Doy...

http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/si.2006.29.3.349

Bike Messengers and the Really Real: Effervescence, Reflexivity, and Postmodern Identity

"Out of more than two thousand bike messengers in New York City, a few hundred participate in alleycats—illegal races held in open traffic. Surrounding this racing scene is a vibrant messenger community. Messengers who race in or attend alleycats carry their messenger identity into all aspects of their lives. Through direct participant observation, this article proposes that alleycats function as Durkheimian rituals for these messengers. Alleycats express the central values of the social world. Lost in collective effervescence, the individual confronts these values as objectified truths, which allow messengers to form stable identities. Further, bicycles, messenger bags, and other objects become sacred symbols within this ritualization process. The ability of messengers to construct such nonreflexive identities is juxtaposed with theories about the self in postmodernity."

(by Jeffrey L. Kidder, printed in the Summer 2006 issue of Symbolic Interaction)

Seems pretty obvious to me, but I'd like to see were the author goes with this.

Anyone have access to the rest of this article?

(also, the abstract says that the paper was researched through the technique of participant observation, which means the writer probably spent at least a few months within the messenger/alleycat culture in order to gather data.)