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Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
As long as there has been culture, there has been counterculture. At times it moves deep below the surface of things, a stealth mode of being all but invisible to the dominant paradigm; at other times it’s in plain sight, challenging the status quo; and at still other times it erupts in a fiery burst of creative–or destructive–energy to change the world forever.
But until now the countercultural phenomenon has been one of history’s great blind spots. Individual countercultures have been explored, but never before has a book set out to demonstrate the recurring nature of counterculturalism across all times and societies, and to illustrate its dynamic role in the continuous evolution of human values and cultures.
Countercultural pundit and cyberguru R. U. Sirius brilliantly sets the record straight in this colorful, anecdotal, and wide-ranging study based on ideas developed by the late Timothy Leary with Dan Joy. With a distinctive mix of scholarly erudition and gonzo passion, Sirius and Joy identify the distinguishing characteristics of countercultures, delving into history and myth to establish beyond doubt that, for all their surface differences, countercultures share important underlying individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and a belief in the possibility of personal and social transformation.
Ranging from the Socratic counterculture of ancient Athens and the outsider movements of Judaism, which left indelible marks on Western culture, to the Taoist, Sufi, and Zen Buddhist countercultures, which were equally influential in the East, to the famous countercultural moments of the last century–Paris in the twenties, Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, Tropicalismo, women’s liberation, punk rock–to the cutting-edge countercultures of the twenty-first century, which combine science, art, music, technology, politics, and religion in astonishing (and sometimes disturbing) new ways, Counterculture Through the Ages is an indispensable guidebook to where we’ve been . . . and where we’re going.
But until now the countercultural phenomenon has been one of history’s great blind spots. Individual countercultures have been explored, but never before has a book set out to demonstrate the recurring nature of counterculturalism across all times and societies, and to illustrate its dynamic role in the continuous evolution of human values and cultures.
Countercultural pundit and cyberguru R. U. Sirius brilliantly sets the record straight in this colorful, anecdotal, and wide-ranging study based on ideas developed by the late Timothy Leary with Dan Joy. With a distinctive mix of scholarly erudition and gonzo passion, Sirius and Joy identify the distinguishing characteristics of countercultures, delving into history and myth to establish beyond doubt that, for all their surface differences, countercultures share important underlying individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and a belief in the possibility of personal and social transformation.
Ranging from the Socratic counterculture of ancient Athens and the outsider movements of Judaism, which left indelible marks on Western culture, to the Taoist, Sufi, and Zen Buddhist countercultures, which were equally influential in the East, to the famous countercultural moments of the last century–Paris in the twenties, Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, Tropicalismo, women’s liberation, punk rock–to the cutting-edge countercultures of the twenty-first century, which combine science, art, music, technology, politics, and religion in astonishing (and sometimes disturbing) new ways, Counterculture Through the Ages is an indispensable guidebook to where we’ve been . . . and where we’re going.
432 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2004
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505 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
August 16, 2016
A pretty cool history book, summarising 2500 years of world history through the lens of exploring groups and ideologies that rejected the status quo of their times. Touching on movements such as Taoism, the Transcendentalists and Sufism - and making some effort to connect them with a common thread - means that Goffman and Joy offer some really nice pieces of social history. There are some flaws with the book's scope (necessarily, as Goffman describes in the introduction), as toward the 20th Century their lens narrows to a very Anglo-centric one. They also seem to shy away from a lot of direct political activist groups - feminism and abolitionism are only touched on as parts of the ideologies of other discrete Movements. But I learned a great deal, had some assumptions challenged and others confirmed. It's also interesting to see internal and external conflicts play out over and over again in the same ways - countercultural movements dissipating after governmental suppression, the deaths of figureheads, or even petty interpersonal strife. Goffman's breezy style means that at no point is the book boring or long-winded - he has the tone of a cool uncle. A book I'll be holding on to, and probably revisiting.
October 2, 2009
Very cool book. Goes throughout history (all the way to the 90's) talking about several cultures and groups like Sufism, Zen, Troubadours, Jesus and His followers, Yippies and so many more; you name it, their in there.
Its a really interesting book, I think anyone who reads it could find some group of people in the past that they can relate to and if you're like me and often feel like maybe you don't belong because of the way you act or think sometimes, this book definitely shows you you're not alone. Give it a chance.
Its a really interesting book, I think anyone who reads it could find some group of people in the past that they can relate to and if you're like me and often feel like maybe you don't belong because of the way you act or think sometimes, this book definitely shows you you're not alone. Give it a chance.
May 21, 2007
I'm not a history buff, so the rate at which I tore through this book, and the degree to which I was inspired to learn more about history was astounding. Finally, historical heroes I can identify with, even as I question and analyze their motives and effects.
August 22, 2011
This was a fascinating look at cultures through the ages that helped push us further into periods of creativity and progress.
Read
April 5, 2020A breezy journey thru history, first setting up two sides of the spectrum of counterculture: Prometheus (ignoring god, trying to surpass the bounds of human potential) v Abraham (rejecting cultural/religious norms and forging a different path/going back to nature). Then dipping in at various times to show how that manifested and how it changed history. Strongest chapters were on Tao and Zen, the Enlightenment, and Paris during the 1920s (I particularly like the half page he just gave to a list of every single interesting person to pass thru or live on the Left Bank).
Read
July 3, 2009In Praise of Cognitive Dissidence
For the past four decades or so (dating back to roughly from Richard Nixon’s evocations of the “silent majority”) culture war has become an increasingly refined ideological specialty of reactionary politicians. It may (or may not) be true that the now stereotypical and media embedded image of America as divided into “red” (gun-toting, NASCAR-watching, gay hating, evangelicals) and “blue” secularist, modernist, metro) values blocs is an accurate description. Or that frankly liberal-progressive candidates will inevitably get their asses kicked outside reliably blue enclaves for their failure to embody traditional values, betrayal of secularist tendencies or hint of closet intellectualism. Unless, of course, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama they can learn to be masters of triangulation ( case in point: Obama on gay marriage).
What’s most striking is how hegemonic some version of the above is, and how hard it remains to find a work of punditry that DOESN’T effectively accept the premise that the “Achilles Heel” of contemporary liberalism lies in its intellectual and cultural “elitism”.
Of course while all this proceeds in the political realm the same counter-culture, endless recycled and repackaged as sex, rock n rolled up consumer novelty, becomes ironically in many ways the life blood of the global economy, an irony that hasn’t escaped caustic cultural critics like Tom Frank who revile counter-culture as an integral aspect of contemporary capitalism. It’s also become a catch-all concept to serve as a short hand for the urban-haute suburban gentry of bourgeois bohemians.
The achievement of Counter-Culture through the Ages by Ken Goffman (aka RU Sirius) and Dan Joy is to take a big step back from the current understanding of culture war, rescuing the concept of counter-culture from both neo-conservative demagogues and the trivialization of consumerist media and providing in the process a philosophical and historical defense of counter-culture as the perennial incubator of innovations in all culture.
The book, eclectically and panoramically spans four millennia, five continents , and far more cultural and historically territory than trained, carefully professional academic scholarship would deem acceptable (though one could argue that sometimes history is too important to be left to the historians). Goffman provides sketches of famous, infamous, or in some cases obscure, dissident cultures, from pre-Mosaic Jews to post-Mohammed Sufis, from the lyrical medieval troubadours of Provence to the rationalists of the early Enlightenment, from the radically skeptical Socratics of fourth century BC to the radically irrationalist or post-rationalist twentieth century artists of Dadaism and Surrealism.
Underlying the sketches and loosely linking the historical episodes is a recurring pattern. In each era Goffman’s narrative charts a secession from a dominant cultural consensus by a small fringe group of rebels, and an even smaller group of charismatic leaders or non-leaders (who fortuitously eschew formal leadership), the construction of a new cognitive consensus cultivated by the free exploration and communication of new ideas , insights and experiences (often deemed heretical to established wisdom) and active or passive resistance to conventional social-intellectual and/or religious hierarchies.
The sketches provided are well written, often funny, and in a brief space bring the movmements discussed vividly to life.
Some cover historical turf one would have thought worn thin, but manage to provide a fresh angle, defamiliarizing the familiar.
Others cover what will probably be to most readers obscure nooks and crannies, but make them compelling and contemporary.
Every single one of these episodes in the history of human freedom has been studied more comprehensively elsewhere in isolation (and one of the values and joys of the book is the impetus it gives to revisit the primary sources and histories).
What emerges is neither rigorous historical scholarship nor a comprehensive theory of historical change, but something nonetheless unique and useful; an unabashedly opinionated, necessarily incomplete guide to the protean, unpredicatable rebellious spirit and of the role of cultural rebellion in history. This is inspired amateur, literary history in the sense (if not perhaps at the same level) of Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur, HG Wells Outline of History, Kenneth Rexroth’s Communalism and Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosphy.
For the past four decades or so (dating back to roughly from Richard Nixon’s evocations of the “silent majority”) culture war has become an increasingly refined ideological specialty of reactionary politicians. It may (or may not) be true that the now stereotypical and media embedded image of America as divided into “red” (gun-toting, NASCAR-watching, gay hating, evangelicals) and “blue” secularist, modernist, metro) values blocs is an accurate description. Or that frankly liberal-progressive candidates will inevitably get their asses kicked outside reliably blue enclaves for their failure to embody traditional values, betrayal of secularist tendencies or hint of closet intellectualism. Unless, of course, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama they can learn to be masters of triangulation ( case in point: Obama on gay marriage).
What’s most striking is how hegemonic some version of the above is, and how hard it remains to find a work of punditry that DOESN’T effectively accept the premise that the “Achilles Heel” of contemporary liberalism lies in its intellectual and cultural “elitism”.
Of course while all this proceeds in the political realm the same counter-culture, endless recycled and repackaged as sex, rock n rolled up consumer novelty, becomes ironically in many ways the life blood of the global economy, an irony that hasn’t escaped caustic cultural critics like Tom Frank who revile counter-culture as an integral aspect of contemporary capitalism. It’s also become a catch-all concept to serve as a short hand for the urban-haute suburban gentry of bourgeois bohemians.
The achievement of Counter-Culture through the Ages by Ken Goffman (aka RU Sirius) and Dan Joy is to take a big step back from the current understanding of culture war, rescuing the concept of counter-culture from both neo-conservative demagogues and the trivialization of consumerist media and providing in the process a philosophical and historical defense of counter-culture as the perennial incubator of innovations in all culture.
The book, eclectically and panoramically spans four millennia, five continents , and far more cultural and historically territory than trained, carefully professional academic scholarship would deem acceptable (though one could argue that sometimes history is too important to be left to the historians). Goffman provides sketches of famous, infamous, or in some cases obscure, dissident cultures, from pre-Mosaic Jews to post-Mohammed Sufis, from the lyrical medieval troubadours of Provence to the rationalists of the early Enlightenment, from the radically skeptical Socratics of fourth century BC to the radically irrationalist or post-rationalist twentieth century artists of Dadaism and Surrealism.
Underlying the sketches and loosely linking the historical episodes is a recurring pattern. In each era Goffman’s narrative charts a secession from a dominant cultural consensus by a small fringe group of rebels, and an even smaller group of charismatic leaders or non-leaders (who fortuitously eschew formal leadership), the construction of a new cognitive consensus cultivated by the free exploration and communication of new ideas , insights and experiences (often deemed heretical to established wisdom) and active or passive resistance to conventional social-intellectual and/or religious hierarchies.
The sketches provided are well written, often funny, and in a brief space bring the movmements discussed vividly to life.
Some cover historical turf one would have thought worn thin, but manage to provide a fresh angle, defamiliarizing the familiar.
Others cover what will probably be to most readers obscure nooks and crannies, but make them compelling and contemporary.
Every single one of these episodes in the history of human freedom has been studied more comprehensively elsewhere in isolation (and one of the values and joys of the book is the impetus it gives to revisit the primary sources and histories).
What emerges is neither rigorous historical scholarship nor a comprehensive theory of historical change, but something nonetheless unique and useful; an unabashedly opinionated, necessarily incomplete guide to the protean, unpredicatable rebellious spirit and of the role of cultural rebellion in history. This is inspired amateur, literary history in the sense (if not perhaps at the same level) of Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur, HG Wells Outline of History, Kenneth Rexroth’s Communalism and Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosphy.
March 23, 2019
This should probably get more than 2 stars. But I found it boring. I am in many ways countercultural, but this just got really boring really fast for me. I think if it just gave more of a boring, chronological, factual account it would have actually been more interesting for me. I guess on this topic, I would have preferred more raw facts and for the author to leave the analysis to me. Just my personal preference. Someone else might find it interesting.
August 20, 2015
I think this is a great book with a lot of interesting arguments and histories.
However, it should be used as a starting point. The author is very obviously trying to keep the book a certain number of pages / tends to gloss over certain events. There was also a discussion in my class that perhaps the author isn't entirely well read.
This book helped me to open up to the idea of counterculture. Each chapter has a different topic / historical situation in really broad terms. It's a great resource because if the chapter's topic isn't something you are really excited about, you can read the chapter and have a basic understanding without wasting too much time with it. At the same time, if the chapter intrigues you, the author has left A LOT of room for further reading.
Really interesting subject matter! I recommend reading this!
However, it should be used as a starting point. The author is very obviously trying to keep the book a certain number of pages / tends to gloss over certain events. There was also a discussion in my class that perhaps the author isn't entirely well read.
This book helped me to open up to the idea of counterculture. Each chapter has a different topic / historical situation in really broad terms. It's a great resource because if the chapter's topic isn't something you are really excited about, you can read the chapter and have a basic understanding without wasting too much time with it. At the same time, if the chapter intrigues you, the author has left A LOT of room for further reading.
Really interesting subject matter! I recommend reading this!
June 29, 2014
Informative, enjoyable read. It's an interesting angle: approaching major world religions in terms of their counterculture elements--including at its inception, during its infancy Judaism, as well as alternative sects within other religions such as the Zen approach to Buddhism and the Sufi offshoot of Islam. I was a little disappointed the early rumblings of Christianity weren't similarly explored and I had especially hoped for a chapter on Catholicism's own counterculture movement: the Franciscans, which did garner a few mentions noting the influence of Sifism on st Francis' formation of his religious order. The author does note in one of the introductions that he expects to disappoint some readers because including every counterculture would've Bern prohibitive, if not impossible.
August 16, 2014
I finally got around to reading this. Highly entertaining read and a great overarching view of counterculture through the ages. Turned me on to a few I didn't know much about. Would also make a fun textbook for a class on the subject that I might teach one of these days...
October 24, 2007
pretty good read so far. it's an interesting history written by an interesting guy. entertaining and informative.
June 28, 2011
this was a great read, I thought it'd be top heavy with US west coast based culture, which is prominently featured, but tastefully and essentially in context and very well done.
March 27, 2012
For a book I had to read for class, I really enjoyed this. Well written, shamelessly opinionated. A nice change. Plus, I learned things about counterculture, so that was nice.
May 26, 2012
Partly read - it is the counterthinkers who bring about changes - Socrates / troubadors / Taoists/ etc)
March 24, 2014
Just a list of endless bohemian subcultures throughout time. But, very thorough and a great jumping off point for further investigation.
August 30, 2017
Can't say I read the whole thing, but from what I did, the whole book tends to read like a badly written college paper in its overquoting and broadstroking themes, its awkward pacing, and its attempt to fit socratics, sufis, buddhists, zen, the enlightenment, transcendentalists, abraham in with modern countercultural history—which just seems like the ambitious, usually never-finished final paper of a BA in Lit. Not to mention adding in lame parenthetical asides. So I suppose there's a certain bias I've developed to nonfiction countercultural history writing and a style I enjoy that Goffman fails at. On the positive side, he does bring up some interesting history, tidbits here and there, and I can tell he's earnest I suppose and even has read the books he puts as main sources in the back (though I feel he must have only browsed some of them), but really I think he bit off more than he could chew and just kept going nonetheless, even though it was sloppy overall. Also the book cover is a horrendous design, which is more than likely not his fault—looking like a gaudy ABC book for two year olds.
Quotes:
countercultures seek primarily to live with as much freedom from constraints on individual creative will as possible, wherever and however it is possible to do so.
Anti-Promethean countercultures tend to be anti-urban, primitivistic, tribal, and moralistic. [Zerzan and Jensen]
Extropians are another name for trans/post/humans
The majority of Socrates followers were children of the aristocracy, some bisexual prettyboys
Socrates message was in a sense the first individual, asking us to know thyself, and that there was potentially something unique inside each individual.
Taoist history embraced alchemy, a chinese form of yoga, a cult of wine and poetry, sexual orgies, church armies, and revolutionary secret societies.
In the first four decades of the 20th century, this Parisian artistic bohemia exploded into something that bordered on a mass movement. Literally hundreds of artists, writers, and world historic characters whose innovative works (and, in some cases, challenging personas) still resonate today passed through the portals of The Paris Moment. For example: Jean Arp, Isadora Duncan, Chaim Soutine, Anis Nin, Vladimir Lenin, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteua, Joan Miro, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lawrence of Arabia, Claude Monet, W.H. Auden, Robert Desnos, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Archibald MacLeish, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Jacques Villon, e.e. cummings, Rene Daumal, Rudolph Valentino, Andre Breton, Amedeo Modigliani, Sergei Einstein, Aleister Crowley, T.S. Elliot, Theodore Dreiser, Stephane Mallarme, Stephen Spender, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Sherwood Anderson, Yves Tanguy, Alexander Calder, E.M. Forster, Edgard Varese, Andre Gide, George Gershwin, Hugo Ball, John Dos Passos, Erik Satie, Philippe Soupault, Luis Bunel, Tristan Tzara, Max Jacob, Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Salvador Dali, Sylvia Beach and Andrienne Monnier, Emma Goldman, Rene Magritte, Andre Masson, James Joyce, Henri Mixchaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Edmund Wilson, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Rene Crevel, Ernest Hemmingway, King Vidor, Man Ray, Henri Matisse, Henry Miller, Constantin Brancusi, Thomas Wolfe, Leon Trotsky, Max Oppenheimer, George Antheil, Georges Bataille, Giorgio De Chirico, Igor Stravinsky, Thornton Wilder, Sarah Bernhardt, Ezra Pound, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Sergei Diaghilev, Virgil Thomson, Christopher Isherwood, Aaron Copland, Henri Rousseau, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Josephine Baker, Vaslav Nijinsky, Natalie Barney, Antonin Artaud, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Djuna Barnes, Maurice Ravel, Paul Valery, Lawrence Durrell, and Max Ernst.
Mary Woronov, Warhol Superstar, contrasted the Velvet Underground/Warholians with the San Francisco hippies who came to check them out when the band performed in that city: "We weren't like them at all. They hated us, they were like, 'Oh wow man, a happening!' We were like reading Jean Genet. We were S&M and they were free love. We really liked gay people, and the West Coast was totally homophobic. So they thought we were evil and we thought they were stupid.'
the incompatibilities between counterculture and authoritarian government
England, that trend crazed country [what's the trend now?]
NWA were in many ways the black Sex Pistols, reinterpreting that band's total, nihilistic rejection of all illusions of bourgeois propriety for an even harsher social reality
if Time magazine proclaimed in a 1994 cover story, "Everybody's Hip" who or what are all those carbon-copy morons on reality TV?
A functioning, decentralized, distributed anarchy on a 9 billion person planet isn't going to happen, kids. Not in my lifetime and not in yours. A more realistic, gradualist approach to a less authoritarian future is called for.
Quotes:
countercultures seek primarily to live with as much freedom from constraints on individual creative will as possible, wherever and however it is possible to do so.
Anti-Promethean countercultures tend to be anti-urban, primitivistic, tribal, and moralistic. [Zerzan and Jensen]
Extropians are another name for trans/post/humans
The majority of Socrates followers were children of the aristocracy, some bisexual prettyboys
Socrates message was in a sense the first individual, asking us to know thyself, and that there was potentially something unique inside each individual.
Taoist history embraced alchemy, a chinese form of yoga, a cult of wine and poetry, sexual orgies, church armies, and revolutionary secret societies.
In the first four decades of the 20th century, this Parisian artistic bohemia exploded into something that bordered on a mass movement. Literally hundreds of artists, writers, and world historic characters whose innovative works (and, in some cases, challenging personas) still resonate today passed through the portals of The Paris Moment. For example: Jean Arp, Isadora Duncan, Chaim Soutine, Anis Nin, Vladimir Lenin, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteua, Joan Miro, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lawrence of Arabia, Claude Monet, W.H. Auden, Robert Desnos, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Archibald MacLeish, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Jacques Villon, e.e. cummings, Rene Daumal, Rudolph Valentino, Andre Breton, Amedeo Modigliani, Sergei Einstein, Aleister Crowley, T.S. Elliot, Theodore Dreiser, Stephane Mallarme, Stephen Spender, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Sherwood Anderson, Yves Tanguy, Alexander Calder, E.M. Forster, Edgard Varese, Andre Gide, George Gershwin, Hugo Ball, John Dos Passos, Erik Satie, Philippe Soupault, Luis Bunel, Tristan Tzara, Max Jacob, Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Salvador Dali, Sylvia Beach and Andrienne Monnier, Emma Goldman, Rene Magritte, Andre Masson, James Joyce, Henri Mixchaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Edmund Wilson, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Rene Crevel, Ernest Hemmingway, King Vidor, Man Ray, Henri Matisse, Henry Miller, Constantin Brancusi, Thomas Wolfe, Leon Trotsky, Max Oppenheimer, George Antheil, Georges Bataille, Giorgio De Chirico, Igor Stravinsky, Thornton Wilder, Sarah Bernhardt, Ezra Pound, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Sergei Diaghilev, Virgil Thomson, Christopher Isherwood, Aaron Copland, Henri Rousseau, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Josephine Baker, Vaslav Nijinsky, Natalie Barney, Antonin Artaud, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Djuna Barnes, Maurice Ravel, Paul Valery, Lawrence Durrell, and Max Ernst.
Mary Woronov, Warhol Superstar, contrasted the Velvet Underground/Warholians with the San Francisco hippies who came to check them out when the band performed in that city: "We weren't like them at all. They hated us, they were like, 'Oh wow man, a happening!' We were like reading Jean Genet. We were S&M and they were free love. We really liked gay people, and the West Coast was totally homophobic. So they thought we were evil and we thought they were stupid.'
the incompatibilities between counterculture and authoritarian government
England, that trend crazed country [what's the trend now?]
NWA were in many ways the black Sex Pistols, reinterpreting that band's total, nihilistic rejection of all illusions of bourgeois propriety for an even harsher social reality
if Time magazine proclaimed in a 1994 cover story, "Everybody's Hip" who or what are all those carbon-copy morons on reality TV?
A functioning, decentralized, distributed anarchy on a 9 billion person planet isn't going to happen, kids. Not in my lifetime and not in yours. A more realistic, gradualist approach to a less authoritarian future is called for.
Read
May 27, 2024breezy, often funny, and very often enlightening historical read for someone (me) whose world history education was one year in high school where the teacher invented this thing called a "flipped classroom" where we taught ourselves the material and then graded ourselves on our work while she drank "water" out of a "water bottle" she kept tucked away in a noticeably stinky backpack.
i agree with most of the arguments made throughout the piece, though there's a minor one that appears briefly in the final chapter that i can't quite itch. this book is one that focuses on western countercultures, especially those directly influenced the US countercultural movements of the 60s (thee "counterculture"of principal analysis). but there's a moment in the book when, reflecting on the nature of third world counterculture, goffman argues that the authoritarian regimes of much of the third world have created a mentality of obedience and fear among its citizens that naturally prevent the necessary communication for countercultures to spawn. i find this insinuation overly general and ignorant of the fact that there are large areas of the world that don't value global publications of its media or the necessity to share its culture with us on the outside, leaving us with a dearth of knowledge compared to the files we have on the US, UK, France, etc. i think our modern access to such a wealth of instant information can make it easy to assume that what isn't there doesn't exist, but this modern world is still mysterious and locked away in ways we will never comprehend whether blinded by a computer's white light or otherwise trying our damnedest to experience its winds and whispers skin-first and balls-out. jstor can't be god, as beautiful and horrible as that would be.
i agree with most of the arguments made throughout the piece, though there's a minor one that appears briefly in the final chapter that i can't quite itch. this book is one that focuses on western countercultures, especially those directly influenced the US countercultural movements of the 60s (thee "counterculture"of principal analysis). but there's a moment in the book when, reflecting on the nature of third world counterculture, goffman argues that the authoritarian regimes of much of the third world have created a mentality of obedience and fear among its citizens that naturally prevent the necessary communication for countercultures to spawn. i find this insinuation overly general and ignorant of the fact that there are large areas of the world that don't value global publications of its media or the necessity to share its culture with us on the outside, leaving us with a dearth of knowledge compared to the files we have on the US, UK, France, etc. i think our modern access to such a wealth of instant information can make it easy to assume that what isn't there doesn't exist, but this modern world is still mysterious and locked away in ways we will never comprehend whether blinded by a computer's white light or otherwise trying our damnedest to experience its winds and whispers skin-first and balls-out. jstor can't be god, as beautiful and horrible as that would be.
October 5, 2023
I only read the opening 2 chapters but this book was very enlightening and entertaining. As a multiply neurodivergent person, I have never truly felt like I ever fit into mainstream society. I have always felt as though mainstream or normal society is too restrictive. This book helped me put several of my thoughts on these issues into words. Reading this book gave me some very fascinating and important ideas for the development of my own Autistic counterculture movement called Starflower. Thank you Ken, Dan, and Timothy for writing this book.
July 31, 2024
3.5 ⭐️
I’ve been reading this over my lunch breaks for a while now and I definitely enjoyed it but I’m glad to be done! A lot of interesting stuff but it is just so much information I don’t think I could’ve read it all at once. Things did blend together a little when he was talking about some of the earlier eastern philosophies but to be fair I also can’t tell any of the Christianity religions apart except Catholicism
I’ve been reading this over my lunch breaks for a while now and I definitely enjoyed it but I’m glad to be done! A lot of interesting stuff but it is just so much information I don’t think I could’ve read it all at once. Things did blend together a little when he was talking about some of the earlier eastern philosophies but to be fair I also can’t tell any of the Christianity religions apart except Catholicism
May 16, 2020
চার দিতাম। কিন্তু লেখক সোশ্যালিজম, অ্যানার্কিজম বা বলশেভিক বিপ্লবকে কাউন্টারকালচার হিসেবে উল্লেখ করেনি। আমেরিকান লেখক তোহ। যদিও সে আমেরিকান ও ফ্রেঞ্চ বিপ্লব, তাওবাদ, জেন বুদ্ধিজম, ট্রান্সেডেন্টালিজমের উপর অনেক আলোচনা করসে, যার গুরুত্ব কোনো অংশেই পৃথিবীর ইতিহাসে সোশ্যালিস্ট আন্দোলনের চেয়ে বেশী না। বইটা অবশ্যই তথ্য সমৃদ্ধ। লেখক নিজেও '৬০ এর কাউন্টারকালচারে অংশ নিসে। যাই হোক পড়তে পারেন।
October 13, 2022
I loved it! Some usual suspects and some surprises as well. The thesis is that the things that define and link countercultures are their anti-authoritarian nature, among other characteristics. The writing was high quality.
March 5, 2021
Un básico para quien busca conocer y las raíces históricas y hasta míticas de la rebeldía. Lo malo, hace años que descatalogaron esta versión en español.
May 23, 2021
A historical survey of philosophy, religion, and arts that ties them all together as "counterculture."
Nothing original here; topics discussed better and in more depth elsewhere.
Nothing original here; topics discussed better and in more depth elsewhere.
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