Hilary Pilkington, Elena Omel’chenko, and Al’bina Garifzianova. Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives. London: Routledge, 2010

Main Article Content

Nils Schuhmacher

Abstract

Just like any other “youth culture,” skinheads have come to occupy several meters in the bookshelves of social research. Its results reflect circumstances of time and place—after all, traditions and national characteristics play a major role when it comes to evaluating “the” skinheads, which, in the end, creates an image that is as versatile as it is contradictory. As Pilkington, Omel’chenko, and Garifzianova point out, the term “skinhead” represents a globally observable and established cultural code (and style), which does not, however, have a fixed meaning. Contrary to this is the finding that, in many countries such as Russia, the United States (Hamm 1993), and for a long time Germany (Möller and Schuhmacher 2007), skinhead culture possesses an explicit political outline and that it functions as a kind of aesthetic cloak for racism and violence.

Keywords

Skinhead Groups in Russia, Youth Culture, Vorkuta, Postsubcultural Approach, Performative Style, Cultural Strategy


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