Club Cultures

"The key argument here revolves around the concept of subcultural capital. Thornton examines the insiders of a much maligned scene: the dance scene. Ethnography pays attention to insiders, and it does so by asking something unique from the researcher: to view the world from the perspective of those she is studying. In doing so Thornton finds that insiders to these scenes share a meaningful taste culture – regardless of what others think of it. A taste culture is a community made of people who have similar taste, and that taste is a shared disposition towards not only music but also a host of many other individual characteristics, such as clothing and make-up, for example, and even bodily shape. Taste cultures emerge around coalitions of people’s determined shared definitions of these things. Besides what I mentioned, Thornton argues that individuals become members of a club culture, a scene, or a subculture – these terms are all very interrelated – by accumulating subcultural capital. What does she mean by it? Think of financial capital, for example: it’s something you accumulate over time by collecting pieces of it, money in this case. Once you have enough you can make certain claims: you claim to be a millionaire, to be successful, to be a VIP, and maybe even demand that you be allowed into that exclusive country club. Subcultural capital works in similar ways. Over time you become an insider by acting like an insider, by displaying conspicuously elements of that scene."