Földessy Edina, Szűcs Alexandra, Wilhelm Gábor: Tabula 6/2 (Néprajzi Közlemények; Budapest, 2003)

HAVASRÉTI JÓZSEF: Szubkultúra: a különbség, a káosz és a rend

JÓZSEF HAVASRÉTI Sub-culture: the difference, the chaos and the order How can we deal with today's youth sub-culture, to what extent may the traditional ethnographic methods be used, and what kind of perspectives on cultural meaning are applicable for the analysis of it? These are the basic questions the essay tries to focus on with the help of a review of Magda Szapu's recently published book on the youth culture of a Hungarian town. It will be shown that this use of ethnographic methodology has its own limits. On the one hand it remains largely unreflective and so it conceptualises its research object too closed, on the other hand since it leans heavily on emic concepts and descriptions it risks to lose the chance of a straightforward analysis of the very same events.