'Cultural Boundaries Essay\r'

'Youth finishing has been canvas from several ideological perspectives on assumptions that they ar ‘not isolated and untouched by the contact culture’ (Keyes, 2000). This notion has lead researchers to assume that youthfulness culture is not part of ‘growing up’, yet a phenomenon that occurs as a foolhardiness of the accessible, political, ethnic and ideological factors. There is not oneness monolithic youth culture that defines all boyish stack.\r\nPopular youth culture embraces a miscellany of sub-cultures or â€Å"tribes” such as skaters, druggies, snobs, band geeks, Satanists, deliverer freaks, techno-goths, computer dweebs, blacks, Latinos and white trash. Groups distinguish themselves by dress, style, music, be 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, practically ends up in analysing one of the factors and tend to romanticise or over-politicise these aspects.\r\nThornton’s study on night confederation cultures and Nava’s treatise on youth and consumerism ar frank examples in this genre. The debates on how best to conceptualise both the structural and cultural transitions of newfangled people ashes a central issue in the sociology of youth. In these debates cultural approaches have been criticised for neglecting the role of kindly divisions and berth inequalities in lifestyle ‘choices’ (Bennett 2002). The cultural night lives of young people have provided fertile ground for social researchers.\r\nThere have been explorations of the character and division of dancing 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 substance abuse and clubbing (Henderson 1993; merc hant & Macdonald 1994; Forsyth 1997). What has not been studied so head is how people drop dead clubbers, what practices this entails, what physical body of young people invest in this lifestyle, what resources are required to do so, whether this process is gendered as strong as if and how this experience has impacted on their maven of identity.\r\nEarlier 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 detail spaces and places’ (Hollands 2002, p. 153).\r\nGiven this it seems important to unpack further the temperament of boundaries: the divisions between ‘us and the m’: the boundary work that we do and how boundaries are constituted in social interaction. Thornton asserts ‘club cultures are taste cultures’, but as she too points out, practices of distinction do not just take aim taste and cultural hierarchies are numerous (1995, p. 3). What new(prenominal) practices of distinction are involved in realization and differentiation processes, both within and between club scenes?\r\nIt 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 charge that recognise that many young people are more suitable than others to engage in particular styles of life, and consumer and cultural activities, such as clubbing. Boundaries are about both the idiosyncratic and the collective, notions not new to youth research.\r\nWillis (1978) suggested that ‘ fit’ a hippie or a bike boy involved not only cultural knowledge, but also a process of developing ag convocation sensibilities, and these sensibilities could be used to identify and differientiate one theme from another. The notion of ‘becoming’ is a way of exploring both individual and group processes (Becker 1991): how young people image to use ‘recreational’ drugs, learn particular practices, colligate with a culture, lifestyle or social group and invest in additional clays of identification, as easy as encounter cultural barriers that constrain corporation and processes of ‘becoming’.\r\n exemplary interactionist theories would suggest that notions of what and who you are, as well as what and who you are not, only become important and significant through interaction with others. When social anthropological and symbolic interactionist conceptualisations of boundaries are brought together they can avail us understand how people come to form into co llective groups, groups that construct shared conveys through interaction.\r\nSymbolic boundaries, group life or how ‘people do things together’ (Becker 1986), are interactional resources that groups draw upon to relieve oneself 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’.\r\n'