Sarah Thornton is a writer, ethnographer, and sociologist of culture. A writer is anyone who creates a written work although the word usually designates those who write creatively or professionally as well as those who have written in many different forms Ethnography ( Greek ethnos = people and graphein = writing is a genre of writing that uses Fieldwork to provide a descriptive Sociology (from Latin: socius "companion" and the suffix -ology "the study of" from Greek λόγος lógos "knowledge" She has written about art and the art world for artforum.com, The Art Newspaper, Art Review, Art Monthly, and The New Yorker. The New Yorker is an American Magazine that publishes reportage commentary criticism essays fiction satire cartoons and poetry Her forthcoming book Seven Days in the Art World will be published by WW Norton (USA) and Granta (UK) in fall 2008, with French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean translations to follow. Once a full-time lecturer at the University of Sussex, then a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, Thornton has authored and edited several influential works about subcultures. The University of Sussex is a British Campus university which is situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, and is from Brighton For the Memphis department store see Goldsmith's. For other uses of the term "Goldsmiths" see Goldsmith (disambiguation. For the term in biology see Subculture (biology. For the song by New Order see Sub-culture (song.
Academic works
Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital is widely acknowledged as an important work in the study of youth subcultures. In their Introduction to the second edition of the landmark text Resistance Through Rituals, Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson describe Thornton's study as "theoretically innovative" and "conceptually adventurous. "[1]
Anchored in an ethnographic investigation of the authenticity and "hipness" of British rave culture and analyzing the changing cultural context of recorded music, the book both builds on and critiques earlier theories of subcultures, particularly that of Dick Hebdige. A rave (or rave party) is a term in use since the 1980s to describe Dance Parties (often all-night events While Hebdige's analysis of British punk subculture is typical of the now-defunct Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in that it suggested that youth subcultural aesthetics rise out of calculated stylistic subversion of dominant societal norms, Thornton instead posits that youth subcultures (beginning as "taste cultures" united around shared media consumption) evolve as an alternative to the constructed dichotomous opposite: the "mainstream. The punk subculture is based around Punk rock. It emerged from the larger Rock music scene in the mid-to-late-1970s in the United Kingdom, the United The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. "[2] She highlights the role micro- niche-, and mass- media play in the formation of subcultural ideology:
"Local micro-media like flyers and listings are means by which club organizers bring the crowd together. Niche media like the music press construct subcultures as much as they document them. National mass media, such as tabloids, develop youth movements as much as they distort them. Contrary to youth subcultural ideologies, ‘subcultures’ do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy into mysterious ‘movements’ only to be belatedly digested by the media. Rather, media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start. They are central to process of subcultural formation" (117). [3]
She goes on to suggest that these alternative social realities, rather than entirely re-inventing a system free from class hierarchies united under a particular style (as Hebdige proposes), "duplicate structures of exclusion and stratification found elsewhere" (115)[4]. She demonstrates this stratification by proposing the idea of "subcultural capital," drawing from the theories of French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu as outlined in his book, Distinction. Pierre Bourdieu ( August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French Sociologist and writer known for his In short, Thornton's work attempts to dissolve the mythic status subcultures had gained through the Marxist class-revolution analysis of the Birmingham school while examining the specifics of rave culture.
Thornton also co-edited the first edition of The Subcultures Reader with Ken Gelder.
Notes
- ^ Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance Through Rituals Second edition. Routledge, London, 2006. pp. xix-xx.
- ^ Tim Lawrence. Dance Research Journal, Vol. Congress on Research in Dance is an international non-profit interdisciplinary society for Dance Researchers. 33, No. 2, Social and Popular Dance. (Winter, 2001), pp. 139.
- ^ Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures : Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover : University Press of New England, 1996.
- ^ Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures : Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover : University Press of New England, 1996.
External links
- www.sarah-thornton.com
- January, 2005 review of "Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital"
- The New Yorker
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