Murphy, David Jo (2011) Hate Couture: Subcultural fundamentalism and the Serbian Black Metal Music Scene. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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Abstract

This work is an ethnography of the Serbian black metal music scene. Through ethnographic descriptions and a study of the manner in which social scientists have conceptualized youth movements and scenes in the past decades it is hoped to present a study of an international phenomenon from the perspective of a Serbian music scene. Many of the current anxieties concerning the post-socialist decline in mainstream consensus and its substitution with forms of youth culture as ‘politics by other means’ will be addressed. These social scenes are a response to the demands and possibilities that contemporary modernity produces in the Balkans and within capitalist society in general. Both Serbia and the black metal scene, have in the past been represented as both ‘other’ and dangerous to the body politic of Europe. The disjuncture between perception and experience are explored here through techniques of ethnographic representation and embodied descriptions of the attraction and internal logics that operate both within Serbia and the wider black metal music scene. Hospitality, scene myth-making, cathartic effervescence, masculinity and a ‘volkish’ performance of identity are some of the themes explored here through the medium of music and its capacity to both mirror and contest extremes of ideology and violence. This work also takes into account the ‘flows’ of influence and discourse that exist in scenic networks that link Scandinavian Satanic Paganism, the extreme right in Polish and Russian metal music and a receptive but deeply individualistic Serbian version of a shared scenic space. Despite the scenes' links to extremist discourses this thesis reveals insights into a (scene based) virulently patriotic Pan-Slavic identity. An identity which manages to regularly contradict and efface many of the tensions that outside observers would typically expect to exist between Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians and their surrounding neighbors, in reflexive and surprising ways.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	Hate Couture; Subcultural fundamentalism; Serbian Black Metal Music Scene;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology
Item ID:	2863
Depositing User:	IR eTheses
Date Deposited:	24 Nov 2011 14:29
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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