front cover of Babylon East
Babylon East
Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan
Marvin D. Sterling
Duke University Press, 2010
An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune selectors, and sound engineers. In World Clash 1999, held in Brooklyn, Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system and the only non-Jamaican competitor, stunned the international dancehall community by winning the event. In 2002, the Japanese dancer Junko Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win Jamaica’s National Dancehall Queen Contest. High-profile victories such as these affirmed and invigorated Japan’s enthusiasm for dancehall reggae. In Babylon East, the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music.

Sterling provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. He considers Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England, to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference, consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan. Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica’s artists to Japanese appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, Babylon East is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.

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Backward Glances
Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York
Mark W. Turner
Reaktion Books, 2003
Backward Glances is an exploration of the history of male street cruising. Too often in discussions of urban space and interpretations of urban culture, streetwalking implies a rigid model for the way we inhabit the streets. Beginning with the simple premise that we all walk the streets differently, Mark Turner suggests that male cruising operates through encounter and connection rather than alienation, and that it is the defining experience of what it means to be modern.

Backward Glances is the first gay urban history of its kind, examining these issues across a range of cultural material, including novels, poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings, the internet, and fragments of writing about the city such as Whitman's notebooks and David Hockney's graffiti. It provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern Western city.

Backward Glances is aimed at all those interested in the culture of the city, queer cultural history and the appropriation of public space.
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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados
Class and Culture on the South Texas Border
By Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani
University of Texas Press, 2017

A classic account of life on the Texas-Mexico border, Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados offers the fullest portrait currently available of the people of the South Texas/Northern Mexico borderlands. First published in 1999, the book is now extensively revised and updated throughout to cover developments since 2000, including undocumented immigration, the drug wars, race relations, growing social inequality, and the socioeconomic gap between Latinos and the rest of American society—issues of vital and continuing national importance.

An outgrowth of the Borderlife Research Project conducted at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados uses the voices of several hundred Valley residents, collected by embedded student researchers and backed by the findings of sociological surveys, to describe the lives of migrant farmworkers, colonia residents, undocumented domestic servants, maquiladora workers, and Mexican street children. Likewise, it explores social, racial, and ethnic relations in South Texas among groups such as Latinos, Mexican immigrants, wealthy Mexican visitors, Anglo residents or tourists, and Asian and African American residents of South Texas. With this firsthand material and an explanatory focus that utilizes and applies social-science theoretical concepts, the book thoroughly addresses the future composition and integration of Latinos into the society and culture of the United States.

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Beer and Revolution
The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914
Tom Goyens
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Understanding an infamous political movement's grounding in festivity and defiance

Beer and Revolution examines the rollicking life and times of German immigrant anarchists in New York City from 1880 to 1914. Offering a new approach to an often misunderstood political movement, Tom Goyens puts a human face on anarchism and reveals a dedication less to bombs than to beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fundraising events, and theater groups were held.

Goyens brings to life the fascinating relationship between social space and politics by examining how the intersection of political ideals, entertainment, and social activism embodied anarchism not as an abstract idea, but as a chosen lifestyle for thousands of women and men. He shows how anarchist social gatherings were themselves events of defiance and resistance that aimed at establishing anarchism as an alternative lifestyle through the combination of German working-class conviviality and a dedication to the principle that coercive authority was not only unnecessary, but actually damaging to full and free human development as well. Goyens also explores the broader circumstances in both the United States and Germany that served as catalysts for the emergence of anarchism in urban America and how anarchist activism was hampered by police surveillance, ethnic insularity, and a widening gulf between the anarchists' message and the majority of American workers.

[more]

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Beginning to See the Light
Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll
Ellen Willis
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

From the New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic comes this pioneering collection of essays by a conscientious writer whose political realm is both radical and rational, and whose prime preoccupations are with rock ’n’ roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. Here Ellen Willis assuredly captures the thrill of music, the disdain of authoritarian culture, and the rebellious spirit of the ’60s and ’70s.

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Citizen Hobo
How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America
Todd DePastino
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship.

In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.
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The Conquest of Cool
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
Thomas Frank
University of Chicago Press, 1997
While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined—and even anticipated —by such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business.

"[Thomas Frank is] perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment."—Gerald Marzorati, New York Times Book Review

"An indispensable survival guide for any modern consumer."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit."—Geoff Pevere, Toronto Globe and Mail

"The Conquest of Cool helps us understand why, throughout the last third of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly confused gentility with conformity, irony with protest, and an extended middle finger with a populist manifesto. . . . His voice is an exciting addition to the soporific public discourse of the late twentieth century."—T. J. Jackson Lears, In These Times

"An invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at hand-me-down counterculture from the '60s. A spirited and exhaustive analysis of the era's advertising."—Brad Wieners, Wired Magazine

"Tom Frank is . . . not only old-fashioned, he's anti-fashion, with a place in his heart for that ultimate social faux pas, leftist politics."—Roger Trilling, Details
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Desi Land
Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley
Shalini Shankar
Duke University Press, 2008
Desi Land is Shalini Shankar’s lively ethnographic account of South Asian American teen culture during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Shankar focuses on how South Asian Americans, or “Desis,” define and manage what it means to be successful in a place brimming with the promise of technology. Between 1999 and 2001 Shankar spent many months “kickin’ it” with Desi teenagers at three Silicon Valley high schools, and she has since followed their lives and stories. The diverse high-school students who populate Desi Land are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs, from South Asia and other locations; they include first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents’ careers vary from assembly-line workers to engineers and CEOs. By analyzing how Desi teens’ conceptions and realizations of success are influenced by community values, cultural practices, language use, and material culture, she offers a nuanced portrait of diasporic formations in a transforming urban region.

Whether discussing instant messaging or arranged marriages, Desi bling or the pressures of the model minority myth, Shankar foregrounds the teens’ voices, perspectives, and stories. She investigates how Desi teens interact with dialogue and songs from Bollywood films as well as how they use their heritage language in ways that inform local meanings of ethnicity while they also connect to a broader South Asian diasporic consciousness. She analyzes how teens negotiate rules about dating and reconcile them with their longer-term desire to become adult members of their communities. In Desi Land Shankar not only shows how Desi teens of different socioeconomic backgrounds are differently able to succeed in Silicon Valley schools and economies but also how such variance affects meanings of race, class, and community for South Asian Americans.

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Desis In The House
Indian American Youth Culture In Nyc
Sunaina Maira
Temple University Press, 2002
She sports a nose-ring and duppata (a scarf worn by South Asian women) along with the latest fashion in slinky club wear; he's decked out in Tommy gear. Their moves on the crowded dance floor, blending Indian film dance with break-dancing, attract no particular attention. They are just two of the hundreds of hip young people who flock to the desi (i.e., South Asian) party scene that flourishes in the Big Apple.

New York City, long the destination for immigrants and migrants, today is home to the largest Indian American population in the United States. Coming of age in a city remarkable for its diversity and cultural innovation, Indian American and other South Asian youth draw on their ethnic traditions and the city's resources to create a vibrant subculture. Some of the city's hottest clubs host regular bhangra parties, weekly events where young South Asians congregate to dance to music that mixes rap beats with Hindi film music, bhangra (North Indian and Pakistani in origin), reggae, techno, and other popular styles. Many of these young people also are active in community and campus organizations that stage performances of "ethnic cultures."

In this book Sunaina Maira explores the world of second-generation Indian American youth to learn how they manage the contradictions of gender roles and sexuality, how they handle their "model minority" status and expectations for class mobility in a society that still racializes everyone in terms of black or white. Maira's deft analysis illuminates the ways in which these young people bridge ethnic authenticity and American "cool."
[more]

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Emo
How Fans Defined a Subculture
Judith May Fathallah
University of Iowa Press, 2020

For many, the word “emo” calls to mind angsty teenagers, shaggy black haircuts, and skinny jeans. A popular music phenomenon in the early 2000s, emo is short for “emotional hardcore,” and refers to both a music genre and a youth scene notable for its androgynous style. Judith May Fathallah pushes beyond the stereotypes and social stigma to explore how online fandom has shaped the definition of emo, with significant implications both for millennial constructs of gender and for contemporary fan studies.

First laying out the debate over what emo is, Fathallah walks superfans and newcomers through the culture surrounding thegenre’s major bands, including the emo holy trinity: My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco. Next she examines fans’ main mode of participation in the emo subculture—online communities such as LiveJournal, Tumblr, MySpace, and band websites. Taking a hard look at the gender politics that dominated those spaces, she unearths a subculture that simultaneously defines itself by its sensitivity and resistance to traditional forms of masculinity, yet ruthlessly enforces homophobic and sexist standards. Fathallah demonstrates fandom’s key role in defining emo as a concept and genre after 2001, with probing insight into its implications for gender constructions through popular music.

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The Ephrata Commune
An Early American Counterculture
E.G. Alderfer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985
Tells of the founding and subsequent history of Ephrata, a mystical religious community that flourished in eastern Pennsylvania in the mid-eighteenth century. Its leader, Conrad Beissel, a German Pietist who came to America in 1720 seeking spiritual peace and solitude. Settled in Lancaster County, his talents and charisma attracted other German settlers who shared his vision of a community built in the image of apostolic Christianity.
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Exploiting Fandom
How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans
Mel Stanfill
University of Iowa Press, 2019
As more and more fans rush online to share their thoughts on their favorite shows or video games, they might feel like the process of providing feedback is empowering. However, as fan studies scholar Mel Stanfill argues, these industry invitations for fan participation indicate not greater fan power but rather greater fan usefulness. Stanfill’s argument, controversial to some in the field, compares the “domestication of fandom” to the domestication of livestock, contending that, just as livestock are bred bigger and more docile as they are domesticated, so, too, are fans as the entertainment industry seeks to cultivate a fan base that is both more useful and more controllable.

By bringing industry studies and fan studies into the conversation, Stanfill looks closely at just who exactly the industry considers “proper fans” in terms of race, gender, age, and sexuality, and interrogates how digital media have influenced consumption, ultimately finding that the invitation to participate is really an incitement to consume in circumscribed, industry-useful ways.
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Fame and Fandom
Functioning On and Offline
Celia Lam
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Celebrities depend upon fans to sustain their popularity and livelihood, and fans are happy to oblige. With social media they can follow their favorite (or least favorite) celebrities’ every move, and get glimpses into their lives, homes, and behind-the-scenes work. Fans interact with celebrities now more than ever, and often feel that they have a claim on their time, attention, and accountability. In Fame and Fandom, the contributors examine this tumultuous dynamic and bring together celebrity studies and fan studies like never before.

In case studies including Supernatural, Harry Styles, YouTube influencers, film location sites, Keanu Reeves, and celebrities as fans, readers find new approaches to fan/celebrity encounters and parasocial relationships. This is the go-to volume on the symbiotic relationship between fame and fandom.
 
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front cover of A Fan Studies Primer
A Fan Studies Primer
Method, Research, Ethics
Paul Booth
University of Iowa Press, 2021
The discipline of fan studies is famously undisciplined. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t structured. This is the first comprehensive primer for classroom use that shows students how to do fan studies in practical terms. With contributions from a range of established and emerging scholars, coeditors Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams pull together case studies that demonstrate the wide array of methodologies available to fan studies scholars, such as auto/ethnography, immersion, interviews, online data mining, historiography, and textual analysis. This collection also probes the ethical questions that are unique to fan studies work, such as the use of online fan content for research, interview methods, consent, and privacy.
 
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From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Fred Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2006

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. 

From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. 

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

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Going All City
Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture
Stefano Bloch
University of Chicago Press, 2019
We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.”
 
In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them.
 
Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city.
 
Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.
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Gravity Hill
A Memoir
Maximilian Werner
University of Utah Press, 2013

“The sound of parenthood is the sigh.” So begins Gravity Hill, written from the perspective of a new father seeking hope, beauty, and meaning in an uncertain world. Many memoirs recount the author’s experiences of growing up and struggling with demons; Werner’s shows how old demons sometimes return on the heels of something as beautiful as children. Werner’s memoir is about growing up, getting older, looking back, and wondering what lies ahead—a process that becomes all the more complicated and intense when parenting is involved. Moving backward and forward between past, present, and future, Gravity Hill does not delineate time so much as collapse it.

Werner narrates his struggle growing up in suburban Utah as anon-Mormon and what it took for him, his siblings, and his friends to feel like they belonged. Bonding in separation, they indulged in each other, in natural and urban landscapes, and sometimes in the destructive behaviors that are the native resort of outsidersincluding promiscuous and occasionally violent sexual behavior—and for some, paths to death and suicide. Gravity Hill is the story of the author’s descent into and eventual emergence from his dysfunction and into a newfound life. Infused with humor, honesty, and reflection, this literary memoir will resonate with readers young and old.

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Hippies American Values
Timothy S. Miller
University of Tennessee Press, 1991
"The sixties' political agenda may have been ground down to ambiguity at best, but moral and spiritual America will never again be quite what it was before the coming of the hippies, and Miller has shown how and why."—Robert S. Ellwood, University of Southern California
The hippies of the late 1960s were cultural dissenters who, among other things, advocated drastic rethinking of certain traditional American values and standards.  In this lucid, lively survey, Timothy Miller traces the movement's ethical innovations and analyzes the impact of its ideas on subsequent American culture.

Dedicated to such tenets as the primacy of love, trust in intuition and direct experience, the rejection of meaningless work, and a disdain for money and materialism, the hippies advocated dropping out of the dominant culture, and proposed new and more permissive ethics in several areas.  They argued that, while some drugs were indeed harmful, others provided useful insights and experiences and therefore should be freely available and widely used.  They endorsed a liberal ethics of sex, in which no sexual act between or among consenting adults would be banned.  They developed an ethics of rock-and-roll music, arguing that rock was the language of a generation and that it helped promote new ways of thinking and living.  They also revived the venerable American tradition of communal living.
In contrast to most available literature on the 1960s, this book deals with the cultural revolutionaries and not the political radicals of the New Left.  And instead of relying on later interviews with persons who were active in the 1960s, Miller draws mainly on underground newspapers of the day, the most important literary creation of the hippies themselves.  The result is a historical encounter of rare immediacy.

Timothy Miller is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas.
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Kamikaze Biker
Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan
Ikuya Sato
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In this firsthand account of high-risk car and motorcycle racing in Japan, Ikuya Sato shows how affluence and consumerism have spawned various experimental and deviant life-styles among youth. Kamikaze Biker offers an intriguing look at a form of delinquency in a country traditionally thought to be devoid of social problems.

"Ikuya Sato's Kamikaze Biker is an exceptionally fine ethnographic analysis of a recurrent form of Japanese collective youth deviance. . . . Sato has contributed a work of value to a wide range of scholarly audiences."—Jack Katz, Contemporary Sociology

"A must for anyone interested in Japan, juvenile delinquency and/or youth behavior in general, or the impact of affluence on society."—Choice

"The volume provides a sophisticated . . . discussion of changes happening in Japanese society in the early 1980s. As such, it serves as a window on the 1990s and beyond."—Ross Mouer, Asian Studies Review

"Kamikaze Biker is a superlative study, one that might help liberate American social science from the simplistic notion that behavior not directly contributing to economic productivity should be summarily dismissed as 'dangerous' and 'deviant.' "—Los Angeles Times Book Review
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Making Scenes
Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali
Emma Baulch
Duke University Press, 2007
In 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. Her chats with young people led her to an enormously popular regular outdoor show dominated by local reggae, punk, and death metal bands. In this rich ethnography, she takes readers inside each scene: hanging out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island’s most renowned tourist area. Baulch tracks how each music scene arrived and grew in Bali, looking at such influences as the global extreme metal underground, MTV Asia, and the internationalization of Indonesia’s music industry.

Making Scenes is an exploration of the subtle politics of identity that took place within and among these scenes throughout the course of the 1990s. Participants in the different scenes often explained their interest in death metal, punk, or reggae in relation to broader ideas about what it meant to be Balinese, which reflected views about Bali’s tourism industry and the cultural dominance of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city. Through dance, dress, claims to public spaces, and onstage performances, participants and enthusiasts reworked “Balinese-ness” by synthesizing global media, ideas of national belonging, and local identity politics. Making Scenes chronicles the creation of subcultures at a historical moment when media globalization and the gradual demise of the authoritarian Suharto regime coincided with revitalized, essentialist formulations of the Balinese self.

[more]

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Marginal People in Deviant Places
Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism
Janice M. Irvine
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.
[more]

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No More Nice Girls
Countercultural Essays
Ellen Willis
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

With characteristic intelligence, wit, and feminist insight, Ellen Willis addresses democracy as she sees it: “a commitment to individual freedom and egalitarian self-government in every area of social, economic, and cultural life.” Moving between scholarly and down-to-earth activist writing styles, Willis confronts the conservative backlash that has slowly eroded democratic ideals and advances of the 1960s as well as the internal debates that have frequently splintered the left.

[more]

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On the Edge of the Law
Culture, Labor, and Deviance on the South Texas Border
By Chad Richardson and Rosalva Resendiz
University of Texas Press, 2006

The Valley of South Texas is a region of puzzling contradictions. Despite a booming economy fueled by free trade and rapid population growth, the Valley typically experiences high unemployment and low per capita income. The region has the highest rate of drug seizures in the United States, yet its violent crime rate is well below national and state averages. The Valley's colonias are home to the poorest residents in the nation, but their rates of home ownership and intact two-parent families are among the highest in the country for low-income residential areas. What explains these apparently irreconcilable facts?

Since 1982, faculty and students associated with the Borderlife Research Project at the University of Texas-Pan American have interviewed thousands of Valley residents to investigate and describe the cultural and social life along the South Texas-Northern Mexico border. In this book, Borderlife researchers clarify why Valley culture presents so many apparent contradictions as they delve into issues that are "on the edge of the law"—traditional health care and other cultural beliefs and practices, displaced and undocumented workers, immigration enforcement, drug smuggling, property crime, criminal justice, and school dropout rates. The researchers' findings make it plain that while these issues present major challenges for the governments of the United States and Mexico, their effects and contradictions are especially acute on the border, where residents must daily negotiate between two very different economies; health care, school, and criminal justice systems; and worldviews.

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Opposing Ambitions
Gender and Identity in an Alternative Organization
Sherryl Kleinman
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"Renewal" is a holistic health center run by baby boomers whose political ideals were shaped by the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Through interviews and observation, Sherryl Kleinman takes us inside Renewal and shows us how its members struggled to maintain a view of themselves as progressive and alternative even as they sought conventional legitimacy.

In Opposing Ambitions we meet the members of Renewal as individuals; learn about the differences in power, prestige, and respect they are accorded; why they talked endlessly about money; and how they related to each other. Kleinman shows how members' attempts to see themselves as unconventional, but also as serious operators of a legitimate health care organization, led them to act in ways that undermined their egalitarian goals. She draws out the lessons Renewal offers for understanding the problems women face in organizations, the failure of social movements to live up to their ideals, and how it is possible for progressives to avoid reproducing the inequalities they claim to oppose.
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Producing Guanxi
Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village
Andrew B. Kipnis
Duke University Press, 1997
Throughout China the formation of guanxi, or social connections, involves friends, families, colleagues, and acquaintances in complex networks of social support and sentimental attachment. Focusing on this process in one rural north China village, Fengjia, Andrew Kipnis shows what guanxi production reveals about the evolution of village political economy, kinship and gender, and local patterns of subjectivity in Dengist China. His work offers a detailed description of the communicative actions—such as gift giving, being a host or guest, participating in weddings or funerals—that produce, manage, and deny guanxi in a specific time and place. Kipnis also offers a rare comparative analysis of how these practices relate to the varied and variable phenomenon of guanxi throughout China and as it has changed over time.
Producing Guanxi combines the theory of Pierre Bourdieu and the insights of symbolic anthropology to contest past portrayals of guanxi as either a function of Chinese political economics or an unchanging Confucian social structure. In this analysis guanxi emerges as a purposeful human effort that makes use of past cultural logics while generating new ones. By exploring the role of sentiment in the creation of self, Kipnis critiques recent theories of subjectivity for their narrow focus on language and discourse, and contributes to the anthropological discussion of comparative selfhood. Navigating a path between mainstream social science and abstract social theory, Kipnis presents a more nuanced examination of guanxi than has previously been available and contributes generally to our understanding of relationships and human action.
[more]

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Psychobilly
Subcultural Survival
Kimberly Kattari
Temple University Press, 2020

“I got 1-2-3-4 psychobilly DNA”—Norm and the Nightmarez
Call it punk rockabilly with science-fiction horror lyrics. The outsider musical genre known as psychobilly, which began in 1980s Britain, fuses punk, heavy metal, new wave, and shock rock with carnivalesque elements. The participants in this underground scene sport coffin tattoos and 1950s fashions. Bands such as The Meteors, Nekromantix, and Demented Are Go play with a wild energy and a fast tempo. Sometimes fake blood runs down a performer’s mouth.

Psychobilly is ethnomusicologist Kimberly Kattari’s fascinating, decade-long study of this little-known anti-mainstream genre. She provides a history and introduces readers to the core aspects of the music as she interviews passionate performers and fans. Kattari seeks to understand how psychobilly so strongly affects—and reflects—its participants’ lives and identities so strongly. She observes that it provides not only a sense of belonging but a response to feelings and experiences of socio-economic marginalization and stigmatization. 

Psychobilly shows how this subculture organized around music furnishes an outlet for members to resist normative expectations and survive; they adhere to their own rules by having a good time while going through a hard time.

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Raving
McKenzie Wark
Duke University Press, 2023
What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.
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Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace
The Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s
Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje
Intellect Books, 2014
It was a scene that had many names: some original members referred to themselves as punks, others, new romantics, new wavers, the bats, or the morbids. “Goth” did not gain lexical currency until the late 1980s. But no matter what term was used, “postpunk” encompasses all the incarnations of the 1980s alternative movement. Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace is a visual and oral history of the first decade of the scene. Featuring interviews with both the performers and the audience to capture the community on and off stage, the book places personal snapshots alongside professional photography to reveal a unique range of fashions, bands, and scenes.

A book about the music, the individual, and the creativity of a worldwide community rather than theoretical definitions of a subculture, Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace considers a subject not often covered by academic books. Whether you were part of the scene or are just fascinated by different modes of expression, this book will transport you to another time and place.
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Sounds of the Underground
A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music
Stephen Graham
University of Michigan Press, 2016
In basements, dingy backrooms, warehouses, and other neglected places around the world music is being made that doesn't fit neatly into popular or classical categories and genres, whose often extreme sounds and tiny concerts hover on the fringes of these commercial and cultural mainstreams.

The term “underground music” as it’s being used here connects various forms of music-making that exist outside or on the fringes of mainstream institutions and culture, such as noise, free improvisation, and extreme metal. This is music that makes little money, that’s noisy and exploratory in sound and that’s largely independent from both the market and from traditional high art institutions. It sometimes exists at the fringes of these commercial and cultural institutions, as for example with experimental metal or improv, but for the most part it’s removed from the mainstream, “underground,” as we see with noise artists such as Werewolf Jerusalem or Ramleh, obscure black metal artists such as Lord Foul, and improvisers such as Maggie Nicols. In response to a lack of previous scholarly discussion, Graham provides a cultural, political, and aesthetic mapping of this broad territory. By outlining the historical background but focusing on the digital age, the underground and its fringes can be seen as based in radical anti-capitalist politics or radical aesthetics while also being tied to the political contexts and structures of late capitalism. The book explores these various ideas of separation and captures, through interviews and analysis, a critical account of both the music and the political and cultural economy of the scene.

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Squee from the Margins
Fandom and Race
Rukmini Pande
University of Iowa Press, 2018

Rukmini Pande’s examination of race in fan studies is sure to make an immediate contribution to the growing field. Until now, virtually no sustained examination of race and racism in transnational fan cultures has taken place, a lack that is especially concerning given that current fan spaces have never been more vocal about debating issues of privilege and discrimination. 

Pande’s study challenges dominant ideas of who fans are and how these complex transnational and cultural spaces function, expanding the scope of the field significantly. Along with interviewing thirty-nine fans from nine different countries about their fan practices, she also positions media fandom as a postcolonial cyberspace, enabling scholars to take a more inclusive view of fan identity. With analysis that spans from historical to contemporary, Pande builds a case for the ways in which non-white fans have always been present in such spaces, though consistently ignored. 

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Storefront Revolution
Food Co-ops and the Counterculture
Cox, Craig
Rutgers University Press, 1994

          In the 1960s, the cooperative networks of food stores, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and housing alternatives were part counterculture, part social experiment, part economic utopia, and part revolutionary political statement. The co-ops gave activists a place where they could both express themselves and accomplish at least some small-scale changes. By the mid-1970s, dozens of food co-ops and other consumer- and work-owned enterprises were operating throughout the Twin Cities, and an alternative economic network - with a People's Warehouse at its hub - was beginning to transform the economic landscape of the metropolitan Minneapolis-St. Paul area. 
           However, these co-op activists could not always agree among themselves on their goals. Craig Cox, a journalist who was active in the co-op movement, here provides the first book to look at food co-ops during the 1960s and 1970s. He presents a dramatic story of hope and conflict within the Minneapolis network, one of the largest co-op structures in the country. His "view from the front" of the "Co-op War" that ensued between those who wanted personal liberation through the movement and those who wanted a working-class revolution challenges us to re-thing possiblities for social and political change. Cox provides not a cynical portrait of sixties idealism, but a moving insight into an era when anything seemed possible.

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Straight Edge
Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change
Haenfler, Ross
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Straight edge is a clean-living youth movement that emerged from the punk rock subculture in the early 1980s. Its basic tenets promote a drug-free, tobacco-free, and sexually responsible lifestyle—tenets that, on the surface, seem counter to those typical of teenage rebellion. For many straight-edge kids, however, being clean and sober was (and still is) the ultimate expression of resistance—resistance to the consumerist and self-indulgent ethos that defines mainstream U.S. culture.

In this first in-depth sociological analysis of the movement, Ross Haenfler follows the lives of dozens of straight-edge youths, showing how for these young men and women, and thousands of others worldwide, the adoption of the straight-edge doctrine as a way to better themselves evolved into a broader mission to improve the world in which they live. Straight edge used to signify a rejection of mind-altering substances and promiscuous sex, yet modern interpretations include a vegetarian (or vegan) diet and an increasing involvement in environmental and political issues.

The narrative moves seamlessly between the author’s personal experiences and theoretical concerns, including how members of subcultures define “resistance,” the role of collective identity in social movements, how young men experience multiple masculinities in their quest to redefine manhood, and how young women establish their roles in subcultures. This book provides fresh perspectives on the meaning of resistance and identity in any subculture.

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Unlimited Intimacy
Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking
Tim Dean
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Barebacking—when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex—has incited a great deal of shock, outrage, anger, and even disgust, but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for Unlimited Intimacy, Tim Dean’s riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it.

Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean’s profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean’s extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene’s bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and Unlimited Intimacy explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus—especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits—one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal—barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works.

Written with a fierce intelligence and uncompromising nerve, Unlimited Intimacy will prove to be a milestone in our understanding of sexual behavior.

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Walking on the Wild Side
Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail
Fondren, Kristi M
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Received the 2016 Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Award for Excellence in Recreation and Park Research from the National Recreation and Park Association

The most famous long-distance hiking trail in North America, the 2,181-mile Appalachian Trail—the longest hiking-only footpath in the world—runs along the Appalachian mountain range from Georgia to Maine. Every year about 2,000 individuals attempt to “thru-hike” the entire trail, a feat equivalent to hiking Mount Everest sixteen times. In Walking on the Wild Side, sociologist Kristi M. Fondren traces the stories of forty-six men and women who, for their own personal reasons, set out to conquer America’s most well known, and arguably most social, long-distance hiking trail.
 
In this fascinating in-depth study, Fondren shows how, once out on the trail, this unique subculture of hikers lives mostly in isolation, with their own way of acting, talking, and thinking; their own vocabulary; their own activities and interests; and their own conception of what is significant in life. They tend to be self-disciplined, have an unwavering trust in complete strangers, embrace a life of poverty, and reject modern-day institutions. The volume illuminates the intense social intimacy and bonding that forms among long-distance hikers as they collectively construct a long-distance hiker identity. Fondren describes how long-distance hikers develop a trail persona, underscoring how important a sense of place can be to our identity, and to our sense of who we are. Indeed, the author adds a new dimension to our understanding of the nature of identity in general.
 
Anyone who has hiked—or has ever dreamed of hiking—the Appalachian Trail will find this volume fascinating. Walking on the Wild Side captures a community for whom the trail is a sacred place, a place to which they have become attached, socially, emotionally, and spiritually.
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Wannabes, Goths, and Christians
The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status
Amy C. Wilkins
University of Chicago Press, 2008
On college campuses and in high school halls, being white means being boring. Since whiteness is the mainstream, white kids lack a cultural identity that’s exotic or worth flaunting. To remedy this, countless white youths across the country are now joining more outré subcultures like the Black- and Puerto Rican–dominated hip-hop scene, the glamorously morose goth community, or an evangelical Christian organization whose members reject campus partying.

Amy C. Wilkins’s intimate ethnography of these three subcultures reveals a complex tug-of-war between the demands of race, class, and gender in which transgressing in one realm often means conforming to expectations in another. Subcultures help young people, especially women, navigate these connecting territories by offering them different sexual strategies: wannabes cross racial lines, goths break taboos by becoming involved with multiple partners, and Christians forego romance to develop their bond with God. Avoiding sanctimonious hysteria over youth gone astray, Wilkins meets these kids on their own terms, and the result is a perceptive and provocative portrait of the structure of young lives.
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