Turner's Diagnosis on Hippie Culture

There is no structure in hippie culture- through spontaneity, immediacy and the sense of "existence," they are thrown into communitas. Turner does not seem to value the communitas which hippie culture has attempted to gain. He uses poor connotation and critical thoughts to describe how they reflect the cool in society- opting out of social obligations, acquiring the stigma of the lowly, dressing like bums, itinerant in their habits, folk in music tastes, and takes up menial employment.

All these are possibly partially true of hippie culture, but living a life like a hippie does not always mean removing oneself from society as one of the cool or hip. When my parents were hippies, they were activists who tried to work for the common good of man. This does not as signify menial employment. Just because someone doesn't become someone important, doesn't mean their job is menial. I would hate to reduce any job to just this. Most jobs one can take can be used to serve society. For example, when my dad became a minister he took a side job of vinyl repair to help pay the bills. This by no means is not menial. It is a job that can help him serve a better purpose in life. The hippies did not want to live a purposeless, meaningless life. They acquired the stigma of the low and dressed like bums for distinctly social reasons. They were fighters for social justice in a time which very little people cared. Ultimately, I don't think Turner paints a bad picture of the hippie movement, instead he shows how Buddhism helped them to aquire a sense of unstructured communitas, which is reflective of pre-industrial societies. However, his initial diagnosis of the hippies, stereotypes them into a box of how the rest of Western society might see them.