Page 185 - Constructing Craft

aspirations. This was the inward-looking alternative lifestyle that some New

Zealanders would also be drawn to.

The hippies were also mythologized largely because of the extensive use of mind-
altering drugs, the advocacy of ‘free love’ and the rejection of the values of

contemporary society. As a protest movement the hippies appeared to have noble
ideals: ‘The essential elements in the hippie ethic [were] based on some very old

notions ‒ the mind-body dichotomy, condemnation of the worship of "things," [and]

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the estrangement of people from each other’. However, the ideals were never
clearly expressed and the movement lacked any unified structure. An example of

the fascination of the public with this apparent aimlessness was the success of the

1968 musical Hair. Hair was described as ‘the American tribal love-rock musical’ in
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which nothing happened, but it offered ‘the audience a glimpse of hippie life’. A
suggestion for the prurient interest was that ‘hippies do absolutely nothing and do it
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with an inexplicable – surely drug-induced – enthusiasm.’

Hippies and Craft

Many hippies appeared to be interested in crafts and a number made craft items to

fund their way of life. However, a lack of unity prevented the development of a craft

ethos. Hippie craftspeople validated the public’s perception of craft by producing the
items that the public associated with hippies – beads, headbands and leather

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shirts. The connection between hippies, rural communes and craft became a
symbol of the physical manifestation of the projections of those who challenged

society. Craftspeople were workers, but they were also ‘free’ and creative, because

they worked outside the normal structures of industrial capitalism. Craft objects
could be seen as sites of transference, by which the rustic could be brought into

urban domestic space; the furnituremaker’s chair and the handmade pot became
portable symbols of progressive political sympathies. Furthermore, craftspeople

appeared to favour antiquated technology and techniques, and so could be seen as
antipathetic to industry, but they also produce objects of use. They represented the

most productive type of pastoral nostalgia, in which ‘critical negation of the social

Constructing Craft