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This study will offer an insight into the complex living of a group of mid-thirties males in a small neighbourhood and describe their personal career journeys. In particular, the study will highlight the complex influence of social capital, the men’s personal development through the ‘opportunity structure’ (K. Roberts, 1977) and how chance along with place of residence impact on career advancement. There have been numerous studies that have sought to discover why people make stereotypical career choices. More specifically, how male stereotyping can influence career choice and shape identity. However, many studies fail to tackle the influence of neighbourhood and family bonding which engulfs the male individual to create a very close knit masculine gang of individuals. By taking the epistemological position of interpretivism and using a narrative interview approach, along with a life history tradition, this research addresses these shortcomings. Additionally, Bourdieu’s (1985) concept of social field is employed within this study to represent the various social arenas in which young people spend their time. This notion of fields, along with the concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’ (Bourdieu, 1985, 1986) are seen to create an effective framework for understanding the social worlds of young people and the community in which they belong. The data is drawn from 10 in-depth interviews with men in their mid-thirties, who were born and raised in an inner city neighbourhood. Despite poverty, deprivation and social exclusion, these 10 men now have a career but choose not to leave the neighbourhood of their birth. They have each turned their life around by being confident, persistent, and determined to succeed, thereby empowering other individuals and their community, to build their own ladders out of poverty and towards a brighter future. However, this is a close knit network of friends and family that according to the headteacher in the local secondary school are ‘unwilling to move the boundaries of opportunity and rely too much on the ways of the past’. Each interviewee has a story to tell and these stories are interwoven and analysed through common themes explored in depth in the thesis. These stories map out a career trajectory that is based on rites of passage into adulthood and an adult sense of masculinity. Throughout the interviews evidence is provided to support the argument that ‘opportunity structure’ (K. Roberts, 1977) plays an important role in the career path of young people. Furthermore, it is argued that career choice is a developmental process with many twists and turns along the way. However, it is further argued that an identity based on age, location, ethnicity, along with common interests and a shared purpose, creates a closed shop ethos, where education and employment are shaped by elders within the family and close friends. In fact, because everyone knows everyone else, a strong common bond between family and friends is displayed, this creates strong loyalties which are manifested in the behaviour of each individual. This situation creates a large gang of individuals whose organisation has a hierarchical structure, starting from new entrants or recruits, through to elders at the top. Membership through birth is non-negotiable and to refuse to be part of this wider family could result in psychological and physiological consequences for the individual.

“Sabha theater” is a genre of Tamil language comedy theater that started in Madras (Chennai) in the period following India’s 1947 independence. Its name comes from the fact that the amateur drama troupes rely on cultural organizations known as sabhas for patronage, but the theater also has a very specific aesthetic and narrative style. Sabhas are known for their patronage of classical music and dance, but many also support amateur theater troupes. These organizations, along with the press and academics, create a notion of “good” taste in Chennai, India. All three fields are dominated by the high caste Brahmin community, which thus both constructs and embodies the idea of good taste in the city. The identity of Brahmins, as the taste-makers of the city, is influential in shaping middle-class culture in Chennai. I argue that this identity is not best visible in tradition, because performances of the classical arts and the response of connoisseur audiences to them reveal an ideal that is frozen in time. I look instead to something spontaneous: humor. The fact that elite Tamil Brahmins choose to join sabhas or attend sabha dramas is not to say that the plays are ideal representations of Tamil Brahmin culture or good taste. In actuality, the discourse about the plays has created two factions within the Tamil Brahmin community, the most vocal of which dismisses them as “just comedy.” I engage with both voices through case studies of plays that have remained popular with audiences over the years. I also consider such things as how the contemporary political climate and development of mass media have affected live theater in Chennai in terms of aesthetics, personnel, scripts, production, and patronage. / text

This thesis is a chronologically comparative study of fairy culture and belief in early modern and Victorian Scotland. Using fairy culture as a case study, I examine the adaptability of folk culture by exploring whether beliefs and legends surrounding fairies in the early modern era continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a single culture system, or whether the Victorian fairy revival was a distinct cultural phenomenon. Based on contextual, physical, and behavioral comparisons, this thesis argues the former; while select aspects of fairy culture developed and adapted to serve the needs and values of Victorian society, its resurgence and popularization was largely predicated on the notion that it was a remnant of the past, therefore directly linking the nineteenth century interpretation to the early modern. In each era, fairy culture serves as a window into the major tensions complicating Scottish identity formation. In the early modern era, these largely centered around witchcraft, theology, and the Reformation, while notions of cultural heritage, national mythology, and escapist fantasy dominated Victorian fairy discourse. A comparative study on fairy culture demonstrates how cultural traditions can help link vastly different time periods and complicate traditional conceptions about periodization. Ultimately, this thesis reveals how issues of class impacted the popularization and persistence of fairy culture across both eras, reflecting ongoing discussions about Scottish identity. / Master of Arts

In the early 1860s, wealthy English Montrealers began to purchase property on the shores of Lake Memphremagog to build lavish summer estates. Each year, these upper-class businessmen and their families would spend a significant part of the summer at their country houses, swimming in Lake Memphremagog, boating, playing lawn tennis and visiting fellow Montrealers. The emergence of summer residences on Lake Memphremagog was part of a broader trend towards villegiature, or tourism, in Quebec, and in North America, that largely resulted from the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic Movement. This research analyses the architecture and landscaping of the nineteenth-century summer residences on Lake Memphremagog as it seeks to understand the factors that brought wealthy Montrealers to this lake in the 1860s. It also examines how their upper-class background affected the way they experienced leisure while at the lake. Through this study, it becomes evident that Romanticism and upper-class values significantly influenced the location and styles chosen by the Montrealers for their estates. Additionally, an examination of the social and recreational activities of the summer residents on Lake Memphremagog indicates that the Montrealers re-created much of their urban social sphere in the country, associating mainly with other upper-class families and pursuing many of the same activities. Nonetheless, the primary sources indicate that the relationship between the local residents and the summer residents was generally a positive one.

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the public music-making by locals in Holmsund 1850—1980, and to explain the great variety of musical forms in hope to thereby illuminate the importance of local music-making for the workers' musical taste, but also how workers' musical aesthetics were affected by a more general working-class culture. The variety of musical forms is explained according to John Blacking's distinction between change of musical system, and variation and innovation within a musical system. There are two major changes of the musical system. The first generations of workers in Holmsund were recruited from the surrounding countryside, and the main structure of their music-making seems to have remained unchanged. During the 1880s and 1890s there is an introduction of new elements which dominate the whole industrial epoch: brass instruments become the most highly valued instruments, and the thoroughly organized group playing. The new ideals of instrument sound are related to the new soundscape of the industrial society. Organized group playing is seen as homological with the social organization of industrial production, where the work of individuals in different departments is coordinated by a conductor/executive in power. During the decade of the 1960s the musical system is once more changed. Electronic technology changes the concepts of sounds and distribution forms, the influence of local music-making on public musical taste became marginal. Local music-making cannot therefore be said to reflect a workers' aesthetic, but should rather be interpreted as tendencies counteracting the professionalism and mediafication of modern society. These epochal models outline the basic structural frame of the musical system of each period and the role assigned to local music-making. At the same time there is a great variety of musical forms within each period. These variations are systematized as temporarily-used ways fo managing certain pairs of concepts, which are seen as oppositional or complementary. These pairs are: individual/collective, ideals of equality/professionalization, education/entertainment, continuity/innovation, culture/subculture, and male/female. Finally, the ways in which values and attitudes of the general working-class culture influence the local music scene are analyzed. Instead of the abstract ideals of composition, the usefulness of the music is stressed in popular aesthetics. The genius cult of art musics does not fit into popular music situations, where the will to work hard for the audience is valued instead. Ways of relating to the body form another distinction between bourgeois and worker culture. Popular music is much centred around dance music, which is also used in concert situations. What these values and attitudes have in common is that they are part of a popular aesthetic which the educated aesthetic uses as a negative reference point. / digitalisering@umu

This thesis is a social history of workplace Australian football between the years 1860 and 1939, charting in detail the evolution of this form of the game as a popular phenomenon, as well as the beginning of its eventual demise with changes in the nature and composition of the workforce. Though it is presented in a largely chronological format, the thesis utilises an approach to history best epitomised in the work of the progenitors of social history, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, and their successors. It embraces and contributes to both labour and sport history-two sub-groups of social history that are not often considered together. A number of themes, such as social control and the links between class and culture, are employed to throw light on this form of football; in turn, the analysis of the game presented here illuminates patterns of development in the culture of working people in Victoria and beyond. The thesis also provides new insights into under-re searched fields such as industrial recreation and the role of sport in shaping employer-employee relations. In enhancing knowledge of the history of grass roots Australian football and demonstrating the workplace game's links with the growth of unionism and expansion of industry, the thesis therefore highlights the complexity and interconnectedness of economic development, class relations and popular culture in constructing social history.

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