Guest Editors’ Introduction: Hip Hop Constellations

As guest editors we welcome you to this special issue of Suomen Antropologi, dedicated to presenting new anthropological and ethnographic approaches to the study of hip hop. We organize these emerging ideas around the notion of ‘hip hop constellations’, as a way to analyze popular music as significant but contingent social practice. Exploring the diverse ways in which hip hop is part of the formation of ties of belonging and action, the following articles converge around indigenous notions of value, temporality, and relationality with vantage points in the everyday lives of hip hop’s protagonists. As such, the articles collected here show a renewed dedication to the empirical study of popular music as embedded social practice, and to the particularities of the conceptual worlds these practices produce.Non peer reviewe