To Örebro University

Since the mid-1990s, in fandom and music subculture studies, Sarah Thornton’s theory of subcultural capital has dominated the research as a highly influential framework. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, Thornton suggests that people’s subcultural capital is built on their possession and knowledge of cultural commodities associated with a certain subculture. It helps them to differentiate themselves from members of other groups, and therefore, in their own perception, raises their status among the society. On the other hand, as Thornton (1995) herself emphasizes, her research is “more thoroughly [an analysis] of the cultural worlds of the white majority” in the UK (p. 20). This fact makes us encounter a problematic situation if we use Thornton’s theory directly as a framework when analyzing transcultural musical phenomena.

This paper is the second presentation of a paper series that I initiated last semester during the commencement of my doctoral work. The series propose to think on the possibilities of expanding Thornton’s theoretical framework to make it more valid and useful in transcultural dimensions of research via focusing on several aspects of transferred and appropriated phenomena. Each paper of the series is intended to bring out different layers of theoretical and practical discussions, and concordantly, to log my research’s process of generating a theory of subcultural transfer.

In this part, I question the issue of autonomous identity construction in Thornton’s and other post-Birmingham scholars’ approaches to the concept of subculture, and I take the problem of “expectations” to the foreground through drawing upon sociological and anthropological theories of collective identity, emotion and affect. By the word “expectations,” my paper specifically refers to the external necessities – which grow separately from the autonomy of the subcultural capital holder – for the accumulation of subcultural capital in certain conjunctures.

The ideas and arguments of this paper series are progressively derived from my ongoing research on Turkey’s indie music subculture.