Read the following text and then answer the questions:
The concept of subculture is essential to social history, with its attention to social classes or other groups out of power. Most social historians dealing with peasants or workers, with ethnic groups, or even with age groups such as youth identify cultural features different from the dominant culture. In the nineteenth century, thus, workers in Britain become aware of dominant middle-class values but deliberately preserved elements of a separate culture, or subculture even though they had little chance to gain wider legitimacy for their values. A youth subculture developed. In many parts of Europe and North America by the later 19th century, even within the middle class.
Subcultures reflect the beliefs of various groups not fully captured by the dominant culture, capable also of influencing it, but not powerful enough to replace it. Some subcultures seem more defiant of mainstream values than is actually the case. Middle-class utopian movements after 1850, in the United States, blasted middle-class beliefs in manage and property but unwittingly upheld other beliefs about gender roles or sexual or emotional propriety (women, thus, were kept domestic and inferior). Other subcultures are traditionally very separate, like gypsy culture in Western Europe.
The importance of subcultures to social history steadily grows as greater attention is given to group beliefs and to cultural causation. No theoretical definitions of subcultures are available in social history. Attention to contemporary fad groups, like punk rockers motorcycle gangs, sometimes involves use of the term “subculture”, here applied to rather small categories and often with little attention to relationships to the wider culture save the obvious claim of the defiance.
Journalists and anthropologists interested in describing varieties of popular culture do not use terms like “subculture” exactly as social historians do. It is clearly desirable to work toward sharp definitions and former overall characterization of subcultures and their contacts with dominant cultures in different periods of social history. At present subculture is not an essential category but a potentially vague catchall in the juncture between social and cultural history.
1. Features of subcultures are:
