This article focuses on presenting, analysing and understanding the ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) representations of over 200 participants in Portuguese punk music scenes between 1977 and 2014. Through an ethnographic study of punk and the DIY ethos in Portugal, the article depicts its local interpretation and significance, and highlights the singularities of this socio-historical context. Our approach has three focal points: (1) the importance of DIY punk manifestations in the development of youth (sub)cultures, including forms of production and consumption of music, fashion, aesthetics, leisure, the night and cosmopolitanism; (2) the singularity of DIY punk manifestations in Portugal and related resistance practices in their correlation with social, political and economic development in a country outside the Anglo-Saxon context; and (3) the embedding of a DIY ethos and the associated claim to authenticity in the professions and careers in which punks engage today.

This article analyses how different forms of involvement in underground punk and/or alternative scenes develop into specific do-it-yourself (DIY) careers. From a corpus of 214 interviews, the various DIY representations of social practices held by Portuguese punk scene members are studied, especially regarding the way they experience and develop knowledge, networks, and skills. These social representations are particularly important in terms of their insertion into the labour market. At the same time, the centrality of DIY in Brazil's funk, electronica, and alternative rock scenes is compared with the Portuguese punk context through a recent analysis carried out in Brazil with 32 members of those scenesmostly womenshowing the importance of DIY beyond punk and the Global North.

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The main goal of our approach is to analyse the social representations of alternative rock in Portugal (or, using a terminology more akin to 1980s Portugal, of the "modern music vanguard") from 1980 to 2010. This is part of broader research into the 30 years of modernization of the country (from the post-revolutionary period initiated in 1974 on), in which alternative rock is regarded as a significant social practice within the scope of the social, artistic and musical structuring of the country itself. We consider that alternative rock is a subject that is illuminated by Bourdieu's theory of fields, without overlooking its clear interconnection with 'art worlds' or music scenes, and the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of late modernity. The article is a pioneering work on the Portuguese sociology of culture, whose results may be the starting point of a debate to problematize the functional logic of popular music in various Anglo-Saxon settings.

This article explores the modalities of involvement of young people in underground punk music scenes, as they forge do-it-yourself (DIY) careers through applying skills in production, promotion, composition and performance, acquired through long-term immersion in these scenes. In each such career, we can see an illustration of how youth culture can be seen as a platform through which young people acquire practical skills and competence in an era of risk, uncertainty and precarious living. Working with a corpus of over 200 interviews, we propose an analysis of the representations of Portuguese punk scene members with regard to the DIY experience, demonstrating and specifying scene knowledge, networks and skills, which are crucial to the location of these subcultural entrepreneurs in the larger labour market. We will also attempt to demonstrate the importance of DIY ethics, aesthetics and praxis in the constitution and dynamics of the Portuguese punk scene from the late 1970s until today, highlighting its role in the lives of the participants. Moreover, we will look at DIY as an expression of the symbolic capital of punk, enabling careers, pathways, trajectories and roles, as well as functioning as a specific (sub-)cultural capital present in most underground musical events, and with particular intensity in the case of punk. Finally, the feud between the mainstream and the underground is a key issue in the discussion of the DIY ethos, taking us into the core of the question of authenticity.