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subculture and possible values of available items. For example, rockers’ passion
for classic rock and roll corresponds to their activity, love for speed and
technology.
Subcultures are resistant and at the same time do not significantly affect the
main trunk of culture; they are born, live and become detached, while the leading
system of culture is preserved. A well-known German sociologist K. Mungayim
compared cultural cycles to biological ones. He believed that subcultures are due to
the differences of generations. That is, adherence to cultural standards, accession to
the world of dominant culture, adaptation to it is a very complex process, full of
contradictions, psychological and other difficulties. This creates special life's
aspirations of youth, that from the spiritual foundation select what corresponds to
their vital movement, value search.
According to numerous culturologists, certain cultural cycles are formed due
to the change of generations. Young people embody a new historical reality, create
their own subculture, which, although it does not cause instantaneous tangible
changes in the main path of culture, however, affects a variety of cultural divisions,
fashion, lifestyle, behaviour and, in general, the style of the cultural and historical
era. In other words, it manifests itself as a link between counterculture and
subculture. With regard to the realities of the modern world, one can say that the
value of counterculture is not allocated to individual subcultural phenomena, but to
the entire set of subcultures. Counterculture, thus, is the cumulative effect of the
search for a new value core of modern culture.
3. Subcultural formations of past cultural and historical epochs
In each cultural-historical episode there are different trends and entities:
elitist and mass, official and folk, pagan and Christian. Thus, in the medieval
worldview and the way of life, a new spiritual, that is, a Christian, began to co-
exist with the old, pagan one.
Also, in the Middle Ages, such a subcultural scientific phenomenon as
alchemy, based on the components of scientific synthesis and imagination, rational
logic and mythology, can be singled out. Alchemy opposed the official medieval
scientific system – scholasticism.
In the Renaissance, along with the official serious culture there was a
carnival-laugh subculture. In general, it should be noted that the folk culture of that
time was precisely represented by the diversity of subcultural phenomena that had
a single style and constituted something quite intact – folk-laugh, carnival culture.
Here, one can distinguish between the concepts of "counterculture" and
"subculture". If counterculture seeks to occupy the place of a dominant culture,
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