Anthropology of indie: why gig goers behave just like Papua New Guinea tribes

Remember that time you were crowd surfing at an Arctic Monkeys gig and thought you were just having a drunken laugh? Rubbish! You were, in fact, being "collaborative in a unique social space, expressing super-intimacy with strangers and rejecting the self-aggrandising that comes with stage-diving". Oh yes you were. And that time you were standing at the bar and thought you were just, well, thirsty? Not at all: you were probably just "proving your credentials as an industry professional" or "communicating to others a disinterest in the act". These are the theories of professor Wendy Fonarow, anthropologist at UCLA in California and the author of Empire Of Dirt: The Aesthetics And Rituals Of British Indie Music. Now available in the UK, it peers into indie culture from a strictly anthropological perspective and is packed with ideas about religious narratives (indie is the new Puritanism, apparently), guest list behaviour (which relate to sociologist Erving Goffman's theories about saving face) and the sexual politics of where to stick your AAA pass.