Background and Rationale

The Seminar explores the idea of alternative culture in several independent contexts. In doing so, it takes up issues, concepts and debates at the leading edge of current research in the humanities and social sciences, with the aim of creating an exciting new area of interdisciplinary study that will reframe our approach to the study of culture in both contemporary and historical perspective.

A study of the products and practices of alternative culture in the context of globalization needs to grapple with the complex changes that both culture and the study of culture have undergone in the past fifty years. In liberal democracies, socialist countries, and developing countries alike, the post-WWII period has witnessed a radical democratization of universities. This expansion of universities has been accompanied by a more diverse student and faculty population: in addition to students from more varied economic backgrounds, greater numbers of women, ethnic minorities and other minority groups have found their way onto campuses.

One of the immediate impacts of this change in the composition of universities has been that traditional notions of culture have been challenged. Culture as a property of elites, whose access to the symbolic register of cultural discrimination helped them to maintain political and social power, has been definitively put into question. At the same time, anthropological notions of culture, which have themselves been challenged due to their connection with projects of imperialism, began to be taken seriously as an appropriate way to assess contemporary societies. If culture is understood as those practices defining a ‘whole way of life,’ it was evident that over the history of the university only a narrow part of social life was actively studied and interpreted; changes in the university meant changes in what we began to look at as culture as well.

In Western universities, members of the New Left made arguments for the serious study of popular culture, including subcultural and countercultural practices, while women and ethnic minorities criticized literary and art historical canons for excluding them from the cultural-historical record. Outside the university walls, as popular commodity-culture became increasingly dominant, groups excluded or separated from the mainstream begun to produce alternative forms of culture to contest the sterility of a culture generated purely for profit.

In Eastern Europe and developing countries, alternatives to official forms of culture also flourished in the period following WWII, if often with a more explicit political intentions. In state socialist countries, samizdat and underground art fought off censorship, broke taboos, and provided alternative fora for political and artistic expression and socialization. After the end of state socialism, the reflexive and inclusive turn in social and cultural studies in the West also made their way into post-communist states. Partly as a reception of western academic disciplines and partly as a home-grown, domestic renewal of theoretical conceptualization, the notions of both ‘culture’ and ‘alternativeness’ were pluralized. To make things even more complex, Eastern European countries also experienced the advent of commercial popular culture, as well as attempts to challenge mainstream culture with alternatives.

What would have made little sense in anthropological understandings of culture, even up to work by structuralist anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, had thus become central to making sense of twentieth-century culture, both East and West: the idea that to every cultural dominant (i.e., mainstream or official culture) there existed numerous alternatives, which in their hidden and underground spaces criticized and even rejected the path of modernity taken by socialist and capitalist states. Most recently, in the middle of these multiple understandings of the ‘alternative’ just beginning to be fully formalized and understood, has appeared a further cultural-historical development that demands further rethinking of how culture is theorized and interpreted: globalization.

Whether globalization is understood as the name for a historical period, as a description of an economic phenomenon or as a change in how human beings experience the world (e.g., the sense of the world as a single space in which formerly disparate phenomena are now seen as linked), it has had an impact on how scholars study and explain culture—not least the relationship of ‘alternative’ cultures to cultural dominants or mainstreams. This impact has been felt especially in how scholars might teach their students about cultural artifacts and practices, past and present. While most studies of culture in the context of globalization have focused almost exclusively on the impact of more extensive and intensive forms of cultural connection across borders as a result of new communications technologies, ease of travel, etc., there has been a relative dearth of research and teaching on the more fundamental question that underlies this spatial transformation: what today is culture for? And what are all the ways in which alternatives in and to culture in globalization are being formulated? Finally, where, how and to what end are alternatives coming into existence?

The Seminar will probe the concept of alternative culture in order to help develop new ways of teaching and researching contemporary culture, both in former socialist countries and in the West. Alternative does not mean minor or insignificant. Indeed, what has been developing through the idea of alternative is an entirely distinct framing and understanding of culture. The era of globalization is one in which enormous numbers of alternatives are positioning themselves against a dominant that has been torn apart by the speed of spatial and temporal transformations. We are heading into a cultural situation without precedent, in which alternative cultures circulate with an ease that substantially challenges official or mainstream culture. This Seminar is essential to generating new ways of making sense of this situation and of creating the intellectual and scholarly tools to teach and research contemporary culture with fresh insight and energy.