The “French Touch”
This article develops an ethnologic analysis of the French appropriations of the hip-hop. It buckles down, in a first part, to spot out the mechanisms of the connection between a media symbolic form and a specific context, in order to analyze the logics of the contemporary reproduction of the “local”. Having pointed out the importance of the Cultural State networks in the crystallization of the French version of this movement, it analyzes in a second part the further transformation of the dance into its evolution from the “street” to the stage, initiated by a cultural policy. The making of the artistic universality in legitimate cultural places led to new aesthetic norms of which we analyze the social implications. In a double evolution, first of re-localization, then of universalization, we analyze how this movement has slowly been fully integrated into the French cultural heritage.