ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the roots of skinhead solidarity. It explores the significance of family relationships and working lives for how respondents understood themselves and their relationship to the world. It also considers the everyday cultural practices of the group and the role of friendship and trust, and the meanings attached to these emotions by respondents in, first, maintaining and, subsequently, undermining the solidarity underpinning the group. In contrast to the majority of existing secondary literature on skinhead groups, therefore, the focus of this chapter is those practices that appear connected only loosely, if at all, to the production of skinhead identity. Moreover, at the analytical level, the chapter attempts not to evaluate the relative importance of ‘environment’ and ‘upbringing’ on the formation of individual personalities or to model or classify ‘xenophobic-nationalist’ behaviour, but to understand the processes and mechanisms via which xenophobic feelings are recognised, nurtured and reproduced through interpersonal communication and group bonds.
