Sým-bolon

Abstract

■ The Greek roots for the word symbol are sým (thrown) and bolon (together). In the recent idealized and abstract turn of the social sciences towards ‘discourse’, it has been forgotten how in their production meanings carried by symbols are precisely thrown together with material, social, and interactive circumstances. Urban ethnographers are well equipped to see the signifier not as ‘free-floating’ but as always engaged — through its intransigent opacities as well as its transparent relevancies — in socially situated context and social action as it finds its signified. Utilizing examples from my own ethnographic work, this article presents an urban and class-specific view of how symbols are thrown together with the circumstances of material want, social pressure, and ideological abjection suffered by young people at the bottom of social space in deprived urban areas. The struggle for survival here produces cultural forms and meanings which are no less creative and complex than the recognized formal creations of ‘art’ but are formed in quite different ways under pressure and compression, rather than in ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’.