Alternative culture is a type of
culture that exists outside or on the fringes of
mainstream or
popular culture, usually under the domain of one or more
subcultures. These subcultures may have little or nothing in common besides their relative obscurity, but
cultural studies uses this common basis of obscurity to classify them as
alternative cultures, or, taken as a whole,
the alternative culture. Compare with the more politically charged term,
counterculture.