Blog #3: Culture As the Windows Through Which We view Our World

Teenage wasteland is the story of a reporter who goes Bergen to investigate a historically unique case of four suburban kids who commit suicide together. She wanted to understand why this young people would choose suicide as the best course of action. She starts in Bergenfield where she finds out that there are specific socio-cultural patterns operating there through which a teenage suicide pact became objectively possible; she also finds out that there are particular conditions that made the town label kids like the ones who committed suicide ‘burnouts’ ‘greasers’ ‘hoods’ ‘beats’ ‘freaks’ ‘hippies’ ‘punks’. She spends the next two years learning about these outcast youth.

This reading was in conjunction with chapter 3 of Experience Sociology, which talks about culture. While reading this article, I kept thinking about the nonmaterial element of culture i.e. values, beliefs, standards, knowledge, behaviors and norms; when majority in the society share this elements, then it is the dominant culture. When a subset of a society does not conform, instead it has values, beliefs, standards, knowledge, behaviors and norms that are different from the rest of a society, then it is a subculture. The ‘burnout youth’ phenomena that Donna Gaines encounters in Bergenfield and beyond shared a subculture.

Culture can be seen as an onion. It has numerous layers to it. The outermost layer is what we can see. In the case of Teenage Wasteland, it can be physical like the description of how the teenagers looked: they wore lots of black and leather, had shaggy haircuts, and listened to thrash metal. The second outer most layer is composed of what our heroes are, and what they pass down to us. For many of us, it is the people we learn from, for others it is the people they admire. The teenagers’ heroes in Teenage Wasteland were rock musicians like AC/DC, whose music was found beside the corpses. At the center of it all are the core values – those deeply held principles or standards by which we make judgments about the world. These values are what led the community at Bergenfield to label some of its youth as burnouts.

When cultures and subcultures are too different from each other, then there will be conflict or consensus. In her research, the author of Teenage Wasteland finds that there are differences between what sets of a population expect of each other, for example, parents expected children to stay in school and get absorbed in legitimate, established routine of social activity; but this was not enough for the kids. They still got bored and occupied their time with worshipping Rock and Roll icons. One of the reasons that emerged to explain the burnout youth phenomenon was ‘teenage boredom’. As teenage boredom became a concern, because it was leading to alcohol and drugs and in extreme cases suicide, the town tried to remedy it with afterschool activities and part time afterschool jobs.