Reappraising « Counterculture »

Abstract

This article offers a critical examination of the concept of counterculture. Beginning with an overview and discussion of counterculture’s application in the context of the late 1960s, the article argues that many of the claims for the validity of counterculture in this socio-historical context reflect issues and shortcomings similar to those offered in relation to the concept of subculture. That is to say, counterculture was cast as a class-based (in this case middle class) mode of resistance to the dominant mainstream society. The article then goes on to offer reasons as to why such a claim was, as in the case of subculture, ill-founded. The article then goes on to consider how the emergence of the cultural turn in sociology and cultural theory further problematises the original conceptualisation of counterculture and renders the term largely incompatible with contemporary understandings of social and cultural movements in a global context. Finally, the article considers why counterculture lives on in a popular and vernacular context, a central facet of which, it is argued, relates to the way in which counterculture has been deployed in the media as a means of representing critical moments in everyday responses to socio-economic and cultural tension.

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