Capítulo 1. Introducción

SEMÁN, PABLO

Youth identities in Argentina: beyond tango

Palgrave-Mac Millan

Año: 2012; p. 1 - 16

Since the early 2000s we have been doing research that has shown us the plurality of issues that are constructed around music and that, at the same time, reveals a symbolic map that is much more variegated and heterogeneous than what previous studies on popular music in Argentina (ours included) had presumed. The music that young people from Metropolitan Buenos Aires (the Capital and its suburbs, which concentrate the bulk of Argentina?s population) listen to shows that the field of ?musical consumption? is a field through which categories of class, ethnicity, religion and gender are constructed and processed. And they are constructed and processed within force relationships and social arrangements that challenge any simplistic cultural analysis because they show that young people compatibilize sexualities, religions, egalitarian political principles and hierarchical social classifications. The construction/inscription of class, gender and ethnic differences is linked to several social changes that work in tandem, such as the transformation of the social structure of the country, cultural change and technological innovations. Those changes allow the appearance (many times quite fleeting) of new social actors, new distinction forms that, moreover, are not necessarily co-extensive with musical genres, but tranversal to them. Within the framework of an important technological change, alongside the emergence of a transformed repertoire of sexual imaginaries, we have witnessed the appearance of a new way to process gender relationships. But, at the same time, it is quite noticeable that the activation of the religious sphere, expressed and/or promoted by music, accounts for a very specific (and non-linear) path of what is usually called ?secularization.? Additionally, what is also apparent is how class and ethnic classifications actualize themselves to recognize or inscribe in the social scenario abrupt and profound transformations of the social.