ABSTRACT
The notion of cultures as isolable, unitary, internally coherent wholes has come in for such trenchant criticism over the last thirty years that its repeated disavowal has taken on the overtones of a redemptive anthropological mantra, a mea culpa for the sins of our functionalist forefathers. A notion of youth culture is clearly alien to a concept of shared, unitary and enclosed cultural universes. There is a reactive dualism to many of the currently fashionable conceptualizations of culture which often retains the elements they critique as running subtexts. In the 1970s, the Birmingham School viewed youth culture as a ‘new’ phenomenon arising through the increased spending power of British youths, the greater availability of cheap, mass-produced commodities and the development of a new leisure industry.
