FROM STREET DANCES AND 'BREAKING' TO NIGHT CLUBBING: POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT AS CULTURAL AND SYMBOLIC CAPITAL IN CONTEMPORARY ATHENS

Natalia Koutsougera

doi:10.2218/tu.v2i2.67

Authors

Natalia Koutsougera Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2218/tu.v2i2.67

Abstract

This paper is an anthropological portrayal of two cultural forms of popular entertainment, with a central emphasis on their dance practices: hip hop dance styles and night clubbing. Their main components are discussed in relation to emotions, materials and regulatory language and how these surround the sense of authenticity of the self, grounding the notion of the popular. Breakdance, street dances of the Athens hip hop scene and night clubbing practices in the western suburbs of Athens unravel in a descriptive manner in order to illuminate their interwoven elements in terms of authenticity and the permutations of the popular. The cultural and symbolic agendas of the subjectivities and collectivities engaged in these popular cultural forms unveil, along with the ways global and local discourses intersect, to produce a territory for identity formation. By highlighting the key aspects of popular entertainment in contemporary Greece, the aim of this article is to contribute to the anthropological study of popular culture by pointing out its role in the processes of shaping and performing subjectivity and in the production of authenticity.

Author Biography

Natalia Koutsougera, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece

Natalia Koutsougera is an active doctoral researcher in Social Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens. The subject of her research and focus of her doctoral thesis is night clubbing and young people in a working class suburb of Athens. She has been trained as a sociologist at Panteion University at a graduate level (1994-98) and has obtained an MA degree in Applied Anthropology, Community and Youth Work, at Goldsmiths College, University of London (1998-99). On her return to Greece, she obtained a second MA degree in Social Anthropology at Panteion University (2002-04) and then began her doctoral research. Her major research interests revolve around the anthropology of dance, urban space, youth culture and musical identities, entertainment and gender. As being consistently research-active, she participated in several research projects on subjects such as migration, urban space, gender and night-clubbing. She has taught criminology in the fire brigade Academy of Athens, and psychology of gender in the Institute of Counseling and Psychology Studies. She regularly writes articles on dance at www.dancetheater.gr and has also co-produced a 10-minute video on street and hip hop dance styles in Greece, and an ethnographic film on “breaking” (breakdance), under the title 'Born to Break'. She has worked as a scientific assistant in the National School of Public Health of Athens (2000-2002) and now works as a sociologist in the Municipality of Perama, Piraeus.