Mapping the Social World of the Counterculture

Here’s another thingy that I’ve had to cut for words. It’s a shame, and I resisted doing so, because I find it fun and interesting. But it was for a chapter-opening vignette, and another map can meet the task with far fewer words and a more direct integration into the chapter’s content.

In 1967, two Bay Area folk musicians and self-described “heads”—i.e., members of the counterculture—met for the first time in a crowded music shop in Berkeley, California, where they quickly bonded over an offbeat world map:

Earl Crabb and Rick Shrubb, Humbead’s Revised Map of the World with List of Population, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, Ca.: Humbead Enterprises, 1969). Color lithograph, 53.5 × 40.5 cm. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine (OML Collections); online at www.oshermaps.org/map/56505.0001.

Rick Shrubb, one of the two, has written a fun account of the map’s origins as part of his ongoing memoir; you can access it on his website at https://shubb.com/humbeads-map-of-the-world/. As Shubb recalls, someone had been going around the store asking if anyone knew of a potential ride to Kansas City; the guy had a ride organized from Kansas City to New York, but he had to get to Missouri first. Finding no help, he finally announced his intention to hitchhike:

“I guess I’ll just go down to the freeway onramp,” he said, “and hold a sign that says Kansas City.”

Another guy spoke up. “No, make the sign say New York,” said the guy who turned out to be Earl Crabb. His reasoning was that the chance of finding a ride would be better, New York being a more common destination. But he didn’t express it that way. He went on to say, “…because New York is closer.”

“He’s right,” I chimed in, catching some idea of where he was going with this. Maybe not geographically, but in most ways that actually affected us, New York was closer to Berkeley than Kansas City was.

Crabb promptly drew a little sketch map to illustrate the concept, drawing an irregular mass (“the world”) divided into the four “countries” of Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, and Cambridge [Massachusetts]. Shubb was immediately “infatuated with [Crabb’s] concept”:

[Crabb’s] little map had a stunning truth about it. You did tend to see the same people in Berkeley that you’d see in Cambridge, at least within the folk music scene. And there was a similarly common population pool shared by NY and LA, and he’d arranged them so as to support this. Socially, if not geographically, it felt just as valid as a “real” map.

Shubb was a graphic artist; Crabb something of an entrepreneur nicknamed “the Great Humbead.” As they continued to play with the concept and elaborate the map, they realized it would make a great poster.

They added other places that loomed large in the geography of the counterculture: San Francisco, Nashville, Boston, Southeast Asia (because Vietnam “could not be ignored”), and North Africa (source of hashish) drawn as a logo map of the entire continent. A small island at upper left indicates the insignificance to the counterculture of the “Rest of the World.” I recognized the other day that there is no mention on the map, other than the border with Mexico, of Central or South America.

Realizing that their map was “a social report, not a geographical one, about where people went and the paths they took to get there,” as Shubb put it, they identified 1,056 friends, folk musicians, key counterculture figures, and Hollywood celebrities and Shubb wrote them in around the border. He arranged the names randomly, forming surreal groupings. In the top-left corner, for example, the sitar-player Ravi Shankar rubbed elbows with then California governor Ronald Reagan and with LSD-enthusiast Timothy Leary.

Crabb published their artwork in 1968, as Humbead’s Revised Map of the World (which you can consult at https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:31042377), followed by a slightly augmented version in 1969 (shown above) and then by a major revision to the design in 1970 (see https://oshermaps.org/map/58008.0001).

The map itself possessed some of the elements of the long-established practices of pictorial mapping. In particular, it possessed cartoonish icons, a decorative title cartouche reminiscent of early modern Dutch printed maps, and the playful caricature of an eight-point “compass rose” (main points, “up/right/down/left”; intervening points, “that way/yon/hither/this way”).

Even so, Humbead’s Revised Map made a significant break with pictorial mapping. Pictorial maps played with just some of the rules of “real” cartography, even as they adhered to its most basic rules. By contrast, Crabb and Shubb’s depiction of social rather than geographical space completely overturned (“revised”) those rules. Crabb and Shubb abandoned the fundamental cartographic principle of geographical similitude in order to delineate the interconnected social geography of the U.S. counterculture.

As Shubb acknowledged, Humbead’s Revised Map was an unashamedly artistic work that differed substantially from the ideal of cartography and the normative map concept. The poster was, in its creators’ eyes, less a map than a spatial metaphor. It dispensed with cartographic propriety to present a different kind of truth. It was more than the kind of artistic work that occupied a playful, fun, and informal register of “cartographic language.” Its kooky outlandishness and brazenly anti-scientific ethos expressed human experience in an authentic manner otherwise denied by objective, scientific maps. Furthermore, Crabb and Shubb’s invitation to readers to actively interrogate the map and to interpret for themselves its structuring of social space and its arrangement of names suborned the formal emphasis then placed on the map maker as determining a map’s meaning.

Humbead’s Revised Map reminds us that mapping is innately political. The counterculture was part of the U.S. popular movements that refracted global political turmoil—the implosion of Europe’s maritime empires, the steady reincarnation of their colonies as independent states, the rapid reconfiguration of great power politics into the Cold War between the capitalist West and the communist East—into popular protests and social upheaval over racial and gender equality, nuclear disarmament, and the Vietnam War. The distrust of authority and of the status quo spilled over into a distrust of normative attitudes towards maps and mapping. How better to challenge convention than redrawing the world’s geography to offer an entirely new conception of the world, one that sustained contemporary calls for social and cultural revolution.

I encourage everyone to spend some time with the map, to see for yourself how a couple of heads understood the social geography of the counterculture.