507. Myerhoff, Barbara G. "The Revolution as a Trip: Symbol and Paradox." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 395, 1971: 105-16.
In a student revolutionary group of 1970 political and cultural aims were in sharp contradiction with one another, leading to the essential paradox of a revolutionary "trip." The rebels attempted to resolve this conflict by means of symbolization, in which such logical contradictions might have been resolved.
508. ———. "Organization and Ecstasy: Deliberate and Accidental Communitas among Huichol Indians and American Youth." In Symbols and Politics in Communal Ideology edited by Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975: 36-67.
A long elegy for the hippie movement and its dreams of permanent communitas (a social state of "anti-structure"; see Turner, V., 1969a, 1977: item 695 e.g.). Myerhoff's focus is on the most intense and dramatic experience of this state, but it seems to me her work might have profited from some consideration of its more moderate forms such as those found among audiences at a gripping theatrical performance or in ritual. She might also have given some consideration to its occurence among members of client and audience cults. As it stands, her somewhat absolutist stance oversimplifies her argument: that the hippie movement was doomed from the start because the societies in which it flourished had no structural accommodation for communitas. [I suggest instead that it might have been found, in attenuated form, to be sure, in such contexts as those mentioned and that the hippies' doom was in part due to their equally absolutist stance. They seem to have insisted on the "pure" experience, idealized replays of Woodstock, Myerhoff's apt metaphor for the whole movement. The hippies were not helped by another aspect of this totalism; they insisted (for the most part) on being in this state of ecstacy permanently, a fact which doomed both the movement as a whole and especially its political arm, which of course demanded a high degree of structure in order to accomplish its aims.]
This situation is contrasted with that of the Huichol, who appear to have successfully integrated the experience of communitas into their culture by means of an annual pilgrimage to their mythical (and probably historical) homeland, where they search for and ingest peyote buttons. Myerhoff's description of this ritual is strikingly reminiscent of the patterns of reversal found in the ecstatic phase of a great many millennial movements.
Myerhoff fails to note that the hippies' deliberately inarticulate speech style and the casualness of their relationships militated against true communitas, making their movement more nearly solipsistic in nature. Something similar is true of the Huichol as well: they make no attempt to reunite groups of pilgrims for repeat visits (and it is not specified how often any given Huichol is likely to make the trip in his lifetime). They resist efforts to "recapture" the experience, usually returning with different pilgrims and different leaders.
509. ———. "Return to Wirikuta: Rituals of Reversals and Continuity." In Studies of Symbolic Inversion edited by Barbara Babcock-Abrahams. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976.
The Wirikuta peyote hunt represents a pilgrimage in which they return to a paradisiacal golden age, before their own (likely actual) "beginnings" as a people, indeed before the beginnings of the world (cf. Myerhoff, 1975, above). This is a time, to be repeated at the end of things, in which differentiation is lacking and categories are abolished. In this respect it strongly resembles the antinomian phase common to millennialism, with its repeated motif of world reversal, though Myerhoff's own parallel is with carnival.
[No wonder the church opposed carnival and its radical reversal of order, first because it violated the church's monopoly on access to God but also because it radically denied the church's hierarchy and introduced at least the possibility of religious innovation].
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