1

[Published as ‘Je suis peut-être un salaud d'Anglais, mais pas un feignant ! Etre

brancardier dans un hôpital écossais’ in S. Chevalier, J. Edwards and S.

Macdonald (eds) Anthropology at Home in Britain, Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France, 2007 (Special Issue of the journal Ethnologie francaise).]

'I may be an English bastard but I'm never lazy':

Classification and Power among Hospital Porters

Nigel Rapport

(University of St. Andrews)

Introduction

One of the strengths of anthropology ‘at home’, it is to be argued (Rapport

2002), is an appreciation of the subtleties of the relationship between form and

meaning. Any social phenomenon has these two elements, Simmel advised

(1971): they represent a co-present dualism. The form of something is its

structure, its skeleton, its grammar; the meaning is its energetic (particular

animating) contents (cf. Rapport and Overing 2000:136-41). The implications of

the realisation that form is ever distinct from, and yet dependent on, meaning

(and vice-versa) are far-reaching. They are neatly encapsulated by George

Devereux (1978:125):

The simple fact is, as a Roman commonsense ‘psychologist’ pointed out

long ago, ‘Si bis faciunt idem non est idem’ (If two people do the same

2

thing it is not the same thing).

Structure, institution, linguistic grammar, discourse, customary behaviour,

habitus are not the same thing as interpretation, sensation, experience.

I find myself returning often to Devereux’s aphorism. It shaped a previous

French academic meeting (Rapport 1994a); it would seem to me a fitting maxim

for the project of social anthropology as such. I am intent on giving testimony to

the experience of the individual in social milieux, the way in which the

individual projects himself or herself into cultural symbologies for the purpose of

expressing meaning, maintaining world-views, fulfilling ambitions (Rapport

1987, 1993, 2003). This self-projection is a thing of beauty and of power. I want

aesthetically to celebrate that achievement in my anthropological writing; I want

morally to secure the right to that self-expression; I want ontologically to

understand the human capacities for this ongoing individual construction of self

and world. Here is anthropology as a liberal and literary science whose

cornerstone is a recognition of human freedom: the right to live in terms of

individual capacities for fashioning personal life-projects (Rapport 1994b,

1997a). Anthropology engenders a liberation from the ‘despotism of custom’

(John Stuart Mill).

In 1925 Virginia Woolf wrote a critique of the state of English fiction

where ‘the pages fill themselves in a customary way’ (1938:148). Novelists

seemed enthralled by notions of plot: ‘comedy, tragedy, love, interest, and an air

of probability embalming the whole’ (ibid.). The trouble with this kind of

writing, she felt, was that life was not like this: ‘life escapes; and perhaps

without life nothing else is worth while’ (ibid.). Life escaped from customary

fiction because life as lived was not a matter of neat design, of externally

conceived system, structure or classification. Life would always escape

3

classification; it could not be represented systemically (‘The will to a system is a

lack of integrity’ (Nietzsche)); it was not caused or determined by the

conventional structures laid atop it. Rather, structure, system and classification

owed their continued social existence to their being found serviceable to ongoing

individual usage, to their being animated by particular individual purpose and

design; while the latter looked to the formal for avenues of expression and

civilitude:

‘Dear Sir,’ (…) ‘yours faithfully’; one cannot despise these phrases laid like

Roman roads across the tumult of our lives, since they compel us to walk in

step like civilized people with the slow and measured tread of policemen

though one may be humming any nonsense under one’s breath at the same

time --‘Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,’ ‘Come away, come away, death’.

[Woolf 1969:223]

The contrast between form and meaning, one might say, embodies a tension

between cultural materiel (social structure, symbolic classification, social

system) and the individual life-forces that variously exist within them, express

themselves through them. The task of the literary, according to Woolf, was to

attempt to convey ‘this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,

whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the

alien and external as possible’ (1938:149). To this end, no method, no

experiment must be forbidden. Life would always escape structure --including

that of art-- but the same infinite possibilities that characterised individual

making of sense in their own lives could be drawn upon in the accounting of

others: ‘no perception comes amiss’ (1938:153).

I recognise that writing about other people is writing fiction.

4

Anthropology’s warrant is its moral and ontological, as well as aesthetic, project.

It inscribes testimony to individuals’ ‘existential power’ and imagines just

constitutional arrangements for its secure and equitable expression (Amit and

Rapport 2002).

The present article treats symbolic classification. I have argued for

classification to be approached as a cognitive strategy to which individuals have

creative recourse, their usage possibly spontaneous, momentary and

contradictory (Rapport 1997b). In the following, classification is explored in the

context of an institution that might formally be described as ‘total’ (Goffman

1961). What can be said here about existential power --the power to make

meaning and to shape a life according to individual interpretations-- in the face

of a structure, discourse, habitus, of workaday discipline?

Setting

Constance Hospital is a state-funded institution, furnished with a wide range of

medical specialisms, in Easterneuk, a large town in the east of Scotland. Among

its thousands of employees are more than 130 porters (almost all male). Porters

are not medically trained, their work calling for physical stamina more than any

other criteria. Porters ferry patients across the hospital, in wheelchairs, beds and

trolleys; they deliver mail within the hospital; they carry body parts and samples

of bodily substances between different parts of the hospital complex; they

transport dead bodies from hospital ward to mortuary; and they act as security

personnel, policing the boundaries between hospital and outside world. In a

setting geared to the ministering and the administration of medical knowhow,

porters occupy a lowly or liminal position: their routine work regarded as less

precious in the hierarchy of expertise then that of clerks, carpenters, laboratory

technicians, nurses, doctors and administrators (cf. Rapport 2003b).

5

When I began working as a porter at Constance,1 I was struck by the

amount of verbal exchange among hospital employees which was taken up with

classifying the world around them --especially by my fellow porters, and

especially concerning the immediate world of the hospital. I was surprised by

what seemed to be the arbitrariness of the criteria by which people and things

were assigned a classificatory identity, and yet the pleasure and the vehemence

with which the classifications were attested:

ALBERT: You're a first-class lazy bastard. D'you know that, Tim?

TIM: Look who's talking!

ALBERT: I'm a self-confessed lazy bastard. There's a difference. You're a

first-class lazy bastard.

TIM: No doubt you'll be going for a 'smoking break' after your 'coffee

break', Albert?

*

'Do I want sugar in my tea?!', Arthur repeats his friend's, Mick's, question to

him, with amazement: ‘Are you fucking English?!'.

*

‘You A-and-E cunt!', Arthur calls after Jim, jokingly, as Jim smiles and leaves

the porters’ lodge to return to his post in ‘Accident and Emergency’.

Why did the porters spend so much of their everyday interactions perpetrating

these kinds of classifyings and counter-classifyings? What was procured by a

fetichistic labelling of people and things with often deprecating descriptors and

affiliations, what being stated?

Induction

6

Being inducted into Constance Hospital on my first morning as a porter gave me

significant insights into the logic of classification as an everyday, institutional

discourse. My induction meant being subjected, for more than an hour, by Pat, a

portering sub-manager, to an elucidation of normative hospital practice which

was above all classificatory in nature. 'Every function has its uniform', Pat

announced, to me and five other neophytes, from the yellow or light blue polo

shirts of front-door porters, to the green cover-alls of Operating Theatre

Operatives, to the dark blue coats of Domestics (who were trained to deal with

waste). We were to beware orange garbage bags in particular, he continued,

because, unlike black ones, they were likely to contain 'sharps' (needles.) After

dealing with three or four patients in a row Pat advised us to wash our hands. We

were to change our clothes regularly and recognise that the hospital was a hot

environment where some people would sweat a lot and needed a shower each

day, or even two. '99% of time, no 99.5%, 99.9%' there was no violence to be

experienced in the hospital, but drink did get the better of people on occasion

and for this reason, earrings were a forbidden part of portering uniform (in case

a violent patient tried to pull them off). We were not to wear our uniforms to and

from work. Time cards were to be clocked when we reached and left the

hospital; if we were more than three minutes too early or late we would get

docked 15 minutes' pay...

There was too much information to take in and by the end we six

neophytes faced Pat in cowed silence; he then required us to sign a paper

stipulating that all the items on a checklist had been explained to us. It might

seem to us, Pat concluded, that within the large machine of the hospital ‘we

Porters’ were merely a small cog: we were not, however, to think of ourselves as

'just' porters --we should not let someone tell us that we were 'nothing'-- because,

'No part of the hospital could run without you. The same with Domestics'.

7

Classification, it might be inferred, is a routine discourse indigenous to the

Hospital as a functioning institution: its modernity, efficiency and rationality

intimately connected to its precise classificatory procedures. It is not surprising,

perhaps, that a major part of the banter casually exchanged by the porters among

themselves partook of a classificatory form: concerning the different skills

contained within the Hospital institution, the different parts of the Hospital plant

these were associated with, the different levels of enskillment and endeavour

these specialisms properly called for and actually manifested.

In what follows, I analyse more closely the ways in which the porters at

Constance engage with a discourse of classification whose skilled enactment

may, at one level, be said to be a sign of their professional competence and

institutional belonging. The extent to which porters 'domesticate' the discourse or

are themselves domesticated, socialized by it, or both, will be a key concern.

Kinds of classification

Classifications of some five main kinds might be said to inform porters' regular

exchanges with one another in the Hospital, and in the porters' lodge, or 'buckie',

especially: two small, windowless rooms in the plant which formed their

institutional base. Let me describe these five kinds briefly in turn before

analysing how they were used (and combined) in practice, and to what effect.

I: Kinds of work

An important part of what the porters professed to knowing was a list of the

different kinds of work undertaken in the hospital, where on the site this was

located, and who the named individuals were who were responsible for

practising these skills at any one time. In the hospital as a whole, there was, for

instance: Management or 'Upstairs', CCU [Coronary Care Unit], AKU [Artificial

8

Kidney Unit] or 'Renal', ICU [Intensive Care Unit], 'Level Two' [Radiotherapy],

'Chemo' [Chemotherapy], Urology, Pharmacy, 'PAMs' [Professions Allied to

Medicine], 'The Pain Lab' [Psychiatry], Clinical Measurement, 'Nuccy Med'

[Nuclear Medicine], 'A and E' [Accident and Emergency], and 'The Labs'

[Laboratories]. This classification could be extended to cover internal divisions

among 'porters', too: 'Front Door', X-Ray, Records, Physio, 'Minefield Squad'

[Amputees' Therapy], OTOs [Operating Theatre Operatives], 'Speck-ies'

[Specimens], 'Matty' [Maternity], Clinical Waste, Ward 15, Cath Lab [Catheter

Laboratory], South Block, Pipes, and Stores.

Such sub-specialisms represented important ways in which porters would

distinguish among themselves, defining one another's individual identities as

well as their own:

KEVIN: You're a Matty Porter, Fred, and you will always be a Matty

Porter! No matter what you do!

Porters could define their own hoped-for careers in the Hospital in terms of job

specifications:

ROGER: I've applied for a porter's job in X-Ray, Physio, Specimens, and

some others. Specimens is okay ‘cos you're your own boss; no one tells

you what to do. But I don't want to work shifts. Just nine-to-five. And I

don't wanna work in the Theatres. Too hot and too boring. You just sit in

an office even hotter than the buckie and you do nothing. Just wait for

patients to come out of Theatre; you just get them from the ward and

transfer them to the trolley in the air-lock. No thanks!

9

II: Kinds of industry

Later on the same morning in which Pat had conducted my induction into

Constance, Bob told me it was not a bad job being a hospital porter so long as

you guarded against working too hard at it: 'After you've been on a job, go for a

walk: don't return to the buckie straightaway'. I was to find that talk about the

hardness of work in the Hospital, portering and other, and who was a hard

worker and who was not, was almost a constant, ribaldrous refrain among the

porters; how hard X was working or wasn't, or should be or shouldn't, or could

be or couldn't, or did not know the meaning of, and had no chance to:

FRANK: Are you a part-timer or something?

SID (leaning against a Coke machine): Sure am!

FRANK: Then I'm a quarter-timer.

*

DICK: Bob! Are you putting in a guest appearance at work? I've not

seen you!

BOB: It’s still an illusion!

*

ALBERT: God you're lazy, Peter!

PETER: Yes. It took me 10 years' practice to get this skilled.

III: Kinds of personality

Besides their laziness or their industry as workers, porters may be defined

according to other kinds of individuating characteristic, often physical or

temperamental: being fat or thin, bald or mustachioed, young or old, tidy or

10

untidy, ugly, rude, aggressive, wealthy, rushed, religious, cheeky, a 'real gent', a

'sneak', a 'chancer', an inveterate tea-drinker, two-faced or old-fashioned. This

also extended to habits and hobbies undertaken beyond Constance but which

infiltrated the world of hospital gossip: one's inability to stop boozing or getting

drunk or frequenting discos, one's claim to sporting or sexual prowess, one's

predilection for garish party attire. As with other classifications met thus far, this

might be something one assumed for oneself or something one was apportioned:

KEVIN: Roger should change his name to 'Alchy' [he laughs]! No cunt goes

out drinking on a Tuesday night! Never. Monday you just might.

Wednesday, Thursday etc, but never Tuesday. [Others look somewhat

sceptical of Kevin's classification, wary of their own reputations]

ALASTAIR: Aye, I heard The Karate Kid [Roger] was dipped [drunk] on

Saturday, too!

IV: Kinds of football supporter

Football was a frequent topic of conversation among the porters, reflecting the

ubiquity with which it appeared in the media. (A radio set was usually playing in

the buckie, and football news, stories and trivia were daily items of fare.)

Different porters were also routinely known by their football allegiances. Some

porters had the initials of 'their' team, the crest or nickname, tattooed onto their

arms. When significant matches came up, especially derby matches between

neighbouring teams, conversation surrounding football reached a peak, as did the

emotion and vitriol with which discussions were laced. Easterneuk boasted two

competing teams, and, as with the more famous Glasgow rivals, Celtic and

Rangers, these traditionally reflected sectarian divisions: Roman Catholic versus

11

Protestant. When Rangers played Celtic, indeed, every porter could be expected

to be implicated, even though the areas concerned purportedly related to

Glasgow rather than Easterneuk (more was felt to be at stake than in the

Easterneuk derby because the teams were so much 'bigger' and more famous

than Easterneuk United and Easterneuk, and the football being played so much

better). A kind of moiety opposition characterised portering life during the build-

up to and aftermath of an 'Old Firm' (Celtic versus Rangers) derby match, the

emotion generated even superseding that when national teams played (Scotland

versus England, or England versus Germany):

PETER: Have those Orange bastards [Protestant Rangers supporters] been talking again?

KEVIN: I really look forward to those Orange bastards losing this time.

NIGEL: Why now?

KEVIN: I just hate Rangers; and the biased[television] commentators you get.

LUKE [who sports a 'Celtic' tattoo on his arm]: I'm off to watch the football at home. See

you boys!

NIGEL: Not down the pub?

LUKE: No, with a cup of tea! I'm not like these people who watch it over beer, Nige: I like to

keep a clear head. [he leaves the room]

ADAM [entering]: Luke just told me to enjoy myself and not get drunk tonight. That must be

Catholic logic!

V: Kinds of nationality and regionality

Lastly, I found porters knowing others in terms of the places they came from.

This traversed a spectrum from particular areas and housing estates in

Easterneuk, through regions of Scotland (east as against west) and of England

12

(Geordie as against Cockney), to nationalities (Scottish versus English), and

ethnicities and races (White as against Black). Whatever the point on the scale

referred to --from being from the Braehead Housing Scheme in Easterneuk to

being African-- as with the other kinds of classification, the classes attributed

were deployed oppositionally, agonistically, calling forth an emotional as well as

intellectual response:

ARTHUR [as Steve, a porter from London, enters the buckie]:’ Cor blimey!’

STEVE: No! I say 'Watch it, mush'. I'm not from south London so don't

confuse me with that lot. Its bad enough being from London! [he laughs]

ARTHUR: Its bad enough being from England!

STEVE: Now, don't you start!

ARTHUR: Walthamstowe?

STEVE: Yeah.

ARTHUR: You Walthamstowe Wanker [he puts on a cockney accent]! South

London Shite. Walthamstowe wanker.

*

ARTHUR: Now we're getting nurses phoning us just to carry patients'

luggage! What do they think we are? Fucking darkies in Africa?!

Kaffirs?

Classifications in use

Having identified a number of kinds of classification which porters routinely

employed to apportion or claim identities for themselves and others, kinds which

I have rendered as ideal-types, let me turn more to these kinds in momentary use.

For there is a fluidity, a subtlety and creativity in porters' employment of these

13

ideal-typical classifiers which adds complexity and contingency to the social

worlds, classes and members to which the classifications might be seen to give

rise.

Two points in particular I wish to emphasise. The first concerns the

fluency and skill with which, in a short span of exchange, the porters will build a

claim to identities which combine different classificatory schemata. Arthur's skill

in this is particularly apparent, so let me exemplify the point with an exchange

involving him:

Arthur makes tea in the buckie and asks those around him if they want to join

him:

Tea, Reg?

REG: Aye.

ARTHUR: English or German tea-bags? The German come with one extra...

[Germany have recently defeated England 1-0 at football; Reg, from London,

supports England]

The second point I would make concerns the self-consciousness with

which the classificatory schemata are applied by the porters. There is an

awareness of how appropriate to reality they actually are --whether the

apportionment of identity is 'accurate' or ironic. There is an awareness of the

extent to which people like or dislike the having particular classifying schemata

applied to them:

ALBERT: Reg is just too mean to buy beer. But then what do you expect of

the English?!

ANGUS: Not all of them. Steve Coleman for instance. I can walk in to the

14

Thistle [the local pub] and order a pint of mild and a cigar and say:

'And charge it to that big tall cunt' [Steve Coleman], and that's okay.

'Bastard', actually, not 'cunt'. Steve doesn't like 'cunt'. 'Call me anything

you like', he says, 'Bastard', whatever, but never call me 'cunt'. He says.

ALBERT: Is he serious?

ANGUS: Aye. Its true: I asked Tracy [Steve's wife], and she said the same:

'Oh, its true! Never call him that.'

There is also an awareness that there are occasions when it is appropriate to

eschew the differentiations of classificatory schemata altogether:

LUKE: Remember I'm married to an English woman, Nige, so it means

nothing to me what people are. If people are okay, I don't care about

nationality... And all the porters are the same. They might joke in the

buckie about Scotland versus England --but its joking. They don't mean

it.

It is time to ask what porters do mean by classifying. What consequences,

meanings and gratifications accrue from the skilled, vitriolic, even fetichistic

way with which they seem to demarcate, delineate, assign and assume identities

in the Hospital?

Reasons to classify

The first thing to say about the classificatory practices of the porters is that it is

in this way that they demonstrate and practice being proper employees. In their

classifying porters show obedience to and membership of normative hospital

practice, reiterating and realising hierarchy and functional differentiation. The

15

porters partake of 'horizontal' differentiation between themselves and other

medical specialisms, and among themselves --as Front Door porters versus X-

Ray, and so on. They also partake of 'vertical' differentiation between bosses and

workers, between different levels of boss and different levels of worker. Through

their classifying practices porters become complicit in the hospital regimen that

divides them off hierarchically from one another and from other workers. As we

have seen, the porters waste little time before bossing one another around,

interrogating fellow porters on their punctuality, industry and absences, always

looking for opportunities to play at Management, to assume its power and

legitimacy.

But one would be wrong to conclude that this is the only or most frequent

or far-reaching reason for porters abiding by classificatory discourses in their

everyday working lives. There are far more, and more significant, things going

on besides obedience and co-optation --a 'successful' socialization into the ethos

of the hospital-- I would contend; there is a domesticating, personalizing,

parodying and subverting of classificatory practice. Furthermore, the fact that

there is more going on convinces me that even when the porters might be seen to

be reproducing hospital hierarchies in their classificatory usage that they are not

doing this willy-nilly, as cultural dupes, embodying a habitus about which they

are unconscious or without choice. More accurately, the porters are running their

own affairs.

They are doing this, firstly, on a collective level. Porters deploy

classificatory procedures to construct and demarcate a portering community,

whose norms and membership practices and means of identification need not

coincide with Hospital expectations or efficiencies. For instance, there are norms

of work which the porters set for themselves which represent markers of

collective self-respect: certain standards they set for themselves as a collective

16

against other parts of the hospital and its authority. Masculinity plays an overt

role in this collectivization. The porters assert a sense of self-worth as

heterosexual males in a work setting where gender and sexuality are officially

irrelevant as a criterion of evaluation, and where (usually) female nurses may be

esteemed and financially rewarded more highly than them, and in a broader

Easterneuk urban setting of post-industrialism and male unemployment.2 Colour,

race or ethnicity are similarly adverted to. Portering worth, for a group of British

or Scottish White men, is measured in terms of the absence among their number,

and the presence in different parts of the Hospital, of those (‘Blacks’, ‘kaffirs’,

‘Asians’) who can be characterized, stereotypically, as essentially inferior.3

Porters also set standards for each other as individual porters, and use

classificatory measures to keep one another up to the mark. There are behaviours

proper to members as to non-members, and limits beyond which neither should

go. Alastair, a porter of long standing, but also someone who has refused

advancement into Management, is teased for an insouciance bordering on

arrogance:

DICK: I can't be seen to associate with you: that's beneath your status.

You're Number One in this hospital!

ARTHUR: You walk down the corridor like you're Head Porter.

DICK: Look! He's spilt coffee on his T-shirt!

ARTHUR: A mouth that size... The distance between y' lips is bigger than

that between your ears, and you can still miss it with y' cup, and spill

something! [people laugh]

ALASTAIR: Well, look! There's a stain on Dick's shirt... Ha!

DICK: Nowhere near as big as yours, Head Porter!

17

Other porters are teased for being Jehovah's Witnesses, or being overweight, or

having a ponytail, or a particular accent or deodorant, or a having new, bright

yellow polo-shirts, or taking too expensive holidays. The particular means by

which attention is riveted on an individual is less important than the fact that,

routinely, members of the portering community may be singled out for bantering

critique. The exaggeration, the fetichizing, of the practices of classificatory

knowledge bespeak the claims of the portering community over its members --its

power and its demand to know and to limit.

But it would be wrong to assume that this collective classifying of

portering --as an all-knowing, masculine, White community against other parts

of the hospital, or as individual porters against other individuals-- amounted to a

coherent or consensual operation. (We saw the scepticism earlier when Kevin

was wanting to criticise Roger for drinking on a Tuesday evening.) The

inconsistency regarding who is criticised or teased, on what basis, with what

fervour, by whom and to what effect, make me think that while it may be a

regular occurrence --porters teasing one another and casting aspersions on non-

porters-- there is no consensual or permanent ‘portering community’ that

emerges. The situation is more transient. Porters regularly and routinely use

classification against the Hospital, as it were, to set up ‘a community’ of porters

but this is not something that every porter is engaged in or cares about, and even

those who do do not do so all the time or to the same effect. This is one way of

domesticating the process of classification, with one consequence, among a

number of others.

Look at what can be seen in the following extended exchange among

porters seated outside the X-Ray unit awaiting patients:

ROBBIE: Oh God [he moans]. You won't see me after 4.30 today; I finish at

18

5. God: roll on 4.30 [he puts his head in his hands]. I danced the night

away yesterday, at the Mardi Gras. But now I wish I'd gone home to bed

instead!

NIGEL: When did you get to bed?

ROBBIE: I went to bed at 3.30 and I was up at 7! God. And the worst of it

is that I think I've lost a bracelet.

DONALD: A bracelet! Are you a fucking poof, Robbie! [the tone is aggressive

and bullying]. A bracelet? Poof!

STEVE: I wear an identity bracelet too. And its only come off twice --both

football-related accidents. It was a present from my mum on my twenty-

first.

ROBBIE: Mine was from my mum too. On my sixteenth.

DONALD: Well [somewhat mollified]. I'd never wear a bracelet. Poofs!

Fucking pair of poofs.

ROBBIE: No! You'd wear a diamantine earring in your ear, instead! [Donald

breaks into a grin]

DONALD: [changing the subject, he bangs on the desk in front of him] I'll sit

in my office, here! President!... Put your Xs, Os and Crosses here: I'm

the Governor of Easterneuk [he imitates an American accent; others

laugh]. This court is open [he bangs on the desk again]. Court dismissed

[he bangs again, to more laughter]... I'm going to the toilet.

ROBBIE: Why do you always tell us when you're going for a crap?! Who

cares!

[Donald leaves]

STEVE: [starts makes clicking noise with his tongue and pretending to be

taking a golf swing and connecting with an imaginary with ball] I won a

golf-club last year, you know. ‘Cos I was the only boy who could get the

19

ball onto the green... 'Come to Daddy! Yes!'. I knocked it all of 200 yards.

ROBBIE: Down hill, was it? [we laugh]

STEVE: Bet I could hit it 500 yards if I imagined the ball was your head,

Robbie!

ROBBIE: You're some lazy cunt, Steve. How'd you get to play golf all the

time?

STEVE: Never lazy! I may be an English bastard but I'm never lazy.

[Kevin returns from a ward]

STEVE: Kevin here, he's the lazy one. He does absolutely nothing at all!

KEVIN: ‘Cos I'm paid absolutely nowt at all! [Steve choruses the last few

words with Kevin, having heard it before] Are you playing football

tonight, Nigel?

STEVE: [laughs] You playing football, Kevin! You had a pie only half an

hour ago! How on earth are you gonna run around and play football?

ROBBIE: He doesn't run much anyway!

STEVE: Not with that great gut! Imagine that! [he laughs]

KEVIN: Why don't you shut your fucking great English gob?

The first point to make, perhaps, is the fun which the porters derive from their

classifying practices, the pleasure they take in it, the skill they exhibit. The job of

portering is repetitive and poorly paid. Imagining one is a president or governor,

that the desk one sits at is a judge's bench or in a private office, that one is a golf

champion or that someone else is a poof --these are means by which the tedium

of the job is temporarily overcome.4 And there is also a logic to the seeming

ridiculousness, the pettiness or juvenility, even the absurdity, of the classificatory

games that take place. As earlier, when we heard porters classifying others and

themselves as 'first-class lazy bastards' and 'self-confessed lazy bastards', so here

20

when Donald claims to be 'President' or 'Governor', or Steve claims to be in his

office, the absurdity of their claims provides a satirical commentary on all such

claims made in and by the hospital. Is it not the case that Pat's setting himself up

in his office upstairs or the Chief Executive presiding over the entire institution

is as risible, as contingent, as temporary and foolhardy, as we so-called X-Ray

porters putting on airs in this corridor? They are no more intrinsically

'presidential' than we; we are no more intrinsically porters than they. The

absurdity of their games of classification, the ridiculous ways which can be

invented to multiply classifications, has the democratizing effect of nullifying all

such practices. Even if a particular classification seems difficult to avoid --we

are dressed and employed as porters; I am English; I am overweight-- the

multiplication of ways in which classifications can and are made has the effect

of cancelling any one out. If others insist in classifying you in a derogatory or

hurtful way, then the compliment can be returned: 'I have a great gut? Then you

have a great English gob'. Multiplying classifications makes for equality.

It is not always the case, however, that one wishes or needs to transcend

the narrow institutionalism of the hospital. It can be useful to have the

institution’s normative classificatory practices as a foil: a kind of excuse or

consolation. One's aggression to fellow porters --calling them lazy, accusing

them of homosexuality-- can be excused as mimicry of the aggression of

hierarchy and the disciplined set of behavioural proprieties that the bosses would

institute. One's dislike of work or effort can be excused by the poor pay and

conditions one labours under. One's poorness at football, or disinclination always

to go out drinking or dancing, can be seen to be an outcome of the demands of

work-shifts and the rigours of the job. One can console oneself, shift

responsibility for what might otherwise appear to be one's own failings or

mishap (both in one's own eyes and those of others), by calling attention to the

21

institutional regimen whose classificatory procedures affect one's life.

Hospital norms of classification can be useful in another way again. They

are a guise. For a number of hours per day and days per week one is thrown

together with people one may not like, know or wish to know, in a large physical

plant. The classificatory procedures of the hospital enable one to form working

relations of a viable kind, also social relations conducted on a superficial level,

and temporal and spatial relations that are expectable and repeatable. When

Arthur calls Jim an 'A and E cunt', he is forefronting the working relationship

between them --portering chargehand seated at the Front Door to porter based in

the distant Accident and Emergency ward-- and also granting Jim a kind of

minimal character or personality which allows for an individuation of their

relationship. Maybe Arthur and Jim do not wish or have the opportunity to know

one another properly: deploying hospital classifiers in this way operates as a kind

of guise, providing a substitute kind of information --a minimal, public,

workaday identity-- to fill the vacuum of personal knowledge and identity.

A closing ethnographic word, however, should go to that number of

porters who eschew the fetish for classification as such. Not everyone always

appreciates the fashioning of identities from classificatory schemata --and some

not at all. Albeit that such schemata offer formal frameworks to workaday lives

that can be approached from a number of very different perspectives, it must

nevertheless be recognized that classificatory procedures entail normativity (a

distinguishing between this and that, a framing of proper against improper) and

hierarchy (a differentiating between better and worse). It can be a relief, then, as

Oliver admitted to me, to avoid the porters' buckie as much as possible; some

porters go there only to clock in and out. The labelling, the 'slagging', is just

boring. Always on one’s feet, away from the buckie, it may be even easier to be

one’s own boss.

22

Coda: The meaning of lives

What may a case-study of hospital porters reveal? I would argue for the

recognition of what George Steiner (1975:170-3) refers to as the 'dual

phenomenology' of social relations. The form and the meaning of social relations

are to be placed in analytic tension. Socialization within conventional forms of

expression --common languages and habits of behaviours-- and their routine

deployment in social exchange does not translate into those forms either

becoming concrete things-in-themselves or achieving agency --determining or

causing meaning, eliminating the animating incentive of individual participants.

It is erroneous to treat social relations simply or primarily as the playing out and

reproducing of an institutional structure or discourse. Discursive forms and

individual consciousness are phenomena of different kinds; social conventions

will be animated by purposes that are individual and ultimately indeterminate. As

Steiner elaborates (1975:46,173):

The language of a community, however uniform its social contour, is an

inexhaustibly multiple aggregate of speech-atoms, of finally irreducible,

personal meanings. (...) [Language has] a common surface and a private

base. [Steiner 1975:46,173]

Steiner's broader point is that individuals at once partake of formal rules

and routines --habitual social relations, structures of symbolic classification--

and make these instruments of their own understanding and use. Formal

exchange is never unmediated by a creative individual interpretation and

improvisation of its conventions. Individuals in interaction can be seen to be

both assisting in continuing collective performances of communitarian

23

production and, at the same time, creating, extending and fulfilling ongoing

world-views, identifications and life-projects of their own.

This is why ‘if two people do the same thing it is not the same thing’:

there are worlds of difference between shared discursive competency on the one

hand and shared experience or mutual understanding on the other. Individuals

remain responsible for the power with which meaning is accorded to life; their

right might be to a space to exercise this capacity in which others’

determinations do not impinge upon their own.

24

Notes

1. I undertook the daily shiftwork of a porter over a period of nine months; a

further three were spent interviewing other hospital staff. I was a volunteer but

otherwise my presence at Constance was commensurate with other short-term

employees on a '0.25' contract.

2. Comparison may be drawn with other impoverished urban milieux where

discourses of competitive moral abuse are employed in the reassertion of core

values of masculinity and self-worth (cf. Bourgois 1995).

3. Thomas Dunk (1991) makes the argument that racism and sexism are

discourses deployed by disadvantaged groups, such as working-class (Canadian)

men, in order to articulate an alternative ideology to that predominant, bourgeois

one which subordinates them. In racism and sexism are to be found widespread

‘truths’ which cross class divides and thus offer a route into values and rewards

of society as a whole. Their usage, he contends, serves to mark working-class

men more definitively as an ‘uncultured’ group, as well as reproducing the

practices of symbolic hierarchicalization and exclusion. By the same token,

however, the very symbolic nature of stereotypes alerts us to the ways in which

such evaluative labelling practices can figure as momentary situating devices

rather than literal truths. Their performance can tend less to the establishment of

fixed group realities and exclusivities than strategic and fluid orientations of

perceived advantage (Rapport 1995).

4. Comparison can be made here with practices and devices that workers employ

in other manual, 'industrial' settings for punctuating the working day and passing

the time more imaginatively (Handelman 1976).

25

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