Simon Gottschalk

UNDERSTANDING MUSIC IN MOVEMENTS: The White Power Music Scene

Relying on the analysis of ethnographic and documentary data, this article explains how U.S. White Power Movement (WPM) activists use music to produce collective occasions and experiences that we conceptualize as the movements music scene. We use the concept “music scene” to refer to the full range of movement occasions in which music is the organizing principle. Members experience these not as discrete events, but as interconnected sets of situations that form a relatively coherent movement music scene. We emphasize three analytically distinct dimensions of this scene—local, translocal, and virtual—and specify how each contributes to emotionally loaded experiences that nurture collective identity. Participants claim that strong feelings of dignity, pride, pleasure, love, kinship, and fellowship are supported through involvement in the WPM music scene. These emotions play a central role in vitalizing and sustaining member commitments to movement ideals.

Making Sense of the Weather: Dwelling and Weathering on Canada’s Rain Coast

Drawing on ethnographic data collected throughout British Columbia’s coastal regions, in this article, the authors examine people’s experiences of ordinary weather. Data show how people experience weather multisensorially and how the weather plays a central role in the way individuals and collectives define sense of place. Experiences of weather, the authors argue, are a reflexive and active form of dwelling. A focus on skillful embodied practices and dwelling highlights how weathering is a process through which people make and remake places and shape their sense of self. The authors conceptualize the practice of weathering as a form of somatic work and explain how through somatic work places and weather emerge within a performative ecology of movements.

Sound Acts: Elocution, Somatic Work, and the Performance of Sonic Alignment

Drawing on reflection, nonparticipant and participant observation, and introspection this article examines the performative dimensions of sound, arguing that sounds of both the nonsemioticized and semioticized variety function as acts, not unlike speech acts. Through a layered text, the article offers analytical reflections and evocative writing focused on the exploration of acoustic environments such as movie theatres, airplanes, street music performances, residential neighborhoods, and more. An important material property of sound acts, elocution, is identified, conceptualized, and examined. Elocutionary sound acts are also examined as social dramas, insofar as they constitute a crisis-ensuing breach of what the authors refer to as the somatic order. The maintenance of, or alignment on, the rules prevalent within a defined somatic order is also examined and discussed. As a whole, the sensuous performative dynamics that sound acts and somatic alignment entail can be referred to as instances of somatic work.

ETHNOGRAPHIC FRAGMENTS IN POSTMODERN SPACES

Various authors interested in postmodernism suggest that Las Vegas is a particularly strategic site that promotes and even exaggerates a postmodern logic and “structure of feeling.” The present ethnographic fragments seek to evoke this postmodern logic through its subjectively experienced structure of feeling. The approach used to produce these fragments consists of juxtaposing postmodern insights; unstructured interviews with, and interventions by, a wide variety of individuals encountered in Las Vegas; and self-reflexive observations in the rapidly disappearing space separating the mediascape from the everyday.

Performing Taste at Wine Festivals: A Somatic Layered Account of Material Culture

Sensuous scholarship refers to research about the human senses, through the senses, and for the senses. Sensuous scholarship asks us to recognize the meaningfulness of our somatic experience of the world, to understand the skilful activities through which we actively make and remake the world through our senses, and to develop evocative strategies of representation— to write sensuously. In this article, the authors reflect on one particular genre of sensuous scholarship, which they refer to as the somatic layered account. The authors draw upon participant observation data collected at wine festivals at seven sites scattered across western British Columbia and Southern California. The authors examine how people express taste sensations and preferences to others, as well as what role wine’s material properties play in these social dramas. In formulating and developing the concepts of somatic accounts, taste vocabularies, and somatic joint acts, the authors contribute to a growing understanding of the social aspects of the senses and of sensations, as well as how people perceive the material world—and the sense of taste in particular—in active and reflexive ways.

Authoritarianism and Pathological Hatred: A Social Psychological Profile of the Middle Eastern Terrorist

Grounded on the analysis of MMPI tests administered to 90 jailed Middle Eastern terrorists, and semi-structured interviews with 57 Middle Eastern terrorists released from jail, this paper suggests that, regardless of their ethnicity, religiosity, political affiliations, or gender, Middle Eastern terrorists share common social-psychological tendencies. Organizing these tendencies under the labels of “authoritarianism” and “pathological hatred,” we suggest that contemporary terrorists are significantly different from their respective ethnic control groups and their predecessors. Briefly stated, rather than using violence against innocent civilians as a means to accomplish rational political ends, we suggest that today’s terrorists use rational political goals as a convenient means to inflict violence against innocent civilians.

Speed Culture: Fast Strategies in Televised Commercial Ads

While various theorists explain the postmodern moment or culture by pointing at an acceleration of transformations in macro-social institutions, such explanations remain often abstract and removed from everyday experience. Seeking to concretize how speed is articulated in popular texts, I analyze here the various strategies TV commercial ads deploy to inscribe speed as a normal and desirable quality of everyday life, objects, and self. Focusing on both pictorial and textual dimensions, I call the readers attention to these strategies, and discuss the possible social and psychological consequences of the ideological orientations they articulate.

Hypermodern Consumption and Megalomania: Superlatives in commercials

Recent French sociological scholarship suggests the notion of hypermodernity to characterize the contemporary moment. While the meanings of this concept vary, the idea of excess seems central. Informed by this new scholarship, this article analyzes the superlative rhetoric in contemporary televised and internet commercials, and suggests elective affinities between this rhetoric and the various trends characterizing the hypermodern present.

Stuck Inside of Mobile Ethnography in Non-Places

Guided by Augé’s concept of “non-place,” we conduct a mobile ethnography of the Las Vegas Strip to evoke and critically reflect on the characteristics of such environments. Informed by our findings, we contribute to the scholarship of non-places by (1) attending to three components of such environments that are seldom mentioned together (temporal organization, soundscape, and social control) and (2) suggesting a tentative model of non-places that integrates function (entertainment, transportation, hospitality, consumption); design (signage, movement, temporal organization, and soundscape); social control system (their mechanisms, visibility, power, sanctions, types of violation); performances (the roles they prompt users to play and the interactions they direct them to perform), and subjectivities (the sort of self-experiences they induce). In the conclusions, we summarize our findings and revisit the concept of non-place.

Inside Bets Two Approaches to Compulsive Gambling

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