at the ancient runes tattooed on their necks, the Celtic jewelry, the spider webs binding their elbows, and their flesh pierced by multiple rings, these things appear as a range of signs or perhaps even attempts at creating “border-bodies” protecting the members of these imagined communities from belonging to the middle class and middle ground embodied by their parents. It is as though fragments of traditions have been reinvented by a new appropriation of communitarian symbols and working-class behaviors recombined, whether in an excessively ordered or satirical way, through the figures of the skinhead and the punk, respectively. ⁴ In the middle of this church, as elsewhere, everything seems to oppose these anarchists and self-proclaimed nationalists, and yet to me they seem united: two sides of the same coin, playing out a carnavalization of the former working classes, whose enfants terribles are trying to resist their own erasure. The noise they make and the fury they sometimes show could be seen as various scansions of the loss of meaning—a meaning they seek amid the ruins of their squats and of a lost world. If we are to believe Walter Benjamin (1931/1978, pp. 302-303) is this not precisely where “destructive characters” follow their paths?

Crucified Skinhead

Yvan had inscribed something of this question and its pressing quality around his tattoos, burning his skin using a cigarette to punctuate his perplexities indelibly on his forearms. On one particular day, in May 2002, a few months before his death, he came to my flat to tell me these things in a biographical interview that was part of a series we had begun a few weeks prior. We had first met 10 years earlier, when we were 18. Our friendship was based on the street and our experience of it. Whereas I had since taken my distance from this world to return to my studies and become an ethnographer (at the time I was, among other things, a doctoral student in sociology), Yvan had stayed on the street without managing to avoid its pitfalls. It had been his hero(in): a heroic figure in his life but also the place where he injected his daily fix into his veins.

Whereas he gave in to the imperatives of his addiction to opiates, I heard the echoes of the battle he was waging in the bathroom to dissolve the Subutex (a synthetic heroin substitute) he was determined to insert in his syringe. After a long period of time, he reappeared, apologizing profusely, as embarrassed as he was exhausted. In the heat, he had stripped off to the waist. The heroin had feasted on his former valor and he was left, hauntingly, with no more than his gaunt nudity, decorated with the tattoos testifying to the long road he had traveled on the streets. On his chest, in pride of place, there was a crucified skinhead. The empty oval of his face allowed all the social rejects who recognized themselves in it to project their own features there. A little higher, his collarbone read first “Loyalty to my friends” and then “No mercy for my enemies.” Yvan often described himself as his own worst enemy and indeed he had no mercy for himself either, no more than he regretted any of his actions. All that remained was loyalty, his friends, and their regrets.

Yvan was 12 when he started to wander the streets, progressively building up a substitute family there. His only previous family, from which he constantly ran away, seemed doomed from the outset, for it was an adoptive family that met the question of his origins only with silence. The only thing he retained about his adoptive father—a factory worker who had become a foreman by the sweat of his brow—was his firm hand stifling him in the straightjacket of rules and anxiety about how one should behave. For Yvan, his father’s clumsy protective brutality was soon nothing more than the yoke of domestic tyranny from which he endlessly freed himself using all the violence of which he proved capable. His younger sister, who was also adopted, later followed the same path of paternal hatred as a teenager, running away to the same streets as him, as she found out when she encountered him there. As for their mother, she struggled to cope with her losses aided by benzodiazepines and beta-blockers, although their chemical haze only imperfectly veiled her growing despair. And yet her son had loved her, despite not knowing how to tell or show her that. He was more preoccupied with fleeing this disintegrating family and creating a new one with a group of nationalist skinheads who quickly took him under their wing. For these men in their 20s, Yvan was an intrepid kid, a mascot of sorts, who emptied their glasses in the bar and absorbed all the strength of this group in which he saw so much solidarity.

He quickly became close to another lost child of the streets: Jérôme. Together, they stole the uniform—bomber jackets and steel-capped boots—that would proclaim their similarities and their shared hatred of “good society.” Nationalism or racism? From what I was able to ascertain, Yvan did not care about either any more than Jérôme did. What was truly appealing to them, however, was the possibility of being as feared as they were hated. The disgust they inspired as skinheads sporting Nazi insignia was in many ways a mirror image of their own repugnance for the hypocrisy of a world in which their place seemed traced out for them: as radically on the margins as possible. Indeed, one of Yvan’s tattoos announced with pride: “I’m not racist, I hate everyone.” In practice, this hatred was expressed time and time again in football stadiums and the brawls opposing hooligans and police in which they fought; it was also expressed in more or less lucrative attacks—for example, those on homosexuals stripped of their possessions in parks at night—or even gratuitous ones, when they threw Molotov cocktails at the store fronts of Turkish or North African fast food outlets. Their street careers were thus regularly interspersed with periods in prison, which Jérôme did not manage to avoid as successfully as Yvan. Whereas Jérôme was earning his stripes as the undisputed leader, Yvan started to take his distance from the deceit embodied in his eyes by the little Nazis whose ultraviolence no longer entertained him. They never forgave him for his defection. We met shortly after, when he had broken out of his isolation on the streets by joining a new family.

A Disordering of All the Senses

This clan was far more heterogeneous than its predecessor and was composed of punks, tattooed men sporting dreadlocks, and urban golems of all sorts whose appearance was a collage of elements from a range of subcultures. Given his past, Yvan generated suspicion and was only accepted progressively thanks to his friendship with Didier—a sort of hairy giant who was a staunch opponent of the skinheads and had initially planned to “cut his throat and eat his dog.” Ultimately, both the guard-dog and the skinhead remained alive, as the thugs began to perceive a deep-seated resemblance uniting them beneath displays of irreconcilable difference. In the mainly peaceful neighborhood in which it was situated, one of their favorite squats had been dubbed the “madhouse” by its neighbors, who were horrified and concerned in equal measure. This was no doubt because, to paraphrase Rimbaud, all the senses of ordinary life were disordered. As I was able to observe, having visited many times, the difference between day and night was only of relative importance there. The collective buzz produced interminable orgies that combined debauchery and savagery and, whether experienced first- or secondhand, fuelled the legend of the urban underground as well as the neighbors’ gossip. Indeed, the unbridled consumption of alcohol and drugs competed with endlessly renewed free love involving multiple partners. As for the group’s economy, it was based on petty theft and other swindles as well as selling drugs—from cannabis resin to “blotters” (individual LSD [lysergic acid diethylamide] doses) and all sorts of powders and pills.

When the atmosphere became too heavy, that is, when there were too many conflicts or the police were closing in on them, the accomplices would take to the road and disappear for a while, especially in summer when they’d tour round all the French festivals. But the true breakdown of the social structures created by their bonds cannot be attributed to these temporary absences. Its explanation lies instead with the heroin injections that found their way into the veins of all the clan’s mainstays, along with the amphetamines, benzodiazepines, and other substances they took. It was this uncontrolled drug use that finally put paid to what remained of the old loyalties. Like many others, this was when I made my escape. A special guest in the world of the zonards, I didn’t consider myself stronger or more cunning than those who taught me some of their knowledge of the streets. I therefore tried to save myself from the worst, having played with fire enough to fear being burned. As for Yvan, he continued to fritter away his life in the bubbling of a spoon, in which everything dissolved for the length of a chemical hit. As his days were swallowed up in a cycle of cravings and their satisfaction, entire years were taken up by this consumerist activity that led him to find a solution to life and its questions in these injections that gradually weakened his body even as his strength deserted him.

It is neither heroin nor the streets that killed him, but the unhealthy disintegration for which they were both the stage and the catalyst. During our last recorded conversation in June 2002, Yvan returned time and time again to his disgust with his physical state. He was plagued by increasing health problems: loss of balance due to an inner ear problem; tumorous growths appearing here and there; and, above all, the fear of AIDS, which he was sure he had recently contracted. He had had sex with a female friend and Didier, who was already sick. Didier’s condom had broken, but he had said nothing, and Yvan was not wearing one. He had just learnt that the young woman in question had been infected and was waiting for his own test results. In anticipation of the verdict, he had tossed out the phrase: “like that Mexican fag with the mustache [Emiliano Zapata] said, ‘better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!’. If I’m infected, I’m not gonna wait: I’ll put a bullet straight in my head!” I never found out what the test revealed. But Yvan’s shotgun spoke for him.

After the body was cremated, the zonards and skinheads went their separate ways without a word or a second glance. The former met on the banks of the river in the city center to pay their last respects to the deceased. Sammy, his eyes misty and his skull freshly shaven to celebrate his dead friend, rushed toward me before stopping short and looking at me with one of those empty expressions at once uncomprehending and lackluster. From the depths of his grief and alcoholic stupor, he managed to say “Shit, now what’s left of us?” Shortly after, Oana, Yvan’s girlfriend, took me to one side and told me how important the work he and I had been doing over recent weeks had been to him. Our meetings had even worried him a bit. He wondered what his remaining memories could teach a guy who, in his eyes, was a sort of encyclopedia of marginal subcultures and a walking library of musical styles connected to the origins of the skinhead movement. And yet it is precisely everything else that he taught me: how to share experiences and all the things that neither books nor music can reveal.

The fact remains that, as with Teddy several years prior, I had the strange feeling that I had failed him somehow, that at some crucial moment I had not been present. When I remember Yvan’s face, I immediately see the cross tattooed on his forehead: yet another sacrificial sign, seemingly etched even more deeply on his brow by his habitual frowns. I also remember the spider inked on his glottis. Its legs stretched indelibly across his throat and “100% bastard” appeared in large letters on the back of his skull, as much to indicate the uncertainty or illegitimacy of his origins—a nod toward his adoption and a denial of the “racial purity” so revered by neo-Nazis—as to mark the pride of someone who wears his stigmas as emblems. This was all summarized to perfection by Yvan’s only Baudelairian tattoo, taken from Le Spleen de Paris (Baudelaire, 1869/1997, p. 17). It declared: “I am not inferior to those I despise!”

Seeking the Other in Oneself

On Yvan’s side, the portrait I painted of his home in one of the paragraphs above bears an uncanny resemblance to how I could have described my own: the same paternal harshness (my father was a print worker—as, in some ways, am I—who had risen up through the ranks of his company), the same maternal anxiety, and the same liminal situation of the class exile left feeling empty by the dissolution of the old working-class ties and tending therefore to value a certain idea of the middle classes they aspire to join. With just a few differences, my experiences, first as a fellow traveler of the people I met in the zone (the term we all used to refer to the spaces of our marginal life), and then as a researcher, have shown me that this remains true for all of them. From one form of liminarity to another, I later supposed that the counterstructure according to which zonards were organized into clans, or street families, served as a form of inverted reflection of our families’ position in the social structure, which was marginal in many ways, but also very conformist. Indeed, although they were no longer manual workers, their status in “good society” remained far from established. At any rate, I was both a participant in, and an observer of, the margins of that world, long before I ever ascribed any academic value to these roles. When I took my distance for the first time, at the end of the 1990s, it was about moving away from the clan with whom I shared both my daily life and a certain tendency toward multiple drug use. The latter had had the effect of knocking repeatedly on the door of my unconscious, eventually awakening grave anxieties and many questions that I couldn’t answer.

I tried to do so by taking the path of psychoanalysis, while also reengaging with the studies I had half-heartedly begun several years prior and pursued occasionally from within the spaces of the zone. I was the first in my family to go to university and I had chosen sociology as a subject, within which urban ethnography seemed to me the closest match to my aspiration to describe and understand marginal experiences. At that time, however, I was firmly opposed to the idea that I might be able to examine the workings of my own trajectory by trying to understand something of the trials pertaining to the in-between and the liminarity that are central in many ethnographical investigations. In both my nascent approach to research and my choice of topics, I chose instead to emphasize distance from, rather than proximity to, my own experiences. In doing so, I was simply following the methodological precepts instilled in us: first and foremost, especially in ethnography, to distrust any subjective impulses that might undermine the scientific value of our work. In this regard, my teachers had a classic and positivist view of the investigative approach, sincerely believing that one should cling onto the method in such a way as to remain objective—in keeping with Mauss’s (1947/2007) precept “say what you know, all that you know, and only what you know” (p. 9)—and to mitigate the anxiety inherent to involving oneself in the encounter with another. However, long before I was taught ethnography, Georges Devereux had demonstrated—and I return to this point despite citing him earlier to the same purpose—that one cannot simply decide to control the transferences that operate unconsciously between the subjects of an investigation (oneself and the other) and the scholarly subjects constructed following these interactions. Transference will always take place and can only be detected by working on oneself through inquiry, as opposed to censorship: Such transference must therefore be fully enrolled in any investigation rather than excluded from it.

As I considered myself decidedly too close to the zonards, I began my first ethnographic study alongside boxers. When I began this inquiry—at the very end of 1999—the reasons for this choice remained unclear. The question of confrontation with the Other interested me and boxers seemed to me to embody this confrontation, somehow reducing it to the space of hand-to-hand combat—an idea that had come to me from reading Sartre (1958/2006). And then there was the fortuitous encounter with Loïc Wacquant, still a young ethnographer at the time, who had not yet published all of his study on boxers (Wacquant, 2004) but whose passion resonated in every word he used to describe his research to the students we were then. Furthermore, one of my grandfathers (I had known neither of them) had been a practitioner of the noble art. The image I had of boxing referred me back to these working-class roots from which my family seemed to have been torn. Finally, I knew some boxers and had even aspired to become one myself. Despite a somewhat dissolute life in the zone, physical exercise had remained a part of my daily life. I had in fact come to consider muscle as a kind of armor designed to protect me from the dangers of the street, on occasion successfully so. A combination of all these motives had therefore brought me to the gym.

As for the private world it opened up to me, this was not the world of the manual workers of yesteryear, but rather the daily life of what Anoop Nayak (2006, p. 826) has referred to as the “(non)working class” made up of banlieusards—inhabitants of the banlieue—from immigrant backgrounds, affected en masse by unemployment and both social and racial discrimination. I was not aware of this for a long time, but I found something of Teddy in this space where we came together as a body to confront others. Contrary to Teddy and I as children, here no one sought to flee combat. We learned instead to face our adversaries and, by extension, the adversity we encountered beyond the ropes of the ring in daily trials of subaltern existence. This is not the place to go into the details of this study, in which I learnt both how to box and how to be an ethnographer. The few things I have said nevertheless indicate why I progressively identified the theme of resistance (in the etymological sense of resistere: oppose, make a stand against) as the organizing principle of boxers fighting in the ring. Most of my investigative work was completed by 2004, but it was only published in book form in 2014 (Beauchez, 2018). The 10 years that elapsed between these two times point to other forms of resistance than those that I documented as I followed the boxers.

To understand these forms of resistance, it is important for me to specify that, in 2002, I began another ethnographic project that brought me back to the zonards, not as a friend but as an investigator. At the time, my intention was to show the other side to working-class youth (Janus once again), which was largely left in a strangely forgotten obscurity by French urban ethnography, mainly preoccupied with banlieusards of immigrant background. And this is despite the fact that the zonards—punks, skinheads, and other drifters—more often than not displayed a variety of tattoos that remained stubbornly prominent. As I have already stated above, their unusual appearance and lifestyle seemed to me symptomatic in the sense of Mitchell Duneier’s (1999) “diagnostic ethnography” (p. 340ff). That is to say that these young people seemed to me to make visible by means of exaggeration both the drift and the rootlessness of the social group to which they belonged and from which I too came. To understand their conception of marginality was therefore to stand a chance of learning a bit more about the contradictions and dead-ends that marked the transition of the old working-class families to the middle classes, which they came to inhabit in other spaces, far from their original neighborhoods and their former ties. For some like Yvan and all those we met at his funeral, this detachment was synonymous with family breakdown, whereas the clan allowed new roots to be put down.

An (Auto)Ethnographic Gaze

None of zonards refused my requests for interviews when asked. I intended to use these to build up a multiplicity of perspectives on my own memories of the zone, recorded in my notebooks over a number of years. In parallel, I was compiling notes on dialogical—or collaborative—forms of ethnography and the possibility of researchers drawing of their own life experiences to create a foundation for an existential understanding of a given world and its codes. ⁵ Although weakened by heroin, Yvan was the first to sign up for this ethnographic project. I did not yet have a very clear sense of how this research would be conducted or where it might lead, but already the idea was forming to make use of life stories, not so much as natural—or quasi-naturalist—documents, in the manner of the sociologists of the first Chicago School who set out to classify deviant lifestyles the way one might catalog botanical species (Bennett, 1981, p. 151ff), but rather as a means of thickening the existential description of a sequence of events shared on a daily basis with the zonards. ⁶ I was imagining in a confused way a textual form that would allow a collage of the present (ethnographic sequences) and memories of the past (biographical fragments) to give access to all the absent present who are to some extent what lies behind the scenes, or in the underground, of what ethnographers usually refer as their field, in the sense of a situated entity as palpable as it is visible.

The invisibility of the familial influences, friendships, and enmities recounted seemed to me to constitute a kind of intermediary level between the ground and the underground—a sort of “chiasm” between the visible and the invisible (to use the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968), p. 130ff). A chiasm into which ethnographic research might venture, far enough to take the risk of exploring the at-once strange and uncertain regions of subjectivity wherein nothing is ever as sure as Professor Mauss would have wanted, recommending as he did—and as I noted earlier—that we confine our inquiry to the scientific certainty of “objective” fact. By way of contrast to the more positivist approaches to qualitative inquiry, a certain number of autoethnographic texts (of which I hope this text is one) have made a significant contribution to describing the “ghostly matters” (Gordon, 1997/2008)—memory, forgetting, uncertainty, lack, and all their specters—that haunt the underground of our research (e.g., Tamas, 2016; Wyatt, 2008). All these inextricably individual and social facts are not things (to use Durkheim’s expression as taken up by Mauss), nor even practical accomplishments with regard to which one might be able to establish any relationship of cause and effect between their presence, of which we can only ever grasp the traces, and their influence on reality, which is strictly speaking impossible to demonstrate. They nevertheless form part of what Michel Leiris and the members of the Collège de Sociologie called the “sacred in everyday life,” made up of the insistent memory of all the people and moments of epiphany in our lives that continue to have a profound influence on how we conceive of our being-in-the-world. Yet as Leiris showed so well, the signs of this influence never appear all at once or in ways of which we are fully conscious. Instead, they reveal themselves implicitly: in the things we—either as subjects investigating or subjects being investigated—struggle to say (or to represent to ourselves) and that we nevertheless experience as viscerally important (Leiris, 1938/1988).

When Yvan decided to fall silent in August 2002, I lost not only his words but also my own. The countertransference proved in some way fatal. Not that I found his suicide impossible to understand, however difficult it was to accept. But the fact is that it sent me back to my own purgatory, or my own underground. The various stages of my recovery took too long for me to recount them here; mostly, they had only personal relevance and are therefore of no great interest for the purposes of this essay. As for what was important, it related to what I have proposed calling the “working-through” of ethnographic data (Beauchez, 2018, p. 219): working through the (counter)transferential resistance that was an obstacle to my inquiry and, by extension, to the publication of its results. When I became aware of the effect of these phenomena on my research, I was able in part to remove these obstacles for the very simple reason that I’d brought them at least partly into the light. One result was a key moment when I identified this resistance as the object of my inquiry. By working on it and naming it, I was able to start unpicking the pattern and following the thread of my unconscious transferences. My work alongside the zonards, interrupted in 2002, only started again many years later (e.g., Beauchez, 2016, 2018). Provisionally falling back on the space of gyms and the experiences of boxers, I reopened this part of my investigation and added to my data to produce my doctoral thesis, examined in 2007. That same year, I began another project in the French Antilles alongside my Martinican partner. This allowed me to revisit some of the old facets of my biography (something to do with the Black condition and Teddy’s face), as well as to perceive some new facets as I discovered the struggle for independence of young Antilleans, firmly opposed to what they see as the neocolonialism of the French state.

In Martinique, the “danmyé-kalennda-bèlè” triptych—a culture made up of dance (bèlè, kalennda) and combat (danmyé) made up of fragments of Africanity preserved from the effects of slavery—constitutes one of the main outlets for the Black being-in-the-world not wearing a “white mask” (Fanon, 1952/2008). As I observed it (over 5 years of regular visits my official investigation started in 2013), this engagement is not openly “political,” precisely a category of understanding considered an example of a white mask. Rather it is “infra-political” in James Scott’s (1990, p. 183ff) sense of the term and is experienced on a daily basis by means of a lifestyle based on the structures of a resistance culture explicitly posited as such and promoting the idea of a totally independent Martinican. This refers to what we might term, after Marcel Mauss (1973), a “physio-psycho-sociological assemblage” (p. 85) of the concept of independence achieved at once at the level of the physical body (a refusal of European standards of beauty), of biology and immediate needs (manger-pays, or eating local food), and of individual psychology connected to the community to which one belongs. Since this time, I have worked on amplifying these local data and also on connecting them to other practical or symbolic expressions of resistance in the global space of the Black Atlantic, a space that Paul Gilroy (1993) suggested situating between Africa, Europe, and America in all the zones to which the Black diaspora extended its heritage and its ethnoscapes. Against this background, I carried out, over the course of the past 5 years, a series of interviews with artists and researchers trying to document the diversity of these cultures of resistance and to fill part of the void left by the loss of African roots, extirpated by the forced passage between continents (e.g., Van Peebles and Beauchez, 2013; Cooper and Beauchez, 2016). As far as I am concerned, it is Teddy who to some extent pointed me down this path; many others followed, whether closely or at a distance.