CONCLUSION: FROM SHARP TO RASH

Members of SHARP Montréal face the challenge of establishing boundaries both as skinheads and as anti-racist skinheads, within and without the skinhead subculture. Prior involvement in the punk subculture provides an introduction to the skinhead subculture, which, because it is embedded in the punk subculture, is nearly impossible for any skinhead or potential skinhead to avoid. Working-class youth may feel "pushed" from punk to skinhead subcultures by the greater flexibility of subcultural boundary activation afforded skinheads, which can facilitate resolutions to material concerns not faced by punk subcultural participants from either upper-class or lumpen proletariat backgrounds.

Once involved in the subculture, skinheads utilize the time-honoured youth subcultural tradition of utilizing bricolage to activate a boundary between subcultural participants and non-participants. However, homological simliarities between skinhead factions mean that skinheads must rely on more than sartorial signifiers to identify factional allegiances. One solution is a greater elaboration of symbolic interactional processes. Another solution is to establish and more firmly maintain the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour of a given skinhead faction. For SHARP, the boundary that initially barred racist skinheads from subcultural interaction sites quickly expanded to include associates of racist skinheads. SHARP skinheads maintain this boundary through banishment &endash; placing themselves in a "policing" role in both the Montréal skinhead subculture and the punk subculture it is embedded within.

Skinhead violence serves as more than another boundary - separating subcultural participants from non-participants. For members of SHARP Montréal, it is a necessary element of their policing role, providing the threat element necessary to fulfilling that role. Violence, and especially intra-factional violence, also serves to reinforce the impression and self-image SHARP members seek to project as a viable and legitimate skinhead faction both to other skinhead factions and to the general public. Furthermore, intra-factional violence provides SHARP Montréal with opportunities to discredit and disrupt the image projection of racist skinheads. As such, intra-factional violence serves as a shaming ceremony, which in turn re-asserts and reinforces the behavioural boundaries for the subculture.

The months following my field work seemed to indicate that SHARP Montréal was winning the battle against racist skinheads. Sightings of known racist skinheads in the Montréal area dropped to almost zero, as did news of violent incidents involving them. When several SHARP members encountered a group of known racist skinheads at a West Island bar during this period, the SHARP members were baffled by the transformation of the appearance of the racist skinheads. "You would never have known they were white powers by looking at them &endash; they were just dressed so normal, like anyone at the bar. Nothing that skinheads would wear," claimed Michel. Even more baffling was that, rather than accepting the challenge to fight the SHARP members, the racist skinheads (or, possibly, former skinheads) declined, claiming to be "past that stuff."

What should have been a period of victorious celebration soon brought about new difficulties for the group as SHARP Montréal found themselves to be victims of their own success. In a very short period of time, nearly half the members of SHARP Montréal had formally or informally dropped out of the group. Without the constant threat of contact with their opponents, the racist skinheads, for whom their identity as anti-racist skinheads depended upon, SHARP Montréal fell into a crisis of identity and purpose. Since so many of the boundaries SHARP had established depended on the presence of racist skinheads to oppose, banish, discredit and police, their absence left SHARP without opposition. Lack of opposition led to a crisis of identity as boundaries dependent upon the presence and threat of deviant "others" blurred. Though racism clearly existed beyond the confines of the skinhead subculture, SHARP had set its boundaries through racist skinheads, thereby limiting their own interactions and goals to within the subculture itself.

Lacking distinct boundaries and a viable opposition, remaining members sought to find a new way of establishing the boundaries of identity by finding "some way of measuring what one is not." (Erikson, 1966: 64, emphasis in original). The lack of available deviant subjects to serve as reference points for behaviour boundaries meant that the community boundaries and identity required radical redefinition if the community was to survive (Ibid.: 107).

And so, with SHARP essentially defunct, several members formed a new group &endash; Red and Anarchist Skinheads (RASH). RASH continued the anti-racist mandate of SHARP but, lacking any credible racist opposition in the skinhead subculture, expanded the boundaries of the group by adding a radical leftist element to that identity, which provided the forces of global capitalism as new foes. Some former SHARP members embraced this, themselves adopting a more explicit political identity. RASH's first action was to participate in the massive protest at the 2001 Québec Summit on the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. A few months later, RASH members became heavily involving with an ad hoc group that had squatted an abandoned building in downtown Montréal to protest the lack of government response to the affordable housing crisis in the city. In the fall of that year, several RASH members were arrested by police outside of Toronto while on their way to join anti-poverty demonstrators who were going to attempt to shut down Bay Street(17) with a huge street blockage.

Other members were notable in their absence from the new group. Derrick, who had been rejected for membership in SHARP, expressed his disinterest in joining RASH as follows: "RASH, they're so poltical and me, I'm a traditional skinhead," pointing out the various pins on his jacket attesting to his love of first wave ska (or perhaps, pointing out the lack of political slogans on his pins). For Derrick, as for the members of the defunct SHARP chapter, it became important to establish new factional identities and new boundaries for those identities, whether as members of RASH, as traditional skinheads, or as something else.

(17)Canada's financial center, serving for all intents and purposes as the country's answer to Wall Street.