Dealing with “Crisis”. Kanak Youth Imaginaries and Styles in Rural Kanaky-New Caledonia

Drawing on the much-discussed trend of the capuche, the practice of covering one’s face with hoods or T-shirts as part of a broader “reggae-gangster” aesthetic widespread among Kanak youth, this article offers a reflection on young people’s bodily and stylistic practices in Kanaky-New Caledonia. The essay wishes to emphasize the subtle entanglement between these emerging clothing trends and gestures, the mediatic and political narratives that stigmatize Indigenous youth through the rhetoric of delinquency, their socio-economic marginalization and finally the Kanak customary system grounded in respect for age-based hierarchies. In doing so, the article proposes an original interpretation of the ways these social and cultural specificities and media-driven stereotypes are embodied, negotiated, and re-signified by young people themselves. The capuche, much like other youth cultural practices, emerges then as an aesthetic response to pervasive discourses surrounding the so-called “youth crisis” and to a structural marginalization experienced by Kanak youth.