Local from Elsewhere: The Influence of Translocalism on Craft Beer Scenes

• In Event: 023 - Regular Session. Popular Culture: Spaces, Places, and Scenes

Abstract

Sociological research on popular urban cultures tends to treat local, translocal, and virtual scenes as three separate entities. Yet scenes, especially for those that exist in aesthetic opposition to the dominant culture of their geographic and spatial locales, are constructed and maintained by participants’ active fostering of connections between the three. Believing in and practicing translocalism, whereby the local products from elsewhere are valorized sometimes over those produced locally, can counterintuitively strengthen a local scene. Based on my ethnographic analysis of Las Vegas, a city with a reputation for what it imports rather than what it creates, and its once stagnant but now growing local craft beer scene, this paper shows how the translocal not only connects to the local, but is incorporated into the local to become the aesthetic essence of the local itself.

Author

• Michael Ian Borer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas