ABSTRACT
It is not the aim of this first chapter to provide an exhaustive critique of studies of youth culture in the West —for this the reader shall be directed elsewhere. 1 What is attempted is an outline of the main discourses on youth and its cultures, indicating their academic and institutional origins, their paths of development and their common themes. For many readers this will be very familiar ground, but it is essential to map out the territory anew before stepping out into a less familiar cultural context. The theoretical debates raised in this chapter will be dealt with briefly and will be confined to those issues which re-emerge as key themes in the youth culture debate in the former Soviet Union or which frame the analysis of the empirical material in Part III of the book. For readers who are unfamiliar with the Western academic debate around youth and its culture, the chapter will act as a basic introduction to Western theories providing a framework for further reading.
