Suchergebnisse

"This manuscript is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Missouri between 2005-2013. Pine spent time with meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, and narcotics agents. At the center of this story are the meth cooks themselves, and Pine's ethnography details their daily struggles. Beginning in the center of an exploded meth lab, Pine's performative, narrative-based work explores meth cooks as modern-day alchemists, combining and exploding again the everyday objects of late capitalism, walking the fine lines (and obviously crossing them) between illegal and legal amphetamines, pulling everyday objects like lighter fluids, frying pans, and kitchen matches into the realm of illegality"--

This paper tracks how difficult material conditions are lived on the level of affect among ordinary underemployed families engaged in the locally named practice "the art of making do" in the contact zone where the informal and illicit economies meet. This zone is where tens of thousands of ordinary underemployed Neapolitans and the camorra, Naples' powerful and diffuse organized crime networks participate in a shared, albeit volatile, affective community. Affect is a pre-personal experience of intensity, the ability to affect or be affected. Affective community in Naples is less an identity or organization than it is a synergy, event or practice. It is experienced as a blend of fear, recognition and tolerance through the phenomena of contact, complicity and conspiracy.

In the 1980s, another popular Neapolitan vocal music scene emerged that today thrives in a position of ambiguous alterity to the once-dominant "traditional" music industry that thrived in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. La canzone neomelodica, or neo-melodic song, is produced, distributed, performed and consumed in an alternative political economic culture, where the so-called formal, informal and illicit economies overlap. The neomelodica music scene constitutes an alternative music industry that encompasses a range of affective-aesthetic sensibilities and economic practices that cause friction with dominant attitudes in Naples regarding "Neapolitan culture" and dominant aesthetic and economic norms performed by the mainstream Italian music industry and its publics. Unlike classic Neapolitan song, neomelodica song has enjoyed national and transnational success largely limited to circulation among southern Italians living throughout Italy, in parts of Europe, and in North America. We describe the neomelodica music scene from an aesthetic and moral/political economic perspective. We analyze how the unique ethico-aesthetic qualities of the neomelodico milieu and neomelodica song's relationship to other Neapolitan and Italian music genres have conditioned neomelodica song's national and transnational articulations while at the same time transforming transnational neomelodica music into a unitary and fragmenting repertoire of southern Italian identity.