Profane Culture (ebook)

Argumento de Profane Culture (ebook)

"Long out of print, this new edition of Paul Willis's classic study of the motor-bike boys and hippies is a must read for anyone interested in cultural outsiders, past and present."--Mitch Duneier, author of Sidewalk

"Profane Culture remains a powerful emblem of both ethnographic and cultural-sociological research that continues to be cited today. It has gained even greater relevance from the passing of time--its coupled studies can now be viewed as quintessential reconstructions of mid-twentieth-century subcultures that are now long past. They did indeed capture the spirit of their age, and we can recover the sense of that spirit by rereading this book. But the principal contribution of Profane Culture is contemporary, not historical. The two studies show how ethnography can contribute to the exploration of macro-level cultural structures."--Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University

Paul E. Willis, an ethnographer and cultural theorist, is a lecturer with the rank of professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. He is a founding editor and current joint editor of the journal Ethnography and the author of Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, among other books.

"A forgotten treasure trove that needs to be recovered."--Mats Trondman, Anna Lund, and Stefan Lund, European Journal of Cultural Studies

"Willis masterfully shows how objects and selves interact, indicating to one another the available paths to follow. . . . I hope a new generation of scholars reads this updated edition and aims to follow its path."--Claudio E. Benzecry, Contemporary Sociology0Moments Preface to the 2014 Edition xi
1 Introduction: Profanity and Creativity 1
Part One 13
2 The Motor-Bike Boys 15
3 The Motor-Bike 69
4 The Golden Age 82
Part Two 105
5 The Hippies 107
6 The Experience of Drugs 177
7 The Creative Age 201
8 Conclusions: Cultural Politics 223
Epilogue 239
Theoretical Appendix 247
Notes 267
Index 273