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Abstract
Subcultural theory is an invention of the Anglo-American sociologists and criminologists of the 1960s and 1970s. They chiefly refer to male urban working class youths whose behaviours are contrary to the dominant society. These youths are usually culturally identified with music, dress code, tattoo, and language. Whereas, it is assumed that subculture refers to lower subordinate or dominant status of social group labelled as such, yet, in societies where the Anglo/American cultural identities are wanting, it becomes difficult to recognise such deviant group of youths as subculture.
This paper argues there should be a rethink about "subculture" and "subcultural theory". The rethink must ensure that youth subcultures are not benchmarked by those Anglo/American cultural identities, but should in the main refer to youths whose behaviours are oppositional to the mainstream culture, irrespective of the societies they come from.
Meaning of subculture(s)
One of the assumptions about "subculture" is the lower, subordinate, or deviant status of social groups labelled as such. These labelled groupings are distinguished by their class, ethnicity, language, poor and working class situations (Cutler, 2006); age or generation (Maira, 1999). These cultural and socio-structural variables make subcultures relatively homogeneous (Epstein, 2002). That is to say, subcultures must bear specific and similar cultural identities to qualify for the name, and they must also be particular to certain societies that labelled them as such. In most cases reference must be made to the Anglo/American youth subcultures, which dominated the whole idea of subculture and subcultural theory for many decades.
Phil Cohen (1972:23), one of the most influential British subcultural scholars describes subculture (s):
as so many variations on a central theme - the contradiction, at an ideological level, between traditional working class Puritanism, and the new hedonism of consumption; at an economic level, between the future as part of the socially mobile elite, or as part of the new lumpen. Mods, Parkers, Skinheads, Crombies, all represent, in their different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in their parent culture, and to combine these with elements selected from other class fractions.
Cohen has clearly indicated that subculture has many varied ways of describing it, which seem contradictory. Irrespective of all these different patterns, the overriding principle is the...