Youth subcultures are defined through bricolage, recombining cultural fragments across time

Evidence

Drawing heavily on Levi-Strauss’s work on myth, Cohen made the influential argument that youth culture was defined through recombination and bricolage in which the relationship between past, present, and future could be reordered. This aspect of his work was relatively neglected in Marxist-inspired work on youth that drew its theoretical framing from Anton Gramsci (see Hall and Jefferson, 1976). Reflecting on this work over 20 years later Cohen writes: “The notion of subcultural bricolage was somewhat ignored, which was perhaps a pity, given that it prefigured so much of the recent debate on postmodern identities” (Cohen, 1997:50). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2982

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of subcultural bricolage, borrowed from Levi-Strauss, as recombination of past/present/future elements.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in culture as recombination and remix — parallels the grafting-as-narrative-metaphor theme from the trees essay. — connects to: Postwar youth subcultures may have harbored democratic potential invisible to political surveys — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2353