The hipster in the mirror by Mark Greif for the New York Times Book Review; 11/14/2010, p27, 0p
“No one, it seemed, thought of himself as a hipster, and when someone called you a hipster, the term was an insult. Paradoxically, those who used the insult were themselves often said to resemble hipsters.”
“They wore the skinny jeans and big eyeglasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashions and ''tourists.''
“''taste'' is the hipster's primary currency”
“Conflict’s for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.”
“Once you take the Bourdieuian view, you can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup's strategy is to disparage others as ''liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands''; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the ''creative professions.'' These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy -- but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural ''cool.''”
“All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what's cool in advance of the rest of the world.”
“Yet the habits of hatred and accusation are endemic to hipsters because they feel the weakness of everyone's position -- including their own.”
This article by Mark Greif is a very researched look into the way people view hipsters and why hipsters exist. At the start it talks about how people react to being called hipsters and why hipsters themselves find this an insult. In the start he talks about how he calls together a debate on hipsters only to be greeted with impassioned emails which he describes as being more angry then if the talk hand been about “health care, young conservatives and feminism.” He then begins to take a long reference to the French sociologist Bourdieu and his work “Distinction” published in 1979. Greif then talks about how Bourdieu’s work into taste in the French people is directly connected to their social class, job, education and many more factors however the point is that there was a striking correlation between them. He then applies these findings to American terms and points how these people are from the same sort of middle class background. He then leads on to show how the taste is used to establish hierarchy in a social community where there is none and talks about how the different types of hipsters interact.
by Toby
