The Autonomous Life?: Paradoxes of Hierarchy, Authority, and Urban Identity in the Amsterdam Squatters Movement

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the internal dynamics of a subcultural community that defines itself as a social movement. The central question that I explore from a variety of angles is how an unresolved and perpetual contradiction between simultaneously publicly disavowing and yet maintaining hierarchy and authority within the movement profoundly structures the world of squatters. While the majority of scholarly studies on this movement focus on its official face on its front stage, I am concerned with a series of ideological and practical paradoxes at work within its complicated micro-social dynamics on its backstage, an area that has so far been neglected in social movement studies.;Because the squatters' movement defines itself primarily as anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, I explore the basic contradiction of how hierarchy and authority function in a social movement subculture that disavows these concepts I analyze how this contradiction is then reproduced in many different micro-social interactions where people constantly negotiate minute details of their daily lives as squatter activists in the face of a funhouse mirror of ideological expectations, which reflects values from within the squatter community, that, in turn, often refract mainstream, middle class norms.;In this dissertation, I repeatedly revisit questions of performance and habitus. I use the term performance for self-conscious behavior exhibited by activists with a range of audiences in mind. Such performances include a number of characteristics. First off, I argue, they should display a specific socialization into a movement subculture through the practice of squatting and by learning a number of skills that gain prestige in this community, which I term squatter capital. Moreover, I demarcate that an essential element of this socialization is to render invisible the long and arduous process of skill acquisition, thus demonstrating a process of mastery and rejection. Finally, I contend that activists should present a hostility and rudeness that is in itself a rejection of imagined middle class insincere politeness.;While performance reflects a self-conscious display of internal movement socialization, I use habitus to refer to the types of unselfconscious quotidian behaviors and style preferences that reflect an activist's upbringing, and thus, his/her class and education. While performance is movement specific and theoretically accessible to all within the community to reproduce, habitus reflects class and education and hence hierarchy and differential status, which I assert, are taboo to acknowledge transparently in a subculture that claims emancipation from differential status hierarchies.;Although these socializations exist independently of each other, I focus on the relationship between habitus and performance. Both performance and habitus require recognition, and therefore, an audience. In addition to analyzing both successful and failed performances and the various types of habitus possessed by people in this community, I also consider how others recognize these performances mainly at the level of discourse. Furthermore, since members of this subculture are fiercely individualistic and view themselves as unclassifiable non-conformists, I contend that the best way to understand norms and values is through the negative classification of others that dominate subcultural discourse. In analyzing these interactions and methods of organization, I place as much value on the meaning of the silences and on the unstated assumptions as on the articulations.;Squatters are constantly negotiating elements of performance and habitus before a range of audiences. Some audience members, such as the state and the media, are temporary, tuning in for only selected, dramatic episodes. Some are ever-present such as the gaze of the squatter 'scene.' Squatters also juggle multiple ideals, many of which are premised on mastery and rejection. Reflecting on all of these factors, I found that the autonomous life is more often complex and fraught than it is libratory and utopic. Especially when considering that this community of people---of different skills, habitus, and backgrounds---live and work intensively together on the legal margins of a tiny, wealthy, northern European, highly bureaucratized, multicultural city dominated by religious and ethnic tensions.;Lastly, I assert that this lifestyle is especially labyrinthine when one examines the paradox surrounding the ideal of the 'autonomous self.' This ideal is never explicitly defined among squatters, but my research demonstrates that it connotes someone who is independent, non-conformist, emotionally self-contained, entitled, and anti-capitalist. The paradox of this ideal is that it is particularly difficult to embody when one is a member of a community that uses slogans and aggression to mask their desire for belonging and love.