'Living Publicly': House Shows, Alternative Venues, and the Value of Place and Space for American DIY Communities

In this dissertation, I present an anthropological study of house concerts and other do-it-yourself (DIY) venues that are organized by young people who define themselves as DIY participants. These venues host multiple genres, including punk, experimental, indie rock, singer-songwriter, and electronic music. DIY participants are commited to building alternative communities circumventing traditional, commercial, and institutional channels for achieving their social and cultural goals. They organize house concerts both to fill the void of suitable non-commercial venues for alternative music-making, and because they enjoy the resulting freedom from the kinds of restrictions usually encountered at commercial concert venues.;I conducted a multi-sited, comparative ethnography of American DIY music scenes (mainly on the West Coast) with a focus on Davis, Olympia, Portland, Oakland, and Los Angeles. In addition, as a part of my ethnographic research, I also went on two tours with different DIY musicians and groups. In the dissertation, I consider many issues that are relevant to the participants of the DIY scenes themselves, mostly related to place and space, which structure the main theoretical framework. My main focus are therefore physical places (architecture and geography) and social spaces used and created by the DIY communities. In addition, I examine the local and translocal social constitution of DIY communities through local shows and translocal touring practices. I argue that particular types of places and spaces are instrumental in building, maintaining, and transforming American DIY communities, and also reflect and generate their social, political, and aesthetic idea(l)s. The place/space-based approach of my dissertation allows for a deeper understanding of the relationship between Western popular music practice and the everyday life of particular music communities in their cultural and geographical environment, a perspective that is often overlooked in scholarly writing about Western popular musics.