The town where these lines are being written is a small meeting place
for hippies, mainly British, american and Dutch; they spend all day here
in a very lively square in the old town, mixed in with (but not mixing with)
the local population who, either through natural tolerance, amusement,
habit or interest, accept them, exist alongside them and let them get
on with life without ever understanding them or ever being surprised by
them either. This gathering has certainly none of the density or diversity
of the huge assemblies in San Francisco or new york; but, because
hippyism in this place is out of its normal context, which is that of a rich
and moralizing civilization, its usual meaning is fragmented; transplanted
into a fairly poor country, and disoriented not by geographical but by
economic and social exoticism (which is infinitely more divisive), here
the hippy becomes contradictory (and no longer simply contrary), and
this contradictoriness of the hippy is of interest to us because, on the
level of social protest, it raises questions about the very link between the
political and the cultural.
This contradictoriness is as follows. as an oppositional character,
the hippy adopts a diametrically opposed position to the main values
which underpin the way of life in the West (bourgeois, neo-bourgeois
or petty bourgeois); the hippy knows full well that this way of life is one
where materialism is central and it is consumption of goods that he aims
to undermine. as far as food is concerned, the hippy rebels against
mealtimes and menus (he eats very little, whenever and wherever) and
Chapter 12
A Case of Cultural
Criticism
1