Subcultures : cultural histories and social practice

Description

This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with Londons Elizabethan underworld, taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marxs later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhews view of subcultures as those that will not work. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social – with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on – but they can also seem immersed or self-absorbed. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood: through their often negative relation to work: idle, parasitical, hedonistic, criminal their negative or ambivalent relation to class their association with territory – the street, the hood, the club – rather than property their movement away from home into non-domestic forms of belonging their ties to excess and exaggeration (as opposed to restraint and moderation) their refu