ABSTRACT
In the same way as the ‘romantic movement’ did not exist in a unitary form, neither does the ‘peace movement’. Configurations of social reality that appear to external observers as homogeneous, on closer inspection, are often more multi-layered, complex or disaggregated. This is particularly true when it comes to emergent and experimental forms of activism. In The Making of a Counter Culture, Roszak (1995: 22) explains how, from the inside, the classical countercultures of the Sixties and Seventies vanish: ‘different people doing different things’, he states: ‘I have colleagues in the academy who have come within an ace of convincing me that such a thing as ‘the Romantic Movement’ or ‘the Renaissance’ ever existed – not if one gets down to scrutinizing the microscopic phenomena of history’ (1995: 23). The ethnographic attention to the social life of claims reveals such a variety in a particular way.
