Punk Subculture

With the high pace of modernization since the 20th Century, people tend to be mechanized into living where they live. Concerned with the erosion of identify and distinct ways of life, large quantities of subculture emerged，especially in the late 1960s and 1970s. Bourdieu has already coined the term ‘cultural capital’ to explicate the cultural asserts available within society. As provided with unique habitus and subcultural production, diverse subcultures often distinct through different subcultural capitals. This essay will interpret the notion of ‘subcultural capital’ thoroughly and analyses how it assists subgroups differentiate themselves from other social groups, especially focusing on the punk subcultural capital and its contemporary condition.
Based on the theoretical foundation on cultural capital originally put forward by Bourdieu, Thornton further developed this notion ‘subcultural capital’ to make sense of the distinctions made by different subcultures and their unique cultural worth, which helps the subculture larruping (Thornton, 1996). Different from the social capital and economic capital, which mainly concerned with status and fund, the subcultural capital focuses on the accumulated knowledge within a particular subculture. Therefore, it is more related to the essence of the culture, rather than the transmission. In this way, Subcultural capital plays a more important role than the social and economic ones on group identification.
Subcultural capital usually originates from the social groups and then exposure to public to set off cultural practice, through which get subcultural productions, mainly are the music, art, literature and fashion. And both the subculture capital and the subculture production may shape the habitus in terms of their cultural tastes. In return, the habitus and the production result in an accumulation of subcultural capital. This process appears to be a circuit and operate to develop the cultural uniqueness. (see Figure 1)