Subcultures - A Brief Look into the Hippie Subculture

Hippies in Animation

Extracted from Wikipedia's "Hippie" article:
A subculture that was originally a youth movement that emerged in the US during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word 'hippie' came from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.

In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularised hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic house truckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970 many gathered at the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people and in later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere.

Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies have gained widespread acceptance, and Easter philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a larger audience. The hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in myriad forms, including health food, music festivals, contemporary sexual mores, and even the cyberspace revolution.

Extracted from Suite's "Hippie Philosophy Understanding the Hippie Ideology" article:
One of the most recognisable aspects of the hippie counterculture was the strong opposition to wars and nuclear weapons. Hippies embraced the principle of non-violence and argued that no good could be obtained from mass destruction since attacking different countries in the name of justice is the opposite of the principle of justice itself.

Hippies understood that it is fruitless to search for peace outside when people have not attained inner peace, so many of the hippie practices such as living in community and sharing possessions were also an attempt to resolve inner conflicts such as selfishness, jealousy and anger. The lifestyle adopted by such communities was an idealisation of a peaceful society which would have overcome the barriers of egocentrism.

Extracted from Pg 22 of "Subcultures Cultural Histories and Social Practice" by Ken Gelder:
Howard identifies four hippie ‘types’ along these lines: the visionaries (‘utopians who pose an alternative to existing society’, repudiating in particular the conventional values of ‘work and commerce’), freaks and heads (drug-oriented hippies who relish the ‘trip’), plastic hippies (those for whom being a hippy is merely a matter of ‘fashion’ or appearance, that is, ‘inauthentic’ hippies), and midnight hippies - considerable numbers of usually older people ‘integrated into straight society’ who are nevertheless in sympathy with the bohemian values that hippies espouse (Howard 1969: 43, 50).

Hippies from the late 1960s might have relished the 'trip' but they also developed alternative modes of settlement through communal living: producing what Speck et al. had called 'new families', made up of groups of peers and radically distinguished from the conventional nuclear familiar at home (Speck et al 1974: 34). In his study of more contemporary 'cultures of resistance', Senseless Acts of Beauty (1996), George McKay mixes post-hippie social movements together with New Age Travellers and various neo-tribes to produce an affectionate tribute to British counter-cultures and subcultures during the 1980s and early 1990s that talks about rootlessness and settlement at the same time.

Extracted from Pg 45-46 of "Subcultures Cultural Histories and Social Practice" by Ken Gelder:
Irwin talked about two 'grand scenes' in the United States, hippies and surfers. These were also 'lifestyle' scenes, but they began with particular kinds of investments: in an ideology and world-view (hippies), and in a combination of way-of-life practices and actual skills (Surfers). Irwin's account gave these two subcultures a rise-and-fall narrative that would anticipate Dick Hebdige's view of the inevitable incorporation of British punks just a couple of years later (Hebdige 1979). The first phase for a subculture is its formation; this is followed by its expansion, its corruption, and finally its stagnation. The hippie and surfer subcultures expanded too rapidly, each drawing 'more people than it could absorb' (Irwin 1977: 121): 'hangers-on' who were less ideologically committed, less skilful, and so on. But perhaps their diffusion is more typical than unique. Scenes, for Irwin, are 'tightly scripted' in one sense, but they always leave room for 'improvisation' (194). The commitment one makes to them can indeed be 'casual' - a feature that also speaks to the inherent instability of a scene. Scenes might have more permanence than fads and crazes, but they do chance and they do become undone.

Reference and Further Reading:
https://suite.io/thais-campos/590d22t
http://classroom.synonym.com/hippie-values-beliefs-5594.html
Subcultures Cultural Histories and Social Practice by Ken Gelder