7.4 Embracing Structure
Research About the Counterculture
Chapter 7 posts discuss my research findings about the big-picture meaning of the counterculture. This post is about the Counterculture experiment in anti-structure.
More than a movement, the Counterculture persists. During the 1960s - 1970s, participants had clear cultural markers like clothing and hair, food, lingo and slang, underground press and music. These creative mediums interacted like mycelium networks, communicating meaning to its members.
The movement created a new subculture; as in all cultures, there are practices in-common based on insider knowledge. For example, ways of doing things, reasons for doing or not doing things, and establishing new norms for relationships. American society was transforming from conservative conformity to multicultural pluralism.
Through rough-hewn experience, newcomers and old-timers in Comptche discovered the harmonizing effect of finding common ground. Back-to-the-landers did this essentially by showing up and wanting to stay, build a life, to raise kids. At first repelled by one another, most residents eventually wanted to make peace. Community events became more inclusive. They established common ground for the common good.
“We’re just gonna have to lean how to get along,” a newcomer declared to an old-timer, diffusing what could have been an explosive issue over land use.
Comptche’s community transformation is a model. It can be adopted by other communities experiencing conflict or to build cohesion and community resilience.
Community change can be understood through theories developed during two different eras by anthropologists Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner. I used their communitas theory to analyze the findings in this ethnography.
Communitas Theory identifies a number of things about healthy community life in human culture:
Anti-structure necessitates structure. Humans live together. We experience community life through its’ structures—from social institutions like school, Grange Hall, church, and social norms of behavior. We experience then liminal space of anti-structure at occasions such as a party, celebration, or ceremony, In liminal space, social statuses are often disregarded.
Being in liminal space is to experience the betwixt and between, going from structure to anti-structure, which humans do in all societies.
Communitas happens when communities come together for a common purpose.
The togetherness aspect of communitas is essential, normal, desirable, healthy.
During communitas, people often experience collective effervescence, a fleeting group high, a feeling of oneness, shared bliss.
Collective bliss doesn’t last indefinitely. At some point, the party’s over.
There is no social cost to participate in communitas, but there is social benefit.
In Comptche, newcomers and old-timer community members met over a number of years to create the town’s general plan. They also held fire department fundraisers, benefit concerts, overcame differences to build a church, and establish a new grammar school. Communitas is like like an attractive social energy, people want to come together, to keep building, improving services, and building relationships.
Communitas theory also explains why Counterculture communes were short-lived. Without structure, commune hippies were like a bouquet of helium-filled balloons. Held together at a temporary focal point, full of happy gas, bobbing together as a colorful bunch, high above it all. Too much freedom happens: the balloons are suddenly released when their focal point dissolved or conflict happened. Each balloon floats away solo, wandering into wild blue obscurity with an inevitable return to earth, deflated.
I recall a stream of characters—colorful, flamboyant, too-high, deeply troubled “heads” pass through Comptche during the Seventies. The fanfare faded after the Parker commune dissolved and the ranch reverted to its origins. Daniel Parker wrote his memoir, Cooking by Flashlight, about continuing on his family’s multi-generation ranch after the commune phase. He blended the traditions of rancher and forester with counterculture practices, like being a nudist, painter, nature sculptor, living off the land. Living with less was an ideal and value he practiced for the rest of his long life.
Hippies tested the structural limits of mainstream culture. By the end of the decade, many found it necessary and more practical to re-integrate into the greater society. Society had changed, it was not the same one they dropped out of in the 1960s. President Nixon had been impeached and at long last in April of ’75, the Vietnam War ended.
Those returning to the mainstream, many having experienced a fundamental shift in consciousness about society, community, and the environment brought these new values with them. They returned to social structure with new ideas to implement. Examples include the growth of urban food co-ops, recycling, and organics.
In Hippies and American Values, Timothy Miller interviewed former commune members who remember their counterculture youth as pivotal in the work and careers they chose: education, health care, social work, the arts, non-profit organizations, organic agriculture, environmental sciences and activism, computer engineering, to name a few fields. This is where many flower children went.
Rather than chide hippies for ambiguous failure, I want to acknowledge the shift they caused in popular awareness and practices. A critical mass of young citizens caused change through a movement. The collective withdrawal from mainstream culture and living outside the bounds of traditional structure was about exploring what could be.
The experience had it’s failures. It also provided wisdom. Anti-structure is cool for a spell, but liminality is not sustainable. Daily life needs structure. What remains of the Counterculture movement are the best practices.
Up Next: 7.5: Counterculture to Elder culture. About reviving strategies.
Resources for this post:
Durkheim, Emile, 2001 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Kaiser, David, 2011. How the Hippies Saved Physics.
Miller, Timothy, 1991. The Hippies and American Values.
Spicer, Lisa Gruwell, 2012. Finding Common Ground: When the Hippie Counterculture Immigrated to a Rural Redwood Community.
Turner, Victor, 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.