Global Aspects of the Subculture of the Flower Children. Hippie Contestation of the Sixties and Seventies as an Outcome and Victim of Crisis
The article discusses certain aspects of the hippie culture in the context of the notion of crisis. I begin by showing critical circumstances of the dominant culture which have contributed to the blossoming of the alternative model of life assumed massively by the youth in the USA and in Europe in ‘60s and ‘70s of the twentieth century. I present the reasons and conditionings of the gradual vanishing of the subculture of the flower children and point at those phenomena taking place in modern youth culture in which one can trace analogies or conscious borrowings from the ideologies and the ways of life of its long-haired antecedents (eg. the “Woodstock Stop”, squatting). I also attempt to illuminate the global aspect of the hippie movement and its genesis, both in its chronologic and topographic sense by referring to the views on contestation of scholars such as Andrzej Tokarski and Gino Castaldo. The first author advanced an argument on the inseparable relation of orientalization and contestation, the second one emphasized its “slave” provenance.
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