Youth Identities through Bricolage in a Changeable Society: The Case of Georgia
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The chapter discusses how youth identities are constructed through bricolage in modern Georgia. Based on the assumption that in the contemporary changeable world, the fact of being exposed to the values and lifestyles of different subgroups or subcultures gives individuals ‘the power of a personal manipulation of the diversified materials provided by their society ... [and] under these conditions, the culture that is experienced differs notably from the culture that is given’, my aim is to explore this ‘experienced culture’ of youth in modern Georgia, to demonstrate how the youth manipulate ‘diversified materials’ provided by both their local society and the global culture, and to find out whether it results in the invention of a new tradition. The research has focused on youth’s leisure activities as the ways of representing their lifestyle and expressing their creativity, and my target group has been the youth aged 16-21. Attempting to bring closer ‘the world of engaged scholarship and the world of everyday life’, I have involved my students as coresearchers in the study aiming to analyze youth culture seen from the perspective of youth themselves, as these co-researchers represent the same age group involved in similar cultural practices as the target group. Thus, the ultimate findings come from the comparison between the interpretations by my students and me, and the secondary interpretation by me as a means of gaining a ‘thick description’. Such an approach has proved to be especially revealing in identifying research subjects’ different kinds of narratives, namely, ‘cultural stories’ and ‘collective stories’. In our case, these two distinct narratives have illustrated the research subjects’ contradictory aspirations toward tradition (told to me from the perspective of ‘cultural story’) and modernity (told to their peers/my co-researchers from the perspective of ‘collective story’), and helped me get closer to the real implications of three most fashionable trends among contemporary Georgian youth revealed by the research - ‘being distinctive,’ ‘being intellectual,’ and ‘being national.’