What do societies mean when they address youth cultures? What youth are they talking about? Do youth even have their own culture? Aren’t they part of a bigger culture? The Egyptian culture? Egyptian society doesn’t solely focus on or study youth cultures and their norms and subcultures, and even if they do it usually relates back to improving their entrepreneurship and employment opportunities.
‘We need to empower the youth and help them develop’ is something we hear a lot. But how can this realistically be applied if we don’t understand the underlying struggle they are going through?
To start off, what is culture? According to Kim Ann Zimmermann’s: “What is Culture”, the definition of culture refers to the characteristics of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Youth culture is simply the cultural aspects of youth.
The first recognized academic study of youth first began in the United States at the University of Chicago. “From 1913 under the direction of Robert Park and later with Ernest Burgess, the Chicago school began to construct ethnographic maps of the social and cultural territories of the city with its diverse populations.” The Chicago model compared human beings to plants. Meaning, the balanced life of a plant was compared to that of humans.
Upon reading this I remembered Herbert Spencer and his essay “The Social Organism”. It states: “Youth cultures are often seen as breaking the norms of societies’ scripted roles that governments and institutions have placed for them. When this begins to happen, institutions see it as chaos and disobedience”.
In order to be able to understand what youth cultures are all about, one must distinguish the differences between subcultures and countercultures.
The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures states: “Subcultures are the meaning systems and modes of expression developed by groups in particular parts of the social structure in the course of their collective attempts to come to terms with the contradictions of their shared social situation. Subcultures are working class people, looking for ways to escape from the structured system by being part of a group who has the same ideologies and style as them. Their style distinguishes them from those around them and gives them identity, individuality and a sense of belonging. In subcultures, work and leisure are strictly separated”.
Countercultures are middle class rather than working class and they are based on believing in a cause rather than being leisure based. The common factor between countercultures and subcultures are that they both want to overthrow what is known as the capitalist structure and institutionalized society. They believe that both of these things are the factors causing inequality in society. Why are so many of the youth acting out or not wanting to be part of such a constructed and constricted system?
Let’s take Egypt as an example. Go and ask an average Egyptian on the street how the youth are doing and currently holding up. A very common answer is: “El shabab taaban”.
When they say this, they don’t just mean the youth are physically tired. It means they are fed up, sexually frustrated, broke, struggling, high on drugs, escaping reality and responsibility, trying to make ends meet, trying to get married, and trying to make a better life for themselves.
People can barely find jobs, make enough money to get married, to have a social life, to basically do anything at all. That’s why you have gangs stealing, unemployed bunches sitting around in run-down houses getting high, sexual harassment on the streets, girls getting raped and violence on end. Isn’t it only natural then for such subcultures to develop? Although the government is consistently implementing plans to develop the youth and create employment opportunities, the general attitude is countering their efforts because they lack trust and ambition.
Instead of trying to study these groups like bacteria under a microscope and coming up with a relevant hypothesis, how about studying the root cause of what makes these people act the way they do? The youth acting out of the conformity of the system or transgressing any set boundaries are seen as a crisis, a threat. So let’s go back to that and talk about another example of a subculture.
Middle-class subcultures can be distinguished from working class ones both in their formation and the way in which they are organized. Michael Brake’s “Comparative Youth Cultures” states that: “Middle-class subcultures tend to be more diffuse, more self-conscious, particularly of international aspects. They have a longer influence over their members’ life styles, and have a distinct relation to the values of dominant classes, although these may be stretched”.
These people have the luxury to get bored of work and drop down the social ladder if they feel like it; opposed to those of the working class who can’t go any lower than they already are. Middle class subcultures have the luxury of being able to intertwine work and play. For example, if a person from a middle class subculture has a passion for cooking, they could open a restaurant and that could be a source of income as well as doing what they love.
Consumerism is a dominant concept when it comes to youth cultures. In order to fit into a certain group, one must have a certain style or identity. Each subculture has a different type of dress and attitude. In order to get those things and become part of that group, you have to work. From work, you get money and with money you buy and buy and buy some more.
Subcultures react imaginatively through consumption and identity to construct creative meanings that can be liberating from subordination. In order to be different one must buy clothes and products they think will make them different. And of course, the sneaky industries realize this. Hence, consumer culture is born. It’s all about making money and distracting people from their sad and miserable realities. They give them the chance to feel like they can finally buy into something and become part of this consumer society. Buying into “the dream” if you will.
So can we really properly define youth cultures? You can look at them, observe them, and try to understand them. You can do so many things but unless you’re a part of them and really understand why they do the things they do, it’s pointless to sit and analyze. Instead of having a 50 year old white man sitting at a desk trying to come up with theories about a bunch of ‘delinquents’ maybe they should try to understand corrupt societies first. Understand why the government gives such low-wage salaries, why there are no jobs, why institutions and the system cause so much inequality between classes.
These are the major things we should be trying to understand and focus on and what educational institutions should be teaching us. Youth cultures are actually a great way to understand everything that is wrong with our social and governmental institutions. Through that, we should be able to understand, learn, grow and change.
The root cause, always go back to the root cause.
