Doing Popular Culture. The Performative Construction of the Goth Scene

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Tauschek
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 325269992

The emergence of scenes is based on far-reaching social and cultural transformation processes. In the context of individualisation and pluralisation, social actors today dispose of a multitude of courses of action and individual agency linked to new forms of socialisation. The emergence of goth subculture at the end of the 1970ies may serve as a paradigmatic example for these new forms. Goth subculture can be understood as the effect of a complex network of actors, which is performatively and discursively stabilised by collectively shared symbols, by the consumption of different music styles, by a specific repertoire of material culture, by specific aesthetic codes and the negotiation of specific lifestyles and ways of interpreting the world. In this context, events as genres of popular culture that are formatted by a powerful media industry play a crucial role and offer only specific forms of performative culture, often in normative ways. However, events also offer symbolic spaces for creative or wilful appropriation. The actor-centered research project on the performative construction of goth subculture analyses three typical events of the scene in Leipzig, Köln and Hildesheim. The main purpose of the research project is to show how a network of social actors is constantly reproduced and transformed through interaction and communication. The project focusses on three different cultural performances in different material and symbolical frames and settings considering various bodily and emotional experiences and different webs of meaning which are influenced by different performative contexts which are highly influenced by a powerful media industry. Hence, a central goal of the project is, through a performance-centered approach, to understand the cultural logics in the construction and transformation of a scene in the context of festivals, which the project conceptualises as cultural performances and as hybrid assemblages. This perspective enables a cultural anthropological analysis of recent social individualisation and pluralisation processes which particularly are materialised in the emergence of scenes or subculture. On a conceptual level, the project additionally contributes to theories of festivals and events and further develops praxeological approaches in the context of an ethnographically oriented, comparative cultural analysis.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants