Aimar Ventsel

PUNX AND SKINS UNITED: ONE LAW FOR US ONE LAW FOR THEM

Abstract This paper discusses social and economic networks within the punk and skinhead culture in two East German cities. The skins’ and punks’ main ideological position is to demonstrate that they are an autonomous group. They regard themselves as a subculture with different values and social norms from the values and social norms of the mainstream society. Skins and punks have created complicated social and economic networks linking various cities. Within these “scene networks” favours, jobs and services circulate to keep people economically independent from the state structures. The most important part of the sub-cultural ideology are the notions of ‘unity’ and ‘loyalty’. People involved in such networks regard themselves as ‘family’ members with the obligation to loyalty and mutual support. On the one hand, their ideology justifies illegal behaviour and the setting up of semi-autonomous social networks. On the other hand, these people cannot ignore the state completely and therefore need justifications for a strategy to cope with state structures, legal situations, and their own behaviour as ‘normal’ citizens, although in such cases a sub-cultural ideology is used. The paper shows how semi-legal economic behaviour is linked to the underground ideology and music culture. As a theoretical framework it uses the concept of the ‘semi-autonomous social field’ (Moore 1973), in order to show that being part of a group that understands itself to be outside of mainstream society affects aspects of the behaviour of members of the subculture.

Generation P in the Tundra 8-10 October 2004, Tartu, Estonia

The conference, ‘Generation P in the Tundra’ (8–10 October 2004) was organised by the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu. The topic of the conference was the young generation in Siberia in all of its facets. The title for the conference was inspired by the cult book Generation P by the Russian writer Victor Pelevin, who describes what he believes is the young, commercialised Pepsi generation in Russia, which has assimilated post-socialist consumerist culture. Using the title of the Pelevin’s book, I invited participants to address the issue of youth in changing post-socialist Russian society. Youth are still rather marginal on the Siberian research agenda. The other highlighted topic, not very popular among Siberianists, was native people in the urban environment and the influence of commercial culture on their lifestyles and worldviews. In this sense, Siberian studies need to catch up to Arctic research in North American communities, but also anthropology generally, where urban anthropology and the analysis of social roles and the changing world of youth is already a well developed field. Although there are some works focusing on youth and youth subcultures in the Russian context, this research is carried out west of Ural Mountains in European Russia (Omel’chenko and Bliudina, 2002; Pilkington, 1994, 1999; Puuronen et al., 2000; Yurchak, 2005), or south in the post-Soviet central Asian republics (Kuehnast, 2000). The conference in Tartu built upon the conference at the Siberian Studies Centre of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany the year before to further this agenda of a framework for Siberian anthropology of youth. Diverging from the Halle conference, the Tartu meeting focused on urban environments, and village communities or young people in the tundra and taiga were not the dominating issue in Tartu.