counterculture

Definition of Counterculture

(noun) A culture within a larger culture that deliberately challenges or rejects the dominant culture’s behaviors, beliefs, lifestyle, norms, and values.

Examples of Counterculture

• Activists during the Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968).
• Aryan Nations
• Beatniks
• cult members
• environmentalism
• feminism
• Hippies, part of the Flower Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
• gay liberation movement
• suffragism
• survivalists (also called preppers)

Etymology of Counterculture

• Term attributed to Theodore Roszak (1933–2011), author of The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969).

Counterculture Pronunciation

Pronunciation Usage Guide

Syllabification: coun·ter·cul·ture

Audio Pronunciation

Usage Notes

• Plural: countercultures
• Leaders in countercultures, particularly gurus or spiritual leaders, typically have charismatic authority and their groups can become sects.
• A type of culture and subculture.
• Variant spellings:
  • counter-culture
  • counter culture
• Also called:
  • anticulture (anti-culture)
    
  • alternative culture (alternative-culture)
    
  • contraculture
• A (noun) counterculturist or (noun) counterculturalist has a (adjective) countercultural lifestyle while practicing (noun) counterculturalism.

Related Quotation

• “[I]t is the American young, with their underdeveloped radical background, who seem to have grasped most clearly the fact that, while such immediate emergencies as the Vietnam war, racial injustice, and hard-core poverty demand a deal of old-style politicking, the paramount struggle of our day is against a far more formidable, because far less obvious, opponent, to which I will give the name ‘the technocracy‘—a social form more highly developed in America than in any other society. The American young have been somewhat quicker to sense that in the struggle against this enemy, the conventional tactics of political resistance have only a marginal place, largely limited to meeting immediate life-and-death crises. Beyond such front-line issues, however, there lies the greater task of altering the total cultural context within which our daily politics takes place” (Roszak 1969:5–6).

Related Video

Additional Information

• Word origin of “counterculture” – Online Etymology Dictionary: etymonline.com
• Berger, Bennett M. 1981. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1999. One Nation, Two Cultures. New York: Knopf.
• Laffan, Barry. 1997. Communal Organization and Social Transition: A Case Study from the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. New York: P. Lang.
• Roszak, Theodore. 1969. The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. London: Faber.
• Westhues, Kenneth. 1972. Society’s Shadow: Studies in the Sociology of Countercultures. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.
• Worsley, Peter. 1997. Knowledges: Culture, Counterculture, Subculture. New York: New Press.
• Counterculture – New World Encyclopedia: newworldencyclopedia.org

Related Terms

• cultural relativism
• culture
• folkway
• mores
• norm
• society
• subculture
• taboo
• value

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Reference

Roszak, Theodore. 1969. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

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Cite the Definition of Counterculture

ASA – American Sociological Association (5th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “counterculture.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary. Retrieved April 25, 2024 (https://sociologydictionary.org/counterculture/).

APA – American Psychological Association (6th edition)

counterculture. (2013). In K. Bell (Ed.), Open education sociology dictionary. Retrieved from https://sociologydictionary.org/counterculture/

Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date – Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “counterculture.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary. Accessed April 25, 2024. https://sociologydictionary.org/counterculture/.

MLA – Modern Language Association (7th edition)

“counterculture.” Open Education Sociology Dictionary. Ed. Kenton Bell. 2013. Web. 25 Apr. 2024. <https://sociologydictionary.org/counterculture/>.