Parkour Community

Transcript:

The topic of my research is the Parkour community on Reddit and Youtube. Before starting this ethnography project, I had heard many different things about parkour from many different types of people. Many people judged it for being hypermasculine, many thought it was a joke, and more still thought of it as an extremely dangerous activity that is “corrupting youths”. 

The aim of this essay is to figure out what parkour truly is, and what all of its participants have in common. I immersed myself within the online community, reading comments and watching videos. I observed the way that members of the subculture give one another helpful tips, and lots of support on Reddit, and on Youtube I learned that parkour can be a pretty intense, sometimes dangerous activity. But, I learned that there is no one answer to the question: what is parkour? Parkourists around the world will give different explanations. In every article I found related to the topic, I found a new answer to this question. As part of my research, I sent out a survey to people of the Parkour Reddit community, with one question that asks them what they actually think Parkour is. Although I only got four responses, I got an extremely wide variety of answers to this question. To some, it is a competitive sport, to others it is a form of meditation. It can be a form of self expression, a social activity, a discipline, a form of art, a way to face one’s fears, and even a life philosophy. 

Through secondary research, I learned that Parkour was invented as a way for people struggling with their identities to express themselves. In 1990s France, a group of children of immigrants started the Parkour movement. They felt like outsiders who didn’t belong in France, nor the country of their parents, so they started the sport as a way of dealing with their frustration in a physical way. Soon after, the practice spread around the world, and became a new identity for so many people. It seems that this feeling of being an outsider is extremely common, and parkour became not only a physical form of therapy, but it became its own community where these outsiders could be a part of something. Therefore, the community is an extremely supportive one, as it consists of members with such strong desire for community. On Reddit, I found many examples of this supportiveness. When I look at the comment section of parkour videos, it is nearly impossible to find a negative comment. Here are just a few examples of supportive comments and constructive feedback that I found while observing the parkour community on Reddit.

Sometimes, however, this identity can be taken too far. One cannot ignore parkour’s history of danger and illegal activity. In one video I found, titled, Rooftop POV Escape Hong Kong! It consists of a group of renowned parkourists illegally jumping through the rooftops of Hong Kong after being asked to get down by a security guard. Not only is this type of video made under illegal circumstances, but it teaches fans of the parkourists that it is okay to break the law and disrespect security guards. However, this type of video is only common among famous parkourists who use this risk in order to gain more subscribers. Through my primary research, however, I have found that the community is mostly against breaking the law.

There are also many parkour-related accidents that have happened. This made me question the morality behind giving support to parkourists. Will this support lead them into possibly fatal situations? I have found through my secondary research that almost all parkour related deaths and accidents come from individuals outside of the community with little to no parkour experience. They see a video on Youtube and try to replicate this video, but due to their inexperience, suffer the consequences. This is a problem in the online community, and more parkourist influencers need to speak out against this copycat behavior. That being said, there is risk attached to every single activity, and it would be unreasonable to blame Parkour as whole for these incidents. 

The goal of the essay is to urge people to practice parkour safely, and not to judge it for its risks, but for the identity and community that came out of it.