Page 61 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

52 Cultural change and ordinary life

of employment it would be promising to examine their relationship to
residential location. (p. 207)
Third, it should be reinforced that ‘Places are defined not as historical
residues of the local, or simply as sites where one happens to live, but as sites
chosen by particular groups wishing to announce their identities . . . places
offer visions of living which do not depend on the character of face-to-face
relationships, or the historical character of the place’ (p. 207). Fourth, while
‘elective belonging involves people moving to a place and putting down roots’
(p. 207), they also talk about other places that they know personally and
through the media. Fifth, ‘identities are developed through the networked
geography of places articulated together’ (p. 208).
These conclusions form the components of model of an alternative
account of globalization that is specific, residential, mediatized concerned
with identity and networked. Some of these arguments have already been
considered at other points in this book. However, I have not theorized these
interconnections. In much of the rest of this chapter, I do this via the idea of
scene, arguing that performance of elective belonging is increasingly played
out in a scenic manner.

Scenes

The concept of scene has been increasingly used to refer to sites of (predomin-
antly) local music production and consumption. In some respects this has
built on commonsense understandings of the idea as represented in ideas such
as the Seattle scene or the Liverpool scene. Furthermore, at times the term has
been used in conjunction with that of subculture, for example, in the work
of Hodkinson (2002). There is much overlap in the literature in the use of these
terms, although there has more often been an attempt to separate them
(Hesmondhalgh 2005). In Audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998) we
argued that the idea of scene offered a potential way forward for the study of
the diffused audience and I take that argument forward here. This will require
a brief recap before further development.
A key study that has advanced this research is that of Austin, Texas, by
Barry Shank (1994). This study builds on earlier work by Shank and the sort of
influential theorisation produced by Will Straw (1991: 373), who argues that
the musical scene can be defined in the following way:
That cultural space in which a range of musical practices co-exist, inter-
acting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and
according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization.
The sense of purpose articulated within a musical community normally
depends on an affective link between two terms: contemporary musical
practices, on the one hand, and the musical heritage which is seen to
render this contemporary activity appropriate to a given context, on
the other. Within a music scene, that same sense of purpose is articulated
within those forms of communication through which the building of
musical alliances and the drawing of musical boundaries take place.
The manner in which musical practices within the scene tie themselves