Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

9 

 

 

 

 

 

     Figure 1: The chav 

Chav identity, as articulated for instance on YouTube, is flagged by means of 

features including obesity, smoking, street drinking, rowdiness, teenage 

pregnancy, unemployment and, surprisingly, one particular fashion feature. 

Soccer player Wayne Rooney would be the archetypical chav. In getting the right 

amount of  recognisable ‘chav’, a very small semiotic dose is in fact enough for a 

certain identity discourse to be activated. Here the metaphor of medication is 

perhaps useful: just as the pain killer we take to get rid of a headache features 

one active substance in the dose that takes away the pain – while the rest of the 

content can in fact be totally irrelevant for achieving that aim – in producing an 

authentic identity all is needed is one active substance in the dose.  

 

 

Figure 2: Chav smiley 

As we can see from Figures 1 and 2

3

, in the case of producing ‘chav’ this ‘active 

substance’ is the fashion feature we mentioned above: the British luxury brand 

Burberry, with its fingerprint tartan pattern. Burberry manufactures a wide 

range of products, such as clothing, shoes and accessories, and as a brand has 

become emblematic of the working-class chav culture. The fact that this often 

takes place in the form of counterfeit Burberry products is of no major 

importance as such: it may in fact be essential for the products themselves to be 

‘fake’ in the production of an authentic ‘chav’. Whether ‘real’ Burberry or not, the 

brand itself is indeed emblematic of ‘chav’ to the extent that the Burberry check 

                                                        

3

 All the images and web information appearing in this paper were retrieved on June 28, 2011.  

---

 

10 

is also enough in itself to turn other cultural products into ‘chav’ – as in the case 

of Chav Guevara (Figure 3.).  

 

 

Figure 3: Chav Guevara 

Turning Che Guevara into Chav Guevara by presenting him in the Burberry check 

pattern points to a significant, more general aspect in identity work. 

Administering the right amount of specific semiotic features is at the core of 

authenticity: being an authentic someone requires orientations towards certain 

resources that index a particular desired identity, and, as with chav identity, the 

dose of resources can be minimal, almost homeopathic. The dose can be small, 

but the only thing that is required is that it is enough – enough to produce a 

recognisable identity as an authentic someone. And as the illustrations here 

make clear: this single emblematic feature can be applied in an almost infinite 

range of cases, redefining every object into a ‘chav’ object. On the Internet, we 

find underwear, cars and houses coated in the Burberry tartan, along with 

almost every imaginable cartoon figure and superhero. The ‘active substance’ of 

chavness can be blended with almost any other substance to produce the same 

‘real’, ‘true’, ‘authentic’ and, above all, instantly recognizable image: the ‘chav’. 

 

Enoughness in action 2: Is this pub Irish enough? 

The second vignette illustrating the processes described in this paper engages 

with a globalized social and cultural icon, to be found at present in almost any 

large and middle-size city of the Western world and many parts of the non-

western world as well. Wherever it occurs, the Irish pub is instantly 

recognizable. And as we have seen in the previous example, this recognizability 

is triggered by the use of a small set of ‘active substances’ that, when present in 

the right dose, lend a pub its instant identification as ‘Irish’. The active 

substances are objects and artefacts people orient towards in an attempt to 

construct authenticity. 

---

 

11 

The Irish pub is undoubtedly an instance of the ‘invention of tradition’ 

(Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983), something which has been developed quite 

recently as a particular iconic place breathing a kind of fundamental ‘Irishness’ 

inscribed in its layout, spatial organization, furniture and products on offer. As 

for the latter, there is little doubt that the Guinness beer brand has been 

instrumental in developing and promoting this worldwide ‘standard’, so to 

speak. The Irish pub is an artefact of globalized commodification. 

As a globalized commodity, it has become extraordinarily successful. In Belgium 

alone, 86 ‘Irish pubs’ are listed on 

www.cafe.be

, the main website on cafés in 

Belgium. Most, if not all of them are of course run by Belgian publicans; 

customers would be served in the language of the place and some of the staff 

working in such pubs have never visited Ireland. Such Irish pubs do in fact 

present a blend of local and global features; the presence of the globalized 

features turns them into instantly recognizable Irish pubs; the local features 

ensure that the overwhelmingly local customers do not feel out of place in such 

pubs. 

Let us now turn to the globalized features, the ‘active substances’ as we called 

them. Running through about one hundred Irish pub websites (and having 

visited a good number of such pubs ourselves), we see that a small handful of 

emblematic features appear in almost every case; we can list them. But before 

we do that, let us have a look at one illustration, in which we see several of the 

emblematic items. In Figure 4, we see a coaster from an Irish pub in the small 

Belgian town of Zottegem: 

 

Figure 4: Paddy’s Pub, Zottegem. 

www.irishpub.eu

 

1. Pubs have a recognizable Irish name. This name can be a family name. From 

the list of Belgian Irish pubs, we note: Blarney, Conway, Fabian O’Farrell, 

Finnegan, Kate Whelan, Kelly, Kitty O’Shea, Mac Sweeney, Mac Murphy, Maguire, 

McCormack, Molly Malone, Murphy, O’Fianch, O’Malley, O’Reilly, O’Dwyer, Paddy, 

Patrick Foley, Scruffy O’Neill, Sean O’Casey. Apart from a name, an identifiably 

Irish word can be used, such as ‘An Sibhin’ or ‘The Ceilidh’.  Alternatively, the 

pub’s name refers to Irish symbols such as the Shamrock, or to well-known 

---