Motorcycles, body and risk: The motorcyclists’ social career

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Motorcycles, body and risk: The motorcyclists' social career

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Motorcycles, body and risk: The motorcyclists’ social career

Gabriel JderuUniversity of Bucharest

AbstractIn this article, I approach motorcycling as a learning process. The main concept used is that of the social career, as advanced by Erving Goffman and David Matza. I highlight the specific bodily practices and risks that occur in the successive stages of a motorcyclist’s social career. Throughout their career as motorcyclists, riders learn how to manage successive risks. The riding body may be approached as a case of voluntary risk-taking, a structural factor identified in many contemporary societies. Motorcycling is thus similar to hang gliding, skydiving, scuba diving or rock climbing. The study is based on data gathered from the main online motorcycling forum in Romania, participant observation carried out among motorcyclists in Romania in 2008 and 2009, and conversations and interviews with motorcyclists. I suggest that the risk implied by using motorcycles depends on the stage that a person is at in his or her social career.

Keywordsbody, mobility, motorcycling, risk, social career

Sociological research on motorcycling

The practice of motorcycling has received some attention in the sociological literature (McDonald-Walker, 2000; Wolf, 2000). Although rich, this literature has generally ignored the role played by the body in motorcycling. I will argue below that becoming a motorcyclist implies an embodied automotive career. I also argue that, through the embodied nature of motorcycling, the perception of risk has a central position in the social career of a motorcyclist. The argumentation is based on Erving Goffman’s theory (1961) of the social career and David Matza’s insight (1969) that one’s career passes

Corresponding author:Gabriel Jderu, Department of Sociology, University of Bucharest, Bulevardul Regina Elisabeta 4–12, Bucharest, Romania. Email: [email protected]

474081 JOS0010.1177/1440783312474081Journal of SociologyJderu: Motorcycles, body and risk2013

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through several stages. I also use Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenology of the body approach, as well as sociological analyses of risk, especially those applied to motorcy-cling (Bellaby and Lawrenson, 2001; Haigh and Crowther, 2005; Natalier, 2001).

As Alford and Ferriss (2006) have noted, motorcycles have a strong presence in public culture. Works on motorcycling fall into several categories: memoirs, sociologi-cal studies, travel books, books on famous motorcycle brands, technical books present-ing information about the mechanics of particular classic models, works illustrating motorcycle driving techniques, motorcycle stories and movies, and albums presenting the motorcycle as an aesthetic object. Despite its public presence, this topic has not generated much social science work, with some notable exceptions (see Bourne, 2007; McDonald-Walker, 2000; Veno, 2007; Wolf, 2000). Some of the latter has focused on the study of motorcycle club members, who, however, represent only a small proportion of motorcycle users. Others focus on motorcycle riding as a philosophical and meta-physical experience.

There are also some sociological studies of motorcycling (Bellaby and Lawrenson, 2001; Carroll, 2008; Halnon and Cohen, 2006; Librett, 2008; Mellstrom, 2002, 2004; Natalier, 2001; Nyanzi et al., 2009; Truitt, 2008). Among these works, there are few that explicitly focus on risk (Bellaby and Lawrenson, 2001; Haigh and Crowther, 2005; Natalier, 2001). Natalier (2001), for instance, argues that motorcyclists overestimate the idea of control, underestimate the risks involved in the activity of riding motorcycles and search for ways to neutralize the risk implied by the activity. In another study, Haigh and Crowther (2005) argue that motorcycling implies a continuous process of reflexiv-ity and negotiation regarding risk. In that process, prior riding experiences and interper-sonal influences are important. Likewise, Bellaby and Lawrenson (2001) point to the discrepancy between official statistics for traffic accidents and the opinion of traffic experts, on one hand, and motorcyclists’ subjective view of the risk of riding, on the other. The objective risk shown by statistics is high, while motorcyclists’ subjective perception of risk is low. Although valuable, these analyses of risk based on a statistical perspective do not enable us to understand the heterogeneous nature of the motorcycling world. Moreover, this analysis in a way flattens the biographical dimension, by ignoring the phases of the social career experienced by people entering the motorcycle world, a shortcoming that I will address.

Another gap this article addresses relates to the fact that the motorcycle represents a type of mobile technology. Studies of motorcycling as a mobile technology are lack-ing. For instance, in 2004, the journal Theory, Culture & Society dedicated an entire issue to auto-mobility, but most articles dealt with cars (Beckmann, 2004; Dant, 2004; Sheller, 2004; Thrift, 2004; Urry, 2004). Studies of motorcycling as a mobile technol-ogy are lacking. Except for Truitt’s (2008), all the studies on the sociology of mobility are focused on research into car-generated sociability. A notable exception, coming from a mobility studies, is Pinch and Reimer (2012), who argue that contemporary ‘moto-mobility’ is produced by the tensions generated by cars’ hegemony in the auto-mobility system. Even if automobiles confer freedom and flexibility, both temporally and spatially, they clog urban traffic. While moto-mobility is a way to regain freedom of movement, it is also grounded in emotions and bodily practices different from those of the car. Even though useful, this study ignores the reasons why people engage in



Jderu: Motorcycles, body and risk 3

motorcycle riding, given that society perceives the practice as highly risky. The socia-bility conferred by motorcycles as a means of locomotion has been ignored. This omission has important implications, as motorcycling involves another type of mobil-ity, different from that of the car, having its own logic that deserves to be studied sepa-rately. Although there are studies that indirectly analyse the relationship between motorcycle and body (Halnon and Cohen, 2006; Mellstrom, 2002, 2004), I will dem-onstrate below that motorcycling culture relies more than car culture on bodily prac-tices and different forms of risk.

The data used for this article come from 28 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with bikers and ex-bikers, aged from 24 to 84 and belonging to different social classes. Additional data were collected through informal conversations with, and participant observation of, bikers in Bucharest. These meetings were held weekly, from March to October (spring and summer in Romania every year). I also attended six additional national meetings in 2008 and 2009. Another data source was provided by active bik-ers’ discussions on the largest Romanian motorcyclists’ forum.1 For the purposes of this article, I selected mainly information on bodily risks. The site of this research is Bucharest, Romania, where motorcycling has grown at a phenomenal rate in the last two decades, acquiring features described by Halnon and Cohen (2006) and McDonald-Walker (2000). More and more high-income people are buying motorcycles. The Romanian Association of Motorcyclists is more and more publicly represented, espe-cially through its social campaigns on the subject of traffic education and the risks of riding. The article is organized as follows. In the next section I review the concept of the social career, pointing to the ways in which it can be used for this study of mobility. Then, I analyse for each career stage the bodily practices and risks assumed by bikers. I conclude by pointing out the usefulness of the concept of the social career for analysis of risk.

Motorcycling as social career

How does one become a biker? To answer this question, I use the sociological concept of the social career and focus on the classical studies by Erving Goffman (1961) and David Matza (1969). Goffman (1961: 127) has defined the career as ‘any social strand of any person’s course through life’. Although Matza developed a social career theory applicable to the analysis of deviant behaviour and Goffman one for institutionalized patients, this theory may also be used for analyses of non-deviant behaviour Vail (1999). According to Matza’s theory, there are three stages of the social career: affinity, affilia-tion and signification.

As Goffman would put it, the motorcyclist’s career ‘can no more be a success than a failure’ (1961: 127). He also refers to ‘changes over time [that] are basic and common to the members of social category, although occurring independently to each of them’ (1961: 127). In brief, Goffman’s career concept is useful for this research in two ways: (1) it implies that individuals under the influence of a social world undergo common fundamental changes, regardless of their social diversity and the social contexts in which they act; and (2) it allows an analysis of the social self as a sum of phased changes, each stage having its own specificity.




These theories allow us to analyse how an individual can enter the motorcyclists’ social world. Thus, as is the case for deviant behaviours, motorcycle usage implies a social learning process, during which individuals acquire the conventions of that world. To a certain extent, the stages described by David Matza (1969) overlap with Goffman’s career phases (1961), that is, the pre-patient phase, the in-patient phase and the ex-patient phase. Matza’s metaphors fit motorcycling better because they are not based on the assumption that entering a certain institution is based on constraint, as is the case for psychiatric patients. Becoming a biker is a matter of free will. Therefore, examining the motorcyclist’s social career involves an analysis of the social process of voluntary change of social identity, that is, the transformations that an individual undergoes in contact with the symbolic universe of the motorcyclists’ world. The individual has, all in all, control over affiliation, membership and abandonment of this world. I thus kept Goffman’s idea (1961) that a career refers to changes of the self, common to members of a social group, regardless of the differences that may appear according to other criteria or the social contexts in which they developed. I also find Matza’s idea (1969) useful: that a career implies a phased social learning process and free will governing the choice of the rele-vant social strand. I will thus analyse how motorcycle affinity is formed, how individu-als’ social identity is modified as a result of affiliation to the bikers’ social category and how individuals’ personal history is re-signified in accordance with this new identity.

Affinity and risk

Affinity formation is the first stage of the bikers’ social career. For Matza (1969: 90–1), ‘persons, either individually or in aggregates, develop predispositions to certain phenomena … as a result of their circumstances’. Thus, affinity ‘may be regarded as a natural biographical tendency borne of personal and social circumstance that suggests but hardly compels a direction of movement’ (Matza, 1969: 93). Vail (1999) sees affinity as the birth of desire. In the case of the motorcycle, it is a question of the transformation of a possibility into desire. Very often, in the discussions that I had with bikers, they highlighted that they were ‘born to be motorcyclists’ or attracted by motorcycles from birth. The development of an affinity for motorcycles implies a self-objectivation pro-cess, a biographical illusion, through which individuals become conscious of the social category they are going to be part of. Affinity, in this context, turns latent dispositions into manifest behaviours.

How does the desire to become a biker emerge? The emergence lies at the intersection of broad socio-historical forces with a narrower interactional context. Despite the com-mon-sense perception that motorcycling is an activity that implies exclusively individual choices, one may identify structural factors that make individuals use the motorcycle. McDonald-Walker (2000), for instance, mentions the US post-Second World War climate in which motorcycling became a possibility. In Romania, motorcycling became an option due to the relatively large number of motorcycles left over after the Second World War, and, later on, due to imports from socialist countries. In addition, during that period, motorcycling became an automotive option because, unlike today, car ownership was extremely rare. At about the same period, in the early 1960s, Romania also began to produce Carpaţi and Mobra motorcycles, which became instant successes.




That success is explained to a large extent by the specifics of the Romanian auto-mobility system. The communist state invested steadily in heavy industries and generally under-invested in road infrastructure. Prior to and during the communist period, railways dominated the mobility system. Even if, in the late 1960s, Romania began to mass-produce cars, the level of car ownership remained low (Murgescu, 2010). Despite its extremely high desirability (Gătejel, 2011), it was hardly accessible. In that context, the motorcycle was perceived, as in other countries, as the poor people’s car. And, with the shortage economy of that period, motorcycle (and other commodity) ownership was based on intense sociality and dense networks of support, the recycling (Chelcea, 2002) and circulation of spare parts, and knowledge of repair and maintenance.

One may thus argue that motorcycling had a key role in the democratization of mobil-ity at the time, especially for working-class people. The testimony of two old bikers is quite relevant in this respect:

My first bike … well, my first bike was a one-piston BMW 350 that I bought from a guy that sold World War II German parts and motorcycles. It was a light motorcycle, very reliable, that helped me a lot with my fieldwork as a geologist. The guy that I bought it from lived in the same street as me and had a lot of scrap iron in his yard, as well as wheels, motors, motorcycles.… I can’t remember any more when exactly; they gave us some Russian Boxers [Russian make of motorcycle] from work. Mine wasn’t really perfect when I received it, but I fixed it myself with the help of a relative of mine who gave me some parts. All eyes turned to look at us when we passed by, because there weren’t so many cars and motorbikes as nowadays. (N, male, 84 years old)

While the above quote summarizes well the situation during the 1950s and early 1960s and the role of epochal, macro, historical changes, increasingly, during the 1960 s and 1970s, other mezzo- and micro-level factors came into play. During that period, the motorcycle represented a pre-marital mobility option for many people in Romania. One informant told me that he had bought his first motorbike in 1979, despite an adverse reaction from family members who perceived motorcycling as something dangerous.2 He sold it five years later because he began to attend a police cadet school and because he got married. ‘A family needs a car’, he told me and, besides, his wife considered motorcycling too risky. In that social context, motorcycling was part of pre-marital masculinity.

The auto-mobility climate during the post-war period and family influences were important factors in motorcycle affinity development in bikers of the 1970s and 1980s. For many, affinity for motorcycles developed inside the family, as illustrated by one interviewee who said that he first rode his grandfather’s bike, a Russian-made IJ. He said that he used to ride it when he was a little boy. Although he was not allowed to play with it for safety reasons, he used to spend long periods of time repairing it with his grandfather (D, 42 years old, engineer).

The 1990s and the 2000s brought in yet other factors. Analysing motorcycling in the US, Halnon and Cohen (2006) speak of the process of ‘gentrification in the new frontier’ By that they mean the tendency of people from the upper social classes to appropriate practices previously associated with the lower social classes. While motorcycling used to be mainly a working-class practice (like tattooing and bodybuilding), it penetrated the




middle classes. A good illustration is the birth of manufacturer-led identities, such as the birth of RUBs (Rich Urban Bikers), that is, well-off individuals riding Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

In Romania, the gentrification of motorcycling was accompanied by an ascending trend in individuals’ orientation towards spare-time activities involving risk-taking (Ivan and Frunzaru, 2010; Lyng, 1990), such as hang gliding, skydiving, scuba diving and rock climbing.3 This created a tension between a public agenda focused on risk reduction and the popularity of the practice. Along with an openness to risk-taking, the post-1990 gentrification of motorcycling also allowed the self-expression of individuals and the emergence of ‘bodily projects’ (Shilling, 2005). In the context of a growing trend of reflexive embodiment in Romania, that is, the ‘tendency to perceive, emote about, reflect and act upon one’s body; to practices of body modifications and maintenance; and “body image”’ (Crossley, 2006a: 1), many people see motorcycling as an appropriate framework for outlining a body project. The body riding a motorcycle became, an ‘iconic body’ (Varga, 2010). In other words, the technology people use to move conveys infor-mation about them, becoming a form of self-expression. Contact with the symbolic world created by motorcycle companies and marketing campaigns participates in the formation of affinity for this type of body technology. Design and creative industries, understood as a technology of power, generate new subjectivities and new mental spaces (Milestone, 2007). The diversification of motorcycles’ design offers abundant opportuni-ties for motorcycling-related bodily projects (speed, custom, touring cruiser, naked, off-road, etc.), creating diverse moto-mobilities identities (Alford and Ferriss, 2007).

Among the people whom I studied, this process was mediated, in a surprising way, by the internet. The main motorcycling website from Romania nicely illustrates this, as it provides easy access to the nexus between the body and the motorcycle. To give just one example, in the discussions that I had with bikers there was the recurrent idea that, before they decided to buy a motorbike, they first searched for motorcycle illustrations on the internet. That ensures an anticipatory socialization with regard to motorcycle usage for individuals attracted by motorcycles. Therefore, affinity for motorcycles is no longer entirely dependent, as during the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and early 1990s, on spatial, temporal, historical or family circumstances; rather, it is IT&C-mediated (Pirani and Varga, 2010: xiii). Thus, for the new bikers, the internet has become a significant agent facilitating individuals’ entry into the motorcyclists’ world. Gazing at motorcycles on the internet seems to be, in Urry’s conceptualization (2002 [1990]), a daytime dreaming activity. As many novices told me, gazing at motorcycles on the street or on the internet remains a permanent activity long after they acquire a motorcycle of their own. Many subjects declared that they are continuously tempted to verify anticipatively what kind of motorcycle suits them.

Anticipative socialization through internet consumption thus represents ‘ground zero’ of a biker’s career, a sort of pre-usage, fantasmatic phase. Affiliation is mediated by dreaming, calculations, plans, sharing of stories and consumption of images. One inter-viewee told me that, initially, he talked often about motorcycles with a friend who, at the time, attended motorcycling instruction lessons together with her boyfriend. That was how he got the idea that he could buy a motorcycle for himself, although his parents




opposed it. The day his friend obtained her licence, he began quite feverishly searching for pictures, making calculations, posting messages, asking questions and answering dif-ferent posts on the internet. He said that it took a long time before he actually purchased a motorcycle, but during that period he felt as if he was already a motorcyclist.

Direct, interactional elements and body experiences on bikes driven by others seem to be extremely important for the transformation of the motorcycle from possi-bility to desire. One’s first experience as a rider, either as a passenger or as a driver, seems to play the role of a founding act. For new bikers, it functions as a revelation, mainly due to the combination of novel bodily experiences and high emotional loads. It is an experience that most interviewees can hardly describe verbally, because it is mainly physical. For one interviewee, discovery of motorcycling unfolded as strongly positive body experiences. Previously he had often seen motorcycles passing by in the street, but he had no feeling for them at all until he actually rode one together with somebody else:

When I first mounted a motorcycle, it was quite unreal. A cousin of mine gave me a ride. The feeling was extraordinary, it was summer and hot and I felt the wind caressing my face. And that sense of motion you have when you take a curve, it’s hard to describe. I held him tight – at first, I felt embarrassed, but fear made me hang on to him tighter. (C, male, 26 years old)

Another subject’s experience was similar. He first got on a motorcycle when he started to attend a motorcycling school together with a friend. His depiction of his first ride centres on bodily experiences and sensations, rather than cognitive categories:

I could not imagine it was so cool, if you know what I mean, I could hardly believe that I could ride without falling. I had that special sensation, when you touch a motorbike, of something heavy – how can I put it – how could I ride without falling, how to coordinate my hands on the controls? And the instructor stayed off and shouted at me: squeeze the bike with your legs! … And the helmet, the gloves … put me under high pressure, do you know the feeling when you go underwater and try to hear something? (E, male, 24 years old)

Such descriptions of first-time experiences on a motorcycle highlight the idea that mounting a motorcycle is the phenomenological equivalent of a break in the natural course of daily body experience. This out-of-the-ordinary sensation produces feelings of a lived body, which then become a form of being in the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). In such situations, if individuals lack the necessary ‘body techniques’ (Mauss, 1979), the body itself becomes a subject. As a subject, the body mediates the relationship of indi-viduals with the world more than in other situations, a fact that renders motorcycling primarily an embodied experience.

The heightened role of the body at this stage, as well as the lack of mastery in ‘how to use their bodies’ (Mauss, 1979: 97), creates some risks.4 As mentioned earlier, many interviewees said that their decision to become a motorcyclist was not welcomed by parents, close relatives, friends, girlfriends, acquaintances and other non-bikers. This reluctance was generated by the risks involved, and the underlying idea that riding a motorcycle implies high risks of bodily injury.




Affiliation and risk

Once the desire to ride has been awakened, the would-be biker passes through another range of transformations. The affiliation stage consists of social learning from existing bikers, and acquiring membership in their world. As Matza (1969: 101) says, affiliation ‘refers to adoption or receiving of a son into a family’. Similarly, in the process of being converted, the newcomer ‘begins to do something new for him/herself, but already familiar to the others’. In motorcycling, that is the process during which individuals learn to behave as motorcyclists from other bikers.

At this stage, issues of performativity are crucial. This is a problematical stage from the performance point of view of the newcomer to the motor world. Upon joining exist-ing bikers’ groups, the newcomers have not mastered the vocabulary and the bodily and meta-linguistic repertoire of the old-timers. Additional challenges arise out of the highly heterogeneous nature of the motorcyclists’ world in Romania. As in motorcy-cling cultures elsewhere, different types and styles of motorcycling exist in Romania. Speed, touring, chopper/custom, off-road, communist and super-motorcycles are to be found there. This variety, together with precarious socialization in that culture, exacer-bates the problem of performativity and self-presentation (Goffman, 1959).

For many bikers, affiliation begins with registration for a motorcycling driving licence course. During the schooling period, newcomers perform (out of a combination of pressure and personal will) their affiliation to and membership of the motorcycling world. Buying a biker outfit becomes a means of affiliation. Many motor school stu-dents and beginners wear expensive biker clothes, helmets, jackets, boots, protective trousers and sunglasses. Some have bought the clothing long before getting a riding licence and even before registering for riding courses. Some even join motorcycling meetings outside Bucharest, wearing appropriate outfits, but travelling by train. For those who actually begin motor school, the performativity of affiliation and the acqui-sition of symbols may be as important as the risk education delivered by instructors. For some beginners, wearing the protective equipment is more a sign of performative affiliation than an expression and outcome of systematic analysis of the safety rules. At that point, it is more urgent for them to resemble motorcyclists than to avoid the risk of injuries.

In addition to heightened performativity, during the affiliation process individuals learn the behavioural and bodily conventions useful for managing to ride outside the premises of the motor school. These conventions play a significant role. Individuals learn to relate to the motorcycle as an object, a long process that eventually leads to seeing it as an extension of one’s body. This is a complicated process, because there is a gap between the heightened desire to ride the motorcycle on normal roads and the lack of the necessary body techniques and the self-confidence needed in order to drive safely. Such bodily techniques include body postures for taking curves, ways to keep a still motorcycle steady, techniques to slow down using both wheels, or strategies for using mirrors when riding.

Fresh bikers need to learn social conventions, in addition to performative and bodily conventions. One such convention is the obligation to greet other bikers met in traffic. Greetings are usually made with the left hand or, if traffic conditions do not allow one to




take one’s hand off the clutch, a movement of the left leg sidewise. One can also greet by using an up–down movement of the head or using the headlight. The conversations I had with beginners revealed that the greeting convention is not easy to observe if individuals have not mastered motorcycle riding techniques very well. There is a special topic on the motor forum where bikers report how they greet each other in traffic. One internet forum post says the following on the topic of greeting, a vivid testimony to the social conven-tions pressuring newcomers who desire to affiliate:

I tell you, it is really uncool when you are a beginner and somebody greets you and you are just too afraid to take your hand off the handle bars. Eventually, I asked my passenger to salute in my place. During the 350 km I rode yesterday, I was greeted in three different ways: a guy even took both his hands off to say hi (Oh my God!), most of them raising one hand over the handle bars and there was a guy on a superb chopper who saluted me bringing his hand under the handle bars. PS: for whoever passed by on a blue Suzuki Bandit 1200 yesterday and did not get a return greeting from me, I’m saluting them now. (20 Aug. 2007, 09:15 AM)

Fear of heavy urban traffic is an emotion that one has to manage at this stage. It is generated by the subjective evaluation of injury risks. The most common solution to this problem is to ride at night, when there is less traffic. Newcomers just ride behind some more experienced bikers, or they ask their friends to drive a car in front of them. Another common protection strategy is to modify the exhaust system so that the motor makes extra noise. That way, they get extra attention from people inside cars.5 Fears are also fuelled by the unfortunate events, experienced by almost all bikers: minor accidents, falls, and hearing stories about other bikers’ accidents. In this case, bodily experiences are re-signified as primary fears through interpersonal communication and mass media stories (Chelcea, 2009).

Along with fear, another risk-related emotion that develops during the affiliation stage is hostility to car drivers. As Musselwhite et al. (2011: 4) point out, road users perceive the road ‘as a competitive rather than a shared space’ and ‘motorbike riding [is] considered one of the least safe forms of road use’. Generally, road users tend to see the road as a space for cars. This view is shared, but also resisted, by the bikers whom I studied. As a minority, they develop an aversion to car drivers. At the beginning of a motorcyclist’s career this sentiment is learnt, rather than derived from direct experi-ence. Bikers develop strong negative stereotypes of car drivers. One can get a sense of this dynamic by the nicknames bikers use. On the internet forum and in daily usage, bikers use the word ‘can’ to describe a car. They call car drivers ‘canned stuff’, while car drivers call them ‘organ donors’. These metaphors allude to the ever-present physi-cal risks: ‘cans’ protect bodies, while motorbikes expose the body.

The heightened perception of risk and the precarious status of a riding body convey to new converts the self-image of a hero. I noticed that many of the discussions that take place at their main meeting place in Bucharest are about accidents or near-accidents in which they were involved. The online forum mentioned above includes many discus-sions of that kind. Bikers participate in the community through these stories in which car drivers are the villains.




According to Mimi Sheller (2004), car users have a feeling of being ‘in the car’, which is related to safety. Being ‘in the car’ is augmented by a wide range of safety-related emotions (e.g. driving happiness), some of them caused by proprioceptivity (smells, air touching one’s body, curve swinging, etc.). While the car creates the feeling of being inside, the motorcycle creates the feeling of being outside, exposed. Inside the car, one’s body is protected. During the journey the car is a kind a house sheltering the body and one’s vision is limited to the view offered by the windows of that ‘house’. On the motorcycle, one’s body is exposed, but the sight horizon is much wider. Contact with the environment is direct. When riding a bike, the self ‘colonizes’ the body, which becomes a subject of its own. Inside the car, the individual’s condition is that of specta-tor-body. On the motorbike, the individual’s condition is that of actor-body. The first admires reality, while the second actively participates in it. In the car, the body is inher-ent; on the motorcycle, the body is problematic. The feeling generated by actor-body status seems to be an important element in motorcycle culture. This feeling was also identified in scholarly (McDonald-Walker, 2000) and popular culture works alike. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Motorcycling (Holmstrom, 2002: xix), for instance, notes that

I never feel more alive than when riding a motorcycle. For me, traveling in a car is like watching television: I feel as if I’m viewing my surroundings through a glass tube. When I’m on a bike, I feel as though I am actually there, experiencing the world. Not only do I see my surroundings, but I feel them, smell them, taste them. I feel a part of something larger, something complete, instead of feeling like an uninterested voyeur.

Sometimes, when riding, the speed, combined with the exposed condition of the body, generates an ecstatic feeling that modifies the perception of time and space and can, paradoxically, allow the annihilation of the sense of risk that is the foundation of this two-wheeled type of auto-mobility. This paradox has been nicely depicted by the novel-ist Milan Kundera (1997: 1-2) in a short passage in his novel Slowness:

... the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time … in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

Signification and risk

In the signification stage individuals come to internalize their new situation and get to re-signify their entire identity. If, in the affinity stage, individuals experience the awakening of the desire to become a biker, and, in the affinity stage, they start attributing to them-selves signs of their affiliation to the bikers’ world, the last stage is focused on profound transformations of the self. Once one has reached this stage, the motorcycle becomes a kind of axis mundi, the central point of bikers’ mental geographies and biographies.6

The prototypical biker of this stage is the veteran, that is, an individual who has been active for several years. The forum that I analysed contains a topic (opened in 2009) on the theme of veterans’ meetings. Discussions under this topic underline the fact that




experienced bikers tend to create certain forms of association in order to distinguish themselves from other motorcyclists. The participants in that topic also debate the definition of the experienced motorcyclist. Thus, one of the most heated debates under this topic relates to the number of years of experience appropriate to a veteran. Some argue that one needs ten years, while others say that a smaller number is enough. It was proposed that experience should be evaluated and acknowledged by means of yellow laces that bikers visibly display on their jackets (one lace for every ten years), although not all participants in the discussion agreed with this solution. Accumulating laces or other visible marks of experience, is, in Bourdieu’s sense (1984), a materialization of distinction. Veterans see themselves as the aristocracy of the motorcycling community. Here is one appeal to organize separate meetings devoted to experienced bikers:

It would be a good thing if everyone came with a little box full of old photos and left it on view, so that the young ones could see what and where we rode. They should listen to our stories, our adventures and especially our advice. I wish many Mobra riders on this forum, and not only them, enjoy riding like that for about 20 years, as we did! Many of us will meet again at the beautiful campsite in Cluj, Eldorado. I propose that the organizers introduce this moment into their program. Gather in a small group, have a beer together and tell stories. Why shouldn’t we even have a parade of our own?

Veterans’ tendency to distinguish themselves from the others is also reflected in the linguistic categories that they use. I found out that, in many cases, in their daily conversa-tions veterans call both non- and non-experienced bikers ‘civilians’, developing a sense of pride when comparing themselves to them.

Risk and risk management take different forms in this stage. Safety is the keyword. Old bikers live with the spectre of the ‘defeated body’ (Le Breton, 2009), of the body that no longer obeys either the ‘soul’ or the mind. At one of the ‘communist’ (Soviet motor-bike) meetings, I heard a discussion among individuals who tried to find solutions for the moment when, due to old age, they would not be able to ride a motorcycle any longer. The sidecar was considered a viable solution. Incompatibility with an aged body is felt more intensely in the case of the motorcycle than in that of the car.

Conclusions

In this article, I have analysed the way bikers pass through different career stages. Using the concept of the social career, I have argued that its meaning must be enlarged, by taking into account the bodily practices that define one’s career. In the case that I studied, motorcycling, bodily practices and risk are closely related, but their relation-ship unfolds differently at different career stages. Motorcycling, like other activities based on voluntary risk, has to be analysed in its social context and in close relation to its embodied nature.

A thorough analysis of the risk generated by motorcycling has to take into account the stages of one’s career. The risk implied by the affiliation stage is different from the risk of the signification stage. If one analyses motorcycling risk based on statistics only, thus flattening out the biographical perspective, one fails to take into account the evolving nature of a motorcycling career.




Analysed through the lens of reflexive embodiment theories (Crossley, 2006a; 2006b), a motorcyclist’s social career overlaps with a reflexive process of insertion of the motor-cycle into one’s bodily practices. As I have shown above, during the affinity stage, a body project emerges (Shilling, 2005), but it is confined only to the daydreaming and contem-plative dimension. The motorcyclist’s body project involves the development of an entire symbolic space of images and memories, which frames their body-related imagination. The bodily project becomes sharper during the affiliation stage, when reflexivity remains high, but it becomes highly performative. Reflexivity is focused on the tension between actual behaviour and the imagined bodily project. During the signification stage, the body project becomes routine, evolving into a personal identity anchor.

Summing up, this article points to the embodied nature of social practices that involve voluntary risk-taking. This analysis also extends our understanding of risk, by emphasiz-ing that motorcycling culture is very heterogeneous. Therefore, risk analysis has to con-sider this variability. It is very likely that the objective and subjective risks of injury vary not only depending on one’s career stage, but also on the category of motorcyclist that one belongs to. In this article I have analysed those events, self-transformations and the acquisition of social practices that are shared by a large number of members of the motorcycling community. As I have shown above, the perception of risk has a central position in a motorcyclist’s developing social career and it is re-signified depending on the particular stage a biker has reached. The basis of risk perception is the precarious status of a body exposed to the world on a powerful machine.

Funding and acknowledgements

This work was supported by CNCSIS-UEFISCU / PN II – RU 68/2010, ‘Modernity and Mobility in Romania’. Earlier versions were presented at Annual Research Day, CeMoRe, University of Lancaster, 2011 and ‘Sociology of Risk Conference’, University of Copenhagen, 2011. Many thanks to Charles Musselwhite, Bianca Maria Pirani, Colin Pooley, John Urry, Lazăr Vlăsceanu.

Notes

1 See: www.motociclism.ro2 Resistance from family members when somebody decides to start riding motorcycles seems

to be a common feature for all subjects of my research.3 Ivan and Frunzaru’s (2010) explanation for this trend is that individuals voluntarily get

involved in activities of high potential physical risk because this allows them to regain the feeling of control in a society where they almost have no sense of control.

4 In general, affinity process analyses ignore the embodied nature of the decision to choose a certain social practice. Sociological studies on bikers also lack embodiment analyses.

5 This practice may be also linked to the aforementioned issues of over-performance of mem-bership of the bikers’ world.

6 See, as an illustration, Barnsley (2009: 108).

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Biographical note

Gabriel Jderu is associate professor at Department of Sociology, University of Bucharest, where he teaches Research Methods and Sociology of the Body. He is currently researching social practices related to motorcycling, as well as the maintenance and repair of automotive equipment.



Motorcycles, body and risk: The motorcyclists’ social career

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