SUBCULTURE FAQ

1. WHAT IS CULTURE AND SUBCULTURE?
Culture is continually evolving as it adapts to the changing realities of life. Culture has been viewed as a construct for reality and a construct of reality. Cultural change occurs in the interaction among individuals. Individuals are both the product and the producers of culture. Meaning is socially-determined an consensualise - it is negotiated. The negotiators, the agents of change, is not the individual, but social subgroups or subcultures. Subcultures are the basic unit of social interaction at which cultural innovation occurs. These ideas are assimilated into the society as they gain wider acceptance. Subcultures contain internal rule mechanisms (social rules or norms) that allow members to identify with one another. Subcultures can be viewed as popular generational forms of identification that intersect with other markers of collective identity, ie. race, gender, class and sexuality. Cultural consensus occurs when members of a culture of subculture have common views. In a broad sense, a subculture is any group within a larger complex culture who have interests that vary from those of the mainstream culture. In a more specific sense, it is a group with a distinct style and identity.

2. HOW CAN WE RECOGNISE A SUBCULTURE?
(1) Subcultures possess strict social rules with ostracization measures guaranteeing their persistence. (2) Subcultures have a structured apprenticeship process in which prospects learn to be members. (3) Subcultures possess easily definable measures of authenticity that create social borders strong enough to allow one to call them a subculture. Prospective members need to show veteran members that they but into the alternative norm - that they are one of the gang. (4) Subcultures are structured around voluntary association. (5) Subcultures create their own sub-interpretations of wider-society norms - rejecting them entirely in favour of their own or amending them slightly to provide meaning to their own subcultural lifestyles. Neither type is deviant per se. A deviant group has an active recruitment process. They form around a single charismatic symbol or literature.

3. WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF SUBCULTURES?
There are two types of subculture groups: (1) Total Institution - a social space in which members live and work with life-minded people - cut off from the wider-society. They lead an internalised, secessionist lifestyle. This is an escape from society. Escape. (2) Operation in Society - this is opposite to (1) - the members share distastes with norms but remain operational with the wider-society. This is an evangelisation of society. Resistance. Another view of different subcultures says there are two different types: the Aesthetic Subculture and the Oppositional Subculture. An aesthetic subculture is one that simply differs from the wider culture. Oppositional subcultures resist particular social institutions or practices.

4. WHY DO SUBCULTURES FORM?
Subculture groups form because of the need to escape from wider society and seek new meanings for objects - they arise out of the collective and almost spontaneous need to redefine something in wider society that provides meaning. People looking for solutions seek out others with similar problems - they become aware of a subculture with which they want to identify. His joining is a job of his own. He has to consider the possible ostracization that may come from the wider society.

5. WHAT ARE THE THEORIES OF SUBCULTURE FORMATION?
(1) Define subculture within the context of class in a Marxist view. (2) Define subculture from a Marxist view but without the class structure. (3) Define subculture as counter hegemony - subculture on a larger scale. (4) Define subculture with a post structuralist view - individual or group resistance. In the 70's the post structuralists view the upper class as embracing the working class, thus motivating them and the lower class to become more affluent. Subculture emerged from this to resolve the conflict between classes. The common thread there is the resistance to dominant culture. If culture is the social production and reproduction of sense, meaning and consciousness, then the dominant culture must be the most popular culture - the culture with the power.

6. WHY DO SUBCULTURES FORM?
To resolve the contradictions of the parent culture - where parent cultures no longer provide a workable ideology for the next generation. Subcultures take form in its creative music, fashion and rituals. There is a trickle-down theory: trends are established at the top of the social structure and then ‘trickle-down’ through to the other levels. ie. the top structure could be fashion designers, models, advertising agencies and celebrities. Information is received by youth through fashion TV, music videos and magazine adverts.

7. WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF SUBCULTURES?
A process of social reintegration takes place through commodification or intellectual stagnation. Some groups could get to the place where they consider themselves a culture. Socially secede - social reintegration. As consumption of alternative cultures increases, subcultures become mainstream. So youth must continually reinvent themselves in order to remain distinct. Media provides us with so much information so quickly that new subcultures are swallowed up by the mainstream media almost at conception. Over media saturation could eliminate the existence of youth subculture. This would mean the end of creativity which is so important at this stage of life. Culture has a recycling effect - once alternative subcultures products are revived into the mainstream - ie. retro, rave and punk. The dominant culture incorporates the emergent culture though mass communication such as print media and TV. The theory of hegemony says that the ideologically dominant in society continuously secure popular consent to an established social order. The prevailing values of a society change over time as members of challenging subordinate groups are incorporated into the dominant culture. This is how social order is maintained - usually without cultural disruption - and the control of the dominant group changes only gradually, if at all. An elaboration of hegemony adds the concept of residual and emergent cultures to the mode: (1) Residual Culture is the product of a previous social formation that remains part of the dominant culture but survives as an anachronism. (2) Emergent Culture contains new meanings, values, practises and experiences that may be alternative to or in opposition to the dominant culture. A dominant culture efficiently absorbs emergent cultures into the hegemony - a process of incorporation. Sometimes the dominant culture is changed through the incorporation of the emerging culture.

8. WHAT ABOUT SUBCULTURES AND CLASS?
In the past, higher education was attached to class - the higher your class the more accessible education was to you. Today, because of bursaries and scholarships, this has changed. Where people did their business was related to class- you could tell people’s class by where they shopped. Today there is more mobility. Class structure is virtually nonexistent because of economic restraint and welfare government.

9. WHAT DIFFERENCES ARE THERE IN SUBCULTURES?
(1) Some subcultures claim territory, while others do not. (2) Some have an apprenticeship system - others don’t. (3) Some engage in recruitment - others don’t. (4) Some are hierarchical - others have no hierarchy. (5) Some involve rebellion - others resist or isolate themselves.