Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field

What is it about?

This book addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the appropriation of indigenous identities that exploded in the 1960s.

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Why is it important?

Hopis and the Counterculture documents an important transition in the popularization of misrepresentations of the Hopi people from a few isolated radicals in the 1940s and 1950s to a countercultural mainstream in the 1960s and thereafter. What outsiders have long thought of as Hopi traditions prove to be the cultural products of a Hopi faction, outsiders both Native and non-Native, and the first sizeable group of people who shifted from non-Native to Native identities. An important source of today's explosive growth of these "neo-Indians" lies here.