TRIBES IN CHILE’S URBAN JUNGLE

TRIBES IN CHILE’S URBAN JUNGLE
Anyone wondering who those kids are milling around central Santiago, with excessive black eyeliner, strange hairstyles, and pierced faces should get their hands on a new book about Chilean urban tribes: Ciertos Ruidos: Nuevas Tribus Urbanas Chilenas (Certain Noises: New Chilean Urban Tribes). The book is written by Andrea Ocampo and arrived in bookshops this week. It’s a comprehensive up-to-date dictionary of the most popular social groups in a changing Chilean society.

Ocampo, a philosophy student and editor of online magazine Indie.cl, gives a detailed explanation about what it means to be a pokemon, emo, visual-kei, gothic, flaite or oshare. Ciertos Ruidos is the first book of to be published about urban sub-cultures in Chilean society. The author analyzes who makes up these groups, what they think about and how they live. She looks into how and why youths join these groups and why they subscribe to certain forms of behavior and dress codes.

By Natalie Muller and Abigail Wilkinson, Santiagotimes.cl