Review: Fighting for Recognition: Identity, Masculinity, and the Act of Violence in Professional Wrestling

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: R. Tyson Smith plays a dangerous game. This is because his new ethnography, Fighting for Recognition, takes in not one but two subjects which wreak havoc with participant observation: the world of professional wrestling and, broadly and hesitantly speaking, 'working class lifeʼ. That in documenting the latter one runs the risk of homogenising 'lived experienceʼ – of being patronising – is evidenced not just in the great boom in reality television programmes since the 1990s, which rather demand such homogenisation for ultimate gawping benefit, but also, for example, the very well- intentioned Mass-Observation movement, Tom Harrissonʼs strange anthropology of the British everyday, meaning pubs and dirty jokes and football pools. Wrestling, meanwhile, almost dares the observer to have a go at lifting the lid on its dirty secrets, to blow apart, finally, the sheer, audacious artifice of it all, safe in the knowledge that those dirty secrets have always been perfectly open at the same time. (The second autobiography by Mick Foley, once one of the foremost stars of mainstream, televised grappling, is entitled Foley is Good: And the Real World is Faker than Wrestling.) How can the writer or anthropologist or documentary filmmaker ever hope to do justice to a dupe so knowing, to a camp so high? One might as well write an exposé of pantomime.