House Parties Research Articles

Realist production designs of class and gender in flux in Play for Today’s house party quartet (BBC1, 1975–78)

Play for Today (PfT) (1970–84) was regarded as the BBC’s flagship strand of single television plays, largely set in contemporary Britain in geographically diverse settings. This article analyses four PfTs from 1975 to 1978 centred on house parties for their representations of class, taste and gender: The Saturday Party (1975), Tiptoe through the Tulips (1976), Abigail’s Party (1977) and Scully’s New Year’s Eve (1978). The article examines the creative input of writers, actors and the overlooked labour of production designers who created these plays’ human spaces within the BBC’s studios. Aspects of set dressing that are analysed include wallpaper, curtains, furniture, reproductions of artworks and props. Analysis is informed by an interview with Moira Tait, a BBC production designer. BBC designers created vividly realistic impressions of contemporary life, which represented structures of feeling in the changing Britain of 1975–78, where increasing home ownership, pleasure and women’s desire for autonomy were pivotal trends.

Negotiating Choice in Leisure Pursuits of Women: A Sociological Investigation

Women are loaded with double-burden of official chores and household chores. It is crucial to identify the amount of time they are getting for leisure pursuits and also to fathom whether they are being coerced to negotiate with their leisure time. Scholars of Sociology have identified, leisure time is when one is free from obligatory activities. It is important to understand whether women who are doubly burdened at all have time away from obligatory activities and whether they can exercise their choice during leisure time. The present study is mainly based on secondary data including journal articles, book chapters, newspapers and so on. The objectives of the present study are, firstly, to find out whether working women, unmarried or married who have to take care of their families get sufficient leisure time, secondly, to find out how far does their leisure time and activity is manifested according to their own choice. Some studies have identified, even during their leisure time they usually cater to the needs of their family, either they stitch clothes for their children or spouse or they organize house parties for their husband and his friends and so on. The concern of ‘choice’ has to be addressed in this case and whether ‘choice’ too can be socially constructed. Satisfaction during leisure time creates sense of fulfilment and is an absolute necessity for well-being.

The role of the "third place" in the practices of youth leisure: house party (home party) as a social event

The problem of youth leisure is a frequent object of study in modern sociology. However, Russian scientists are increasingly paying attention to club culture and various youth subcultures, often overlooking the social phenomenon of house parties. The article analyses the results of individual studies of house parties in the USA, Holland, Denmark, the UK (skins party), the former USSR (“kvartirnik”/home gig) and modern Russia (“vpiska” (inclusion)/ shubz and its various formats). For the methodological basis of the study two approaches are used. The approach of E. Hoffmann, that allows us to study a house party as a social event of an entertaining nature, and the theory by R. Oldenburg of the “third place”, that a house becomes during a party. The article touches upon the historical aspect of house parties, their golden age dating back to the 19th century in the UK. In the context of the sacredness of the event and institutional freedom, a house party is compared to a “crash pad” commune of the hippie subculture. The researchers note the possibility of forming a hangout (“tusovka”) as a series of house parties opp osing disciplinary culture and social hierarchy. Special attention is paid to the issue of alcohol consumption as a ritual of collective intoxication during house parties and drinking games. The concept of a home quasi-party is introduced, which main purpose is not entertainment, but education, political agitation or direct sales. The main idea of the article is to reflect not only the negative, but also the positive socio-cultural functions of a house party, that is considered by some researchers as an exclusively deviant and/or criminogenic form of leisure of the modern youth.

Music-making Beyond the Pub: The Importance of Community Music and DIY Enterprise in Maintaining Regional Music Scenes (Gippsland Case Study)

ABSTRACT Regional music scenes in Australia face unique challenges tied to distance, deflated economies and youth flight to urban areas. Drawn from seven interviews with music workers from Gippsland during 2020, the article examines these challenges and the cultural practices that glue musicians to this south-eastern region of Victoria. Findings highlight that Gippsland’s music scene is sustained at the intersection of two cultural practices: community music enterprise and a do-it-yourself scene centered around the live pub circuit. In addition, locals have banded together to keep the scene alive through the online television program Live at Spectrum and performances at house parties.

Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia (review)

Reviewed by: Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia John W. Troutman (bio) Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia University of Nebraska Press, 2020 SEVERAL RECENT BOOKS have chronicled contemporary, local, and transnational Indigenous music scenes. Kyle T. Mays's Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018) charts the rise of Indigenous hip-hop generations, and the way hip-hop's aesthetics, sound, and accelerant for political mobilization have staked out innovative expressions of sovereignty within various Native communities. Kevin Fellezs's Listen but Don't Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific (2019) posits the Hawaiian slack key guitar as a fecund site of expression of and contestation over notions of Kanaka Maoli values, aesthetics, politics, and more. Kristina M. Jacobsen's The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging (2017) showcases in rich detail the vibrant, diverse, and long-standing country music scenes that proliferate within the Navajo Nation. Now, in Rez Metal, filmmaker Ashkan Soltani Stone and historian Natale A. Zappia have illuminated yet another set of multigenerational music scenes that rattle and shake the Navajo Nation's lush soundscape. The publication of Rez Metal accompanies a documentary film project by Stone and Zappia, who spent time interviewing band members and scenesters in multiple communities, as well as in the metal epicenter of Gallup. Following a brief introduction, the slim volume's chapters rely upon lengthy quotations from excerpted interviews to explore the idea of "rez metal" to describe the experiencing of bands within a sampling of the Navajo Nation's metal venues—from hogans and house parties to dedicated clubs—to introduce the readers to some of the bands through interviews and to contemplate the genre's future. Throughout, the authors and interviewees ruminate on why and how metal matters to its Diné and neighboring Indigenous adherents. "Metal is justice," says Jay Cee, a radio DJ at Gallup's KZZ classic rock station. He continues, "It helps release all my anger, all my frustration" (33). The authors queried several men and women in the first chapter who expressed their histories with the genre and why they were drawn to identifying as a metalhead. Cee celebrates the life as a means to release tension but also to let loose and have fun within a community of like-minded peers [End Page 189] who congregate through mosh pits, head bangs, and the spellbinding, deafening lockstep drones of guitar, bass, and drums. Cee speculates that those drums might provide a link to older Indigenous musical traditions, but he also points out that metal continues to conjure negative stereotypes in the minds of others: in Zuni, where he grew up, some elders consider the metal scene a distraction that prevents its citizens from fulfilling their duties to their people. Edmund Yazzie heard similar concerns from some of his elders, but his parents were metalheads, and his father, a pastor, bought Yazzie his first record as a kid, by the band AC/DC. Now Yazzie gigs as the drummer in his son's band, Testify. Yazzie is also a member of the Navajo Council, and his interview reveals how deeply metal has been embraced by members of the Navajo Nation. Stone and Zappia's work is most compelling when it reveals through anecdotes the deep multigenerational history of metal and its embrace by the Nation's government as a positive, family-friendly element of today's vibrant Diné culture. The authors interviewed current Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, who also passionately supports the Nation's metal scene and sees it as a positive tradition with the capability to heal and provide hope for many. In the first chapter, Stone and Zappia suggest that the "cathartic communal experience" of metal fuels its embrace and provides "'equipment' to deal with the historical, cultural, and economic trauma shared by Navajos . . . the music is both an escape from the day-to-day and also a saber to rattle in frustration and anger at the status quo" (13). With this power to bring people together, multiple...

“I am not yet satisfied”: Desire and Violence in the Works of Christos Tsiolkas and Roberto Bolaño

ABSTRACT From child prostitutes in Prague to wogs in suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas's fiction is full of characters defined by the desire for, discrimination against, and addiction to some form of Other. His work traces a libidinal economy that thrives where utopian ideals such as communism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have failed to unify people around anything other than consumption. With particular attention to Dead Europe (2005) and Merciless Gods (2014), this article considers Tsiolkas's work alongside that of Roberto Bolaño, particularly 2666 (2004). Tsiolkas and Bolaño unearth the intersections between desire and violence across cultural, geopolitical and temporal borders. Their work offends because it implicates the subject in violence that is neither sensational nor exceptional. This violence is ongoing and without a clearly identifiable agent. Sometimes set against historical violence, such as the Holocaust, 9/11 or white Australian colonialism, it emerges in the backyard barbecues, drug-fuelled house parties and porn theatres that Tsiolkas's characters populate. This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine how Tsiolkas's work redistributes the violence from the pathological and geopolitical peripheries to the centre, disrupting Australian narratives of innocence and isolation and bringing together North and South, the Old World and the New.

Where and What You Drink Is Linked to How Much You Drink: An Exploratory Survey of Alcohol Use in 17 Countries

Background This paper aimed to explore the differences in subjective experiences of intoxication depending on drinking location and drink type. Methods: Data came from 32,194 respondents to The Global Drug Survey (GDS) 2015, an annual, cross-sectional, online survey. Respondents selected their usual drinking location (home alone: home with partner/family: house parties: pubs/bars or clubs) and usual drink (wine; beer/cider/lager; spirits or alcopops/coolers). They indicated how many drinks they required to reach three stages of intoxication (feeling the effects; an ideal stage of intoxication; and the tipping point) and how frequently they reached each stage. Results: Drink type affected grams of alcohol reported to reach the tipping point: 109 gm wine, 127 gm alcopops, 133 gm of beer, and 134 gm of spirts. Respondents who drank at home alone, or in clubs reached their tipping point more frequently compared to other locations. Conclusions: Where people drink, and the type of alcohol they drink, affected the amount of alcohol reported to reach different stages of intoxication. Understanding why different drinking locations, and drink types lead to a need for greater consumption to reach an ideal state of drunkenness, such as social cues from other people who drink, may enable people to reduce their drinking.

Covidiots as Global Acceleration of Local Surveillance Practices

On a global scale, the COVID-19 pandemic compels civilians to drastically alter their conduct and to remain vigilant about the conduct of those around them. As cases spiked, the term covidiot emerged to capture a range of newly transgressive behaviors. Open denunciation of covidiots has become a prominent appeal from governments, with the mayor of Amsterdam instructing the public to report house parties and other novel infractions. In both public venues and the private sphere, politicians, journalists, and other influential figures urged their audiences to watch over and report behavior that was deemed to be a public health risk. While such calls normally provoke controversy, they now encounter less friction among civilians. Here, Trottier et al discuss the forms of convergence of the current public health monitoring.

Corrections, repudiations, and revisions

2020 has been a strange year for many reasons. By February of 2020, the Pandemic was already impacting many parts of the world, and by April, a majority of human lives across the globe were well and truly disrupted by the Covid-19 virus. Some might remember this period as that time when hand sanitizer and toilet paper couldn't be obtained, even at gouged prices. Others may remember this past summer as the time when violence against Black people at the hands of the police achieved a visibility that forced all of us in the US, like it or not, to stop and take note. By the end of the summer headlines heralded what some thought might be the end of the modern university system as colleges and universities across the country announced mass lay-offs and even the dismantling of longstanding majors and departments. Even those with tenure found themselves suddenly without a job. By early fall, the death toll in the U.S. had slowed to the point that schools considered reopening, bars and restaurants unshuttered their doors, and house parties reappeared, if they ever disappeared to begin with. As the positive counts began to surge again, the only thing spreading faster than the virus was misinformation on social media. We end the year in the US with a new President Elect, an emergency approved vaccine, and hope. So many tumultuous events have occurred in this single year that it behooves us to pause for a minute or ten and reflect on what we've learned about the role we want computing to play moving forward.

Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý

Andrzej Tichý Wretchedness Trans. Nichola Smalley. Sheffield, UK. And Other Stories. 2020. 165 pages. THE NOVEL WRETCHEDNESS begins with a chance encounter between a cellist and a homeless young man in Malmö, Sweden. It could be an everyday event, repeated in cities throughout Europe, throughout the world even. This meeting, however, sends the musician’s mind on a stream-of-consciousness journey to his past and what his present and future may have been, had his music not enabled him to escape from the housing projects and the hopelessness of their inhabitants. The narrator morphs from the protagonist to his associates and back, while the stage moves through the squats, the house parties, underground clubs, and drug-fueled nights in the less-desirable districts of Europe’s larger cities. At various points throughout, Andrzej Tichý (b. 1978) reminds us that we are but voyeurs to the suffering of this otherwise invisible underclass. Music and rhythm flow throughout; it is the life-beat of the disadvantaged on the outskirts of urban societies and echoes their captivity. The tempo ebbs and flows, creating intense images of the true “wretchedness” of life and languidly portraying everyday disappointment and failure with but a few brief glimpses of hope when the musician resurfaces to the present and contemplates the Scelsi piece he is to perform. Nichola Smalley’s sensitive translation captures both the slang and gritty reality of the cellist and his friends. It is a language that incites both empathy for the almost inescapable fate of the youths and also awe at their resilience as the world around them repeatedly collapses. Tichý is a Swedish author born to a Polish mother and Czech father. Wretchedness is the first of his works to be translated into English, while his novels and collections of short stories have been nominated for and awarded renowned literary prizes in Sweden. Smalley’s translation was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for book-length literary translations into English. This novel will take you to places you have never been and hope to never actually experience. Wretchedness is a perfectly chosen title and aptly encapsulates the sustained sentiment of the novel. Catherine Venner Durham, UK ANDRZEJ TICHÝ 0 a m m WORLDLIT.ORG 93 ...

The Last Friday in Caracas

The Last Friday in Caracas Alejandro Puyana (bio) The morning after the first night my friend Coco slept over, Anita, our maid—and my nanny since I was four years old—put a hand over her mouth and gasped from behind the kitchen island. The night before had been a band night, and Coco had asked for a ride to his apartment all the way west to La Pastora, and everyone he asked made a face as if he’d asked to go to the moon and not a few miles west on Avenida Urdaneta. To be fair, space travel was significantly safer than going to La Pastora at 3:00 am, so I told him, “Just stay over at my place tonight.” And he shrugged and said, “Fino.” And that was the beginning. Anita stood there with her face as flat as a corncake until I walked over and kissed her on the cheek and said, “Buenos días, biutiful,” like I did every morning except Sundays, when she had her day off. In that time, all those years ago, it was one of the ways I kept track of the days of the week. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were a blur: interchangeable rum and cokes, guitar riffs, dented and chipped mic stands, busted sound equipment. On Sundays there was no one walking around the house picking up after me and my sisters and my dad (my mom never gave Anita any work to do, except the work to clean after the rest of us, which was plenty, I guess). A kiss on the cheek was enough to hit the reset button. Anita smiled wide and blushed and snapped the kitchen rag at me, shooing me away, “Sale pa ‘lla! Go. Go sit. Arepas are almost ready,” she said. “This is Coco, Anita. A friend,” I told her. And Anita immediately turned cold again. “Good morning, joven,” is all she said before turning back to the griddle. “I didn’t make enough for two,” she said. But I knew Anita would make more dough for him. I didn’t even have to ask. “No worries, ma’am, I’m okay,” Coco said. His voice was guttural as always, and still scratchy from a night of screaming into the microphone, and cheering for the other bands (mine included), and talking loudly over the music so we could hear each other, and flirting with Lucía. Coco had a big crush on Lucía, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him yet that he might as well have been flirting with a wall because she would have never—ever—done more than politely chat with him. Lucía was the type of Caracas sifrina that only went to those house parties and listened to those bands because it was the cool thing to do and not because she liked the music, or even the people, except for a few that she would run into [End Page 164] at church or at Le Club or at the pool at El Country. I mean, imagining Tamara Vicentini, Lucía’s mom, seeing her daughter hold the hand of a guy like Coco was enough to send me into a fit of delight. There were not enough pearls in the Caribbean to clutch. The only Black people the Vicentinis routinely spoke to were their chauffeur and the folks at the Aruba Hilton where they stayed three weeks every summer since Lucía turned five. Coco was big, had a nose ring, and wore Pantera T-shirts. Two Pantera T-shirts, to be exact, and he cycled through them ad infinitum. People assumed he was a metalhead—I mean, he loved metal, but that’s not the music his band played. It was garage rock with electronic beats he arranged in a beat-up IBM laptop that weighed as much as a compact car. That thing could have stopped a bullet and kept churning out beats. He worked through obsolete FL Studio software that he had bought, pirated of course, from a place close to his house that would burn anything and everything, from the latest video game to the raunchiest...

INTERVIEW WITH MARIE JONES

INTERVIEW WITH MARIE JONES

A psychoactive paradox of masculinities: cohesive and competitive relations between drug taking Irish men

This article explores one dimension of Ireland’s illicit drug landscape: men’s predominance as recreational users of illicit psychoactive substances. It uses a gender lens on Irish men’s drug taking practices, to reveal how men’s drug use and drug intoxication converge with masculinities in paradoxical ways. Drawing from twenty in-depth interviews with Irish men who identified as illicit recreational drug users, their drug histories and experiences are unpacked; making visible the intersections between men’s use of illicit psychoactive substances, gender, culture and place. I explore how illicit drugs can have, at times, paradoxical uses within homosocial spaces. Men’s bedrooms, house parties, the street, nightclubs and pubs (albeit discretely) were common places where men engaged in the recreational use of illicit drugs, and it was in these spaces that men’s illicit drug use was interpreted as a symbolic activity with gendered meanings. By employing a masculinities lens to analyse men’s recreational use of illicit psychoactive substances, men’s drug taking interactions reveal intricacies within the gender order. I argue that illicit drugs are resources that some men utilise to navigate conventional understandings of masculinity, albeit in paradoxical ways.

Rockers, soulheads and lovers: Sound systems back in da day

Abstract This article explores the emergence of sound system culture in Britain, from post-war Caribbean migration to the early 1980s, in terms of House and Blues parties, clubs and dancehalls, bass culture, dance-floor corporeality, and raver’s sartorial aesthetics and interventions, with reference to oral history interviews with sound system pioneers, practitioners and ravers from my installation-based exhibition, Rockers, Soulheads & Lovers: Sound Systems Back in Da Day (New Art Exchange, Nottingham and 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, London 2015–16).

House Parties: An Innovative Model for Outreach and Community-Based Health Education

Purpose To connect low resource communities to innovative services that address gaps in health access and knowledge. Description We describe the house party model, as a community-based workshop approach to health education developed by the Westside Healthy Start program (WHS) in Chicago, Illinois. Key elements of the WHS house party model include use of community health workers as facilitators, collaboration with participants and community-based organizations, referrals to health care and social services, and engagement strategies such as interactive activities, personal stories, and discussion. Assessment In 2014 and 2015, WHS completed 23 house parties with 271 participants, delivering education on relevant maternal and child health (MCH) topics. Participants demonstrated improvements in knowledge of several health-related areas. About half of participants were able to identify causes or signs of preterm labor prior to the house party, compared to over 80% after. In addition, 94% of participants rated the house party workshops “excellent” or “good”. Conclusion House parties are a promising strategy for increasing knowledge about MCH topics and linking hard-to-reach populations to resources in the community.

‘Isn’t it mostly girls that do pre-drinks really?’ Young men and women’s accounts of pre-loading in the UK

Aims: Pre-loading, the consumption of off-sale alcohol within private settings before socialising in licenced premises, is common among young people. The research explored young people’s accounts of pre-loading within their experience of wider peer group drinking occasions in the UK.Methods: Fourteen semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted with peer groups of young people (N = 70, 16–21 years) and analysed using thematic analysis.Results: Pre-loading with friends prior to a ‘night out’ drinking in public spaces was a common sequential practice within their collective drinking experiences. Although traditionally conceptualised within policy, academic and media discourse as drinking in the domestic sphere before entering licenced premises, young people also considered drinking within the home prior to attending private parties (e.g. house parties) as pre-loading. Price was represented as a key, yet not sole, motivating factor and pre-drinking alcohol held importance in reaching a desired state of intoxication that enhanced shared fun and pleasure among both young men and women. However, the social (e.g. chatting with friends, taking photographs) and preparatory activities (e.g. ‘getting ready’) at play during pre-loading appeared to hold more importance to young women, in promoting group bonding and in the creation and management of heterosexual feminine identities both on- and off-line.Conclusions: Although price is important, there is a wider social and cultural significance of pre-loading as a gendered phenomenon. Young people apply a wider definition of pre-loading that incorporated the consumption of off-sale alcohol prior to parties within private settings.

Gangs and Deviant Leisure

ABSTRACTThe objectives of this study, guided by the principles of the social learning theory, were to explore the participation and motivations of gang members for involvement in deviant leisure activities. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with 30 former gang members residing in Chicago and central Illinois. The findings showed that their leisure behavior included house parties that typically included the use of drugs, alcohol, and sex; “hanging around” on street corners and “gangbanging” violence perpetrated against members of opposing gangs or other members of the same gang; and various types of vandalism. Motivations for involvement in deviant leisure included those outlined in the social learning theory, as well as thrill and pleasure from committing crimes and achieving flow-like states. The research confirmed that both individual factors and social processes contributed to explaining gang members' involvement in deviant pastimes.

Why Saints Love Samba: A Historical Perspective on Black Agency and the Rearticulation of Catholicism in Bahia, Brazil

In the sociohistorically important Reconcavo region of Bahia, in Brazil's northeast, the local majority African descendent population regularly celebrates its patron saints not only with masses and processions but also with samba song and dance. As such, samba is found at pilgrimages, ritual cleansings (lavagens), and, most prominently, saints' feasts. The last of these is perhaps most famously exemplified in the large three-day Festival of Our Lady of Good Death, held annually in the city of Cachoeira, which culminates in hours of celebratory samba dancing (see A. Castro 2006; Marques 2008). Less publicly, samba caps off rollicking patron saint house parties known as rezas, each moment of which is marked by ritual music. Standing in front of the home altar, attendees first intone a series of hymns before gathering in a ring to dance and responsorially sing their saint-saluting sambas (Fig. 1). On occasion, this samba can even prompt saints (and other entities) to possess the host and other guests for a divine dancing and singing distinct from the types of possession rituals characteristic of Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomble and Umbanda (Iyanaga 2013, 313-359). People typically see this samba for saints as an expression of their faith. In fact, with its church-inspired contexts and choreographies (e.g., the Sign of the Cross, bowing before the altar, etc.), saint-extolling texts, and capacity to instigate possession by Christian martyrs, this type of samba might best be described (in analytical, etic terms) as a Catholic But why is samba--by which I mean a local Afro-Brazilian dance, song, and rhythm--a fundamental facet of both public and private patron saint celebrations in Bahia? After many years of fieldwork in the Bahian Reconcavo (2008-2014), I can offer a fairly straightforward, ethnographic answer: People believe their saints adore samba. In the enthusiastic words of one Bahian woman I met in 2011, What Saint Anthony likes is parties ... He likes samba! (1) And Saint Anthony is no oddball. In fact, Saint Roch, Saints Cosmas and Damian, Saints Crispin and Crispinian, Saint Barbara, and Our Lady of the Conception--all of whom can be counted among the region's most popular saints--are believed to share Saint Anthony's predilection for the Afro-Brazilian art form. Yet this local, native perspective only provides a partial response to the question; an investigation of macrohistorical processes reveals another explanation for why saints love samba. In the present article, I insist on asking why, in a diachronic sense, people perform samba for their saints. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] By interpreting more than three centuries of devotional black musical practices in Bahia, this article posits that saints enjoy samba because Africans and their descendants effectively reinvented and transformed their saints, converting, so to speak, the Christian martyrs into samba-loving gods. And while my argument that samba is historically linked to Catholicism revises the secular frame through which scholars have traditionally studied samba, my focus here is less on samba itself than on saints and Catholicism in this Afro-diasporic Brazilian context. Indeed, my overarching goal is to reframe practices as integral to the African diaspora in Bahia as well as, by implication, in the Americas more generally. After all, scholars interested in African-American religious practices have, over the past century or so, turned primarily to religions in which (West) African gods figure prominently (such as Candomble, Regla-de-Ocha, Vodou, etc.), while relegating Afro-Catholic practices to the margins, either by treating them as a form of passive assimilation (e.g., Karasch 1987, 254) or by dismissing them as a creative sham that allowed Africans to resist colonization by veiling their beliefs and rituals in Catholicism (e.g., Bastide 1971, 183; Pollak-Eltz 1977, 243). …

Putting the party down on paper: A novel method for mapping youth drug use in private settings

This article proposes a novel method for generating context-rich knowledge about ‘hard-to-access’ places. We ground our discussion in a recent qualitative study of social settings of youth drug use in Denmark. The study confirmed that private house parties are common sites of youth drug use, although these parties presented limited opportunities for fieldwork. In response, a ‘map-task’ was introduced to the study to complement fieldwork and interviews. We assess the most significant methodological and epistemological features of this map-task, and explore how it may to used to conduct observations ‘from a distance’ in hard-to-access places. Further, we argue that the map-task has a number of analytical and logistical advantages for scholars interested in the health and social aspects of ‘hidden’ phenomena, such as youth drug use.

"The Southern Thesis": Revisited and Reaffirmed

first, I would like to thank the contributors to this journal issue for making me feel important, and for helping to keep my name and scholarship alive. It is indeed flattering but humbling to find my name used alongside that of Alan Lomax in the title of Ron Cohen's essay. And when Paul Tyler describes my narratives as impres- sively factual and my analyses as penetrating, I begin to know what it means to be damned with lavish praise. It is somehow strangely satisfying to be made the center of an issue even if the intent is to repudiate one of the central theses of my life's work.I find it troubling, though, to see my motives for writing described as malicious in origin. Of the various criticisms made by Paul Tyler, his kindest observation is to describe my work as reductionist exercise. Otherwise, he attributes my motives to mischief and my writings as in the service of sectionalist pride. I am not certain what he meant by the charge of sectionalist mischief, but he makes it sound as if I am some kind of rebel warrior intent on waving the Confeder- ate flag and prolonging the War of Rebellion. That will come as surprise to my conservative friends who know me as an ardent liberal and defender of civil rights and unions (both political and economic). Actually, although born, raised, and edu- cated in the and having spent the greater part of my academic career there, I have lived in the Midwest for about 18 years, and am pleased to be citizen of Mid- dle America and to share in its well-known generosity and rugged honesty. Since establishing residence in Wisconsin, I have been privileged to hear and perform with many of the region's finest country musicians, such as Chirps Smith and the Goose Island Ramblers.But I do want to acknowledge the fine work that Tyler and the other contributors have done in broadening our knowledge and understanding of American country music. Their work follows on the heels of insights contributed as early as the 1970s by such scholars as Simon Bronner, Bob Coltman, Peter Narvaez, and Neil Rosenberg, who have written about manifestations of country music outside the South. Since that time, other writers such as Jim Leary, with his investigations of folk culture in the Upper Midwest, and Gerald Haslam and Peter La Chapelle, who have written about country music in California, have similarly sharpened our knowledge of coun- try music outside Dixie's parameters.Students of American music, myself included, have long been aware that people have always made music at home and in community settings all over North America. Wherever they settled, from Canada to the Mexican border, people of European ex- traction sang ballads, love songs, and religious pieces, played fiddles, banjos, har- monicas, pianos, and other instruments, danced frequently at house parties or other local functions, and often utilized music as accompaniment or celebration of work. And everywhere, talented or ambitious musicians often tried to commercialize their art by exploiting or utilizing any means of dissemination that was available (whether community dance, stage show, radio broadcast, or phonograph recording). Newspapers, entertainment trade journals such as Billboard, and ephemeral journals such as Coun- try Song Roundup, Rural Radio, Talking Machine World, Mountain Broadcast and Prai- rie Recorder, National Hillbilly News, Radio Digest, and many others provide plentiful examples of hillbilly radio shows and barn dances that flourished throughout the United States for varying periods of time in the decades prior to World War II.While it is wonderful to see the full story of country music's history being fleshed out by these impressive essays, and refreshing to ponder the questions about the music's identity raised by Huber and Cohen, I nevertheless feel that my central thesis remains intact. As I argued in an essay in The Encyclopedia of Country Music (1998), I still believe that country music bears a special relationship to the South, and that its defining and appealing elements are linked to its origins in that region. …