Scavenger and Bricoleur: A Critical Analysis of Dick Hebdige’s Repurposing of Subculture Through the Intersection of Biography and History

Abstract

This chapter explores Dick Hebdige’s approach towards subculture from his MA thesis, Aspects of Style in the Deviant Subcultures of the Sixties, at the University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) to his more recent University of California, Santa Barbara, Desert Studies based on the development of ‘repurposing subculture’ through the intersection of biography and history. There will be an assessment of how Dick Hebdige’s book on Subculture was received within sociology and how there are degrees of similarity between the negative reception of C. W. Mills’ (The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, New York, 1959). The Sociological Imagination and Dick Hebdige’s (Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Methuen, London, 1979) and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. From a critical research position, I will look at his interpretation of the youth subculture: mod (because his personal roots and early research at the CCCS is on mod); through the lens of autobiography and his creative participation in the Shoop sound system as a practice-based intervention in music and culture and will conclude by comparing Desert Studies to his classic study of Subculture to advance a close reading of the Subcultural Imagination. The chapter will develop the argument that the conceptual approach of Dick Hebdige can be theoretically understood as a critical bricoleur and methodologically grounded as an ethnographic scavenger always seeking to understand and to explore social and cultural disruptions and transgressions in order to challenge the orders of normality.