Road bowling in Ireland: social space and the context of context

ABSTRACT

Consumer research has offered a multitude of understandings of space. While these insights have contributed both to absolute and relativistic appreciations, the discourse has tended more often towards absolute representations. Through an examination of Irish road bowling, built from a four-year ethnography, we position Henri Lefebvre’s triadic model of social space as a heuristic device that may be used to further relativistic representations of space. In doing so we expose how Irish road bowlers produce space on public roads. We find that such space and the actions of road bowlers within it are deeply influenced by both historic and contemporary socio-cultural discourses. In this way, we highlight how Lefebvre can be used to get at the context of context and offer an alternative understanding of normative and existential communitas.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish road bowling
• Lefebvre
• space
• transitory dwelling places
• communitas

Notes on contributors

Killian O’Leary is an interpretive consumer researcher at Nottingham Trent University. Killian’s research interests surround ethnographic studies of subcultures of consumption and internet cultures. His work has focused on online poker, Irish road bowling and anonymous social networking apps to date.

Maurice Patterson is an interpretive consumer researcher at the University of Limerick. Maurice’s key research interest centres on the relationship between consumption, embodiment and identity, and his work uncovers the connections between body-related consumption, individual identity projects and marketplace cultures. This research acknowledges how cultural capital endowments systematically structure consumer preferences and thwart explicit social mobility goals. Maurice’s other work addresses the representation of gendered bodies in advertising, the affective potential of bodies and, more recently, embodied responses to sonic phenomena.

Lisa O’Malley is an Associate Professor at the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick. Her research interests include Relationship Marketing, Consumer Culture, Sustainability, Gender and Macromarketing. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Marketing Theory, Journal of Business Ethics, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Macromarketing and Consumption, Markets and Culture.

ORCID

Killian O'Leary http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3779-4559

Notes

1 Figures 2 and 3 depict a “man on the sop” – a person who places a piece of grass on the road, “the sop,” as a marker to demonstrate where the road bowler should aim, and a “road liner,” a person who positions a bowler at his/her throwing point to ensure that they are correctly lined with the sop, as the geometric positioning of a bowler is crucial to the length of a bowling throw.

2 “Stake” is a road bowling term to denote the collective funds pooled from members of a road bowling subgroup when gambling on the outcome of a scór.

3 Ból Chumann na hÉireann is a voluntary-run association that organizes road bowling throughout Ireland.

4 Turner (1982) identifies gambling as a practice that gives people states of flow. However, states of flow from gambling in road bowling are dependent on normative communitas, as to place a bet in a stake you must adhere to certain norms. Additionally, these states are exacerbated by the performance of flaming where the we-ness of collective celebration intensifies the experience of gambling.

5 See the attached clip which references road bowling’s history of resistance https://youtu.be/06Dx4KZgktA.

6 The Gaelic Athletic Association is an Irish and international amateur sporting and cultural organization focused primarily on promoting Gaelic games.

7 The term for road in Gaelic is “bóthar,” which literally means a passage for cattle.