Contributions from European Symbolic Interactionists Reflections on Methods

EMBODYING THE POSTMODERN

SELF: ECSTATIC RITUAL AS

A NEW MODE OF YOUTH

IDENTITY WORK

Philip Lewin

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how young people develop meaningful self-concepts

in the postmodern social world. Drawing from an ethnographic investi-

gation of punk subculture, I explore how identity work is performed

when young people are saturated with competing self-definitions and

encouraged to engage in reflexive self-doubt. Focusing on the ecstatic

qualities of concerts, I describe a complex process of identity formation

wherein youth emotionally experience their identities through ritual per-

formance rather than constructing them through institutional affiliation

or narrative. My analysis draws heavily from Bourdieu’s practice theory

and the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing the

centrality of embodiment and performativity to postmodern identity. I

conclude with a discussion of how postmodern theories of the nonself

exaggerate the insecurity of contemporary identity, and I outline a new

theoretical framework regarding identity formation that bridges the

Contributions from European Symbolic Interactionists: Reflections on Methods
Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 44, 161
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