Counterculture - Definition and Characteristics

Definition and Characteristics

The term counterculture is attributed to Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture. It became prominent in the news media amid the social revolution that swept North and South America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Scholars differ in the characteristics and specificity they attribute to "counterculture". "Mainstream" culture is of course also difficult to define, and in some ways becomes identified and understood through contrast with counterculture. Counterculture might oppose mass culture (or "media culture"), or middle-class culture and values,. Counterculture is sometimes conceptualized in terms of generational conflict and rejection of older or adult values.

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. It does not look favorably on party politics or authoritarianism.

Typically, a "fringe culture" expands and grew into a counterculture by defining its own values in opposition to mainstream norms. Countercultures tend to peak, then go into decline, leaving a lasting impact on mainstream cultural values. Their life cycles include phases of rejection, growth, partial acceptance and absorption into the mainstream. During the late 1960s, hippies became the largest and most visible countercultural group in the United States. The "cultural shadows" left by the Romantics, Bohemians, Beats and Hippies remain visible in contemporary Western culture.

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". 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… 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 Charlie Manson cast a darker light on its underlying agenda, one that reminds us that ‘pathological issues still very much at large in today’s world".