Of skills and tools: Skateboarding as city craft

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the sports- and crafts-like skills skaters acquire and maintain to navigate the built environment. Building upon the anthropology of the senses and the praxis of enskilment, we argue that skaters engage in a plurality of complementary learning strategies, from institutionalized sport-based regimes to in situ city play. Our contribution to recent ethnographic scholarship on skateboarding is that we position its enskiled practice as a city craft. This emphasis on craft reveals meaningful facets of skateboarding as structured around an entanglement of emplaced knowledge and material apprenticeship. Associating skateboarding with craft, we conclude, broadens and deepens our understanding of how skaters come to know.