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Volume 5
Anthropology of Europe
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Punks and Skins United
Identity, Class and the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture
Aimar Ventsel
194 pages, 15 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78920-860-3 $120.00/£89.00 Hb Published (August 2020)
eISBN 978-1-78920-861-0 eBook
Reviews
“[This book] is really interesting, provides fascinating insights and presents questions for the scholarship and future study.” • Matthew Worley, University of Reading
Description
Germany has one of the liveliest and well-developed punk scenes in the world. However, punk in this country is not just a style-based music community. This book provides an anthropological examination of how punk reflects the larger changes and contradictions in post-reunification Germany, such as social segmentation, east-west tensions and local politics. Punk in eastern Germany is a reaction to the marginalization of the working class. As a cultural, social and economic niche, punks create their own controversial “substitute society” to compensate for their low status in mainstream society.
Aimar Ventsel is a Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Ethnology in University of Tartu, Estonia. He was a founding member of the Siberia Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. From 2009 to 2013 he participated as a Research Associate of the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, in the project “Post-Socialist Punk: Beyond the double irony of self-abasement” where he conducted fieldwork in eastern Germany on punk and skinhead subculture.