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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujò de la Playa
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Ask Barry Goldwater.
EDIT:
Or ask Ted Nugent
EDIT2
Ask Mr. Ali if a Vietnamese ever called him extreme
EDIT3:
Ask Mr. Hollyfield if doing the vampire thing with Mike Tyson was extreme
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Lennox
climber
just southwest of the center of the universe
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lefh,
You explained your reasons for limiting your responses to questions 4 & 5, per DMT's critique, but I still wish you'd framed questions 4-8 as you did in question #2.
I took the survey, but could not answer #'s 4&5.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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OP:
Tami was the first to nail it. I’d refer you to Spradley’s, “The Ethnographic Interview.”
“http://www.amazon.com/Ethnographic-Interview-James-P-Spradley/dp/0030444969/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417487021&sr=1-1&keywords=spradley+ethnographic+interview
Asking direct questions that refer to definitions is faulty. You might as well be asking “why” or “what” questions (the worst approach of all). Your instructor should have helped you with this.
There are three principles to follow:
1. Make repeated explanations of what you are attempting to do. Which is what?? Say what your intentions are up front. Participants (interviewees) won’t trust you unless you do.
2. Restate what participants say. Do not interpret. Select key statements and descriptions and say them over and over back to them. Participants will most usually elaborate. That’s the gold you’re looking for. That’s the data you analyze. From their elaborations you should be able to piece together worldviews (partially).
3. Don’t ask for meaning. Ask for use.
Enough from me on this subject.
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MisterE
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
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Tami and MikeL are wise.
And no bouldering option?
I gave up pretty quickly after the first 3 questions.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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"Extreme Sports" is a media invention for the spectator sector of society. It's designed to entertain the apparent herds of "sheeple" who dare not think of doing anything the least bit dangerous but seek only the safest possible existence.
I have met people who want "adrenaline" activities like it was some kind of drug.
I climb because I personally need to. Rocks, cliffs, mountains, steep hills, etc. It feels good. I'm annoyed when people consider this "extreme." It's usually people who are very out of shape physically.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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I'm a professional anthropologist and I wish we had been given assignments like this. All I ever got was theory.
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john hansen
climber
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On the last page Tami wrote
"Extreme" for one person is probably 'boring' for another.
When Jeff Lowe read a Mark Twight article about a climb they had done together, he
said " he must have been on a different climb.."
Or something to that affect.
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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What's rock climbing?????
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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Well, "extreme" is a marketing gimmick. But that said, there are activities that fit the description. Things where you have to be very good and everything has to go right, or you get seriously hurt or die.
Big wave surfing. Proximity flying in squirrel suits. Skiing steep narrow chutes with cliffs. High altitude alpine climbing. The fact that the marketing folks have got ahold of these and labelled them, doesn't change what they are.
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
Nothing creative to say
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Russian Roulette, but with 2 chambers out of six filled is extreme.
Climbing is fun.
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looks easy from here
climber
Ben Lomond, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 1, 2014 - 09:48pm PT
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Lovin' all this, everybody. Thanks!
You explained your reasons for limiting your responses to questions 4 & 5, per DMT's critique, but I still wish you'd framed questions 4-8 as you did in question #2.
That would have been better. Filed away in case this ever pops up again.
I’d refer you to Spradley’s, “The Ethnographic Interview.”
Thanks for the suggestion and synopsis. In addition to the fairly simple survey the project also requires 3 more in-depth interviews, which that sounds like it would be very helpful for.
And no bouldering option?
Pebble wrestling? Eww. (Just yanking your chain-I've seen some high balls that look pretty damn extreme to me.)
I'm a professional anthropologist and I wish we had been given assignments like this.
Feel free to steal my idea and write a grant application to compare emic and etic viewpoints on extremeness (extremity?) of rock climbing. I promise I won't sue for plagiarism. Probably...
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two-shoes
Trad climber
Auberry, CA
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The way most of us do it, it's not extreme. It is not a sport unless there is direct competition.
"It's a narcissistic activity", so says Chongo Chuck.
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mcreel
climber
Barcelona
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It's kind of amusing to imagine what the effects of sponsorship might have been on climbers from different periods:
John Salathé: new hat with feather, 15 dried apricots per day instead of 10
Harding: New Corvette and a good supply of fine red. New dress for girlfriend.
Bridwell: first man to make a trip around the moon without rocket or space suit
Beckey: Trips to put up a 5.8 A2 on every continent. New dresses for girlfriends.
About the original topic, I don't consider most climbing to be extreme, but the speed and free solo ascents are, IMO. I view extreme as more or less synonymous with risky.
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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In a survey "extreme" means what you think it means. You use your own definition.
DMT is right as far as i know "extreme sports" took off from extreme skiing, the Euro definition of skiing very steep slopes, then the American version popularized by Eric Perlman, of the masters of stone video series, in his extreme skiing series, was more cliff jumping along with steeps.
At the first extreme games many of the athletes were already sick of the term be so over used in marketing, such as extreme bowling! So many people jumped on the bandwagon and called it uncool and the next year they were the x games. But I still think its a useful term and I'm not going to throw it out just because its been overused and abused for marketing. It was so uncool they changed the extreme skiing comps to "freeride comps" which doesn't make any sense because freeride is what you did when you weren't racing or training. Now all kinds of sports have "freeride" disciplines when extreme would actually make more sense.
So I tend to think extreme is a fringe expression of the sport, like Hondos solos. But TRing in a gym can't be considered extreme.
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Todd Eastman
climber
Bellingham, WA
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With "Extreme" came the reclassification of outdoors folks as "athletes"...
... drop and give me $50,000
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steveA
Trad climber
Wolfeboro, NH
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I just completed your survey.
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skcreidc
Social climber
SD, CA
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Completed your survey. Interesting reading all the different takes on the topic, especially "the fet's".
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Da-Veed
Big Wall climber
Bigfork
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Done.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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"It's a narcissistic activity", so says Chongo Chuck.
Now there's a news flash!
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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I won't be responding to your survey, because I'm bone-weary listening to folks pretend they've understood something about a population from a worthless sampling of its members. Your results might tell you something about the group of responders, if you don't do dumb things with the data like averaging over different categories, but please do not pretend you know anything more than that---because you don't.
As for the "extreme" label, it is, as several have already mentioned, a characterization slapped on from the outside by commercial interests hoping to sell something. As Tami said, climbers pursue a range of activities and make various choices from day to day, so that sometimes what they are doing is mellow and other times may be extreme, and that either by choice or happenstance. This is far too complicated an concept for commercial labeling, and the solution is to tar the entire expanse of climbing activities with a single brush. You are now asking climbers, most of whom surely know better, whether this exceptionally crude generalization actually characterizes what they do.
Of course, your question isn't whether the undefined term "extreme" is appropriate in some objective sense, you are asking whether climbers themselves view what they are doing as "extreme," still an undefined term open to a considerable range of interpretation. And here we have to remember that, at least internationally, climbers have been using "extreme" in the sense of difficulty, for a long time. The French overall grading for mountain ascents has, at the top, the ED rating for "extremely difficult." And the delightfully whacky British grading system has the "extremely severe" rating as well, in which risk and difficulty are so badly conflated that it takes a second difficulty grade and a lot of experience to figure out what the rating is trying to communicate. In both the French and British cases, "extreme" was just the next adjective up the ladder from "very."
So there you have it. We don't know what "extreme" means, or at least we understand in in different ways in different contexts. To the extent that it has some meaning, it is not a universal feature of rock climbing so serves poorly as a label for the activity.
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