De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de contracultura. Una aproximación desde la historia cultural

Abstract

The complex relationship between the counterculture and the youth culture of leisure and consumption must be approached by reviewing this notion from the perspective of cultural history, in relation to the debates on the definition and hierarchization of culture in the English speaking sphere since the mid-twentieth century. This paper will attempt to reconsider this relationship, starting with the study of the debates in the United States during the 1950s in which the intellectual opposition to mass culture was forged, and then moving on to the 1960s and analyzing the progressive recovery of these forms of culture in British Cultural Studies. The emergence of the counterculture in the theoretical debate in the sixties as a form of political youth culture, in the diagnoses of Jeff Nuttall and Theodore Roszak, will evolve in the following decade, in the works of George Melly and Dick Hebdige, to a reconsideration of many of these pop forms of culture under the idea of style. Based on this review of the intellectual debate in the English speaking sphere, we will then address the cultural framework, agents and media through which this notion of counterculture entered Spain in the early 1970s, during a process of intense socio-cultural change, through cultural magazines such as Triunfo and Fotogramas, and new publishing houses interested in contemporary culture. To conclude, we will contrast these historical discourses with the conceptualization of counterculture in the revitalized historiography dedicated to it that has been developed in the last decade in Spain.