Loties subculture and the experience of social exclusion (Case study: Loties of Khoramabad city)

Loties of Khoramabad live in suburbs and down town districts and do some trivial jobs. The dominant culture of society has marginalized this subculture and made it into a subaltern other that is not able to adopt itself to the developments of modern society. The main question is that how do Loties experience this social exclusion in the context of their own subculture. This research, relying on the subcultural theory of Birmingham school and using critical ethnography, attempts to interpret the experience of social exclusion among Loties. Twenty members of this subculture have been interviewed and the data have been analyzed through the technique of thematic analysis. The findings are categorized under “samples of social exclusion”, “contexts of social exclusion”, “consequences of social exclusion” and “subcultural resistance to exclusion”. The first category includes the exclusion of Loties from neighborhood interactions, social participation, the field of education and modern lifestyle. The second comprises of being traditional playing, intergenerational poverty, essentialism, believing in impurity of Loties and media misrepresentation. The third one also includes consequences like economic poverty, preventing out-group marriages, migration, withdrawing the job of playing, hatred of dominant culture, concealing real identity and feeling of being useless. In this situation, Loties understand that the only way to redemption is to resist dominant culture through their own subculture.