Origin of the Hippies - Wandering Groups and Modernization - Gypsies, Bandits, Hoboes and Bohemians

By Dr. David Shapiro

The destruction of tribal and traditional western life by modernization spawned groups separated from society. These groups often mobile and reaching into many nations re-emerged in history. They have influenced change in the world and in turn have been affected by the cultures of the world. Gypsies, Bandits, Revolutionaries, Hoboes, Bohemians, Beats and Hippies are subjects of the studies recent and historical forerunners. This study analyzes the cause of these groups rooted in levels of energy consumption, changes in modes of production and modernization that create fertile ground for social change. It reveals links in the chain of changes in society and its institutions that give rise to new emerging groups and beliefs. A 34 nation comparative study was undertaken in 1968. This was a critical year for the evolution of the Hippie Movement and its gradual incorporation into the general culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Georgetown Press
• Release date: Dec 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9780975487426

Book preview

Origin of the Hippies - Wandering Groups and Modernization - Gypsies, Bandits, Hoboes and Bohemians

ORIGIN OF THE HIPPIES

DR. DAVID SHAPIRO

THE GYPSIES TO THE HIPPIES A 34 NATION STUDY

The Georgetown Press

"Books of Profound Significance"

COPYRIGHT

2004 The Georgetown Press

First Printing

The Georgetown Press

P.O. Box 461

Georgetown, CA 95634

ISBN 0-975-4874-2-6

1. Modernization. 2. Wandering Groups. 3. Energy

Utilization. 4.Social Change. 5. Culture 6.Hippies

6.Bohemians. 7.Beats, 8.Gypsies 9. Bandits

10. Migrant Workers

FORWARD

Many nations have modernized since 1968 when we studied 34 nations to reveal the impact of energy consumption on the development of wandering groups. Asian and Middle Eastern nations have risen in the ranks of the world’s energy consumption. North America, although still one of the highest energy users, has grown more slowly and standards of life and the cost of labor have grown increasingly comparable world-wide. Massive urban cities much larger than in the West have been built in the former developing world in Asia, Africa, Mexico and Latin America.  Youth in the developing nations have given rise to movements similar to the 60’s, but growing out of tribal and ethnically cohesive societies.  Terrorist rebellions led by the children of the wealthy classes in developing nations found fertile ground for recruits  both in the  West, Central Asia, the  Middle  East all reflecting the loosening of family, ethnic and tribal ties as modernization and war forces these areas into the world of internet communication, and youthful separation from the arena of work as agriculture and small business give way to jobs in the military, industry,  technology and urban services and professions. Whole groups representing millions of people have been expelled from their geographic place of origin in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Latin America, giving rise to new communities in modern societies and the separation of millions of youth from their extended families and communities. The sine qua non of western European and US families spawning Hippies and youth cultures, the lack of an economic and productive role in their families, and high geographic mobility has become increasingly pervasive for youth from developing nations. The continuing world modernization gives rise to counter movements concentrating on nationalism and the survival of cultural identities, no longer rooted in the geographic communities.    The  music  and  cultural artifacts of  the  Hippie movement, has now become increasingly  pervasive among communities of youth throughout the world. The energy consumption thresholds for the development of wandering group cultures, has now become pervasive among most nations of the world. The homeless, the migrant and the immigrant from the poorer classes has become generic throughout the world with large groups moving from place to place seeking out each other to find survival and friendship in a world where the destruction of community and family ties is increasingly common.

Introduction: Hippies, Wanderers and Revolutionaries

The emergence of the Hippies or Modern Bohemian Movement in the 1960’s reflected an amorphous and sometimes submerged cultural movement going back into the far reaches of history. The scientific reasons for its emergence have rarely, if ever, been explored. The Hippies were part of the traditional emergence of wandering groups and rebels characteristic of social change separating communities, strata or individuals from their traditional social moorings within their societies. This work will not only explore the origins of the Hippie phenomenon, but how a world-wide lateral culture developed impacting the world as a whole and each locale in which it existed.  The rebellions and revolutions so prevalent in 1968, the final year of our 34 nation study, were not merely local or national phenomenon but reflected a self- conscious movement of international proportions in which the Hippie Movement played a part.  The impact of this movement originally located among the youth of many nations has continued to have far reaching consequences for our worldwide culture.

The wandering groups of the world are both a symptom and a catalyst in the unfolding of human history. Wandering groups were spawned in the world in the midst of social upheavals and carried with them the diversity of the world they experienced. These groups deposited this new knowledge along their way, pollinating the peoples of each locality with information gleaned from the myriad forms of human social and cultural life. How and why wandering groups emerged in the world and in what manner they survived or died away is a major focus of this work.  The understanding of the significance of the wandering group gives to us an additional vantage point to develop a science of history

and a self-conscious understanding of our human race. We will explore the emergence and survival of groups such as the Gypsies, bandits, hoboes, Bohemians, Beats and Hippies, the focus of our 34 nation research study.    The Gypsies are a mobile kinship based tribe originating from a non-agricultural caste; the Bandits are a non-kin mobile band, originating from agricultural laborers and freed serfs; ¹

Hoboes were a highly mobile free association of migratory workers with an occupational orientation, originating in the decaying peasantry and the developing working class; Bohemians were a free association of individuals, with an artistic occupational orientation, originating in the handicraft and petit bourgeoisie strata; Beats were a free association of individuals with a literary orientation, originating in the lower middle classes and skilled workforce and Hippies were a free association, generally based on age, not particularly occupationally oriented, whose participants originated in the managerial, skilled craft, white collar and professional strata.   These groups were selected as examples representing a range of historical periods and conditions.

Peoples of the world are increasingly being made aware of world- wide networks of human interaction which transcend all nations but have a dramatic impact upon our productive capacity and our social and cultural life.  The impact of energy consumption, technology and ideology  are particularly notable.   These networks of groups with similar cultures and activities located in multiple nations are called lateralizations.²    Modern societies are closely integrated through these lateral cultures or lateralizations which included groups concerned with

¹ For an analysis of the ‘freeing’ process in the period of declining Feudalism, See Karl Marx and Eric J. Hobsbawn, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, International Publishers, New York,

1964

²  The term lateralization means a lateral culture which transcends particular geographical or political boundaries. It will be further defined

in Chapter One and Seven of this study.  the concept of lateralization was originally discussed in Burt E. Aginsky and Ethel G. Aginsky, Lateralization Among American Indians, Proceedings of the 32nd International congress of Americanists, Mundsgaard, Copenhagen, 1958, and Burt W. Aginsky, the fragmentation of the American community, The Journal of Educational Sociology, Special Issue, toward Community Improvement, Vol. 26, No. 3, Nov. 1952, pp. 125-133.

production and consumption, research and information, values, norms and ideologies.    These lateralizations together comprise the total modern world culture.

The emergence in the world of a wandering group as a lateralization is generally a consequence of a chain of events in both time and space. Scientists have discovered the profound effect of energy usage on the development of forces of production in societies. Our study will show how energy usage and the changing forces of production stimulated the emergence of wandering groups and their continued survival or demise.

In addition to our study of wandering groups in history, the modern nomadic Bohemian or Hippie lateralization presented to us a laboratory of social forces available for study in recent times. The study of the Hippie Lateralization spans a ten year period from 1959 to 1968. The research findings indicate how the Bohemian lineage beginning in the

1830’s re-emerged in the modern world first with the Beats and then the Hippies. The Hippie Lateralization reached its apex of differentiation from the dominant culture in 1968 and presented to us a slice of time particularly suitable for a world-wide study of the relationship between the level of modernization of societies and the emergence of a wandering group. Our study compares thirty-four nations of different political and economic systems and levels of productive development. Evidence for the study of the Hippie Lateralization was collected from participant observation in 1963, 1964, 1966 and 1968 in various parts of the world, and from personal interviews, second-hand reports and the literature.

Since 1968 the Hippie Lateralization as a part of the lineage of Bohemianism has increasingly become submerged and many elements of its cultural life have been incorporated within the dominant culture. These include many of the cultural artifacts of the Hippie Lateralization such as dress, language, drugs and belief systems.  The profound difference of the Hippie from the dominant culture apparent to analysts in the middle and late sixties has disappeared particularly in the more industrially developed nations.  In the less developed nations the life style and culture of the Hippie lateral culture presented a more apparent difference from the dominant cultural life. As Hippie cultural elements became incorporated into western culture, the apparent differences reflected in Hippie appearance and life style are increasingly viewed as

traditional impositions of more developed nations on the cultural life of less developed nations.

THE STUDY OF THE EMERGENCE OF HIGHLY MOBILE GROUPS

The study of the emergence of migratory groups has major sociological significance. The appearance of new groups with highly mobile participants is generally symptomatic of social change which may be of a transitional nature. The motion of human history presents a constantly  changing landscape of methods of survival and accompanying social and cultural forms. At various periods in history the stress created by the great competing economic, political and social forces, embodied in the movement of peoples and classes forge new economic and political structures. The contradictions generated in the fabric of society when the productive relations become a fetter on the continued development of the productive forces create a fertile context for the freeing of individuals and groups from previous social bonds and set these individuals and groups in motion both socially and geographically.

Revolutionary upheavals and wars accompanying great economic and political stress often portend or define whole new epochs in human history such as Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism.   Within these epochs new eras in history come and go denoting different methods of production resulting from automation and technology, reduced or increased government control and the enslavement or ennoblement of the laborer.   Epochs and eras during their transitional phases in particular spawn the great movement of mobile and wandering groups and peoples. Thus, an analysis of these groups as they emerge gives one a window through which to view the present state of catastrophic economic and social forces and their continuing effect upon the changing epochs and eras of human history.

Many studies designed to explore the conditions which have given rise to people and groups freed from former social bonds, have also generally posited causation which portended or indicate large scale

social change.  Karl Marx in such works as The German Ideology, ³

Critique of Political Economy, ⁴ and Grundrisse ⁵ began to develop the theoretical and analytical basis of conditions which gave rise to the

emergence of mobile groups in his description of the transitional period

between Feudalism and Capitalism. This period was marked by the forced separation of individuals from the bonds of the soil and Feudalism, thus increasing vagabondage and increasing the quantity of people traveling the highways with no secure or socially legitimate sedentary locality.  However, anti-vagabond laws were soon passed ⁶, forcing the migratory vagabonds either back onto the land as farm workers rather than peasants, or into the cities as factory workers or into apprenticeships with the urban guild structures. ⁷ However, not all those freed from the soil ended their vagabondage rapidly, and new individuals were continually being freed from the land, so that institutionalized migratory forms developed. These included kinship groups such as the Travelers⁸ and free associations such as the Bandits. ⁹

The existence of migratory Bandit groups ceased or became stable as Capitalism gathered strength and eliminated frontiers and rural areas which were unsettled or un-policed.  Thus, as Marx posed this phenomena, freed people were both a result of emerging Capitalism in transition from Feudalism, as well as a further stimulus to Capitalism, through the development of a free and mobile workforce utilizable in factories and working for wages.

³ Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s, The German Ideology, International Publishers, New York, 1947.

⁴ Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Edited by Maurice Dobb, New World Paperbacks, International Publishers, 1970.

⁵ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Vantage Books, New York, 1973.

⁶ See Marx and Hobsbawn, Op cit., p. 111.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 47, 55, 100-101.

⁸ See for a discussion of Travelers, Barbara Adams, Judith Okeley, David Morgan and David smith, Gypsies and Government Policy in England, Chapter 7, Heinemann, London, 1975, and Farnham Rehfisch, Gypsies, Tinkers, and other Travellers, Chapters 9, 10, and 11,

Academic Press, London, New York and San Francisco, 1975.

⁹ See Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, Dell Publishing Co., New York, 1969.

Major or secondary periods of transition have existed both before and after the advent of Feudalism and Capitalism. For example, writers have attempted to reconstruct the social conditions and movements of peoples which gave rise to the Gypsies as a nomadic community or tribe.¹⁰ The author believes that the evidence indicates that at the end of the first millennium, conflicts between sedentary and pastoral agriculturalists for territory, notable the invasion of India by the Mongols and Tartars, appears to have been the catalyst which tore an entire caste from its social bonds. It is posited that this caste of smiths and entertainers were formerly in symbiotic relationship with the pastoral nomad warrior conquerors.

Hobsbawn’s¹¹ work on primitive rebels and bandit bands is perhaps the foremost attempt to develop an incisive analysis of the conditions which gave rise to certain types of nomadic bands, notably bandits and other rebellious groups during the transition between Feudalism and Capitalism in various parts of the world.  Hobsbawm’s theoretical considerations are drawn directly from the early works of Karl Marx, ¹² on the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism.   Hobsbawm¹³ additionally describes the hard core social revolutionary groups, such as the Bolsheviks and Anarchists as a part of social revolutionary circles, from the original groups which began the First International to the Russian Revolutionaries initially described by novelist Chernechevsky in his famous novel, What is To Be done? and reiterated by V.I. Lenin in his famous pamphlet forty years later called What is To Be Done?¹⁴

¹⁰ See Ragnar Numelin, The Wandering Spirit, McMillan and Co., Limited, London, 1937, and Jean-Paul Clebert, The gypsies, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1967.

¹¹ Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, Frederick A. Praeger

Publishers, New York, 1959, and Hobsbawm, Bandits, See footnote 9.

¹² See footnotes 3, 4 and 5 of this chapter.

¹³ Hobsbawm, Bandits, op cit., also see footnote 10, Chapter 8.

¹⁴ These groups in the 1840’s included the League of the Just and the Communist League, predecessors of the First International. See Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, Pelican books, 1976 for a description of these groups. Also see A. Chernechevsky, What is to be Done? Vintage, New York, 1961, and

V.I. Lenin, What is To Be Done?, International; Publishers, New York,

1929.

Nels Anderson’s¹⁵ seminal work on the Hobo is perhaps the only comprehensive study of the conditions for the emergence of a more modern nomadic phenomenon not premised solely on tribal or agricultural organization.  The Hoboes were a free association of migratory workers of non-kin origin whose participants developed transitory relationships both on the road and in various locos, rather than the band-like or tribal structures found historically among tribal nomads, Gypsies or Bandits. The phenomenon of the migratory farm worker is a specialized continuation of the migrant worker phenomena of the early twentieth century. ¹⁶

The evolution  of the Bohemians  through the Beats and to the Hippies is a lineage begun in 1830.  The nomadism of these freed individuals became a way or style of life for increasing numbers within this lineage. There are few studies of the contextual forces giving rise to the Beats and the Hippies. ¹⁷ There is nothing previously written concerning the modern Bohemian lateralization as a behavioral system and the economic and social determinants of its emergence and survival.

There is however a vast literature on nomadic communal people, the migration of formerly sedentary peoples and the setting in motion of these peoples through warfare, food gathering needs and climate. ¹⁸  Our

¹⁵ Nels Anderson, The Hobo, Chicago University Press, Chicago and

London, 1923

¹⁶ See Willard A. Heaps, wandering Workers, Crown Publishers, New York, 1968, for a discussion of the modern agricultural wandering workers.

¹⁷ See Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1933, 1960, Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians, Julian

Messner, Inc., New York, 1959, Ceasar Grana, Modernity and its

Discontents, Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Row, Publishers, New York, Evanston and London, 1967, Basic Books, 1964, and Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Anchor books, Doubleday and Co., Inc., Garden City, New York, 1969 (1968).

¹⁸ See Numelin, op cit., Chapter 7 to 15, Donald Powell Cole, Nomads of the Nomads, Aldine Publishing Company, 1975, and Owen

Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History, Oxford University Press, 1962,

area of interest focuses upon economic and social forces which destroyed or upset social bonds within a society itself, a phenomenon which is the dominant spawning ground of wandering groups in the modern world. Small, but important movements of this type in history include the Diggers and Levelers, ¹⁹  utopian movements generated during the period of declining Feudalism and the rise of Capitalism, as well as the Wandering Saints  of the middle  ages. ²⁰  The American cowboy is another interesting example of the migratory worker in the period of the development of agricultural capitalism in the American West.²¹

Generally studies that have coherently addressed the contextual framework for the emergence of a highly mobile group have narrowed their point of address to the movement of an original nomadic tribe and/or some of its tributary or sister tribes through time and in various geographical locales, as is done with the Gypsies,²²   or to the independent development of highly mobile groups in similar conditions in different parts of the world, as is done with Bandits. ²³

However, the contributions of Aginsky and Aginsky’s²⁴ theoretical formulations applied to the study of Harvesters, a mobile American Indian lateral formation, and their identification of multiple lateral formations which cross national boundaries, have developed the conceptual framework for analyzing the more recent nomadic groups

Nomads and Commisars, Oxford University Press, 1962 and Inner

Asian Frontiers of china, Beacon Press, Boston, 1962.

¹⁹ Christopher Hill, the world Turned Upside Down, Viking Compass Book, The Viking Press, New York, 1972. the Diggers refers to those who began digging and planting on public lands in rebellion against prohibitions on raising food for landless poor people, because of private and sanctions against farming public lands, under the king or lord.

²⁰ Eleanor Duckett, The Wandering Saints of the Early Middle Ages,

W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1959.

²¹ Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choate, Jr., The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1855.

²² See Clebert, op cit., Chapter Two.

²³ See Hobsbawm, Bandits, op cit.

²⁴ See Aginsky and Aginsky, in footnote 2 of this chapter.

represented by the Modern Bohemianism or Hippie Lateralization. Instead of tracing either the development through time and space of a single original grouping, or the independent development of a group in similar conditions in different areas of the world, our study is oriented to understanding the contextual framework for the emergence in time and space of a similar group which forms an identifiable and self- conscious lateralization. This lateralization is affected by each locality within which it is found and in turn affects each locality through its international cultural network (lateralization).

The study of forces which are affecting multiple nations reflects an assumption  of  interdependence   of  economic  and  social  forces throughout the world. It is incomplete at best and incorrect at worst to concentrate solely on the forces at work within a locale in determining the emergence of a phenomenon, just as it is equally unwise to rely solely on the international interactions without studying the internal development within each locality or nation where the phenomenon exists.

Our approach in this study combines both an analysis of the contextual conditions for the development of a particular phenomenon such as a wandering group, i.e., what makes the ground fertile, with the notion of cultural diffusion, i.e., the vehicle which brings the seeds to the fertile ground.

Finally, another notion may be of importance in viewing the emergence of highly mobile groups.  Whereas Marx ²⁵ proposed the formulation that vagabondage was a symptom of the coming of a progressive stage of development and that vagabonds were used to stimulate such a development, the notion that nomads were themselves a progressive force within society has been rarely evaluated. There is a common notion concerning the role of the traveler or the outsider who bring with them new cultural material  into a locality  and are the vehicles of acculturation. ²⁶   However, the factor of mobility itself as a progressive development in societal evolution is espoused by Lattimore in his studies of pastoral nomads in China and Mongolia. ²⁷

²⁵ See footnotes 3, 4, and 5 of this chapter.

²⁶ See Aginsky and Aginsky, op cit., pp. 146-147.

²⁷ Lattimore, Nomads and Commissars, op cit., p. 34.

WANDERING GROUP SURVIVAL