ABSTRACT
Reflecting the core concern of this book – understanding the meaning of respondents’ everyday practices, actions and interests – this chapter considers subcultural choice – in this case skinhead – within the context of broader collective and individual cultural practices and preferences. The ethnographic material drawn upon allows us to go beyond respondents’ own narrations of their subcultural identity and to see not only where this fits with ‘official’ skin ideology but also where cultural interests and practices within the group diverge from it. This is not to suggest the need, in the light of globalisation, to distinguish between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ subcultures but rather to propose that subcultural choices be understood within broader cultural strategies whose development is shaped by territorial, class, gender and ethnic locations, available opportunities, access to informational resources and individual cultural interests. This approach also facilitates an understanding of respondents as fully rounded individuals1 whose personal cultural preferences change over time, consolidating or, alternatively, rupturing group solidarities. Tracing respondents’ individual and evolving cultural interests reveals ‘skinhead’, in the case of this particular group, not to constitute a binding ideological or stylistic commitment but to be part of a wider, ‘progressive’2 cultural strategy that allowed individuals the immediate satisfaction of standing out from the perceived ‘mainstream’, as well as the prospect of overcoming class and territorial constraints through other, imagined, lives. Over time the constellation of individual cultural interests, wider life strategies and skinhead identities evolved in increasingly divergent ways, resulting in some group members consigning skinhead to their ‘childhood’ while others, feeling betrayed by the apparently faint hearted, withdrew into the more self-contained and controlled space of the virtual skinhead community.
