Electronic dance music as a cultural 'field': The case of İzmir

Among the popular music genres, electronic dance music is one of the most difficult genre to examine. Changes in computer technologies and the increase in the use of mass media make it difficult to define this type. Nevertheless, popular cultural studies have made it possible to develop theoretical approaches about this difficult-to-define field. Popular Culture Studies are divided into two lines. The first, the Frankfurt School, emphasizes the commercial and ideological foundations of popular cultural products. The second line, British Cultural Studies, focuses on the relationship of cultural products with the community, class and ethnic groups of people. However, while first one focuses on the consumption of popular cultural products and positions the subjects as passive consumers, the latter examine subjects in terms of production processes and treats them as active actors within the production. This difference in subject positioning leads to the ignorance of relationality in the field of cultural production. In the computer age in which individuals can easily participate in the production, it is essential to think relationally when examining a new and expanding field such as electronic dance music. In this context, the concepts of Habitus, Capital and Field, which Pierre Bourdieu creates relationally, appear as concepts that will provide relational understanding. For example, while the concept of Habitus points to the subjective and objective structures underlying the taste of a popular cultural product, it also takes into account the will of the subjects who own it. However, this will be related to the form and volume of capital of the subjects and the field in which they are situated. So, when these subjects decide to listen or perform any electronic dance music, on the one hand, they determine the rules and boundaries of the field to which they belong through the forms of capital they possess, and on the other hand, they are subject to it. The struggle of subjects consisting of listeners, DJs or producers, organizers or space owners to determine the boundaries of electronic dance/music and the ambiguity of the boundaries with the emergence of various subgenres in this process necessitates a Bourdieusian sense of 'autonomous' field. This is the main reason for examine electronic dance music as a cultural 'field' in this study.