Festa fandom : individualised youth and cultural consumption

Abstract

This chapter questions Bourdieuian interpretation of distinctive cultural tastes by exploring the involvement of tertiary educated youth with working class family background in the village festa, as an expression of popular cultural representation. These youth are considered to be socially and culturally mobile group in comparison to their blue collar family background. This chapter presents the meanings given by this social group to their festa fandom. It questions whether their attitudes are influenced by their former, more parochial dispositions. This chapter also questions the agency of this social group and whether they are operating in a reflexive individualised manner in their cultural consumption. Whereas these young people claim that they have the freedom to design their own lives, they still feel a need to involve themselves in communitarian events such as the village festa. This chapter thus proposes an understanding of the festa as a multifaceted site of cultural consumption, traditionally associated with low status social groups but highly meaningful to tertiary educated youth social groups. It examines the ambivalent interplay between the habitus, as a structural determinant, and the agency, apparent in their reflexive and individualised self.