Cultural Boundaries Essay

Youth culture has been studied from several ideological perspectives on assumptions that they are ‘not isolated and untouched by the surrounding culture’ (Keyes, 2000). This notion has lead researchers to assume that youth culture is not part of ‘growing up’, but a phenomenon that occurs as a precipitation of the social, political, cultural and ideological factors. There is not one monolithic youth culture that defines all young people. Popular youth culture embraces a diversity of sub-cultures or â€Å"tribes† such as skaters, druggies, snobs, band geeks, Satanists, Jesus freaks, techno-goths, computer dweebs, blacks, Latinos and white trash. Groups distinguish themselves by dress, style, music, body modification practices, race, ethnicity, and language. (Hines, 1999) Thus a researcher, who intends to study the ethnic, racial, political, cultural, sociological or linguistic aspect of a subculture, often ends up in analysing one of the factors and tend to romanticise or over-politicise these aspects. Thornton’s study on club cultures and Nava’s treatise on youth and consumerism are good examples in this genre. The debates on how best to conceptualise both the structural and cultural transitions of young people remains a central issue in the sociology of youth. In these debates cultural approaches have been criticised for neglecting the role of social divisions and status inequalities in lifestyle ‘choices’ (Bennett 2002). The cultural night lives of young people have provided fertile ground for social researchers. There have been explorations of the character and division of dance scenes (Thornton 1995), the relationship between femininities, women’s clubbing experiences and feminism (Pini 1997a, 1997b), clubbing experiences (Malbon 1999) and the relationship between drug use and clubbing (Henderson 1993; Merchant & Macdonald 1994; Forsyth 1997). What has not been studied so well is how people become clubbers, what practices this entails, what kind of young people invest in this lifestyle, what resources are required to do so, whether this process is gendered as well as if and how this experience has impacted on their sense of identity. Earlier studies portrayed Rave culture as being a social arena where social divisions were put aside and anyone and everyone mixed together (Henderson 1993; Merchant & Macdonald 1994). Yet, more recent studies suggest that distinctions do operate between ‘mainstream’ and ‘hip’ club scenes (Thornton 1995), that ‘nightlife provision exploits existing cleavages in the youth population, and segregates young adults into particular spaces and places’ (Hollands 2002, p. 153). Given this it seems important to unpack further the nature of boundaries: the divisions between ‘us and them’: the boundary work that we do and how boundaries are constituted in social interaction. Thornton asserts ‘club cultures are taste cultures’, but as she also points out, practices of distinction do not just involve taste and cultural hierarchies are numerous (1995, p. 3). What other practices of distinction are involved in identification and differentiation processes, both within and between club scenes? It seems unlikely that these processes and practices are wholly elective. Young people’s experiences of clubbing, their lifestyle ‘choices’, need to be contextualised and conceptualised in such a way that recognise that some young people are more able than others to engage in particular styles of life, and consumer and cultural activities, such as clubbing. Boundaries are about both the individual and the collective, notions not new to youth research. Willis (1978) suggested that ‘becoming’ a hippie or a bike boy involved not only cultural knowledge, but also a process of developing group sensibilities, and these sensibilities could be used to identify and differientiate one group from another. The notion of ‘becoming’ is a way of exploring both individual and group processes (Becker 1991): how young people learn to use ‘recreational’ drugs, learn particular practices, affiliate with a culture, lifestyle or social group and invest in additional forms of identification, as well as encounter cultural barriers that constrain participation and processes of ‘becoming’. Symbolic interactionist theories would suggest that notions of what and who you are, as well as what and who you are not, only become meaningful and significant through interaction with others. When social anthropological and symbolic interactionist conceptualisations of boundaries are brought together they can help us understand how people come to form into collective groups, groups that construct shared meanings through interaction. Symbolic boundaries, group life or how ‘people do things together’ (Becker 1986), are interactional resources that groups draw upon to create their own boundaries. These notions offer a fruitful way to explore the relationship between the individual and the group, and the divisions between ‘us and them’ found in the empirical studies exploring the cultural night-lives of young people. Moreover, it may be that identifying as and ‘becoming a clubber’ may only acquire meaning in relation to and in contrast to those who do not identify as or become ‘clubbers’.