culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

MICHAELA PRAISLER, STELUŢA STAN
changes in question may be positive or beneficent for the groups’ continued
existence, or they may be negative, endangering future growth.
The common ground envisaged by many today is, nonetheless, slippery
due to the mechanisms of cultural change at work on all levels and throughout
the world, the most noteworthy being: diffusion (from a dominant to a
dominated culture), acculturation (exchange of features between cultures),
independent invention (whereby new solutions to old problems are found),
cultural convergence (or the development of similar traits due to similar
environments) and, last but not least, globalisation (the present day accelerated
networking of nations within a broad and common world system).
In today’s global culture, that many refer to as postmodern, diversity and
plurality are heralded – as old boundaries and distinctions have been “both
enlarged and erased” (Appadurai 1990: 1) and as multiple identities are managed
depending on place and context. Consequently, from among the characteristics
of culture enumerated above, one of the most prominent aspects of the
contemporary cultural stage is acculturation, which results in indigenization
(modification to fit the local or specific culture) and syncretisms (cultural
blends).
This opens the discussion on postmodern(ist) popular culture, the flexible
borderlines of its territory or the trespassing of other frontiers on the cultural
map.
Dictionaries define the term popular as “of the people”, “pleasing to”,
“liked by a lot of people”, “suited to the understanding or the means of ordinary
people”, “common”, “democratic”, “plebeian” or “vulgar”. Popular culture then
may be looked upon as a mass-phenomenon, closely determined by “market
forces, mass reading habits and education, class divisions and attitudes at once
political, social, cultural and always aesthetic” (Bloom 1996: 5) and as pointing
in the direction of symbolical discontent with and resistance against the notion
of authority, cultural imperialism and elitist cultural forms. It seems to be aimed
at identifying and undermining hegemony in the act of reading or decoding, just
as it is at denouncing it in the cultural production process. From hip-hop to
sitcoms, popular culture may therefore also be considered in terms of asking for
individual creative acts, for personal readings of the cultural text – nowadays
increasingly media-borne.
In short, popular culture has been contaminated by countercultural tenets
and has continuously undergone changes especially in the area of globalisation,
closely related to economic factors, and in the area of the fragmentation of
markets, styles and constituencies (in Bennett, Shank and Toynbee [eds] 2006:
2). In other words:
• Mainly with the aid of the mediating media, globalisation facilitates
intercultural communication which, in its turn, has a powerful effect on the
production, reception and form of popular culture.
• The cultural capital is no longer exclusively associated with canonical,
academic or elitist forms, which have, they themselves, grown popular due to
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