It’s the shuffling of your feet as you wait in line for the usher to check your ticket, it’s the jostling of other bodies as you climb the stairs to find your seat, it’s the tingling crinkle of cold in your nose as you breathe in the smell of the arena, and the crackle of the loudspeaker as the unseen announcer introduces the home team.
That’s right, friends and neighbours – it’s hockey night. In Halifax.
Tonight I’m going to a Halifax Mooseheads hockey game, and I’m thrilled. For someone who didn’t play many sports growing up, I have since found my competitive streak, and it’s manifested in cheering ardently and one-sidedly for whatever team I support (generally decided by choosing the team with the better uniform, or the team that is not expected to win, or the team that is playing against Australia).
In fact, sports games seem to be the ultimate communities of practice: those people who support one team throughout their lives are easily within the boundaries of that group, hockey jerseys and ball caps featuring favourite teams are boundary objects that connect and disconnect (Wenger, 1998, p. 107) fans, even those people who go only occasionally to watch games have a role: as peripheral participants.
As a sports fan, I occupy a peripheral position with the community of practice of, in this case, Moosehead fans, who offer me “casual but legitimate access to a practice without subjecting [me] to the demands of full membership” (Wenger, 1998, p. 117). That is, I can go to the game tonight and cheer for the Mooseheads without having to pay season ticket-holder prices or knowing the name of every team player. I am on the edge of the community of practice representing regular Mooseheads spectators.
And frankly, I like it that way. Throughout my life, I’ve interpreted many of my experiences (and therefore negotiated meaning) as peripheral connections: I was smart, but not quite smart enough to finish a doctorate; I was an actress, but never committed to the practice enough to make it my craft; I was a Canadian living and working in New Zealand with residency status, but didn’t complete the paperwork to attain dual citizenship. I was and still am happy to move along the fringes of other communities, dipping my toe in to test the waters from time to time but not jumping in.
But I wonder to what extent are we ourselves creating boundaries around communities of practice? I’m sure that if I had the means, and interest, in purchasing Moosehead tickets from now until the end of time, I could easily do so and join that community of practice, but I’m making the choice to observe the boundary that identifies that group, and possibly even manufacture that border when it doesn’t exist.
In 1975, Michel Foucault claimed in Discipline and Punish that our omni-surveillant society, in which everything is witnessed, recorded, monitored and accessible to others, has created people who take on the trappings of self-monitoring and self-regulation:
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault, 1975, pp. 202-203)
Am I observing boundaries that aren’t even there? Have I become so sensitive to monitoring – to being inside and outside of communities of practice that I encounter, and subject to the practices of its members – that I’m imagining restrictions where there are none?
And does everyone else do this, too?
I have been, for twenty years past, admittedly the greatest magician in the world. I have held my place with such style and flourish that I have raised what is really a very pretty achievement to the dignity of art. Do you imagine that in my best moments when I have had very distinguished audiences—crowned heads, as all magicians love to boast—that I have not thought fleetingly of producing a full chamber-pot out of a hat, and throwing it into the royal box, just to show that it can be done? But we all hug our chains. There are no free men. (Davies, 1975, p. 110-111)
Yet we know boundaries create exclusion and, in uninformed or malevolent circumstances, racism and homophobia and other prejudices. Instances of rioting between rival fans at football games, such as that which recently caused 79 deaths at a game in Egypt, are commonplace, and demonstrate the extent to which communities of practice can enforce the boundaries of its membership. Could we possibly be creating these boundaries that have life-or-death potential even in seemingly benign conditions such as a sports game?
Such is the urge to belong, and an interesting discussion that Wenger alludes to implicitly in his repeated cautions that communities of practice can have negative consequences as readily as positive effects. We learn these boundaries, perhaps add to them, and observe them, and transgress them at our own cost. Being on the periphery doesn’t save one from these risks, either; history is full of stories of those who refused to take sides and were annihilated for the same reason.
Gives a new twist to the old joke, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out”, doesn’t it?...
REFERENCES:
Davies, R. (1977). World of wonders. Toronto: Macmillan Canada.
Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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