A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior are opposed to those of the current mainstream society, and sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Houghton Mifflin. . (1993) p. 419. "Members of a cultural protest that began in the U.S. In the 1960s and Europe before fading in the 1970s... fundamentally a cultural rather than a political protest." A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes.
Prominent examples of countercultures in the Western world include the Levellers (1645–1650), Bohemianism (1850–1910), the more fragmentary counterculture of the Beat Generation (1944–1964), and the globalized counterculture of the 1960s.
Definition and characteristics John Milton Yinger originated the term "contraculture" in his 1960 article in American Sociological Review. Yinger suggested the use of the term contraculture "wherever the normative system of a group contains, as a primary element, a theme of conflict with the values of the total society, where personality variables are directly involved in the development and maintenance of the group's values, and wherever its norms can be understood only by reference to the relationships of the group to a surrounding dominant culture."
Some scholars have attributed the counterculture to Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture.His conception of the counterculture is discussed in Whiteley, 2012 & 2014 and Bennett, 2012. It became prominent in the news media amid the social revolution that swept the Americas, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand during the 1960s."counterculture", Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 2008, MWCCul.Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, 1968/1969, Doubleday, New York, .
Scholars differ in the characteristics and specificity they attribute to "counterculture". "Mainstream" culture is also difficult to define, and in some ways becomes identified and understood through contrast with counterculture. Counterculture might oppose mass culture (or "media culture"),Gelder, Subcultures (2007) p. 4. "...to the banalities of mass cultural forms". or middle-class culture and values.Hodkinson and Deicke, Youth Cultures (2007), p. 205. "...opposition to, the middle-class establishment of adults." Counterculture is sometimes conceptualized in terms of generational conflict and rejection of older or adult values.Hebdige, Subculture (1979), p. 127. "defining themselves against the parent culture."
Counterculture may or may not be explicitly political. It typically involves criticism or rejection of currently powerful institutions, with accompanying hope for a better life or a new society.Hall & Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals (1991), p. 61. "They make articulate their opposition to dominant values and institutions—even when, as frequently occurred, this does not take the form of an overtly political response." It does not look favorably on party politics or authoritarianism.Hazlehurst & Hazlehurst, Gangs and Youth Subcultures (1998), p. 59. "There does seem to be some general commitment towards antiauthoritarianism, a rejection of the traditional party political system which is considered irrelevant."
Cultural development can also be affected by counterculture. Scholars such as Joanne Martin and Caren Siehl deem counterculture and cultural development as "a balancing act, [that] some core values of a counterculture should present a direct challenge to the core values of a dominant culture". Therefore, a prevalent culture and a counterculture should coexist in an uneasy symbiosis, holding opposite positions on issues that are essential to each. According to this theory, a counterculture can contribute a plethora of useful functions for the prevalent culture, such as "articulating the foundations between appropriate and inappropriate behavior and providing a safe haven for the development of innovative ideas".Organizational Culture and Counterculture: An Uneasy Symbiosis (1983), p. 52.
During the late 1960s, hippies became the largest and most visible countercultural group in the United States.Yablonsky, Lewis (1968), The Hippie Trip, New York: Western Publishing, Inc., , pp. 21–37.
According to Sheila Whiteley, "recent developments in sociological theory complicate and problematize theories developed in the 1960s, with digital technology, for example, providing an impetus for new understandings of counterculture".Cf. Whiteley, 2012 & 2014. Andy Bennett writes that "despite the theoretical arguments that can be raised against the sociological value of counterculture as a meaningful term for categorising social action, like subculture, the term lives on as a concept in social and cultural theory… [to] become part of a received, mediated memory". However, "this involved not simply the utopian but also the dystopian and that while festivals such as those held at Monterey and Woodstock might appear to embrace the former, the deaths of such iconic figures as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, the nihilistic mayhem at Altamont, and the shadowy figure of Charles Manson cast a darker light on its underlying agenda, one that reminds us that 'pathological issues [are] still very much at large in today's world".Cf. Andy Bennett, 2012.
Literature The counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s generated a distinctive body of literature, including comics and cartoons, and was sometimes referred to as the underground press. In the United States, this includes the work of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, as well as Mr. Natural; Keep on Truckin'; Fritz the Cat; Fat Freddy's Cat; Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers; the album cover art for Cheap Thrills; and in several countries contributions to International Times, The Village Voice, and Oz magazine. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, these comics and magazines were available for purchase in head shops, along with items such as beads, incense, cigarette papers, tie-dye clothing, Day-Glo posters, and books.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of these shops selling hippie items also became cafés where hippies could hang out, chat, smoke cannabis, read books, etc., e.g. Gandalf's Garden in the King's Road, London, which also published a magazine of the same name. Another such hippie/anarchist bookshop was Mushroom Books, tucked away in the Lace Market area of Nottingham.
Media
Some genres tend to challenge societies with content meant to outright question cultural norms and even effect change, usually towards a more modern way of thinking. More often than not, sources of these controversies can be found in art such as Marcel Duchamp whose piece Fountain was meant to be "a calculated attack on the most basic conventions of art" in 1917. Contentious artists like Banksy base most of their works on mainstream media and culture to prompt viewers to think more deeply about their pieces and the themes behind them. An example can be found in Dismaland, the biggest project of "anarchism" to be organised and exhibited, which showcases many works such as an "iconic Disney princess's horse-drawn pumpkin carriage, appearing to re-enact the death of Princess Diana".
Music Counterculture is very evident in music, particularly in the separation of genres into those considered acceptable and within the status quo and those not. Since many minority groups are already considered countercultural, the music they create and produce may reflect their sociopolitical realities, and their musical culture may be adopted as a social expression of their counterculture. This is reflected in dancehall, with the concept of base frequencies and base culture in Julian Henriques's "Sonic diaspora", where he expounds that "base denotes crude, debased, unrefined, vulgar, and even animal" for the Jamaican middle class and is associated with the "bottom-end, low frequencies…basic lower frequencies and embodied resonances distinctly inferior to the higher notes" that appear in dancehall. According to Henriques, "base culture is bottom-up popular, street culture, generated by an urban underclass surviving almost entirely outside the formal economy". That the music is low frequency sonically and regarded as reflective of a lower culture shows the influential connection between counterculture and the music produced.
Assimilation Many of these artists, though once taboo, have been assimilated into culture and are no longer a source of moral panic, as they do not overtly address controversial topics or challenge staples of current culture. Instead of being a topic to fear, they have initiated subtle trends that other artists and sources of media may follow.
Digital counterculture
Definition and theory Digital countercultures are online communities and patterns of tech usage that significantly deviate from mainstream culture. Lingel's classifications of mainstream approaches to digital discourse say that "online activity relates to (dis)embodiment, that the Internet is a platform for authenticity and experimentation, and that web-based interactions are placeless."
The basis for online disembodiment is that, unlike offline interactions, a user's physical being is irrelevant to their online interactions. However, for users whose physical existence is marginalized or shaped by counterculture (e.g., gender identities outside the binary, ethnic minorities, punk culture/fashion), their lived experiences build a subjectivity that carries over into their online interactions. As put by Shaka McGlotten: "[T]he fluidity and playfulness of cyberspace and the intimacies it was supposed to afford have been punctuated by corporeality."
Arguments that the internet is a platform for authenticity and experimentation highlight its role in creating or enhancing identities. This approach asserts that norms of non-virtual social life restrict users' ability to express themselves fully in person. Still, online interactions eliminate these barriers and allow them to identify in new ways. One means by which this exploration takes place is online "identity tourism," which allows users to appropriate an identity without the offline, corporeal risks associated with it. A critique of this form of experimentation is that it gives the "tourist" a false impression that they understand the experiences and history of that identity, even if their internet interactions are superficial. Moreover, it is especially harmful when used as a means to masquerade oneself to appeal to digital counterculture communities deceptively. However, especially for countercultures that are marginalized or demonized, experimentation can allow users to embrace an identity that they align with, but hide offline out of fear, and engage with that culture.
The final approach is on online communication as placeless, asserting that the consequences of geographic distance are rendered null and void by the internet. Lingel argues that this approach is technologically determinist in assuming that the placelessness afforded by access to technology can single-handedly remedy structural inequality. Moreover, Mark Graham states that the persistence of spatial metaphors in describing the internet's societal impact creates "a dualistic offline/online worldview [that] can depoliticize and mask the very real and uneven power relationships between different groups of people." Subscribing to this perceived depoliticization prevents an understanding of digital countercultures. Socio-cultural power hierarchies on the internet shape the mainstream, and without these mainstreams as points of comparison, there are no grounds for defining digital counterculture.
Examples