Skateboarding in Makhachkala
images: kamila banks; words: diane tippett
Omelchenko, Poliakov and Mayboroda wrote in 2019 about the dichotomy between subcultures in Makhachkala. Specifically, they examined two “polar” subcultures: street workout and anime communities. The former group is characterised “inscribed in the context of the local patriarchal regime” whilst the latter constitutes symbolic resistance against “the pressure of social ‘normativity’” [1]. While this article about skateboarding in Dagestan does not necessarily use the framework suggested by these authors, their discussion of the practices of public presentation and group identity demonstrations in Dagestan is a useful starting point for considering Makhachkala’s skateboarding community.
Throughout the 1990s deindustrialisation and the resulting growth in unemployment plagued the North Caucasus. The social fabric was latently fragmented on the basis of ethnic, linguistic, religious and urban/rural divisions. The Second Chechen War, sparked by the invasion of Dagestan by Chechen rebels, and the subsequent alienation of the North Caucasus region from the remainder of the Russian public saw the Dagestani ‘other’ form a civic in-group, though latent intra-communal tensions remained [2].
In this context, sites of socialisation can be conceptualised through the lens of hybridity – “a fraught, anxious and ambivalent condition. It is about how you survive, how you try to produce a sense of agency or identity in situations in which you are continually having to deal with the symbols of power and identity” [3]. For Matthews, this renders informal sites for socialisation such as ‘the street’ as a “thirdspace,” where people can experience a liminal status, with their emergent identity being a mixture of societal and adult superordinancy and their internal, perhaps childlike, subordinacy [4].
In this vein, Omelchenko, Poliakov and Mayboroda discovered that in the street workout space, performance of the “correct masculinity” [5] contradicts the marginality of the group. For members of the anime subcultural group, their marginality is defined by exclusion for safety [6]. As for skateboarding? Performing in an open space, and performing mainstream masculine normality, these youth practice a westernised hobby meaning they are subject to be rendered as a cultural and symbolic ‘other’ within Dagestan [7].
References
[1] Elena Omelchenko, Sviatoslav Poliakov, and Alina Mayboroda, “Peers/strangers/others? The youth of Dagestan in search of group identities,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 5 (2019): 841–865, 841
[2] For details see: Diane Tippett, “Barriers to Justpeace in the Republic of Dagestan,” Master of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney, 2020.
[3] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994),
[4] Hugh Matthews, “The Street as a Liminal Space: The Barbed Spaces of Childhood,” in Children in the city: Home neighbourhood and community, eds. Pia Christensen and Margaret O'Brien (Routledge, 2003): 119–135, 103.
[5] Omelchenko, Poliakov and Mayboroda, 861.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, 842.
