Countercultural Values Research Articles

Философские аспекты влияния контркультуры как феномена социокультурного доминирования в современных масс-медиа

The relevance of this paper is conditioned by the fact that the ideas and values broadcast through mass communication media influence both the development and socialization of an individual and the comfortable existence of the whole society. The aim of the paper is to analyze how the counterculture influences society through mass communication media. This goal mediates the implementation of the following tasks: to disclose the content of the concepts of “communication” and “mass communication”; to outline the main functions of mass communication media; to analyze the nature of publications of the “Topor” Telegram channel; to disclose the content of the term “counterculture”; to note its main functions. The basis of the study was formed by the works of Ya. Assmann, A.G. Donskikh, I.A. Zosimenko, V.V. Kasyanov, A.A. Kokorina, E.S. Muratova and others. As a result, it is concluded that the broadcasting of countercultural values by mass communication media, which is taking place today (which is confirmed by analyzing the publications of the “Topor” telegram channel), can lead to the limitation of the dominant culture, substitution of its principles, as a result of which the traditional values relevant to Russian society will be destroyed. For this reason, we believe that mass media, namely channels in the social network “Telegram”, need additional control by supervisory authorities, which will allow levelling countercultural functions and preserving traditional values.

Lefebvre'nin Mekân Teorisi ile Allen Ginsberg'ün "Howl" Şiirini Okuma

Allen Ginsberg, a prominent American poet and writer, is widely recognized for his significant contribution to American literature by creating his authentic style and as a critical figure in the Beat Generation. This literary movement emerged in the 1950s as a response to the time's oppressive and conservative societal norms, including the fear of nuclear war, the rise of consumerism, and the stifling conformity of the Cold War era. Ginsberg's literary voice captured the essence of this movement, expressing its countercultural values through his descriptions and language, which were often explicit and straightforward. This study examines "Howl" through the lens of Lefebvre's Spatial Theory, which provides a critical framework for analyzing the spatial dimensions of social life. By applying Lefebvre's theory, this analysis reveals the spatial dimensions of the poem, including the relationship between space and time, space and ideology, and the relationship between poetry and language. The use of spatial theory in literary analysis offers a unique perspective on the social and cultural context of the time, providing insights into how spatial and ideological power relations are reflected in literature. This study will contribute to a sociological commentary on American literature as it explores the role of space and place in the production and reception of literary works. It also provides an analytical framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of social life in 1950s America.

Sustainable learning and some counterculture values in Jamaica: a Rastafarian spiritual ethos to ESD

This paper draws on some of the findings of an ethnographic doctoral study on ESD in a Jamaican school and community. The research study explored the interaction between local knowledge, values and practices and dominant Western approaches to education for sustainable development (ESD). Accordingly, the paper focuses on the challenges and lessons revealed by these diverse perspectives and how they can inform academic and policy ESD discourses locally and globally. Imbued with eco-pedagogical and postcolonial perspectives, it proposes that encompassing a Rastafarian spiritual ethos within ESD pedagogical approaches in Jamaica represents a potential to address some of the shortcomings that emerge from a critical review of the international literature on ESD, as well as the drawbacks of ESD implementation in the island.

Tiny houses: movement or moment?

Contemporary tiny houses are relatively recent phenomenon, claimed by some as a panacea for housing unaffordability and unsustainable development. It is difficult to assess these claims with any rigor because a definition of what constitutes a tiny house remains elusive. It is unclear whether they represent a small, specialized housing niche or a significant ‘movement’. Drawing on data from questionnaire surveys and interviews conducted in Australia and social media, we argue the need to develop more precise definitions of the extent of tiny house living and the wider socio-cultural aspects underpinning claims of a new movement. We explore five major themes: four that motivate tiny house living—economic, secure tenure, sustainable community and freedom; and one deterrent—regulatory barriers. Our findings suggest the Australian tiny house movement is as much a manifestation of counter-cultural values as a preference for a specific dwelling type. This helps position tiny houses in the broader contemporary Australian housing market, enable preliminary international comparisons and allow some speculation about future trajectories.

Surviving through subculture: Finding undeath in psychobilly

While some scholars suggest that subcultures are a thing of the past, that we are living in a post-subcultural era, an ethnographic exploration of psychobilly shows that subcultures still play a meaningful role in contemporary society. Since its development in the early 1980s, psychobilly has uniquely blended punk, rockabilly and horror to express countercultural values and aesthetics. Like the groups studied by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, the psychobilly subculture is characterized by consistent and distinct values and tastes, a shared sense of collective identity, committed involvement over a long period of time, and relative independence from the culture industry. By participating in this obscure but strongly defined subculture, psychobillies not only express their resistance to mainstream culture but also find strategies to manage and improve their lived experience. As a result of their committed subcultural involvement, psychobillies feel alive, or, rather, ‘undead’, a metaphor made all the more symbolic because of the subculture’s interest in a host of undead creatures. This article thus argues for continued application of subcultural theory to understand the significant meaning and impact of participation in non-conformist communities today.

Whatever Happened to Couples and Family Therapy in Psychiatry?

Whatever Happened to Couples and Family Therapy in Psychiatry?

El vampiro y el sexo/The Vampire and Sex (René Cardona, 1969): El Santo, sexploitation films and politics in Mexico 1968

ABSTRACTTaking a cue from Eric Schaefer and Linda Williams, whose work underlines the value of studying sex/adult films and sex in films as a significant part of cultural and social histories, this article explores the production and subsequent disavowal of El vampiro y el sexo/The Vampire and Sex, a Mexican erotic film and alternate version of popular horror/wrestling hybrid Santo en el Tesoro de Drácula/Santo and Dracula’s Treasure made ‘only for export’ in 1968. The article analyzes how El vampiro y el sexo’s ‘dirty parts’ might signify the context of dominant and countercultural values in Mexico in 1968: particularly in relation to its emergent student movement and the repressions imposed by the country’s politically authoritarian regime. The article explores El vampiro y el sexo as part of an upswing in production of sexy films, analyzing the textual and political reasons why softcore, alternate versions like El vampiro y el sexo were deemed problematic enough to determine them for export only whilst other sexy films could be shown with an 18 rating.

Assembling an Anti-Neoliberal Spirituality from the Vision of Pope Francis

This essay is an attempt to construct an anti-neoliberal spirituality from the vision of Pope Francis. This paper will argue that postmodern and new age spiritualities serve today, to update Max Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis, as the “spirit of neoliberal capitalism.” Neoliberal capitalism requires “entrepreneurial subjects” that embody the values of atomistic individualism, consumerism, flexible, and multicultural. The destructive consequences of these values to social solidarity, compassion, social justice, and moral fabric of societies can only be arrested by the counter-cultural values of Pope Francis’ anti-neoliberal spirituality.

Crossing The Atlantic: Bouqui and Malice, a Caribbean Counterpoetics

This article is a comparative study of trickster tales from a Haitian collection (Le Roman de Bouqui, by Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain) and a Senegalese collection (La Belle histoire de Leuk-le-lièvre, by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Abdoulaye Sadji). The analysis traces the transformation the stories underwent when they were transmitted as oral literature to slaves in the New World. Drawing on Maryse Condé's work, I relate Bouqui and Malice, two of the most famous characters of Caribbean folklore, to the bossale and the créole, two figures associated with slavery as well as with continuing social divisions in Haitian society. Using Glissant's concept of the contre-poétique, I investigate Bouqui and Malice's countercultural values as embedded in their stories, arguing that the storytellers crafted a form of fictional revenge through their folktales: by subverting the plot of the African tale, they confronted and challenged the dominant colonial discourse.

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) by Aimee Pozorski

<i>The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007</i> by Sally Bachner, <i>Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010)</i> by Aimee Pozorski

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

Monastic Practices Countering a Culture of Consumption

Monastic Practices Countering a Culture of Consumption

The Right Stuff? The Original Double Jay as Site for Youth Counterculture

The Right Stuff? The Original Double Jay as Site for Youth Counterculture

When grown-up kids go snowboarding. A study of participants at a camp for adult snowboarders

Snowboarding has traditionally been viewed as an activity best suited to the younger generation, due to the age of the participants and its origin in youth cultures and counter-culture values. Studies show that adult people compose a minority of the snowboarders, which has been paid little attention in scholarly research. The present study focuses on adult snowboarders exploring why they snowboard and how they fit into the snowboarding culture. Theoretically, the study combines a generational aspect with Giddens’ perspectives on self-reflexivity and identity. The empirical investigation is based on interviews with participants at a camp for adult snowboarders, seven males and one female, all except one were aged between 33 and 41 years, one was 19 years old. The results reveal that snowboarding appears to be a central part of the interviewees’ lifestyle and identity. The quest for challenges and skill improvement are predominant motives for involvement, where bodily experiences and expressions through riding are elaborated with reference to snowboarding styles. The age differences are mainly experienced in mixed-age contexts. Therefore, the mature riders have established patterns of social interaction varying from ad hoc relations to more permanent communities.

Thomas Pynchon and the Black Panther Party: Revolutionary Suicide in Gravity's Rainbow

This article pertains to the recent upsurge of interest in the politics of Thomas Pynchon. It considers Pynchon as an author very much of the 1960s counterculture, and explores the countercultural values and ideals expressed in Gravity's Rainbow, with particular emphasis on revealing the novel's attitude to the Black Panther Party. Close textual analysis suggests Pynchon's essential respect for Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, and his contempt for Marxist dialectical materialism, two core elements of Panther political theory. Drawing on an analogy between the BPP and Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, an assessment is made of the novel's perspective on the part played by various factors – including the Panthers’ aggressive militancy, the rise of Eldridge Cleaver through the leadership, and the subtle influence of a logic of power influenced by scientific rationalism – in bringing about the disintegration of the Panther organization by the early 1970s. Given the similarities between the paths taken by the BPP and the wider counterculture in the late 1960s, the article considers Pynchon's commentary on the Panthers to be part of a cautionary tale for future revolutionaries fighting similar forms of oppression.

American Neo-Hasids in the Land of Israel

American Neo-Hasidism in Israel today is part of a sustained revival of traditional Judaism that began in the late 1960s among followers of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who sought to restore meaning to Jewish practice and identity. This unique religious subculture blends elements of New Age spirituality and American countercultural values with Hasidism, a mystical movement within Judaism dating back to the eighteenth century. The result is a new syncretistic Jewish culture and practice. At two English-speaking yeshivas, one in Jerusalem and the other in Bat Ayin in the West Bank, this Neo-Hasidic subculture exhibits kinship with both the conservative religious culture of Israeli settlers and the countercultural spiritual values of young American Jewish immigrants.

The American Dependency Conflict: Continuities and Discontinuities in Behavior and Values of Countercultural Parents and Their Children

Beatrice Whiting recognized the American "dependency conflict": parental training for independence and selfreliance values, while at the same time rewarding dominantdependence and seeking attention in parent‐child interaction. The countercultural youth of the 1960s and 1970s valued interdependence and questioned authority and dominance. A study of 150 countercultural parents and their childen, and a comparison sample of 50 two‐parent married parents, show remarkably high rates of seeking attention and verbal interactions across countercultural and comparison‐sample families alike. This parenting and child behavioral style, which encourages dependency conflict, did not change, although countercultural values were transmitted. Change processes require the study of the intimate, cultural‐emotional worlds of children and families, as well as broader forces of political economy and social movements.

The Real Old-Time Religion

This paper, based on dialogic fieldwork and close collaboration between the ethnographer and the tradition-bearers, examines Wiccan and Neo-Pagan musical performance practice. In the absence of a single unifying text or body of beliefs, songs may actually serve to codify and diffuse a shared set of principles in Wiccan and Neo-Pagan folk culture. The paper delineates various categories of songs, examines their role in Wiccan and Neo-Pagan ritual, and explores how emic critiques of music illuminate areas of conflict and tension within the movement. It attempts to delineate an emerging aesthetic of Neo-Pagan song, one that is syncretic, participatory, anti-authoritarian, Romantic and woman-centered, reflecting the movement’s counter-cultural values.

“We're the young generation and we've got something to say”: A Gramscian analysis of entertainment television and the youth rebellion of the 1960s

Using Grama's theory of hegemony to examine a growing crisis of authority erupting within American culture, this paper focuses on three popular, youth‐based television programs of the 1960s—The Monkees, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and The Mod Squad—and on how their themes of youthful disaffection, countercultural values, and political rebellion circulated and were made meaningful in the popular press. Although conflicts and struggles manifest themselves within other sectors of the social order, the field of popular culture is particularly valuable in showcasing breakdowns in consensus, the unmasking of coercive power, and the process of incorporating rebellious social formations back into a reconfigured hegemonic structure.

Chapter 7 The College Scene Today:

The contemporary college scene is surveyed from two perspectives. The first author, taking a wide-angle view, observes that students have become open about psychological problems in the last generation, the student population has become diverse, family and parental pressures seem to be on the rise, and conservative and counterculture values currently coexist. Students today seem open-minded tolerant, but the heterogeneity of standards is confusing for some. The second author focuses on gender issues: identity, role and sexuality. For today;s students, gender roles have softened, facilitating access between men and women in the coed living situation. Students living together in quasi-familial relationships and frequently observe an "incest" barrier. Diverse sexual expression and committed couple relationships are common. Sexual identity and role conflict in college women are explored.