Strays from “psychogenic” understandings of delinquency, and thus, subculture – however, Cohen focuses on the role of choice and rationality in belonging and social action, yet still notes that most interactions are ritualized and are not consciously addressed. Selection from “A General Theory of Subcultures” (1955). However, subculture is associated more with personality and individual rather than context of larger social organization.Īlbert K. work to form an overlapping set of expectations and norms – ^here, examining nascent intersectionality? Leads us to inquire about access to resources and status, assumptions about uniformity of meaning, questions about deviance is labeled. Sex, age, class, religion, ethnicity, etc. Subculture as “a sub-division of a national culture, composed of a combination of factorable social situations such as class status, ethnic background, regional and rural or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming a functioning unity which has an integrated impact on the participating individual” (46, here – italics his). Mentions of urban, rural, middle-class culture are generic and are taken uncritically, when we should more likely focus upon these classifications as subculture.
Selection from “The Concept of the Sub-Culture and Its Application” (1947). Historicizing subcultural research – Chicago School worked to look at constituent, often ethnically-based groups of persons that had not “succeeded” in assimilation – Park’s “cities within cities” – also tying subcultural studies with emerging criminological study – however, 1970s critiques the vocabulary used, as most used terms of faddishness, or craze – did not speak to community, cohesion, or complexity. Muggleton (2000)’s post-subculture views subculture as “a symptom of postmodern hyperindividualism” (6, here 13), where the desire to individualize promotes group affiliation – however, this seems to obscure social location and additional contexts of analyses. Post-subcultural studies begin in 1970s, Birmingham School, particularly in the work of Dick Hebdige – works away from class and domination as well as semiotics – instead, looks as transience, fragmentation, and fluidity of identity ^examine work on post-subcultures. Scene, as defined by Irwin (1977) offers expression to a definable social world, with recognition of its fluidity in social identity and mobility – in terms of relationships, and multiplicity of membership. “Subcultures may be non-normative, but they are not ‘normless’” (6).
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Relates Turner’s communitas as anti-structure: “an expression of liminality, of social marginality and difference a site of unmediated contact between people at the edges of society, unregulated by it and free from its orderly gaze, a realm of full and ‘total experience” (Turner 1969, 136 here, 10). However, unlike Adorno, community relates to the group, rather than society (to Tonnies, the elevation of the individual) ^ think of applications to Durkheim, here. However, subcultural studies looks to Tonnies (1887) ideas of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – differentiation between community (folk, kinship, authentic relations) and society (modernity and capitalism, development, rationality), respectively.
References to Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry – the homogenizing, rationalizing process that removes individuality from cultural production and consumption, as a root for cultural studies. Subcultures are social groups, but socialness is unique to group. Primary role of ethnography and anthropology in documenting subculture, as well as Chicago School of sociology. Origins in 1940s, but ideas and presence of subculture has existence long prior to this – examinations of ‘fringe’ or ‘anti-‘ society folks, the inhabitants of ‘underworlds’ of ‘unproductivity and instability’ – in Elizabethan literature and into nineteenth century England – examination of lumpenproletariat by Marx (continues into English narrative of skinheads, mods, well into the 1970s, and migration of these ideas to America around turn of the century). Different subcultures deal with subcultural difference – well, differently- celebrating, or dreading difference. Subcultures as “groups of people that are in some way represented as non-normative and/or marginal through their particular interests and practices, through what way they are, what they do and where they do it” (1). “The Field of Subcultural Studies” – Ken Gelder – pp.