Hipici

The collection "Hippies" presents a selection of texts by Mike Brake, Stuart Hall, Lewis Yablonski and Paul Willis, who view the hippie movement as a complex youth subculture and a countercultural response to the values ​​of Western society in the second half of the 20th century. The authors do not reduce hippies to a characteristic appearance, music, drugs or way of dressing, but investigate how an alternative view of society, work, family, authority, consumption and interpersonal relations was formed through these elements.

Brake places hippies in the wider development of youth cultures and especially considers the transition from beatnik culture to hippie counterculture. Hall analyzes hippies as a social and cultural phenomenon, their ideology, style and attempt to create an alternative world. Particularly interesting are the alternative institutions that arise within the movement - from centers to help hippies to underground press, art and other forms of independent organization.

Yablonsky focuses on the inner life of the hippie community: its leaders, the "high priests" of the psychedelic experience, newcomers, different factions, and the search for a new form of community. His analysis shows that the hippie movement was not a homogeneous community, but a space of different ideas, experiences and degrees of commitment to countercultural values. Willis, on the other hand, observes the everyday life of hippies through drugs, music, rituals, lifestyle and alternative institutions, showing how social resistance is expressed through everyday practice.

The value of the collection today is also in the fact that it enables an understanding of hippies from the perspective of authors who studied the movement almost simultaneously with its emergence. At the same time, contemporary research warns that early sociological interpretations sometimes oversimplified hippie identity and neglected its social diversity.

"Hippies" is therefore not just a book about a historical youth group, but an analysis of attempts to build a different way of life outside the dominant social order.