Punks And Skins United

Germany has one of the liveliest and well-developed punk scenes in the world. However, punk in this country is not just a style-based music community. This book provides an anthropological examination of how punk reflects the larger changes and contradictions in post-reunification Germany, such as social segmentation, east-west tensions and local politics. Punk in eastern Germany is a reaction to the marginalization of the working class. As a cultural, social and economic niche, punks create their own controversial “substitute society” to compensate for their low status in mainstream society.

"The world Watson depicts is so skillfully captured, giving an undeniable pull to these pictures...." --"FHM" What started off as a small collection of photographs the 14-year-old Gavin Watson would take of his family and friends in Wycombe, middle England, in the 1970s and 80s would grow into one of the most important and influential photographic youth culture books of the last 20 years. "Skins," published in 1994 and hailed by "The Times of London" as "a modern classic," has shown its influence in such photographers as Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, and Ryan McGinley, as well as pretty much every kind of "youth" photography popular today. Last year, having persuaded him to begin working again after a long period of self-seclusion, VICE Books was bequeathed Watson's lost archives, hundreds of photos reaching deep into the lives of the subjects of his first book. Each photograph reveals an understanding and sensitivity that belies the sometimes brutal subject matter. "Skins & Punks" is a singular retrospective complete with commentaries and oral histories. The stories behind the shots are shocking, hilarious, severe, and heartbreaking, and each gets behind what it was really like to be a rebellious workingclass youth growing up in the 1980s. This is documentary photography at its best, a stunningly intimate window into a cultural movement. "Watson photographed from the inside, the only member of a provincial and isolated gang with a camera, only occasionally aware that his friends were part of a larger moment.... Some of his photographs are funny, some are tender, some are domestic. Many of them show skinheads smiling, others display a great vulnerability: young boys struggling for their place in an adult world. If there is aggression it is playful and uncertain. And in the background sits an unbeautified England of the 80s, a harsh depiction of extreme disunity." --"The Observer"

NUMBER 57 / 2008 "Strategies of Struggles" among the Santal Adviasi Fauzia Shariff 1 Punx and skins united Aimar Ventsel 45 The Everyday Functioning of Benin's Legal System Thomas Bierschenk 101 Decentralization and Co-Management of Protected Areas in Indonesia Yonariza and Ganesh P. Shivakoti 141 Book Reviews 167

When Feral House first published the award-winning Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, little was known about the "black metal" genre of music, or how many of its members were involved in the murder of citizens, the torching of churches, or its link to Fascist ideas. We've all heard about the racist form of skinhead punk music, but little do we know of the groups involved, and how they got involved in right-wing political movements. The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement is the first book to provide much more than mere photographs of the scene, documenting the bands, their members, the releases, shows, and infamous events. Robert Forbes and Eddie Stampton can authoritatively speak of the movement, obtaining first-hand material from members of the scene. This book covers both British and American bands, and even if you revile the movement, its ideas, and its music, this is an important piece of pop culture history. Feral House's controversial Lords of Chaos has sold over one hundred thousand copies.

A Transnational History of Punk Communities in Poland is a multi-regional study of the history and contemporary condition of two Polish punk communities: the one in Warsaw and surrounding areas, and the Upper Silesian region: both rich in varied and sometimes conflicting punk traditions. The author, a self-identified member of the punk subculture formerly living and active in Warsaw, explores the various political, economic and social dimensions of the development of these unique communities and the meaning of the punk ethos for people across different age groups, genders, and life experiences, in relation to other subcultures, especially skinheads, and the broader society. An additional dimension, previously unexplored in scholarship, are the ties between these Polish punk communities and their counterparts in the United States and Canada. The personal connections between early bands and the long lasting transnational aspects of punk practices are shown to be an important factor in the shaping of punk attitudes across time and space. The economics of everyday punk life are discussed referring to contemporary scholarship on the subject, punk lyrics, and ethnographies which throughout the book illustrate selected themes and problems. This study includes insight about obscure yet foundational Silesian bands and their defiant, sardonic humor; about punk and anarchy, punk versus communism and the political opposition in the 1980s, punks’ attitudes toward the transformation of 1989, about being a punk girl on the streets of Warsaw or Wodzisław Śląski. Discover punk as an old subculture that cherishes its own past and remains an important alternative to mainstream cultural practices in a rapidly “Westernizing” and corporatizing country.

If you used to be a punk, you never where! I wasn't even twelve years old in 1976 when I heard about this "New Thing" from England called: PUNK ROCK! Something completely new, snotty and revolutionary. A musical and verbal revolution against the Establishment! A punch right in the face of the whining love song era! I was immediately affected...or better said: infected! It started with The Sex Pistols and The Damned - but when I heard Jean Jacques Burnel's bass guitar in "Goodbye Toulouse" by The Stranglers I was totally stoked! Then as now, the music has never lost its power and energy, and I love all these songs like the first day I heard them! In this book I'm attempting to describe the beginning of the Punk movement in Bremen - a very unpopular and rough German city - especially in the 80s. About the ongoing battles with right-wing Skinheads, and how we had to scrape together every penny just so we could go to as many cool shows as possible. First in Bremen, then other German cities, then in England (the Promised Land of Punk Rock!), and later in California. To me, it's an ongoing, never-ending adventure. Finally, In 2012, I "landed" in the Bay Area. In December 2014 I became 50 years old and Punk Rock is still, to this day, the only kind of music that always gives me goose bumps! And this will never change - as with many of the other "infected" - to my last breath!

This book is the first in-depth, ethnographic study of the Dutch punk scene. It questions the artificial boundaries of subcultural research, calling for a critical analysis of the distinctions drawn between subcultural and everyday lives, and between localised and globalised subcultures. The everyday experiences of punk are framed within the mobile and connected global subculture of which they are a part. It traces its emergence in the 1970s and its development through to 2010, with chapters that map Dutch punk historically and spatially. Further chapters explore the meanings and practices attached to punk by its participants before focusing in particular on the political affiliations of punks. This book argues for an approach to social research that recognises the ‘messiness’ and the ‘connectedness’ of punk and of the social world.

In the middle of the night a taxi driver noticed a rumbling noise under his car during an empty ride. Whilst traveling down Fördestrasse, the taxi had caught a body on the road and dragged it along for almost twenty metres. The man on the street was already dead by that time. It was likely that another vehicle had run him over at the place where hitchhikers used to stand. For years, undesirable hitchhikers had been intimidated here with gestures and steering manoevers. Was it the brainless fascist skinheads again, who already before went on a manhunt in their car on the bicycle path towards the Olympic Centre? A 15-year-old pseudo-punk joins the Kiel punk scene and experiences a blatant and wired time, which culminated in the Hanover Chaos Days 1983. It is puzzling why he suddenly joined the new skinhead scene around the wicked ex-punks Gonnrad and the Konz brothers. What got him into it? When the teenager later realises that the first skins are taking on right-wing radical tendencies, he tries to break away from the scene, but that doesn't turn out to be that easy. Finally he pulls the ripcord after another incident, even if he would have liked to remain a skinhead – England-style and working-class just like in the beginning. He manages to get out after a brutal fight with Stidi, one of the chief skins. The price is high. His face is smashed and his reputation ruined. Many punks are resentful and can't forgive him for the excursion into the strange world of skinheads. Even for the skins it is not over and done with yet. There is massive trouble on both sides. It was the madness of the 80s, a time full of self-destructive punks, scolding old Nazis, marauding skinheads and streetclubs, aspiring young Nazis and overtaxed policemen at the Chaos Days. After a crime against a rocker, a disoriented skinhead ended up at a New Year's Eve party of ordinary people: I remember there was a lot of light in the flat. The bright light and the white wallpaper hurt in my eyes. In my booze state I scribbled something on the white wallpaper in the hallway: Oi! Oi! Oi!, the battle cry of the skinheads. But I was afraid that this could be brought back to us, and I painted a T before: Toi! Toi! Toi!

Authenticity in our globalized world is a paradox. This collection examines how authenticity relates to cultural products, looking closely at how a particular "ethnic" food, or genre of popular music, or indigenous religious belief attains its aura of originality, when all traditional cultural products are invented in a certain time and place.

Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating towards cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity-endeavors considered to be more 'real' and 'genuine.' Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities during the Cold War, Culture from the Slums details how punk became the site of historical change during this era: in the West, concerning national identity, commercialism, and politicization; while in the East, over repression, resistance, and collaboration. But on either side of the Iron Curtain, punks' struggles for individuality and independence forced their societies to come to terms with their political, social, and aesthetic challenges, confrontations which pluralized both states, a surprising similarity connecting democratic, capitalist West Germany with socialist, authoritarian East Germany. In this manner, Culture from the Slums suggests that the ideas, practices, and communities which youths called into being transformed both German societies along more diverse and ultimately democratic lines. Using a wealth of previously untapped archival documentation, this study reorients German and European history during this period by integrating alternative culture and music subculture into broader narratives of postwar inquiry and explains how punk rock shaped divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.