Class, Style and Territory in the <i>Drari</i> Microcultures of Brussels

oleh: Mattias De Backer

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: MDPI AG 2019-09-01

Deskripsi

Much like Parsons&#8217;s notion of &#8220;youth culture,&#8221; the tradition of subculture developed by the Birmingham School was criticised as being too romantic, too general, and too dependent on a simplistic model based on the inside/outside binary. Since the 1990s, &#8220;post-subcultural&#8221; studies have developed which prefer to focus on agency rather than structure. A &#8220;third school&#8221; of youth cultural studies focused on medium sizes groups and their attachment to place, which they called &#8220;microcultures&#8221;. This paper, drawing from fieldwork undertaken in Brussels between 2013 and 2016 with young people, studies members of the Brussels &#8220;street culture&#8221; called the <i>drari</i>, while zooming in on the combinations of personalities, the events they share and the locations they make their own. Specifically, this paper argues that the <i>drari</i> microculture does not fit in the binary model of (post-)subcultural theory, nor in the criminological frame of urban youth gangs, by focusing on the affective and class-related phenomena internal to their practices of territory-building.