Most studies of the 1960s counterculture focus more on the “counter” than the culture. They want to know what did—or did not—make the phenomenon oppositional to the dominant structures of power in American and global life. What were the politics of the counterculture’s strange effort to reimagine, and even possibly revolutionize, both self and society through experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, a freer sense of sexuality, ecstatic experience, unconventional spirituality, and new configurations of kinship, family, and social relations?[1] Others point to something more like a store “counter” in the counterculture. They concentrate on how institutions of corporate capitalism cleverly diverted Read more