Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970sDuke University Press, 2007 M04 27 - 296 páginas From “getting loose” to “letting it all hang out,” the 1970s were filled with exhortations to free oneself from artificial restraints and to discover oneself in a more authentic and creative life. In the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s, anything that could be made to yield to a more impulsive vitality was reinvented in a looser way. Food became purer, clothing more revealing, sex more orgiastic, and home decor more rustic and authentic. Through a sociological analysis of the countercultural print culture of the 1970s, Sam Binkley investigates the dissemination of these self-loosening narratives and their widespread appeal to America’s middle class. He describes the rise of a genre of lifestyle publishing that emerged from a network of small offbeat presses, mostly located on the West Coast. Amateurish and rough in production quality, these popular books and magazines blended Eastern mysticism, Freudian psychology, environmental ecology, and romantic American pastoralism as they offered “expert” advice—about how to be more in touch with the natural world, how to release oneself into trusting relationships with others, and how to delve deeper into the body’s rhythms and natural sensuality. Binkley examines dozens of these publications, including the Whole Earth Catalog, Rainbook, the Catalog of Sexual Consciousness, Celery Wine, Domebook, and Getting Clear. Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, Binkley explains how self-loosening narratives helped the middle class confront the modernity of the 1970s. As rapid social change and political upheaval eroded middle-class cultural authority, the looser life provided opportunities for self-reinvention through everyday lifestyle choice. He traces this ethos of self-realization through the “yuppie” 1980s to the 1990s and today, demonstrating that what originated as an emancipatory call to loosen up soon evolved into a culture of highly commercialized consumption and lifestyle branding. |
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... , and Culture 6 , no . 4 [ 2003 ] ) ; and in a PhD dissertation titled Consuming Aquarius : Markets and the Moral Boundaries of the New Class ( New School for Social Research , 2002 ) . For my parents , for Dörte , and for Dave.
... Social Research , this project benefited from the oversight of Marshall Berman and Orville Lee , and the comments of Stuart Ewen , Don Slater , Jo Entwistle , Randal Doane , Betsy Wissinger , Britta Wheeler , Margarita Palacios , Martin ...
... social groups and across a range of locales and lifestyles . In millions of American homes , food would become purer , its naturalness less constrained by additives and processed ingredients ; clothing would become more sexual and ...
... social and historical change in a thin slice of popular cultural history . The style of life described in West Coast lifestyle literature and crystallized in the jargon of Landy's hippies pro- vides evidence of the changing ways people ...
... social and cultural change generally . With the onset of mercantilist trade in early modern Europe , for example , traditional social hierarchies , ordered ac- cording to what Arthur Lovejoy termed the " great chain of being " ( a unity ...