Abstract
One of the strengths of ethnography and the ethnographic method is the ability it grants researchers to produce ‘thick description’, though at the cost of losing the ability to see ‘how the everyday lives described played out large-scale historical and structural processes’ (Pilkington 2010: 25). In her research on Russian skinheads, Hilary Pilkington raised this concern and set out to explore how historical and social processes shaped the lives of young people in the city of Vorkuta. In response to the same concern, this chapter traces back to how historical process and social changes contextualise the punk phenomenon and the formation of the punk scene in China.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Thick description’ is a term used by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949). As Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz (2015: 1) explains, anthropologist Clifford Geertz brought it to general attention in 1973, describing it as ‘a detailed description of actual behavior, typically resulting from ethnography, sufficient to permit the reader (or viewer, in the case of images) to see below surface appearances by offering an understanding of underlying patterns and context that give the information meaning’.
- 2.
The name, also 无聊军队, (translated as ‘Battalion of Boredom’), was originally that of a punk zine produced in Beijing by a student from overseas, Tina, which introduced cutting-edge Beijing punk bands. It then became the moniker for a group of punk bands, including Brain Failure, Reflector, A-Boys (or A Jerks, Anarchy Boys), and 69 (who also produced an album in 1999 with the name ‘Wuliao Contingent’).
- 3.
This reform, also known as the Chinese economic reform, is the programme of economic reforms termed ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ (改革开放, literally ‘reform and opening up’), which was initiated in China in December 1978 by reformers within the Communist Party of China, led by Deng Xiaoping.
- 4.
As De Kloet (2005) explains, ‘Dakou CD’ refers to cut CDs, dumped from the West, becoming available in illegal markets in China. The rise of Dakou culture in the later 1990s marked a new generation of Chinese rock music.
- 5.
CBGB is a music club that opened in New York in 1973. While the initials originally meant ‘country, bluegrass, and blues’, it became a famous venue for punk artists such as the Ramones and Patti Smith.
- 6.
The WeChat account is usually created by We Media users.
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Xiao, J. (2018). Punk in China: History, Artefacts, and Blogs. In: Punk Culture in Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0977-9_2
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