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Article Excerpt
One issue that has long interested drug ethnographers is how to conceptualize the social relations and forms of cultural knowledge expressed through, and constructed by, drug use. In addressing this issue, they have typically resorted to the conceptual and methodological tool of "subculture" (or related terms such as "social world," "small world" or "social type"), making important contributions to the development of urban anthropology and sociology more generally. The argument of this article, however, is that the concept of subculture, with its emphasis on normative values, beliefs and practices, is inadequate for analyzing the heterogeneity of some drug-using groups and their constitutive practices, particularly those groups that draw together people from diverse backgrounds and for whom drug use is not characterized by "dependence."
Reviewing subculture
There are two main traditions of subculture studies. (1) The first, originating in the U.S., is usually traced back to the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s. A group of sociologists employed qualitative methods (including ethnography) and social epidemiology to produce empirical studies of the various subcultures of inner-city urban life--tramps, alcoholics, prostitutes and youth gangs. Their methods were informed by an interest in the socially situated nature of human action and the necessity of comprehending the participants' "definition of the situation." Later sociologists continued the focus on subcultural ethnography and symbolic interactionism, producing a number of key drug studies (e.g., Agar 1973, Becker 1953, Finestone 1957, Johnson 1973, Preble and Casey 1969, Sutter 1966, Sutter 1972, Weppner 1973). Theoretically, there was a shift from seeing subcultures as "closed and relatively cohesive systems of social organization" (Gordon 1947, cited in Thornton 1997a:14) to a view of subcultures as "lifestyles, action systems and social worlds which are not fixed to any group" (Thornton 1997a:14). In much of this work, following Cohen (1955), subcultures were conceptualized as collective responses to commonly experienced sets of problems.
While this work countered popular and scholarly representations of drug use as deviant or passive with fine-grained depictions emphasizing its complex cultural meanings and social organization, the sociological tradition to which it belonged has drawn extensive criticism (e.g., Fine and Kleinman 1979, Hannerz 1992, Waterston 1993). First, subculture researchers had tended to confuse structural and cultural definitions of membership; thus, because the members of subcultures were often drawn from the working class, it was assumed that their cultural beliefs automatically reflected wider working-class values. Second, there was a lack of meaningful referents, with few studies defining what it was that they meant by subculture. The third problem was that many studies of subculture were synchronic and did not allow for fluidity and flux over time. They were predicated on the normative and reifying assumption that all the members of a subculture shared a common set of values, beliefs, practices, and, less often, common (usually "lower-class") socioeconomic origins. Furthermore, they assumed the subculture to be a homogeneous and closed social entity isolated from larger society. The depiction of the relationship between the subculture and the broader cultural entity suggested by the "sub" prefix was mechanistic. The implicit "mosaic" metaphor of cultural pluralism, then dominant in U.S. sociology, ensured that the units of study--whether by intention or by accident--were conceptualized as demarcated social worlds with fairly rigid boundaries. Finally, sociologists had tended to portray subcultures as having a central core of values organized into a system. These central values were somehow external to the subculture's members who were constrained by them.
More recent drug ethnographers (e.g., Bourgois 1995, Maher 1997, Sterk 1999, Williams 1990) or those analyzing the ethnographic data of others (e.g., Waterston 1993) responded to the view of drug subcultures as coherent, closed, homogeneous and normative entities. Inspired by political-economy approaches to drug use, they redirected their analytical focus to the broader economic, social and political structures that shape "street [sub]culture[s]." However, the focus on marginalized "street addicts," based in particular geographical neighborhoods and with common socioeconomic backgrounds, remains unchanged.
The second tradition of subculture studies, less focused on drug use than the U.S. work, emerged in Britain in the 1970s. It drew heavily on the U.S. research from the 1920s to the 1960s, but whereas the U.S. work leaned heavily on ethnography and symbolic interactionism, and was underpinned by a consensual and liberal view of U.S. society, the British work, informed by critical Marxist theory, focused on issues of social class, hegemony and power. (2) The bridge between the U.S.- and the British-style subculture research was the work of Young (1971) and Cohen (1973), both of whom retained an interest in the participants' "definition of the situation" but who situated this within an explicit investigation of the wider society's response to "deviant" behavior.
Perhaps the most well-known research on subculture in the British tradition was produced by scholars associated with The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), who considered the connections between youth subcultures and their broader class parent cultures. In this theoretical formulation, working-class youth subcultures were seen as "doubly articulated," sharing, on the one hand, many of their parents' focal concerns (e.g., the working-class emphasis on neighborhood) while, on the other, remaining subordinate to the dominant culture. Working-class young people attempted to win cultural space and to resolve the tensions of late capitalism "magically" (i.e., ideologically) through highly ritualized and stylized subcultural forms (e.g., Teddy Boys, Mods, Skinheads). To paraphrase the title of an influential CCCS book (Hall and Jefferson 1976), working-class youth "resisted," through ritual, attempts by the dominant class to control their lives.
If the U.S. subculture research was "internalist" and therefore neglectful of the relationship between subcultures and the encompassing society, the opposite criticism could be made of the British work (e.g., Cohen 1980, Clarke 1982, Hannerz 1992). With the exception of the empirical work of Willis (1977) and McRobbie (1978), the British studies paid little attention to the internal processes and differentiation of subcultures. In their primary focus on class, they neglected issues of gender, ethnicity/race and sexuality; the reliance on textual/semiotic approaches meant little attention to social organization; they romanticized "resistance" and therefore ignored the oppressive features of subcultures; they tended to see subcultures as either authentic or commercial; the rapid, self-conscious and self-referential recycling of British youth styles in the 1980s and 1990s made CCCS-style subculture analysis all but obsolete; and they neglected young people who did not participate in "spectacular" subcultures. What these criticisms amounted to was, in the words of Gary Clarke (1982:a), a call "... to focus on what (working class) youths actually do and what the appropriation of particular clothing means to youths themselves in these activities."
"Post-Birmingham" analyses of subcultures took several directions but maintained the focus on power, albeit inspired by poststructuralist formulations of the concept. Thornton (1996:8) argued that the CCCS definitions of subculture were "empirically unworkable," that past researchers had uncritically reproduced subculture ideologies (e.g., critiques of the "mainstream"), and, echoing Clarke's sentiments, that future research needed to move away from overly "objectivist" renderings of complex social phenomena in order to focus on empirical social groups. Thornton focused on the "club cultures" of dance clubs and raves, which comprised diverse subcultures with "their own dress code, dance styles, music genres and catalogue of authorized and illicit rituals" (Thornton 1997b:200). Her aim was to explore not resistance to hierarchy or cultural domination but the "micro-structures of power entailed in the cultural competition that goes on between more closely associated social groups" (Thornton 1997b:208). The movement away from the search for resistance reveals the more complex and contradictory nature of subcultures (e.g., their conformity, passivity and competition).
Other criticisms targeted the Marxist underpinnings of British subculture research. For example, Tait (1993a, 1993b) argues that the CCCS assumptions about young people winning cultural space are replicated in studies of "street kids." Young homeless people are frequently described in government, media and academic reports as comprising a street kids subculture, thereby transforming a diverse group of young people into a discrete entity with apparently shared and specific codes of behavior and ways of relating to those outside the subculture. This CCCS template, in Tait's view, is problematic because it fails to consider the various ways in which young people end up on and experience "the street." While he concedes that there are some shared aspects--being young and without a place to sleep--this is a meager basis for describing them in terms of a subculture consciousness or an antihegemonic "ritual of resistance." Instead, Tait argues, the subject position of street kids is an artefact of governmental strategies, of discourses based not solely on humanitarian care but also on surveillance and political concern. Street kids are often located within a "normal versus problem child" discourse, and "techniques of normalization" are applied to them; they are located, scrutinized, measured and assessed within an expert-assembled distribution of children. The construction of the street-kid category, with its numerous pathologies (e.g., substance abuse, risky behavior), is one more scale against which "normal" young people can be juxtaposed. This process of determining averages and norms and constructing categories (e.g., the...
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