WORKING ON THE EDGE:
EXPLORING THE STORY OF YOUTH
DEVELOPMENT THEORY
Fiona M. Beals
Tutor
Wellington Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Youth Development
Background Paper for:
The Workshop
Working on the Edge: Understanding the Role of Storytelling in identity development, identity negotiation and
the practices of storytelling
Funded by WelTec Innovation and Research Fund
Delivered at
The Collaborative National Hui
July 10-11, 2014
Lincoln University
WORKSHOP ABSTRACT
Today practitioners have a wealth of theories and resources to assist young people in finding their place in the
world. In this workshop, participants will be taken on a journey of theory and practice. Theories are often
located in a particular point and time in history, and, as such, speak first to the generation of the time before
influencing generations to come. In this workshop, traditional theories of identity development will be
compared with contemporary theories such as edgewalking, liminality and reflexive identities. Contemporary
theories allow for recognition of the diversity of young people in our communities today. Participants should
expect to be engaged in a series of practical activities which allow for the exploration of identity to occur
through narrative, storytelling, personal and social biographies. This is not a workshop to expect to sit at,
rather it is a workshop which expects participants to get involved.
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In my own research (Beals, 2008), I am interested in how current understandings of young people are
grounded in historical theories. That is, I am interested in the whakapapa of youth development. However,
over time, I have increasingly found myself becoming cognisant to the reality that our current practice is not
only informed by what has gone before, but is also informed by the current moment; our current practice is
informed by current theories. The problem is, in this reality, we often do not know these theories. We are
using them daily in our ‘commonsense’ notions about what works and what needs to occur. Unless we search
for these theories we remain blind. In our blindness, we cannot draw intentionally on the theories we do not
know about and we lose some of the potential current theories offer to our practice.
It is true, we swim in a sea of theory and we do draw upon the ones that we know about. These are often the
theories we were exposed to in our initial training and ongoing development. In the field of youth
development here in Aotearoa New Zealand, these theories may consist of Erikson’s (1968) psychosocial
theory, Durie’s (1998) Whare Tapa Wha, Bronfenbrenner’s (cited in Santrock, 2002) socioecological theory and
the Circle of Courage (Brendtro & du Toit, 2005). Many of us would add other theories to this list that we have
come across in our training and research.
In this workshop, we are going to explore some contemporary theories and we are going to review the theory
behind a traditional practice in youth development, giving young people breathing moments. These theories
may help us respond to some of the dilemma’s facing our youth today; dilemmas that are spoken about in
current emerging theories. A key to understanding these emerging theories is to understand the role theories
have played out over history and to see how each theory endeavours to tell a story. The most powerful
theories, the lingering theories and the freshly innovative theories go beyond merely telling a story to seeing
storytelling as an important feature of the quest for identity.
THEORIES ARE RESPONSES TO CURRENT EVENTS
Those of us who teach theory often do a disservice to both the theory and the theorist by devoicing the theory
from the time period in which it was written. We teach it as an objective truth suspended in history as an
absolute. In reality, this is not true. It is true that our theoretical present has a tail that permeates back into
history, or to flip this on its head, our theoretical whakapapa, our theoretical history, defines who we are
today as practitioners (Beals, 2013). So, there are traces of our history in our present. In this sense, traditional
theories do hold some truth in this present moment. But to claim that traditional theories are The Truth for
our young people today is problematic because it neglects the situational elements that lead to the theorist
asking the theoretical question in the first place.
Often these situational elements expose a disjuncture in history and contemporary understandings of young
people (Beals, 2008). They are moments of social stress and strain or they are moments of increased
opportunities. They are moments in which a ‘new’ and ‘different’ generation of youth seems to emerge. They
are moments in which adults pull out that age old saying ‘In my day, things were different. The youth of today
just don’t know how good they have it.’ But, most of all, they are moments in which theorists find themselves
asking ‘How can we explain what we are seeing today?’
An example of a theorist responding to changing social conditions was Granville Stanley Hall (1908), the father
of adolescence. Hall was writing at the apex of nationalism and modernity. He is remembered today for the
phrase “storm and stress” (p.xiii). However, this phrase tends to not be contextualised into Hall’s historical
moment even though Hall, himself, located his idea of the turmoil of adolescence with the turmoil of his own
European society:
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Never has youth been exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and day.
Increasing urban life with its temptations, prematurities, sedentary occupations, and passive stimuli just when an
active, objective life is most needed, early emancipation and a lessening sense for both duty and discipline, the hast
to know and do all befitting man’s estate before its time, the mad rush for sudden wealth and the reckless fashions
set by its gilded youth – all these lack some of the regulatives they still have in older lands with more conservative
traditions … In this environment our young people leap rather than grow into maturity. Our storm and stress
strenuousness too often imparts at least the narrow nervous intensity of an individuation that is biologically
antagonistic to genesis and that is less ephebic [characteristic of a youth of Ancient Greece], as we fondly think it to
be, than ephebeitic [characteristic of a feverish development of youth] (p.xv-xvi).
For Hall (1908) the storm and stress enveloping many European and Western countries pre the first world war
could be seen in a psychological and biological storm and stress within each nation’s youth. Hall read that
storm and stress into, and onto, the youth of Europe. Like Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting
movement, Hall saw the poverty of urban youth. He saw the rise in youth crimes and the onslaught of media
terminology in defining these youth – hooligans and larrikins. And, like Baden-Powell, Hall saw youth as both
displaying the symptoms of a broken society and a solution to this broken world.
At the time Hall (1908) was bringing his ideas together, youth practitioners also drew upon the same ideas to
inform their practice (Lesko, 1996, 2001). Emerging organisations in the late 1800s and early 1900s – the
Scouts, Guides, Girls/Boys Brigade and even organisations working beyond the period of adolescence like the
Salvation Army – used similar practices and methods to re-evoke in young people a sense of pride in one’s
nation (one’s race), a strong sense of loyalty and practices of self-control and discipline. Uniforms, badges,
flags and oaths were standard techniques of youth engagement and ‘positive’ youth development.
While we cannot travel back in time, we can draw a pretty firm conclusion given that these organisations did
not refer to Hall’s (1908) theory directly. Youth organisations were not developing their practice from theory
but, rather, were reacting to the same situational elements to which Hall, himself, was reacting. Baden-Powell
(1954) noted some of these elements in his establishment of the Scouting Movement:
With this inculcation of self-interest into all grades of society it is scarcely surprising that we have as a result a
country divided against itself, with self-seeking individuals in unscrupulous rivalry with one another for supremacy,
and similarly with cliques and political parties, religious sects and social classes, all to the detriment of national
interests and unity.
Therefore the aim of the Scout training is to replace Self with Service, to make the lads individually efficient,
morally and physically, with the object of using that efficiency for the service of the community (p.4).
Hall (1908) and Baden-Powell (1954) were responding to the same situational elements – a brokenness in
society that was being exposed in the state of youth. In the 1950s and 1960s, United States’ theorist Erik
Erikson (1968) was also responding to situational elements occurring in post-war US culture (elements also
evident here in Aotearoa New Zealand). The post-war economy outside of war-torn Europe saw an increase in
the technological know-how of the United States. In re-building Europe, demand on industrial manpower in
factories and export commodities increased. While the United States led the way, other industrial countries
like Australia and New Zealand were quick on its heels; after all, our relationship to the motherland, England,
was still strong and the motherland needed rebuilding (Carlyon & Morrow, 2013). With the rise of industry,
suburbia was born and with it came a new generation – teenagers (Savage, 1971). Young people had access to
employment and money.
Out of the post-war years, many young people with purchasing power were doing things differently (Savage,
1971). Instead of conforming to the culture of their parents, they were buying fashionable clothing, engaging
in sexual acts and purchasing the latest rock ‘n’ roll records. It was to this situation that we find Erikson (1968)
responding. In his prologue, Erikson tells us the history of his ideas. The ideas around ‘identity crisis’ originally
came from working with war veterans who “lost a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity”
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(p.17). He then moved on to work with “severely conflicted young people whose sense of confusion is due … to
a war within themselves” (p.17). Later he formulated his general theory when he felt himself observing a
generation of youth literally taking on a concept of identity crisis to define their moment of transition into
adulthood.
Erikson’s (1968) concept that, during the period of adolescence, one is forced into a position of choice – you
have to determine your future now or else what WILL YOU BE when you grow up? – is one that even he argues
reflects the conditions of society in the post-war years. He agrees, yes, the youth of today differ to any other
moment in history; they wear their identity conflict on the outside for all to see. However, he goes further with
his theory to say, any conception of identity will be bound to both the individual and the historical moment:
… in discussing identity … we cannot separate personal growth and communal change, nor can we separate … the
identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development because the two help to define
each other and are truly relative to each other (p.23).
It is further in Erikson’s (1968) work that we learn the importance of storying for understanding identity
development. According to Erikson, it is in the biography of a person, the story, that a picture of the person’s
own identity emerges allowing the interpreter to understand. Erikson demonstrates this through storying the
lives of famous psychologists, not so famous individuals like the ‘unknown Indian’ and fictional characters such
as Hamlet. He also situates this biography within a greater social biography of history and period of time. The
social biography of a generation, of history and of a period of time. In this, he cautions society, do not leave
your understanding of self, your own story, to whims of science and technology. In other words, do not allow
the situation, even though it is an opening, to define you. Instead, carpe diem, seize today and write your own
story.
For Erikson (1968), writing at a point in history where the ideals and ideas of the Enlightenment (a period of
time in Western history where human reason, individuality and the development of technology was held in
high esteem) had collapsed and died on the battlefields of Europe, he saw that a moment of possibility had
been created for postwar youth. And, while identity crisis and the psychopathology of youth, is a key lynchpin
of his theory, Erikson firmly believed that young people were now at a point where they could positively create
strong individual and collective identities. Through these identities, young people could hold in check ideas
and technological developments which ultimately led to the downfall of western civilisation in the great wars
of the 1900s.
Just as Erikson (1968) was responding to the situational elements of the post-war years and the new post-war
generation, so were practitioners. Furthermore, like the practical responses of the pre-war years at the turn of
the last century, it is unlikely that practitioners were responding by taking up the contemporary ideas of
Erikson. It is more likely that they were responding to a perceived need. Indeed, in 1950 Aotearoa New
Zealand, such a perceived need did in fact exist as working-class youth congregated in urban milk bars and
alongside the urban river banks. As suburbs popped up throughout the main centres, the new pavements were
quickly filling with young people dressed as ‘Bodgies’ and ‘Widges’ (Carlyon & Morrow, 2013). The Bodgies and
the Widges were New Zealand’s first experience of a genuine youth subculture, and they were also the centre
of adult fear and moral panic (Shuker, Openshaw, & with Soler, 1990).
Aotearoa New Zealand responded in two ways to this perceived psychopathology hitting its young people. The
first was in writing about the problem. Psychologist A.E. Manning (1958) published a definitive text exploring
the lives and abnormal traits of Bodgies and Widges. His research would feed into the first and only written
Government Inquiry into the moral state of New Zealand youth – the Mazengarb report (Mazengarb et al.,
1954).
Outside of this written and political reaction, empty suburban halls across Aotearoa New Zealand began to fill
up on Friday and Saturday nights. Groups of adults seeing a need decided to create the first youth centres and
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youth clubs (Carlyon & Morrow, 2013). In these spaces, young people could safely, under adult supervision,
explore the new possibilities for their identity. They could allow rock’n’roll, fashion and hanging out with
friends to shape their conceptions of what it means to live in an adult world in the safe confines of a
community hall. In the confines and safety of the adult-supervised youth club, young people could create their
own identity story.
So, if theory and grassroots practice tend to respond to similar issues by coming to similar conclusions, what is
our world like today and how is theory interpreting it?
LIVING IN A RISK SOCIETY
It is of no doubt that we live in a world of increased opportunities. However, with these opportunities also
come great risks (Lupton, 2013). Nowhere is this played out more than in the lives of our young people who, at
this point of history, are increasingly left in the dark as to what the world will be like when they get their
inheritance. Sociologists such as Urlich Beck (1992, 1999) and Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991, 2010b) argue
that the globalised world in which we live is a one of risk and heightened choice embedded within a period of
late modernity. For these thinkers, we never left the modern world in which G.S. Hall (1908) lived and Erikson
(1968) responded as modernity ushered in two global wars; instead, we live in a hyper-modern world, a world
on steroids, determined through science, technology and an increased sense of individualisation. We live in a
later form of modernity.
Beck (1992, 1999) argues that the social and environmental consequences of science and technological are
found in a new set of previously unconceivable risks and hazards. These risks and hazards cross national
boundaries and flow through generations. In contrast, Giddens (1990, 1991) argues that the risks themselves
have not increased, but rather western societies are much more sensitive to risk and perceive the number of
risks to be greater than they were in previous generations. Both though agree that not only is this condition of
risk a condition of contemporary capitalist western societies, but this current condition has created openings
for individuals to make their own choices and write their own life story.
Beck (1992, 1999) and Giddens (1990, 1991) call this the formation of a reflexive identity – a type of identity
that is constructed through personal storying, or choice biographies. These biographies allow a person to
determine where they sit in a world that is increasingly susceptible to risks and hazards. Every risk and hazard
creates a possibility of choice and change, just as every new choice creates a possibility for new hazards and
risks to emerge.
A person’s identity is now malleable and a person has to take ownership for the consequences of the choices
they make in life. Their stories, their own identities are not locked within boundaries of class, family, work,
culture, gender or nation. To an extent, people can now choose to move inside and outside of such
boundaries. However, nothing is certain. The future is unpredictable. People can no longer choose a job for life
in a world which is both full of economic risk and full with the possibilities that technologies may be developed
to replace labour. In this world, people’s biographies become increasingly personalised as they find themselves
shifting between different worlds and different contexts:
The system of coordinates in which life and thinking are fastened in industrial [early] modernity – the axes of
gender, family and occupation, the belief in science and progress – begins to shake, and a new twilight of
opportunities and hazards comes into existence – the contours of the risk society. Opportunities? In the risk society
the principles of modernity are redeemed from their separations and limitations in industrial society.
(Beck, 1992, p. 15)
Living in a risk society for Beck (1999) and Giddens (1990) entails understanding that we live in an
interdependent and global world. The challenges facing the world today and the possibilities for overcoming
these challenges are global. Like our biography, they are not locked within boundaries like nation states. For
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example, climate change is not an issue for individual countries but for all countries (Beck, 2010; Giddens,
2010a) and as a hazard, climate change creates possibilities for new collective identities and responses.
At the same time, risk does not create an equal playing field. Beck (1999) reminds us: “pollution follows the
poor” (p.5); with risk comes responsibility, trust and a need for security. Beck sees the answer to this in
‘individualisation’ within our biographies of choice:
Let us be clear what ‘individualisation’ means. It does not mean individualism. It does not mean individuation –
how to become a unique person … On the contrary, individualisation is a structured concept, related to the welfare
state; it means ‘institutionalised individualism’. Most of the rights and entitlements of the welfare state; for
example, are designed for individuals rather than for families. In many cases they presuppose employment.
Employment in turn implies education, and both of these presuppose mobility. By all these requirements people
are invited to constitute themselves as individuals and, should they fail, to blame themselves. Individualisation thus
implies, paradoxically, a collective lifestyle (Beck, 1999, p. 9).
It is important to note that Beck (1992, 1999) and Giddens (1990, 1991) are not posing a theory of youth
identity development. For these authors, identity is continuously being shaped throughout the life course by
the choices we make. At no point and time does the fully complete developed adult emerge, the adult is also
emerging and never complete.
Peter Dwyer & Johanna Wyn (2001) follow the writings of such authors and challenge both practitioners and
theorists in the youth sector to move beyond traditional theories which locate identity in a liner concept of
development. Dwyer & Wyn note that challenges to a young person’s identity will occur throughout their
lifecourse. However, advice, practice and research does not incorporate these perspectives; we still ask and
encourage young people to make a single choice: what are you going to be when you grow up; what are you
going to do when you leave school? The reality is, the be and do of these questions is framed to elicit a single
response. The answer from many young people, the ‘I don’t know,’ is probably more truthful than most adults
think. The reality is, for all of us, we become and do many things over the course of our life.
It is not that the youth sector has not responded to the new conditions talked about in this period of late
modernity. Youth organisations today, compared to those of the 1980s, are full of risk management plans and
policies and procedures to ensure the safety of both staff and clients. Youth workers are trained to fill out
RAMs forms and supervision practices ensure that professional practice reflects on the lessons one can take
from current practice to ensure that the choices made future practice have successful implications.
Even documents and practices that are popular within the youth sector reflect the ideas behind late
modernity. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the strategy that informs the sector, the Youth Development
Strategy Aotearoa (Ministry of Youth Affairs, 2002) has an underlying theme of supporting young people in
making the right choices now for their future. Practices that involve a participatory element drawn from the
work of writer Roger Hart (1997) involve youth practitioners creating opportunities for young people to make
a variety of choices and experience the implications of these choices for the better or for the worse. The move
towards participatory decision-making and research is also reflective of the world of choice and risk in which
we live and our youth will inherit (Dwyer & Wyn, 2001).
So, the way that we work with young people has changed to reflect the time. But most of us would agree that
we do not talk about identity development in terms of ongoing malleable reflexive choices. Aside from
cultural theories of development, most of our training is still grounded in the theories of the past. Alongside
ideas of choice biographies, there are many theories of identity exploration that we can choose upon at times
to inform our practice. We are now going to explore two such theories: Jeanne Steele & Jane Brown’s (1995)
Adolescent Media Practice Model (the AMP model) and Nina Kerbs’ (1999) concept of Edgewalking as adapted
by Anne-Marie Tupuola (2004) in her work with young Samoan New Zealanders.
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WRITING ONE’S STORY THROUGH MEDIA
When it comes to media and young people, often our focus in research is either on the ways in which media
influences young people or the ways in which media portrays young people. We tend not to ask – why and
how do young people use the media? Instead, this is a question in which we presume to already know the
answer; if it is a videogame, the young person is playing it; music, the young person is listening; television, the
young person is watching it; cellphone, the young person is connecting with pears and/or getting up to no
good.
Steele & Brown (1995) focused their research on the why and the how. They explored the bedroom cultures of
young people and found the answer to their question to be a lot more complex. Young people do use media in
a passive way; they just consume it. However, young people also use the media in a very active way; they use
the media to explore their own identity. They use the media to choose through various youth cultures and
various identities to create and fashion their own biography. Steele and Brown developed the AMP model to
explain this process.
Identity
Incorporates
Resists
Application
Motivates
Lived
Experience
Evaluates
Interprets
Interaction
Selection
Pays Attention
to
The AMP Model (Steele & Brown, 1995) starts with acknowledging that all choices are grounded in the lived
reality of the moment (the lived experience). So while young people may choose to experiment with identities
outside of their immediate cultural, family, community, peer group boundaries, these boundaries have shaped
them and they may see them as either restricting, or encouraging, them to choose particular forms of media. A
young person’s identity is shaped by his or her lived reality and it, in turn, motivates them to select particular
forms of media. Paying attention to this media requires some form of interaction and this will differ depending
upon the young person and their interests. Through interaction, the young person evaluates and interprets the
media and then applies that media in various ways to their own identity. This application could either be in the
form of incorporation (consciously or unconsciously bringing elements of the media, or the media message,
into their own life) or resistance.
Steele & Brown’s (1995) model is useful both to our understanding of identity exploration and in our own
practice. In our understanding, the AMP model acknowledges the role media has in a young person’s
biography. Many young people use media to actually write their identity onto their bodies. Whether it be a
young person choosing to be thin or to resist the false ideal of thinness, or even a young person deciding that
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reggae is the next best thing to heavy metal, media is the paintbrush with which the young person takes up to
start writing. This is even more so today with the onset of social media, smartphones and tablet technologies.
Not only are the choices of applications reflective of a young person’s identity but the blinging out of the
technology itself, and the chosen places for ‘selfies’ shows the complexity of identity choices young people are
now making.
In practice, the AMP model (Steele & Brown, 1995) provides a tool for the intentional use of media. This can be
in two ways. First, we can use the AMP model to learn more about the biographies our young people are
making in today’s word. Simply asking, ‘what does your Facebook/smartphone say about you?’ opens a door
into a myriad of conversation journeys. We quickly get to hear the story of a young person through asking
about the media that is important to them.
Second, we can use the AMP model to journey with young people at the incorporation/resistance stage of
application. For example, if a young person is selecting gangsta rap, attending to the negative message to
incorporate a FTP lifestyle, we can journey with the young person on the whakapapa of hip hop as a music for
cultural resistance. With the young person we could explore the music of indigenous and Pasfika groups like
Smashproof. In this way, we still allow for a voice of resistance but we can intentionally channel this in another
direction. At other times, we may need to channel a young person away from incorporating media messages
to resisting them altogether. However, we journey with the young person, knowing that young people are
actively using media in forming their own identity story is important in our practice today. Added to this,
knowing that young people are often walking between many worlds is equally important.
WRITING A STORY TO SUIT MANY WORLDS
Kerbs (1999) argues that the cultural boundaries determining identity in a traditional context no longer exist.
Rather, today, we live in a world where globalisation has led to cross-cultural interactions and technology has
allowed people to be connected over distance. Kerbs argues that the world today is less connected, people are
rushed for time and the workplace has become more open to spirituality. This condition has led to a new type
of identity (or the revival of an older spiritual identity) – edgewalker. An edgewalker is a “someone who walks
between the worlds” (p.14). Edgewalkers do not define their identity through one cultural, religious,
vocational context; instead, they walk within, and between, these contexts.
Edgewalkers are everywhere. Today, in countries like Aotearoa NZ, immigrant youth and young people from
minority populations find themselves “poised in transition … belonging at one and the same time to several
‘homes’ (and to no particular home)” (S. Hall, 1992, p. 310). Here in Aotearoa NZ, Tupuola (1996) explored this
experience for young women with Samoan descent. She wanted to find out if young people still experienced
the crisis and transition talked about by Erikson (1968) especially as, she observed, young people were living in
a world of choices saturated by media and popular culture. She argued that young people are creating new
identities, similar to Kerbs’ (1999) notion of edgewalking. These young people did not form an identity in
closure; but, instead held shifting and open identities reflective of the context in which they were situated:
Some youth of Samoan descent consider themselves to be in a position of privilege in that identity for them is a
negotiable entity. They are able to weave in-between both papalgai (European) and fa’aSamoa worlds with ease
and confidence. Knowledgeable of both cultures’ strengths and weaknesses, differences and similarities and
traditions and contemporary shifts. (Tupuola, 1996, p. 47)
Tupuola (2004) argues that in a world of shifting boundaries, one must have a malleable identity. But as
researchers and practitioners working with young people, this means we have to shift our thinking about
traditional models of identity. These traditional models marginalise young people:
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… either into different compartments or outside of the model altogether. In short, some models merely recycle
older traditional models such as Erikson. There is an over emphasis on one self/single identity when identity may
in fact be “transient and shifting in nature” (Tupuola, 2004, p. 89).
It is on the edge of identity that creation occurs. Such stories fuse worlds together, but also show stack
differences. These stories can be found in the creative arts of poetry, spoken word, music and art. For example
the following piece from hip hop artists PNC (from the song Half Kast) explores edgewalking, the perception of
the need for a single identity and the comfort of being on the edge.
In ’84 it put some in a spin
To see a brown-faced baby
With a white woman’s
She was sitting me in a pram
Pushed me around
Some gave her a face like she did something wrong
Some gave her a face like hey good on ya
I don’t think faces ever faced my mama
And my father never stuck around
No bother to show me how to rock a lava lava
So you probably think I’ve got a problem with identity
But I see there are plenty of mes
My breed is widespread
The life I led is not a divided soul but the best of both
There are two sides of my life
And I am going to be this way
Forever – ha
Such storytelling also allows for young people to speak out the desperation of lost when a sense of identity or
turangawaewae is lost through displacement. This is shown in a poem by Sonia Azizi (2010, p.69), a young
refugee participant in a storytelling and poetry programme:
I packed my bags throwing
My life into my suitcase
Not knowing where I was going.
Here I’m in windy wild Wellington.
Cold
Depressing
Alone
Quiet
Isolated
A neglected human.
Here it’s like a garden that
Goes on forever
Not like home.
There are no apartments
Busy streets
Halal restaurants.
My journey has been long
So long.
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Never reaching the end.
It has not finished.
Loss, Happiness
Always feel like living in a jungle.
My new refugee land
New home, garden,
My new, New Zealand
Home of sorrow.
Hence, while writers like Kerbs (1999) and Tupuola (2004) see edgewalking as a positive experience in that it
opens a space for creatively in identity exploration and the formation of one’s own story, the reality is, for
many young people their worlds, at times, collide. Tupuola acknowledges that many Pasfika young people
have been drawn to American gangsta hip hop to find themselves in a world where the culture at home is
completely different to the culture outside; not all young people listen to Pasfika artists who wrestle and find
their cultural identity in their lyrics and fusion of cultural sounds.
For some young people, arriving at a youth development centre and engaging in a full and open participatory
project may contradict the values and perspectives of parents at home. For some, the expectations of a school
teacher to question everything may collide with the home expectations to honour and never shame a person
in authority by questioning things. This collide between home and other worlds is a long known element of
sociological theory (Bourdieu, 1974) and has been researched in Aotearoa NZ with Pasfika youth in the 1980s
(Jones, 1986). So, how do we open the door for edgewalking to occur but also acknowledge the worlds in
which our young people are negotiating? The answer may be in a return to the past.
LET’S GET LIMINAL: FINDING A BREATHIER IN THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN
It could seem to us at this point that we should be pushing into the future instead of looking at historical
theories to find the answer to supporting our young people to walk through a world of choice. But it may not
be so in all cases. Indeed, sometimes we forget things in our past that might help us today. One of these
concepts concerns the space of the liminal (Turner, 1977). Just as the first four letters give us the key to the
concept of edgewalking, the first four letters of liminal point us to another edge – a limit. The liminal is the
space or the spaces inbetween worlds and roles. In traditional anthropology, these are the rites of passage and
the rituals which cultural groups establish to determine the movement of members from one identity to
another. In western culture, a traditional wedding transforms a bride and groom to a husband and wife. Other
rites of passage transition children into adulthood. The wedding and rite of passage sit at the limits of our
social world.
Kerbs (1999) argues that rites of passage are unsuitable to a world of shifting identities; however, researchers
like Jeremy Northcote (2006) point out that in this world of increasing complexity and choices, young people
are creating their own rites of passage. The issue is, when created by young people and not a society as a
whole, the youth-created rites of passage can be dangerous and life-threatening. But, if we take both Kerbs’
and Northcote’s points on board, perhaps it is not rites of passage that we need, but formal and built in
moments for ourselves and the young people we work with to take a pause in the life process of story making.
This calls for rituals.
We all have rituals in our lives. Some of which we are conscious, but many we are not until we miss out on that
cup of coffee before going to work, goodnight hug before turning out the light and shower before getting
ready for work. We have all had our bad hair days and our days that have seem strangely weird because we
forgot our coffee but have we realised that what we are really missing out on is that liminal moment; that
space inbetween?
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Whether a rite of passage or a ritual, a liminal moment has three aspect: separation, transition and reintegration. In the separation stage, we are removed from one world or one context. In the transition stage we
go through some form of ritual. Finally in re-integration stage, we return to the world with a new identity. In
an institutional sense, schools, prisons and hospitals all serve as institutions of transition – you enter as one
identity and leave with another (supposedly). In a ritual sense, these are moments that we give ourselves to
transition and move into another role or identity. Because they are rituals they are predictable and consistent.
In a world where nothing is predictable, rituals provide some certainty. No matter what happens at work
today, I can cope because I had my coffee before coming to the office.
Incorporating ritual into our youth development practice enables us to give young people a predictable,
consistent certainty to their experience. No matter what happens, we will start and finish with identified
rituals. Culturally, this is the space of opening and finishing karakia, and it can be a space for meditation and
quietness. It can be the taking up of an object and the replacing at the end. But it opens the world of our time
with a young person and it closes it. This enables a shifting between worlds and encourages young people to
walk the edge of many worlds without feeling lost. The place of ritual occurs in the limit of the edge. It is a
solid rock that a person can jump upon to shift into another world.
But most importantly, rituals can be intentionally incorporated as moments of storytelling and reflection.
Through the creative process of storytelling, we find ourselves in our worlds when we feel that all is lost.
Through storytelling we transform ourselves but also find comfort in the present. Through creative processes
of storytelling we find and construct our identity in deeply reflexive moments of choice.
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