Distinct, non-normative, Do-It-Yourself (DIY), and marginal cultures, often encapsulated under the umbrella term ‘subcultures’, continue to be popular topics across a variety of social science and humanities disciplines and empirical research areas. Building on academic trajectories rooted in the Chicago School of sociology and the Birmingham School of cultural studies, the consistent publication of research that uses the subculture concept attests to the sustained scholarly interest in, and relevance of, theoretical and empirical examinations of a diverse range of phenomena using the concept as an interpretive lens. Despite such interest, however, no prior book has assembled a set of contributions that intentionally explore the interpretive practices through which subcultural phenomena are conceptualized— that is, made real by scholars and by social actors in everyday life. In the chapters that follow, scholars from around the world discuss in various ways their own research to show the reader how interpretive practices connect to the sociological concept of subculture. By explicitly focusing on interpretation as a process that has profound influence in our understandings of social and cultural phenomena, this introduction begins by bringing meaning-making to the foreground of subcultural studies.

The process of conceptualizing and articulating subculture is part of the larger process of conceptualizing reality. For a theory of reality, we can go at least as far back as ancient Greece and Plato's concept of ‘forms’, which suggested that if people want to understand what something is, they should begin by considering what it should be, that is, to imagine the phenomenon in its ideal form. Plato (and ancient Greek philosophers more generally) argued that everything had an ideal or essential form that was created by the gods— a perfect version that might or might not exist in lived reality. What Plato was theorizing philosophically was the nature of the relationship among reality, language, and knowledge. While a variety of scholars over the centuries have come to various conclusions about the nature of reality, the important point for this volume on interpretive practice is that beliefs about a pure, abstracted, gods-given version of things has been largely rejected within the social sciences. Most sociologists, for example, agree that reality exists obdurately, but that the meanings that are created and negotiated by people turn that reality into a social and cultural world.