免费福利资源在线看片

Tourism and the Countercultural Traveller: Reconsidering the Hippie Traveller

A talk by Dr. Trevor W. Harrison, emeritus professor of sociology
Friday, Oct. 24, 1-2:30 p.m.
W646 (免费福利资源在线看片 Centre for the Arts) and via Zoom

By the 1960s, tourism had become a large commercial industry selling travel as a purchasable commodity. A subset of conventional tourism saw youths from western countries make the journey to India along a route that partially replicated the fabled Silk Road.

Termed 鈥渉ippies鈥� by the popular press, the number who made the journey is estimated as close to two million. The emergence of these countercultural travellers was the product of specific material and cultural conditions. This presentation is abridged from a soon-to-be-published book based on my own experiences and interviews with 48 individuals who made the journey in the 1960s and 1970s.

I focus here on the socio-demographic characteristics of travellers and the cultural milieu of the time. Specifically emphasized is the mutual impact of fiction and non-fiction writings, films and music in shaping images conducive to a desire to travel the Hippie Trail.