Chinquapin: Hippies' Ideas of Culture?, Culture, Critique, Harbin

Hippies' ideas of culture? Counterculture? Protest? Envisioning anew? Communitarianism? New society?

In an anthropological sense? Victor Turner's communitas and liminality? In terms of practice? In the 1960s and early 70s, there was a return to folk practices, a return to the land, and while hippies were 'all over the map' in terms of reasoning (in the context of modernity), aspects of hippie '{counter} ~ culture' were very analytical, - for example, in systems' thinking (Norbert Wiener), Laurel Robertson's "Laurel's Kitchen" with its nutrition tables and information, as well as recipes, and Stewart Brand's "The Whole Earth Catalog," for example. And hippies and counterculture also, significantly, gave rise to (what's the best language here when writing about culture?) the personal computer, and contributed significantly, also, to the scientific discipline of ecology, for example.

Perhaps Jim Clifford expresses current anthropological conceptions of 'culture' best in his books "The Predicament of Culture" and "Writing Culture," in my view. But while these books could be viewed as possibly 'dated' in anthropology, even at only around 20 years old, they do highlight key challenges with the word 'culture,' as well as point to a variety of epistemological questions that anthropology will continue to address.

I think anthropologists, counterculturally, shy away now from the idea of 'ethnic group' as a key concept informing the notion of culture, as well as any connotations of this, partly due to challenges (historically, too) of thinking about race, even though this has been an ongoing focus throughout anthropological history, in one way or another. And anthropologists and anthropology graduate students still choose a field site ('place') as key to their work, which in turn relates to seeking to understand people who live 'there' in not yet examined ways.

But the role of critique was fundamental to counterculture, which articulated uniquely with academic thinking and critical thinking, as a millennial old practice {e.g. since the ancient Greeks}. Anthropological critiques (e.g. Marcus and Fischer's "Anthropology as Cultural Critique") have a century-old body of literature informing them; and anthropologists and anthropological literature have played a dissenting role in academia, especially by making central on--the-ground approaches to knowledge-generation in research.


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Harbin Hot Springs and 'culture?' The pools, the clothing-optionalness, its freedom-mindedness, the fabric of life in the Harbin valley, the residents, the people who live there, Harbin visitors, - all emerging from the 1960s and early 70s ... MMmmm ... & the relaxation response ...