Pamokos, įgytos pažvelgus pro rakto skylutę į Lietuvos hipių rojų (2)
Lessons from a Hippie Paradise Glimpsed Through a Keyhole (2)

Summary/Abstract: Because there is a close relationship between observations and theory, in this paper, we presented examples of ethnographic information viewed within a dynamical systems approach as applied to study the behaviour of a small hippy community in Lithuania during the Soviet era. This approach invites organization of the domain of observation into systems, environments and interactions as a way to deal with complex systems in a manageable way and yet maintain consistency between incomplete descriptions, the usual situation in field work. The first section concentrates on the description of individuals as systems, pointing out the information needed to describe their states and responses to interactions coming from their environments. The second section emphasizes the definition of interactions among the subsystems, particularly the influences that individuals exert on their environments. As this is a preliminary report, neither analysis is yet complete: the work has yet to include all the individuals making up the group and the number of variables needs to be increased. Nevertheless we feel that even the incomplete examples are sufficient to indicate that the introduction of systems concepts, which then structure the ethnographic information into states, expression variables and influence variables, has considerable utility. While it is yet to be convincingly demonstrated, it appears that it may be possible to relate the essentials of group phenomena to the interplay of self-expression variables and influence variables between the group members in the course of forging a group identity. By providing a common informational structure for describing groups, such a systems oriented approach should provide a natural framework for making comparisons between different subcultural groups, not only for the Lithuanian “hippie” subculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as discussed here.

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