Dissident consumption, or is it?

4‘make the best and finest sarapes that are known, blankets, wraps, cotton cloth, sashes, and other things for their dress and for sale….A proposition I made them…in order to stimulate them more to work with the interest it will produce for them, which is in essence, their sarapes being so appreciated by the presidial officers, they might make as much as they can until the departure of the wagon train, they might deliver them to me so that I might send them to be sold and the proceeds bring them spun wool of several colours in order that with these making them more showy they would command a better price and be of equal utility, it seeming to them very well that my plan be executed’.

There still remains no way of underestimating the detrimental impact that White contact imposed upon the native peoples of North America from the early 1600s until modern times. Their motives were greedy, ruthless and marginalizing. Long after the Spanish control of the Southwest, the nineteenth century saw programmatic attempts by missionaries and agents representing the United States government seeking to destroy or modify native political, social, religious, and economic institutions as a step toward their political integration and complete social assimilation into the conventions of the American mainstream ideal of ‘civilisation’.

Despite the introduction of an independent Hopi agency in 1869, many promises were made and undone by the federal government, in response largely to a Hopi delegation requesting famine relief in the face of adverse drought little or nothing was done to implement the resolution of title rights to the region’s water and mineral supplies. An issue that lay at the root of the conflict between White and native cultures, as native societies were restricted to increasingly smaller reservations most often lacking access to traditional natural resources.

For years spanning the most part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth the interference of the White ‘civilisation’ forged a history of confrontation and contempt through victimising, exploiting and manipulating. Regular assaults by the U.S army on those deemed ‘dissident’ would often result in savage butchery or instantaneous and extensive imprisonment. One anecdote recalls an incident whereby the recently appointed Hopi agent ordered the delousing of the Hopis, by forcefully man handling men, women and children indiscriminately into a large vat of sheep-dip. Women were stripped naked and;

5‘the few men in the village when this happened tried to stop the white men, but they were unable to stop them. The white men were armed with heavy sticks like baseball bats and they would hit our men over the head with them. One man…was hit over the head so hard that his head was split open and he was dead for nearly two hours. When he came alive again they put handcuffs on him and on another man and hung them to a horn of a saddle and sent them to jail…’.

INDIANS AND THE COUNTERCULTURE

The arrival of the mid-twentieth century saw a different turn of events which led to the emergence of a youthful counterculture in America which saw itself very much embodying the reflection of the American Indians, particularly those of a traditional and actively political standing. The ideal of this counterculture sought to lay down the foundations for an egalitarian coexistence catalysed by America’s growing urban-industrial success. An inadvertent cultural deviation triggered by the seminal effects of World War 2 and its subsequent ‘baby boom’ period which propelled the U.S into a seemingly utopian age of new wealth, power, leisure, and inextricably; guilt.

The 1960s spawned an age that was to constitute an unusually large and vociferous youth population, who revelled in this affluence and leisure, exuding new levels of political and cultural confidence in response to the revolutionary advancement and expansion of media access. Thus, facilitating a heightened sense of awareness for political and cultural change. The sixties again brought with it a sizable and controversial war, culminating in a state of alienation and fear of a world wide political crisis, the knock on effect incurred a radical fascination with notions of spiritual revival and invention, in turn sealing a departure from any faith in high technology and austere intellectuality. Membership traits included;

6‘colourful or ragged garments, long hair on males, sexual promiscuity, use of drugs for pleasure and insight, esoteric and eclectic religious politics, earnest commitment to group process and honesty, and language that evolved rapidly to stay ahead of usurpation by the movement’s vast and fascinated audience’.

American Indians epitomised the very essence and ethos of what this young white movement was searching for.

7‘Ecologically aware, spiritual, tribal, anarchistic, drug-using, exotic, native, and wronged, the lone genuine holdouts against American conformity and success’.

This newly formed cult integration formed the basis of what would later evolve and proliferate into a situation that David Howes has since described as the, decommodification of ‘Indianness’, whereby Indian practices have eventually come to be appropriated and misrepresented. The new counterculture embraced the old with such vigour, enthusiasm and emulation that the young white Americans were effectively telling the Indians how to be Indian. A pivotal movement came in 1967 when at an event called 8‘The San Francisco Human Be-In’ or subtitled as the, ‘Gathering of Tribes’, huge groups congregated calling themselves, “hippies”, “freaks” and “longhairs”; many of whom adopted traditional native Indian pseudonyms.

The Indians reception to this immense influx of White interest was initially ambivalent and superficial but as the sixties got under way the two groups reconciled a mutual political cause. With the development of pan-Indian national organisations such as the National Indian Youth Council and the American Indian Movement, a new energy of youthful pride became manifest within the Indian spirit. White sympathisers wanted to aid Indians in political causes, reciprocation for ritualistic and religious teachings offered to them by the wise elders of most often Hopi and Navajo tribes. Soon the fusion of political interests evolved into a cultural exchange and hybridisation of the arts and humanities. Ultimately the American Indians provided the counterculture with a living identity base in return for this culture to provide them with a revival of respect and support for traditional Indian ways amongst the Indian youth, procuring a mutual dissipation of dominant white ideologies.

However, in spite of this unity a paradox has evolved according to David Howes. He argues that a consequent effect has been the huge saleability and commodification of native American culture. The expropriation of their heritage has resulted in a state of;

8‘popularisation and corruption of native traditions and imagery through their unauthorised reproduction and commercial exploitation by non-Indians’.

His argument contests that the appropriation and proliferation of Native American culture within counterculture groups serves as much to denigrate the integrity of Indian traditions and beliefs as the oppressive persecution they so long endured during the nineteenth century.

A quote from Sharyn Udall’s, The Irresistible Other offers a rationale behind the cult absorption of all things Indian, which, in my mind also forms the basis for subcultural appropriation by groups such as hippies and travellers who became very resurgent later on in the eighties.

10‘The ‘discovery’ of the Snake Dance coincided perfectly with an accelerating American search for national identity. Hungry for a cultural past distinct from that of Europe, Americans had begun to look among the indigenous peoples of their own continent. Onto ancient American roots, Euro-Americans began to graft their aspirations for a noble past’.

Also in support, Howes quotes;

11‘The Hopi are typically held up as icons of spiritual wisdom, exemplars in a quest toward new meaning in the malaise of modern life’.

In this country the eighties was an era that witnessed the development of high unemployment and high expectations, such events resulted in mass protests, dwelling in squats and for many the ‘road’ was the alternative whereby living in converted buses, trucks and old caravans became common place. For these people individuality, anarchy and non-conformity became the integral essence of their being. Despite them still representing a large and forceful contingent today their style of the unconventional, cheap and hard wearing has since become subsumed by contemporary mainstream fashion and, by the nineties had become very much interchangeable with subcultural styles; thus making these Travellers harder to distinguish. Many theories and studies have been invested in the understanding of what Levi-Strauss terms as the bricolage of subculture; a term which looks at how a group responds to an environment by carefully ordering, classifying and arranging into structures elements of the physical world so as to gain insight into the natural world.

Again referring to Howes, he states that;

12‘The relationship between goods and culture needs to be rethought, taking the constant displacement of things in the increasingly global marketplace into account. In particular, we need to know more about the social relations of consumption- or in other words, the logic by which goods are received (acquired, understood and employed) in different societies’

Paul Willis develops this argument by applying the idea of a 13homologous style, to assess and consider the symbolic fit between the values and life-styles of a group, and how it appropriates forms to express or reinforce its focal concerns. He demonstrates that in spite of its highly publicised stigma of being lawless and decadent, the internal structure of any particular subculture is 14‘organically related to other parts and it is through the fit between them that the subcultural member makes sense of the world’. It’s Willis’s consensus then that the hippy culture cohered as a ‘whole way of life’ to a complete alternative value system.

When the question was posed, 15‘what specifically does a subcultural style signify to the members of the subculture themselves?’, the answer was that appropriated objects reassembled in the distinctive subcultural ensembles and were, ‘made to reflect, express and resonate….aspects of group life’. In their adapted forms, these objects were perceived to be homologous as regards to focal concerns, group structure, and collective self-image. They were ‘objects in which the subcultural members could see their central values held and reflected’.

In 1994, Amy de La Haye and Cathie Dingwall launched an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on subcultural style. They acquired a unique collection of authentic subcultural clothes worn from the 1940s to the 1990s and proved to be of great support to academic and sociological studies surrounding subcultures, as its focus was upon clothing worn by individuals to signify their allegiance to a particular subculture. According to De La Haye, it concentrates upon 16‘real clothes’ worn by ‘real people’.

A lecture written by Caroline Evans, in conjunction with the V&A exhibition seeks to articulate and support the issue of how garments and dress relate to such profound notions of resistance, identification, consumerism, style, politics, pleasure, authenticity and alienation.

Much of her argument derives from the theories of Dick Hebdige and The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Their fundamental consensus is that of a class-based analysis, whereby subculture theory is a form of working class resistance to the parent and dominant culture. Culminating in a:

17‘style that is not just constituted in what is worn but, rather, by the way in which commodities are organised to express ‘being in the world’. This may mean subverting and transforming their meanings and uses’.

So, for example where Punks adorn such motifs as the swastika, this shouldn’t be taken to mean their adherence to fascism; Hebdige considers this to mean a ‘transgression’ from an existing order or a symbol for ‘being hated’ or ‘being an outsider’.

In the same way I take this idea of bricolage when applied to hippie/ traveller styles and my case study to represent a subculture that purports ideologies of an ecologically, spiritually and a harmoniously minded coexistence that finds solace in anti-conformist and anti-‘civilised’ practice, when considering the significance and symbolism encoded with in American Indian motifs. As the meanings attached to these signs that are part of a set of signs are re-ordered and re-contextualised, juxtaposing individual signs with new meanings.  

Do you think your style of dress retains the impact it did in the past?

18Sophie Xi-Zeta: Yeah I think so. You get looked at in the street, I don’t notice, I get told this, I don’t notice cos I’m chronically short sighted, but you get looked at in the street and that may be my intention when I was younger cos I did, I will admit to going up to King’s Road and posing and charging tourists £1 for a photo etc. etc. but now, I’m so comfortable with it, I would feel uncomfortable in jeans and a t-shirt. I suppose there’s, there’s an element of vanity in it- but then that’s kind of natural, it’s kind of, tribes people do it, you’re doing it to send out signals to people, “You’re like me, be attracted to me”, not necessarily in a sexual way, but just for making friends, maybe gathering a kind of a tribe round you, you’re sort of sending out a signal saying “I look this way because I like these things, I have these beliefs. Hey come and join me!”. It’s just that attraction thing and you know it’s good, it’s good if you can go out and share your love of music or your beliefs or whatever.

              

Bibliography:

Weaving a Navajo blanket- Gladys A. Reichard- Dover Publications, Inc. New York 1974.

Hopis, Tewas, And The American Road- Edited by Willard Walker and Lydia L. Wyckoff

- University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1983.

Cross-Cultural Consumption- Edited by David Howes, Routledge 1996.

History of Indian-White Relations: Volume 4- Indians and the Counterculture- Stewart Brand; Volume Editor Wilcomb E. Washburn- Smithsonian Institution Washington 1988.

The Subcultures Reader- Edited by Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton 1997- Subculture The Meaning of Style -Dick Hebdige 1979; Routledge London and New York.

Surfers Soulies Skinheads & Skaters- Subcultural Style From The Forties To The Nineties – Amy De La Haye & Cathie Dingwall; V&A Museum 1996.

Costume- The Journal of the Costume Society no. 31- Street Style, Subculture and Subversion: Lecture in Conjunction with Street Style Exhibition given at Victoria & Albert Museum on 3 December 1994 Caroline Evans 1997.

Websites Referred to:

 New Mexico Archaeological Society

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

 

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