self-definitions (Gergen, 1991)and encouraging self-doubt (Giddens, 1991).
I then describe its specific effects on youth who participate in punk sub-
culture, all of whom describe feelings of doubt and insecurity with regard
to their identities. In the empirical sections, I explain how young punks
form and stabilize their self-concepts. Rather than forging their identities
through institutional affiliation and/or narrative construction, punks
worked to physically embody their senses of self during the “deep play” of
subcultural ritual (Geertz, 1972). Such ritual took the form of ecstatic con-
certs, which anchored their emerging self-concepts in cathartic emotional
experiences.
After discussing how the ritual qualities of concerts countermand post-
moderncentrifuge, I develop three conclusions. First, I argue that post-
modern theories of the nonself fail to account for how youth respond to the
world around them and thus exaggerate the fluidity, playfulness, and
insecurity of contemporary identity. Second, I argue that although post-
modernization does not undermine the pursuit of a “deep” self, it alters how
many young people perform “identity work.” Lacking stable institutions in
which to anchor their self-concepts, the punks in my study had to work very
hardculturally, physically, and intersubjectivelyin order to attain the
stability of identity that youth in the past achieved with greater ease. And
third, I argue that the “body work” of young people plays a decisive role in
holding the pressures of post-modernization at bay. While all of the punks
in my study utilized “identity talk” in the construction of their self-concepts
(Snow & Anderson, 1987),the confirmation of identity ultimately required
that they embody that “talk” during the ritual context of shows. This find-
ing, I contend, indicates a need to reconcile classic symbolic interactionist
models of the self with the growing literatures on subjectivity and
embodiment.
DILEMMAS OF THE POSTMODERN SELF
The effects of “post-modernization” can be seen in a number of areas,
including the augmentation and ubiquity of mass communication, rapid
transit, and mass media, which compress the social dimensions of time
and space (Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989); globalization, which lifts social
relations out of their local contexts and rearticulates them across expansive
contexts (Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989); growing “incredulity toward
metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1984); and the digitalization of society via
Ecstatic Ritual as a New Mode of Youth Identity Work 163