“Skate & create: lines in composition (2024)” by Julio Cesar Stabelini | PhD Thesis

Abstract: “This work explores the implications and correspondences between perceptual skills involved in the relationship between individuals and the environment through skateboarding practice, deepening the understanding of emic categories such as flow and line. It also examines the role that listening – which, in the case of skateboarding, involves the whole body – plays in the engagement of skateboarders with urban affordances and other practices unfolding in this environment. This is intertwined with a discussion of what we can grasp from the environment-world with our senses through different forms of engagement, as well as the (im)possibilities of audiovisual resources to convey the sensory experience linked to skateboarding practice in its sensory and relational developments. The main theoretical influence of this work is Ingold’s (2000, 2007, 2013, 2015, 2015a) proposal for an anthropology immersed in life as a type of knowledge interested in its flows and pathways in the world, as well as his proposal for an ecological anthropology, unfolded in contributions related to the field of perception, especially studies on issues related to environmental perception. Contributions from Gibson’s ecological psychology (1986) are also part of the conceptual framework, as are theoretical and methodological contributions from audiovisual anthropology, especially those that address the possibilities of exploring sounds in ethnographic construction (FELD, 1982, 1988, 2020). Therefore, it is an ethnography of sensitivities and perceptions involved in skateboarding practice and their correspondences with the worldenvironment, with other practices and logics. It does not start from a specific spatial context but rather emerges from the impressions and expressions (both physical and verbal) of practitioners observed, captured, and gathered through ethnographic, autoethnographic, literature review, and excursions into skateboarding-related audiovisual records. Skateboarding is conceived here as a way of dwell (INGOLD, 2015) the urban environment through a type of sensory engagement that allows for varied compositions, in a movement of openness to the weather-world (IBIDEM), being attentive to life, the possibilities of building with and being built by, of experimentation, and expression”

 

This doctoral thesis, written by Julio Cesar Stabelini under the supervision of Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji, was defended in 2024 in the area of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo, and is available in Portuguese at the USP Repository.

ANO

2024

AUTORES

Julio Cesar Stabelini

EDITORES

Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji