Counterculture

Abstract

Similar in meaning to the more inclusive term “subculture,” counterculture designates a group whose norms, values, symbolic references, and styles of life deviate from those of the dominant culture. Indeed, sociological commentary on the counterculture of the 1960s is so deeply informed by the rubric of subculture as to render the terms inseparable in many respects. Initially applied to the study of youth cultures in the sociology of deviance, subculture research drew heavily on the contributions of the Chicago School sociologists Robert Park and later Howard Becker, but also on the Durkheimian sociology of Robert Merton, whose formulation of Durkheim's concept of anomie provided the basis for delinquency and deviance. Subcultures were viewed as alternative moral formations in which the blocked status aspirations of disadvantaged working‐class youth were realized through appropriations and inversions of dominant moral codes. Whether criminal or retreatist, such groups were considered as aspirational, if innovative, in their aims. This largely American analysis of subculture received a more political interpretation in the works of the British Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, where blocked avenues of class agitation were expressed through styles of life in which symbols were appropriated and modified in their meanings (Hebdige 1979).