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Since the 1950s four distinct inductive research traditions developed in California, following the migrations of Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, Anselm Strauss, Harold Garfinkel, Jack Douglas, and others. Each of these traditions has made intellectual, organizational, service, pedagogical, financial, and personal contributions to the growth and development of symbolic interaction.

The ways that individuals interact with and through music have changed dramatically over the past 70 years. The advent of radio, television, and film brought strange and unfamiliar forms of music into the most remote corners of the world (see Peterson, 2004), profoundly transforming the role of music in everyday life and the spaces in which it is consumed. The rise of the Internet in the past 20 years has highlighted an ever-increasing complexity in communication among people interacting in musical spaces. In the process, music subcultures have become less definitive, static, and exclusive; scenes have become increasingly archetypical and symbolic; while music communities have become more situational and recurring. While each concept highlights a different aspect of music-cultural space, it is important and useful to examine how their evolution highlights the relevance of interactionist approaches to the study of music.

In 1969, Warren Nutter left the University of Virginia Department of Economics to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Nixon administration. During his time in the Defense Department, Nutter was deeply involved in laying the groundwork for a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Although Nutter left the Pentagon several months before the successful 1973 coup, his role in Chile was far more direct than the better-known cases of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Arnold Harberger. This chapter describes Nutter’s role in Chile policymaking in the Nixon administration. It shows how Nutter’s criticisms of Henry Kissinger are grounded in his economics, and compares and contrasts Nutter with other economists who have been connected to Pinochet’s dictatorship.

In jam festival music scenes, participants build elaborate networks that connect members formally and informally between music events. Largely regional in scope, participants form these networks to develop and perform scene identities and cultivate intimate social relationships. Emerging through cultivated “crews” and “camps,” members build hubs of interaction that sustain and persist well beyond the festival event to create a vital sense of belonging and place. While the affective relationships formed at music festival events tend to be temporary, diffuse, and episodic, scene networks provide a “portable” interactional infrastructure that promotes relational continuity and persistence. These networks also provide more pragmatic benefits to networked members in the form of social and subcultural capital exchanged for symbolic and material rewards within the scene. Drawing from nearly 20 years of formal and informal participant observation in festival scenes, I provide an analysis of these networks and articulate common practices that drive their formation and continuation.