Abstract
This chapter focuses on the ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) representations of participants in the Portuguese and Brazilian underground artistic and music scenes. Through comparison, we identify the emergence of a (re)meaning of DIY relocated in the Global South, considering the socio-historical contexts of both countries. Our approach has three focal points: (1) the importance of DIY manifestations in both countries in the development of youth (sub)cultures, including forms of production and consumption of music, fashion, aesthetics, causes; (2) the singularity of DIY punk manifestations in Portugal and Brazil, together with the related resistance/commodification practices and their correlation with social, political and economic development outside the Anglo-American context; and (3) the embedding of a DIY ethos and the associated claim to authenticity in the careers in which these social actors engage in their transition to adulthood.
This phrase—used in an ironic tone—is related to the need to approach DIY cultures beyond the Anglo-American vision. We thus propose an approach to DIY in the Global South, encompassing the Portuguese and Brazilian contexts, to demonstrate that these countries are much more than resorts: they are a central part of global artistic and creative production, always seen from the perspective of scientific colonization of its musical manifestations. It is no coincidence that this title refers to the Sex Pistols’ song ‘Holidays in the Sun’.
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Notes
- 1.
Feminejo is a type of sertanejo music made by women, aimed at women. The difference from traditional sertanejo is that, for the first time, women are in the leading roles.
- 2.
The Keep It Simple Make It Fast project, which includes the interviews for the Portuguese case, was conducted on the basis of a broad-spectrum quantitative and qualitative methodology from 2012 to 2016. A total of 240 in-depth interviews were conducted within the project’s timeframe, with a set of participants representing punk in the various Portuguese scenes. For the purposes of this chapter, and considering the comparability inherent to it, we selected a subsample of 61 individuals.
- 3.
This sample was constructed through the snowball method, according to the actors’ contact networks and starting from an initial database referenced by the research team. It aimed to be as complete as possible in terms of generation, gender, geography, roles and punk subgenres (Guerra, 2017, 2018). The KISMIF project’s 214 interviewees are past or present participants in the Portuguese punk scene, as musicians, fanzine producers, illustrators, designers, promoters, publishers, critics or other intermediaries, or consumers. On the Brazilian side, the sample was constituted by the same process and the 32 social actors also play a plurality of roles in the different musical-artistic scenes: as musicians, fanzine producers, radio broadcasters, illustrators, promoters, publishers, critics or other intermediaries.
- 4.
The Paredes de Coura Festival began in 1993; since then, it has been organized annually in the small town of Paredes de Coura.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s HORIZON 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement no. 742705. It is also part of the research project ‘Youth and the Arts of Citizenship: Creative Practices, Participatory Culture and Activism’, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/SOC-SOC/28655/2017). The publication was supported by FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, within the scope of UIDB/00727/2020.
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Guerra, P., Pàmpols, C.F. (2021). ‘Not Just Holidays in the Sun’: Understanding DIY Cultures in the Global South. In: Campos, R., Nofre, J. (eds) Exploring Ibero-American Youth Cultures in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83541-5_11
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