The overwhelming trend among Paul’s peers at the university was ethnographies of the “sporting body,” a reaction against the abundance of netnographies, studies of online communities that saturated journals and publications. Or maybe a natural outcome of living in a city obsessed with recreation and its own greenness, or even the upcoming Olympics. Students conducted fieldwork among cultural groups formed by marathon addicts, competitors in extreme endurance races, or transgendered wrestlers. There was always pressure to find original, eclectic material, a community that occupied a very particular or unusual niche. Sometimes it felt like you were spinning so-called cultural groups out of nothing, just to keep pace with your fellow academics. But he enjoyed the challenge of identifying some obscure, tenuous cultural phenomenon and then mining it for publishable work that actually said something about society. There were risks, of course, like chasing an idea down a dead end—his master’s thesis had come close—or simply becoming stumped for ideas.
