An ethnographic study on the influence of popular music on young Algerians’ cultural identity: fashion, style and everyday life

This PhD is an interdisciplinary research project in the field of cultural studies, youth studies and popular music studies. It is a qualitative research, which applies ethnography as a main method to explore the everyday life of twenty five Algerian young adults and gain a deeper knowledge on the influence of popular music on their cultural identity, style, fashion and everyday life experience.

The thesis focuses upon the role of music in Algerian young people’s lives, examining the impact of popular music consumption on young Algerian Adults’ cultural identity, fashion, style and everyday life. The study examines the role of western media, specifically popular music and its impact on Algerian young people’s cultural identity, highlighting the social and cultural changes that occurred in their everyday lives, including their lifestyles, fashion and styles. This thesis argues that Algerian young people’s cultural identity is affected by the media consumption of western media, mainly popular music. The aim of this study is to explore the influence of popular music with its all different genres on Algerian young people’s everyday life.

This study has accessed a detailed empirical data by employing an inductive approach and ethnographic methods and strategies, like; interviews, observations and field diary, which helped creating a trust relationship with the research participants, who are a group of young Algerian woman and men, aged between 18 to 25 years old. The Study was conducted in Algeria, particularity in the city of Guelma, Algiers, Annaba and Constantine.

This current research explores the major changes that most of the research participants’ experience in their everyday life, which is mostly caused by consuming popular music. Focusing on the challenges they encounter to maintain their cultural identities and highlighting the struggles they face between modernity and traditions. Offering further insights into the concept of everyday life; portraying the research participants’ daily fashion and styles, and the various displays of music tastes. The main focus is to explore the struggles that most Algerian young men and women experience; their inner conflict between adopting the western lifestyle and modernity, or maintaining their traditions and cultural identities. Based on the findings of this study, Algerian young men and women are well aware of the influence that the western popular music has on their intersecting identities, reflected through their daily life interests and activities, style, and fashion. Some hesitate between adopting the modern lifestyle and western beliefs or keeping and maintaining their own traditions and values as a whole. The data found that the research participants are caught in a liminal position, on the one hand, they resist their curiosity and interests towards western cultures, and ignore the call of modernity, and at the same time feel restricted by engaging themselves in local, traditional and religious interests. The PhD found mixed results, some appeared lost and confused, resisting any forms of modernity, while others were compromising by adopting parts of the western cultures, beliefs and values, trying to make it fit within their own, creating a combination of hybrid cultures of their own.
In this research, intersectionality is used as a theoretical framework, which allows me to explore meaning throughout the data, and helps me understand the different layers of the intersecting social identities, such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, class, physical appearance, and others, which shape and affect the lives of Algerian young people in so many different ways depending on the context. Intersectionality as an analytical tool allows the thesis to raise awareness about the overlapping social categories, which result in creating various intersecting systems of oppressions and privileges. That can affect Algerian young people’s life choices and opportunities, and the everyday life experience. (De Certeau, 1980). The findings suggest that Algerian young adults have diverse preferences in music, mainly western popular music, which happens to have a major impact on their identities, style and how they react in their everyday life. Furthermore, the versatile styles and fashion of most of the research participants is characterised by its diversity and modernity, which was highly influenced by their different music tastes and interests in by popular music bands and music artists.