ABSTRACT
Subcultures became an important subject of scholarly inquiry in the second half of the 20th century. Much of that scholarship has been devoted to refining the very definition of subcultures because the term has been deployed so widely that it seems, at times, undefinable. That is because the term Subculture is a polysemic one, composed of the word culture and the prefix sub. Sociologist Russ Haenfler has offered the working definition of a subculture as being a “relatively diffuse social network having a shared identity, distinctive meanings around certain ideas, practices, and objects, and a sense of marginalization from or resistance to a perceived ‘conventional’ society”. That is, the groups studied as subcultures “are often positioned by themselves and/or others as deviant or debased”. In Latin American countries, the genealogy of the concept of culture–and hence, the subordinate notion of subcultures–has followed a different trend than in Europe and the Unites States of America.
