The concrete culture : a subcultural analysis of Maltese skate culture

Abstract

I first decided to research the local skate scene around a year and a half ago. I was walking past, what I now know is a popular skate spot, when I suddenly heard the unmistakable slap of a deck hitting the concrete. I looked over and saw a boy in his early teens leap over a four-foot wall with a skateboard. I was flabbergasted, not by the stunt in itself, but by the young age of the skater. I had never seen a boy that age perform a trick of that complexity in Malta. The salience of this observation lies in the fact that this level of skating requires substantial commitment towards, what seems to be a spontaneous subculture. Despite being widely known for its phenomenal attributes, skate subcultures received meagre academic recognition both locally and internationally; a fact that called for a qualitative methodology. Over the past year and a half or so, I conducted thirteen interviews with two different groups. I also tried to parallel the data from the interviews with observations I had made, both before and during the actual fieldwork. The idea behind the research design is to explore the meaning of the local subculture, possibly in its own terms. The fieldwork proved to be as rich as it anticipated to be in the preliminary observations. While the constraints of time and textual space of the project may have bridled the analysis somewhat, I believe that the data presented illustrates some of the more profound meanings of the local skate scene, particularly in terms of the subculture's existential ethos. Which ethos appears to translate itself in social critique.