That sinking feeling : elitism, working leisure and yachting.

Eric Laurier

Finding a footing.

How shall we know what we are feeling? An everyday question, yet a perplexing question nevertheless. Knowledge and feeling remain held in opposition and knowledge is all too often in the dominant register (Averill 1974). How shall we feel what we are knowing? This second question is seldom on our lips. To be candid, I doubt I will do any justice to this second question in the chapter that follows. Instead I shall be reaching toward knowledge of the emotions, but if you the reader can hold onto the second question then you will have a way of disagreeing with my feelings from the very outset of this journey around the coasts of work, leisure and elitism. Leisure has been defined in many ways by many different researchers and I am going to try and define it as not one but several ways of feeling. Then this suggests a third question which I should try and answer, how can you (or I) feel that way?

In what follows I will try and tack between the rocks of ‘personal’ experiences and the shoals of a set of social theories. This tacking between two different ways of knowing and feeling the world will be reliant on a set of navigational aids. To find your way in what follows will involve relying on marking from the outset the critical importance of the acquisition of inequitably distributed competencies and dispositions in leisure practices (Lamont 1992), the learning of practical knowledges (Bourdieu 1977), and the embodiment of resources (‘finding your feet’, ‘knowing the ropes’). Knowing the boundaries by assisting in the production and reproduction of their lines of division and bounding the known by assisting in the learning and teaching of how to be at leisure. This ethnography provides a kind of counterpart to Willis’s (1977) classic ‘Learning to Labour’ which examined the enculturation of working class boys, in this case it is about the upper classes learning to leisure.

What does it mean to critically reflect upon how we attempt to amuse ourselves? It might mean that we spoil our own sense of fun entirely, which would in turn remove the license to claim that we are able to feel what we claim to know. We would only know about leisure and no longer just know it, or of course in the words of one particular leisure brand, just do it. All of which shifts us gradually toward some very geographical questions about the making of boundaries and their materialisation in yachting as a leisure practice.

Moorings.

‘May I come aboard?’ ‘Yes, come aboard.’

And so I made my nervous leap from the harbourside onto the restored 1920s yacht. The elderly couple had been waiting for me for about an hour or so because of my overly-ambitious estimate of how long it would take to drive to the harbour. As soon as my feet hit the deck and my bag thumped down beside me, Hugh (the husband) set the motor running and the boat pulled away. He was irritated already because we had almost missed the tide, Dee, his wife, explained ushering me into the cockpit. Not exactly a promising entrance strategy, I thought and then noted with a shiver that I probably hadn’t brought enough warm clothing.

I could not pretend to be a total outsider to sailing since I had had a GRP dinghy of my own for several years as a teenager and my father had been dragging me out on small boats since I was a toddler. I had even spent a week on a sail training course learning the basic principles of sea, wind and sail For all of that experience I was still gripped by a great deal of anxiety as I stowed my kit in the main cabin and felt the first offshore waves tipping up my feet.

Although this chapter will follow the narrative of just one boat and its occupants during a short trip along the coast, it will shift out of its local account to reflect upon wider relations between leisure, knowledge and elitism. Briefly, it will drift away from leisure as simply a conservatively defined public good - ‘playtime of the masses' where it creates social cohesion, self-realisation, bonds of community, responsible citizens, healthy and committed individuals (Kraus 1987), in other words leisure as ‘an all round good thing’. This drift begins by considering just who is able to ‘play’ at sailing since only 1.2% of all households in the UK own a sailboat of any kind let alone a large yacht (economically yachts are the largest part of the boating sector but numerically dinghies dominate, see Mintel 1997). Many more people aspire to own or sail a yacht, since it occupies a particularly powerful symbolic position in both the signification of social status and the imagination of leisure. Rather than reducing my analysis of sailing to spending power I will try and critically interpret the workings of this particular leisure practice in creating orders of people and things through boundary and emotional work. The investment of money in yachts does not explain, apart from very simplistically the investment of other forms of capital and the investment of meaning, and intense human feelings in and around yachting. Articulating the passages of these investments are smaller and larger assemblages of machines, knowledges, actors and places which serve in defining the power relations of its field (definitions which, like wooden boats, are never in the end watertight). Whether these assemblages are small or large depends the practices of those involved, whether they ‘raft up or anchor off’.

One first monetary grasping of the supportive structure of yachting we can label as the ‘pleasure boat sector’ (comparable to the classic car sector) though this does not do full justice to the articulation of producers, consumers, sites and trajectories involved, it is the sufficient grasp for a series of business interests (Mintel 1997). Reading the texts of market reports on yachting can provide an unsettling reminder their particular grasp of ‘leisure’. ‘Sailing is the preserve of ABs who are three times more likely to own a sailboat than the C1s... The good news is [my emphasis] that ABC1s are expanding rapidly as the middle strata contracts and society polarises along socio-economic lines’ (Mintel 1997 pp5)

Classic boats are more exclusive since they require greater competence in practical and historical knowledges. Their arrival as a popular category amongst the affluent classes came in part from the recession in the fishing industry during early twentieth century which freed up wooden fishing boats, and also from the ageing of purpose built river pleasure boats, cruising and racing yachts from the turn of the century. Like the car industry, the pleasure boating industry has been driven in part by product renewal, fashion and technological change and it has created a corresponding lineage of material culture. Cruising and racing are two quite separate practices though they may involve shared actors, sites and equipment. This chapter will be concentrating on cruising as the more ‘leisurely’ of the two practices for a number of reasons, including the absence of formal competitive rules that are found in racing. Its discursive construction as free time and escape. Its reliance on abstract geographical knowledges (charts), textual maritime orientations (cruising guides), social exchange (dialogues between sailors) and personal memory and creative acts (doing your own thing).

Rope knowledge

We didn’t go very far on the first afternoon. I think Hugh wanted to watch me struggle with some ropes and sails for a while to assess my competence on board and having realised I didn’t know much he moored the boat and left the difficult passage through Cuan Sound (a tidal passage on the West Coast of Scotland) for the next day. For the most part he maintained a grumpy presence at the wheel, from time to time issuing short instructions. Dee was delighted to have me there, and I was pleased that she was pleased while worried that we were getting on so well that Hugh would very quickly question my disposition. My reasons for giving up sailing as a teenager were in part due to its male domination and culture of beer and bravura.

Below decks while Hugh was busy tying knots in ropes above, I asked Dee about Hugh’s health since part of the reason I was there was because he had suffered a heart attack a few months previously. ‘Oh he’s not had any more problems. It’s just.. and it’s not that he will .. but if he did have a heart attack then I couldn’t sail the boat by myself. And help would not arrive immediately.’ And then she began to organise the cooker and the food while I asked a lot of questions about who does what on the boat. I wanted to see how she justified the very traditional roles that seemed to be taken on board yachts. Women down in the galley cooking, or lying on the deck reading a book, or being told to ‘grab that rope there.’ She put up with my questioning the obvious in a way that I suspected Hugh would not have. With considerable tolerance she corrected me on my grosser mistakes; she was a capable sailor but it was like when they drove together in the car, Hugh wanted to be in the driving seat. As the weekend wore on Dee eventually told me a story about when she had first gone sailing with Hugh as a young woman. She was at that point ‘quite a wild young thing’ and ‘had several men on the go at the same time’. Hugh was not the most charming of them but somehow he had convinced her to come sailing with him for a weekend. Being confined on a boat with him had made her nervous at first (a feeling I could understand) but his competence and ability on board the board won her over. She realised that she could place her trust in him completely because she never felt in any danger from the sea while they were together. In its unhesitating and well-plotted delivery I knew that Dee had told that story about placing her trust in Hugh many, many times before. It was a key narrative in her fashioning of their marriage and of Hugh’s value as a man. And in the context it was told, as Hugh barked orders, steered through rip tides and interpreted sonar readings, I had to position myself in agreement with her map of mattering. Though of course my choice of Hugh at the helm was only for a weekend, Dee had left him at the helm for the last thirty five years. Or had she? Was she taking control in the places that fitted her disposition?

After dinner I asked about whether Dee and Hugh thought of themselves as part of a leisure class. I had tried to lay some ground for this question by chatting a little bit about my research interests and about what leisure might mean. Nevertheless, Hugh decided to leave the table immediately. Oops. How did I upset him? Dee explained that Hugh didn’t like explaining himself. So Dee spoke about the way they lent their boat out to several of their friends who could not afford a boat because they were too young or just did not have the money.

‘But they knew how to sail of course?’

‘Of course.’ Dee added that there were several charitable schemes for taking ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘disabled’ people out on sailing holidays. I couldn’t help noticing the gap between the ‘deserving’ poor and the rest that simply could not afford to go out on the water. At a later date another yachting enthusiast explained to me that people took shares in yachts, he had known up to ten people sharing the cost of a yacht and then time-sharing it during the sailing season. Most of them, he added, were members of the local sailing club, rather than the Royal Northern Yacht Club. Ownership was not the most important thing anyway, he continued, anyone that really wanted to could find a place as crew on a yacht. There was a constant demand for young people willing to crew. Meanwhile I was busily noting down - ‘young people, not old, and mostly young men who don’t want to sail with their fathers anymore. It’s a way of acquiring the emotional and tacit competencies for the financial power that will arrive later. The dispositions are already in place.’

What is required to understand how elites perform and reproduce competencies is an attenuated account of their life-worlds and critically an understanding of their socio-economic, cultural and moral boundaries, which are worked though in their ways of acquiring and transmitting their embodied dispositions and spatial knowledges. To begin to think about how an elite is able to function without declaring itself as such (Parry, forthcoming) leaves questions open about whether the term should be used at all. However there are boundaries drawn around and through the sailing of classic boats (Lamont 1992) which create a passage for the reproduction of elites which is not in the obvious sites of education, family or work. Or perhaps it is the reproduction of an attitude; elitism? To call it that is to risk collapsing it into another disposition and one which most of the sailors I had met would deny. They prided themselves on their egalitarianism and yachting was a resource for other ways of social being that were not based on their position at work or their home address. It was, they claimed, more about a shared enthusiasm than a shared exclusivity.

Paradoxically what I also wish to pick up on in a somewhat Foucauldian sense are the various forms of disciplined labour required to mess around a yacht, the disciplines of the practice that prevent mutinies, sinking and the ‘wrong kind of people of getting involved.’ Though it is a disciplined leisure, I still do not want to let go of its emotional geography or map of mattering.

`These "mattering maps" are like investment portfolios: there are not only different and changing investments, but different intensities or degrees of investment. There are not only different places marked out (practices, pleasures, meanings, fantasies, desires, relations, etc.) but different purposes which these investments can play. Mattering maps define different forms, quantities and places of energy. They "tell" people how to use and generate energy, how to navigate their way into and through various moods and passions, and how to live within emotional and ideological histories`.(Grossberg, 1992, p82)

Dropping anchor on the second evening I assisted Hugh by peering over the front of the yacht and warning him of rocky outcrops under the water. He had sent me there calling out his credo that ‘there must be a system’ and his system for finding a mooring in a bay like this one was to use his sonar to calculate an average depth for him, to get me to look for underwater rocks, for him to glance at his charts from time to time and exercise his local knowledge of the island we were coming into. With all these calculations going on, more than usual really because it was low tide and Hugh had chosen a cove with a tricky route into it, he was also keeping one eye on the weather. As I wrote cryptically in my journal: ‘it is sooo complex.’ This was not the soccer player ‘on the ball’ that Merleau-Ponty uses as a metaphor to exemplify practical sense. How to play a good of game of soccer could be learnt with the minimal of material resources - a ball, a flattish surface, some goalposts and some other players - which was why it was the democratic if gendered example that Merleau-Ponty used. Sailing a large yacht into a shallow cove required, well to begin with, ‘a large yacht’, then; charts, sonar, an obedient human assistant, the shipping forecast on the radio, weather forecasting skills, a diesel motor for the little manoeuvres, tactile knowledge of how the boat ‘handled’ and the memory of this island being a ‘good place to stop on a night like this.’ Hanging over the front of the boat I was filled with the same awe that I had had as a child when my parents got us all into a car and then drove from a suburban house in Scotland to a campsite in Brittany. How did they do that? How do they find the way? How utterly dependent am I? Where did they learn? It was a as great a mystery to me as the nomad’s spatial knowledge of the apparently smooth space of the desert is to the anthropologist.

The leap between my skills and knowledges and Hugh’s was almost as great as that between the five year old child and his parents taking him on holiday. Except I was an adult now, learning to drive a car to my holiday destination was a practice I had acquired along with the majority of Westerners. Sailing a yacht to take my holiday? I had a sense of how Hugh did what he did and found the way to this cove but I also knew that it was beyond what I could do. The questions I was asking now as an ethnographer were what boundaries had I crossed already to be here and what further ones remained before I could take my leisure as Hugh was taking his (still rather grumpily if I may say so.) In the meantime I retreated to the warmth below decks to peel potatoes for Dee who was making dinner.

Working toward leisure

Do leisure and work stand in opposition to one another? Leisure theory makes it quite clear that they are utterly entangled (Rojek, 1985, 1995, Cohen and Taylor 1992, Shields 1992). Release, escape and freedom from work in leisure are unattainable states, yet they remain key signifiers in discourses of leisure. And for elites in particular as Veblen (1925) argued at the outset of research on leisure, their lavish expenditure and display of idleness marked their distance from necessities of labour for survival in capitalist societies. For Veblen the dreams of escape for all of society were shaped by a leisure class - and something of this remains in the mythology of the yacht, still frequently invoked as the purchase to be made after winning a large sum of money or working up to it, marrying into it or retiring to it.

Perhaps there are moments when a yacht fulfils those dreams and those on board feel free, relax and forget all their worries. Yet to make those moments requires all kinds of work. Drawing on of theories of social interaction (Goffman 1967, Gieryn 1983, Hochschild 1983), class (Bourdieu 1984, 1990, Lamont 1992, Skeggs 1997) and embodied performance (Morris 1995) I will make a ‘system’ of the workings involved in cruising on a classic boat into two sets of actions.

a. Boundary work - perhaps most important to any argument about elites is that boundaries are always being shaped to include a privileged few and exclude an under-privileged many. Such boundaries pre-exist those that find themselves on one side or the other. For their existence however they rely on being reproduced constantly. They are not simply ‘symbolic’ boundaries in that they are constituted from combinations of socio-economic, cultural and moral measures and they are solidified in the material culture. So it is that a classic boat requires considerable capital for its purchase, maintenance, equipping, berthing and sailing. Further, it requires an education in maritime heritage and history, taste, aesthetics and oddly enough a series of moral judgements about integrity, honesty and trust. And when a classic boat is brought into the flow of leisure practices it is expected to assist in their bounding. Boundary work is vital to the creation of conformity, since without ‘bounds of reasonable behaviour’ then there can be no deference via embarrassment (Goffman 1967). As it has been suggested by social psychologists, ‘it is not hard to see that this account construes embarrassment as an emotion of social control’ (p40, Parrott & Harré 1996). It is the ‘emotional’ character of embarrassment that takes us into the next category. What is worth commenting on here is that being embarrassed because of acting out of context, relies on a shared knowledge of what the context is and where its boundaries lie. Like shame, guilt or chagrin, embarrassment puts an individual’s competence on the line and will frequently lead to submission to the limits on behaviour or avoidance of the situation where the embarrassment occurred.

b. Emotional embodying work - frequently under-estimated in research on leisure, a high degree of emotional management is required by those involved. Leisure is constructed around notions of appropriate emotions, ‘having a bad time’ is the ultimate failure of precious investment given over to leisure. On the self and for others a considerable amount of effort is thus required around lines of hosting, relaxing, encouraging and enthusing, in other words strategic surface acting is required to maintain the appearance of having a good time together to maintain the definition of the situation. Also finding out how to feel works in combination with the boundary work since shame and embarrassment, and often fear are powerful cues and ‘clues’ (Hochschild 1983) for the adjustment of interactions. For most people embarrassment is also displayed by their flesh, in a rush of blood to their face and their becoming flustered. Avoiding embarrassment is one of the key motivations in normal social interaction and the encouragement of free acts during leisure activities by increasing a situation’s informality multiplies the possibilities of an embarrassing occurrence arising. This is not to say that there are no rules for leisure time, the display of embarrassment in various leisure situations indicates to those involved that there are social conventions and norms framing behaviour and that the embarassed individual knows that he or she has just found themselves ‘faulted’ by them (Goffman 1967). On board a boat considerable amounts of practical skills are required, these are more than just getting about, they are also to do with intimacy, ‘knowing the ropes’ and giving off embodied impressions of enthusiasm.

Times of leisure are thus testing times, where away from the written exams and the other assessments of educational authorities, the work that is done on boundaries, through an emotional body is assessed. To enjoy the trip on a yacht, can the participants fit in financially, judgmentally and aesthetically with their hosts or crew? Can they carry out the many tasks of tying, untying, folding, helming, staying upright and all the while smiling? Can they perform their enjoyment?

‘Cheer up, there’s a good chap’ Hugh said to me, his grumpy mood replaced by a chuckling elation as the wind got up, waves started splashing across the decks and his crew took fright. I was hunched over in the cockpit out of the wind looking distinctly unenthusiastic. As I noted later, ‘fear was my way of feeling incompetent.’ A competent sailor isn’t startled by a bit of sea spray and the boat leaning over. With Hugh standing over me I definitely felt his inferior and I just bet he felt damned superior showing his courage off. It wasn’t spontaneous courage though like my spontaneous fear, Hugh’s courage was learned. It was a socially distributed emotion. Yet the imperative for me I was aware was to at least wrestle my clearly visible fear into an almost camouflaged anxiety.

Much mockery was made of ‘fair weather sailors’ at the yacht club. They were characterised as people who used their boats for drinking gin on sunny days and only left the marina in a flat calm They were not ‘real’ sailors and were dismissed on many occasions as having wasted their money on boats. I surmised that it was wasted money in the sense that they would be excluded from the privileges that being a member of the classic boat owners brought. The informal resources: the friends in powerful places, the tips on investments of various kinds, the introductions to exclusive networks and ‘movers & shakers’. Or was it just that they failed to experience the thrill of helming a boat through rough seas. Internally, as I took Hugh’s hand up on to the deck, I was struggling with a degree of fear knowing that I should try and flatten the very tight fold in my self around lack of control and, well, drowning at sea. ‘This is just a light breeze’ Hugh added and waved to another boat passing in the opposite direction with its spinnaker up.

I liked this waving-thing that people on boats did to one another. At the same time I was aware it was another one of the parts of the performance, people that did not wave from their boats were ‘anti-social.’ It reminded me of something that David Crouch had written about caravanners signalling one another in various ways when they were in motion as well. They were making a boundary as they waved and placing each other inside it.

What surprised me about the classic boats when they were at the harbourside or in a marina was how welcoming they were to visitors. Perhaps this was more a feature of festivals and regattas, Goffman’s ‘actions spaces’ that I had been to, where nearly everyone there would be classic boat enthusiasts. There was something about ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘enthusiasm’ that meant more than all carefully constructed liminal practices I was thinking about. Or was there, since enthusiasm was emotional work? Compliments were paid on the restoration of the boat, the ultra-compact arrangements of life below deck. Interest was always shown toward the leisure object and its accompanying texts (talk, logs, original documents) and displays (photographs, charts of voyages, sketches and paintings). There were few dis-interested visitors. And there were also few that didn’t say ‘May I come aboard?’ The secret password that allows seemingly anyone on to any boat.

Working knowledge or leisure knowledge?

Hutchins (1996) fieldwork aboard an United States Navy ship showed how cognitive skills are unevenly socially distributed amongst the members of the crew. What was of further significance in Hutchin¢s work was his attention to the place of instruments, charts and equipment as well knowledge of informal conventions aboard naval ships in stabilising hierarchies and ranks at sea. Practical knowledges, according to Hutchins, are acquired by ‘kinetic mimetics’ as well as by talk, in other word by doing as others did at their level as well as doing as they were told by higher ranks. In its combination of material and discursive orders the acquisition and exercise of practical knowledges on board a ‘leisure’ sailing boat and the importance of both giving and obeying orders make this form of leisure very appealing to organisations that want to increase the relations of order and obedience in their ‘teams’ (i.e. during business adventure weekends). Boundaries have a degree of stability in the materiality of the yacht. Each time someone steps aboard the boat they are offered a position which they can then best fit according to their dispositions and competence. If they fit well then they will do well and may even relax as they find themselves comfortable (i.e. un-embarrassed and free from anxiety) in that position. While the classic boat’s mythology encourages further affective investments from organisational workers that their office as context for passionate relationships is for the most part unlikely to articulate. Order can be embodied in the leisure object.

Much of this discussion remains internal to the space of the yacht, what of the larger flows of materials and knowledges within which they move? There is a great deal of cross-over between producers and consumers, many of the shipwrights, marina developers, and boat charterers have entered these industries through involvement with sailing as consumers before shifting into the sector as workers. In effect they learnt ways of consuming before ways of constructing in the maritime realm. In making and selling high unit cost products the close integration between producers and consumers is vital as one unsold boat is a large loss.

With such a high profile collection of consumers, there is considerable work going on by marina developers to commodify the spaces of the coast. These vary from waterfront schemes associated with inner city urban redevelopment often replacing docks destroyed by the shift to containerisation (Boyer 1994 and Sekla 1996) to attempts to use cruising guides to locate ‘green coast’ developments. Craobh Haven was a purpose built marina which involved building timeshare properties, chandlery shops and other facilities simultaneously a convenient location for yachts cruising the West Coast of Scotland to stop off. A commodified ‘rafting up’.

Hugh and Dee put great store by their local knowledge of secluded coves like the three different ones that we moored in. Many were off uninhabited islands and I was able to take the tender (a small rowing boat) and row ashore to explore and get away from the excessive physical and emotional intimacy of the boat. My own unease over dressing and undressing rituals, sleeping arrangements and boat-bizarre toilets all telling signs of my lack of practical knowledge. And the bruises of course from constantly cracking my head, striking my shins and catching my shoulders on various protruding bits of wood and metal. The way being an observer in this case was something of a misnomer since inhabiting the boat was beyond ‘gazing upon it’ as a touristic ethnographer. As well as working on my fear of sinking in a storm or hitting unseen underwater objects or being hit by Hugh for incompetence I had to work on my co-ordination in a tight space.

Hugh and Dee also put great store by their orderly knowledge of the multiple internal divisions, the poetic nooking and crannying of the boat in stowaway boxes, drawers & shelves: ‘without these "objects" and a few others of equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects." (Bachelard 1964, p78). Hugh: ‘A place for everything and everything in its place. According to a system of course’. My first glance at the inside of the cabin had suggested a kind of chaos but the more I lived in it and watched one pattern of chaos transforming into another after the stowing of morning things and the unpacking of mid-day things the more I realised that it was simply that I was used to things being arranged with gaps between them. Empty space was a luxury which could not be afforded inside a yacht. And it was Dee that was the librarian to this archive of everyday goods. Hers was the work of distilling a house’s equipment down to its purest elements and still being able to surprise with a packet of chocolate biscuits from inside a welly boot.

The charts that are used are, in their sparse cartographic details and absence of advertising, relics of an older kind of mapping. Cruising manuals from the 1940s are still used somewhat riskily to guide people around the 1990s coast. And word of mouth from other sailors when ‘rafted up’ or settled into a harbourside pub or restaurant provides further guidance on where is ‘good to go to’ and where is not. These spatial practices and knowledges allow the people on board their boat to move in and out of commodified places. Those variable and shifting articulations are, it seems to me, the kind of privileged freedom that sailing does seem to offer, the power of disconnection from an extensive network that Hinchcliffe (forthcoming) identifies in the urge amongst Danish householders to use stoves and fireplaces instead of central heating. Out on the water, cruising in a sail-powered boat, a considerable amount of work is certainly required to keep things moving and yet this work achieves the effects of escape from other kinds of work and larger ‘systems’ that are beyond the individual. Hugh’s ‘systems’ in the earlier section are his, they are not the systems he was submerged in at his workplace before he retired. Even as a manager in the shipbuilding industry, or perhaps more so as a manager in the shipbuilding industry, he felt trapped in ‘forces beyond [his] control.’ The yacht gives the impression of being a discrete object, a sealed up place independent of larger human assemblies. That is part of its exclusionary appeal.

I got up well before they did so that I hoped no one would hear me peeing over the side of the boat. Even though this was what I had been told to do, I wasn’t so sure about it. It was about 7am I suppose, the water absolutely still - once I had finished rippling the surface that is. A few curlews called out, I could see a white farmhouse on a distant hill, a high grey sky, some whisps of cloud caught on the barbs of a pine forest. Muffled human sounds from inside the cabin and the smell of rain not long finished on the wood.. I think I might even have been enjoying myself.
 
 

Knowing how to feel about it all.

In narrating one episode from a pilot study for a research project on elite leisure practices, I am still working on how I should have felt about it all. The research proposal was a very emotionless document, competently hiding the frustrations involved in writing it and trying not to encourage amusement in the suggestion that studying an elite leisure practice would involve crewing on a yacht. Doing research carries its own special modes of comportment (Cook & Crang, 1994, Cook 1995, Parr, forthcoming) which are about making boundaries and embodying emotion. Beware the moral boundaries of representing the fun that can be involved in doing research. Even in a research milieu that has been thoroughly reshaped by feminist critiques of heroic masculinity and objective knowledge, stories of suffering or stoicism during fieldwork remain the disciplinary norm.

Studying elites as a ‘critical social researcher’ sets up a series of socio-economic, moral and cultural dilemmas. Can you afford to do it? What is also on issue is to what extent you are going be ‘genuine’ during the time spent with them. Amongst the elites studied by Lamont (1992) identifying phoneys, social climbers and salauds was a constant purifying activity to ensure moral order amongst the upper-middle classes - so certain attempts to mimic the dispositions of elites or make tactically attractive impressions may result in your prompt disposal from their company. So the dilemma is a mixture of the interaction dilemmas of impression management and the relatively ‘weak’ position of the researcher. For me there was still the lingering moral sense that somehow presenting an inauthentic self was an unacceptable practice, even though necessary to gain the confidence of certain dis-similar participants. Added to which of course all the manuals on ethnographic work tend to urge a sympathetic treatment of all research subjects (i.e. Kleinman and Copp1993).

On a cultural level, where are you coming from? Will you be treated as an outsider by the elite because of your own cultural traits, your maps of mattering?. In my pilot work I came from the elderly couple’s home town, was middle class enough and was enthusiastic enough about yachting. Except I was not really competent enough, yachting in practice frequently involved hosting guests who were neither emotionally nor practically competent and sometimes managing guests who might well end up having a terrible time at sea. For all my fearful moments I was, like the weather, relatively calm during the weekend, showed willing to try and do things I did not have a clue about and my hosts in turn made it all easy because they were old hands at looking after fair weather sailors.

Then there is the final tricky issue that this chapter began with, can feelings be mapped by knowings? Kleinman and Copp’s (1993) excellent work on emotions and fieldwork in qualitative research taps into the diverse re-workings of feeling required to engage fully with participants in research projects. They emphasise the multi-layered nature of feeling, the way in which during an interviewer the researcher can be bored, anxious and curious at the same time, each layer masking the connections of the other layers. Taking their cue from symbolic-interactionism and Hochschild’s (1983) work on ‘feeling as clue’ they stress that emotions cannot be divided off from research and that they are part of the material for analysis. After detailing a great deal of negative feelings encountered during research such as avoidance, despair and anger, they shift on to the good feelings of pride, identification and rapport. They warn of the tendency ‘to bask in our feelings of competence, believing that the good relations we have established reflect our skills at developing rapport’ (p46). In other words, taking our leisure when things are going well in research rather than asking why things are running so smoothly. Part of the work that leisure requires as I noted earlier was in making guests feel comfortable, making the guest, even if he or she is a researcher, feel good and in that sense my enjoyment was part of the experience I had to reflect upon. It was not entirely my skills as a researcher that had lead to my being able to bask on the deck of Dee and Hugh’s boat during a sunny afternoon. Equally my moments of embarrassment were clues about where there were boundaries being broken. From my experiences of yachting I would like to push the definition of social ordering through emotion on to feelings of fear and courage as a socially acquired response to those feelings. Leisure in these terms provides spaces for the re-shaping of emotions other than pleasure and enjoyment.

In extending definitions of empirical material in research to include the very subjective sphere of emotions, Kleinman and Copp (1993) ignore an important aspect of Hochschild’s (1983) ground breaking exploration on the colonisation of human emotions by commercial ideas of good service. Hochschild’s central thesis was that working on our emotions has become a central part of labour in late twentieth century service oriented economies. In the search for perfect customer relations, for a kind of ‘feelgood factor’ so important to profit in sectors such as the leisure industry (Mintel 1997), the repertoire of feelings and their performances of service workers have been delimited in favour of a constant drive towards customer satisfaction and comfort. `It is from feeling that we learn the self-relevance of what we see, remember, or imagine. Yet it is precisely this precious resource that is put in jeopardy when a company [or research process] inserts a commercial purpose between a feeling and its interpretation.` (Hochschild, p196).

And equally for the growing number of social researchers who now carry out in-depth interviews, participant-observations, focus groups and other forms of affectual research, managing emotions while doing research has become a central part of ‘the job.’ This means that at the end of an hour’s work, or day’s, or a week’s or nine months, the ethnographer is left working overtime trying to reclaim their inappropriate feelings from their appropriation and suppression in favour of knowledge production. Which is another way of saying that investigating leisure involves knowing what you are feeling and then being able to return to feeling what you are knowing.

To finish on an emotional topic I would like to re-consider my efforts to work out Hugh’s grumpy demeanour, since I have commented on my own fears earlier. In interpreting his attitude the premises I began with were; since cruising was Hugh’s main source of pleasure then he would be happy and since he was grumpy there must be a reason for it. That reason, I suspected, being my presence on board his boat. So I tried to assess whether I was being intrusive as an incompetent sailor, culturally distant by my class origin, age and related tastes, a social researcher invading his private life, or combinations of these.

My discomfort in his presence was my ‘clue’ and my required emotional response was to try and establish some kind of rapport with Hugh (they sometimes describe it as ‘making friends with the enemy’) even though I normally would simply have avoided the situation entirely (Kleinman and Copp 1993). After all Hugh’s name was on the list of commodores at the yacht club I remembered sneering over as a teenager. So I kept smiling, I kept trying to be bouncy and enthusiastic. Hugh’s grumpiness masked my seeing his freedom and perhaps more significantly masked the major emotional work that Dee was doing in the background. My efforts would perhaps have been best directed to attending to her efforts to make me feel at home.

Acknowledgements:

Without question my understanding of cruising was thanks to the understandings of ‘Dee and Hugh’, and also several other woody boat people who shall remain nameless - ‘Jenny, Will and Robert’. Ian Cook for his own take on being grumpy. And to the Dept. of Geography, University of Wales Lampeter for financing 'Bristol and the Sea' out of which this pilot was made and the Dept. of Geography, University of Bristol for hosting me for a year.

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