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dc.contributor.advisorTucker, Sherrie
dc.contributor.authorYeager, Elizabeth Anne
dc.date.accessioned2011-08-02T14:28:02Z
dc.date.available2011-08-02T14:28:02Z
dc.date.issued2011-04-26
dc.date.submitted2011
dc.identifier.otherhttp://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11492
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1808/7842
dc.description.abstract"Understanding It: Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene" is an ethnographic study of "scene identity" around the contemporary rock band Phish. Utilizing data generated from six years of ethnographic fieldwork, including over one hundred and fifty interviews with Phish scene participants, this project explores how the production of space at Phish shows works to form a Phish scene identity. I contend that the identity of the Phish scene, what the band members and fans refer to as "it" and I call a spatial articulation of affective authenticity, is produced and formed by scene members themselves, drawing from the interrelations between the production of space (practices that create a specific environment) at shows and a white, middle and upper-middle class cultural memory of the Grateful Dead scene. I situate this process amidst a cultural backdrop of 1980s and 1990s identity politics and in particular, multiculturalism and suggest that Phish scene identity be analyzed as a middle class performance of resistance that achieves community and meaning without resisting class privilege. Following many American, cultural, and performance studies scholars as well as numerous anthropologists, sociologists, and both musicologists and ethnomusicologists, I treat performance as a ritual and posit Phish scene participants can be seen to achieve a social efficacy in their performance of resistance that although heightened from everyday life ultimately serves to replicate the structures of such life. Research regarding the affective nature of "it" and its relationship to the process of cultural memory, collective remembering and forgetting, can be seen as an insightful and powerful theoretical and methodological tool in cultural studies, for it exposes information pertaining not only to subject identity, but also to the discourses and contexts which help articulate such identities. This dissertation begins to examine what interdisciplinary scholars are to make of textual and spatial connections. How does one work to understand these affiliated, and oftentimes, affective relationships? And, in the case of Phish scene identity, how can one understand "it"?
dc.format.extent223 pages
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherUniversity of Kansas
dc.rightsThis item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
dc.subjectAmerican studies
dc.subjectCultural anthropology
dc.subjectMusic
dc.subjectCultural studies
dc.subjectEthnography
dc.subjectGrateful Dead
dc.subjectPhish
dc.subjectPopular music studies
dc.subjectScene
dc.titleUnderstanding 'It': Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene
dc.typeDissertation
dc.contributor.cmtememberChappell, Ben
dc.contributor.cmtememberBial, Henry
dc.contributor.cmtememberWeisbard, Eric
dc.contributor.cmtememberHodges Persley, Nicole
dc.thesis.degreeDisciplineAmerican Studies
dc.thesis.degreeLevelPh.D.
kusw.oastatusna
kusw.oapolicyThis item does not meet KU Open Access policy criteria.
kusw.bibid7643000
dc.rights.accessrightsopenAccess


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