ABSTRACT
Chapter Two details how this Samoan Christian youth group’s selfrepresentations of their faith experiences represents a new kind of agentic subjectivity for them and is representative of a growing youth culture centred on ‘faith communities’. Yet these young people and their relationship
to music in particular go beyond an expression of their faith and become an enactment of what Appadurai calls a ‘capacity to aspire’, a strategy by which they partially bypass the many constraints of their material conditions. By documenting their experiences of developing and sharing new work, both religious and secular, these young people’s voices are foregrounded as providing a more complex interweaving of the usually binarised notions of secular and spiritual in contemporary culture (including their intersections with hybrid musical genres like hip hop and R&B). This chapter traces the ways in which this faith-infused music scene in Samoan youth culture provides a type of global citizenship for these otherwise locally embedded young people that links them to global communities of culture, faith, and creativity.
