Читать книгу White Utopias - Amanda J. Lucia - Страница 13

Long before the New Age dawned, Americans turned to religious others when dissatisfied with the dominant culture. As the historian Philip Jenkins explains, “The perennial American interest in Indians grows and shrinks in inverse proportion to satisfaction with mainstream society. . . . Throughout American history, romantic Indian images are most sought after in eras of alienation and crisis.”¹¹ Americans have engaged with Indigenous and Indic cultural and religious forms in multifarious ways as a means to protest and reject Euro-American culture. By adopting exoticized practices of marginalized religious minorities, they have offered critiques of industrialization, consumerism, rationality, violence, sexual repression, and the devastation of nature. At the turn of the twentieth century, white women flocked to Swami Vivekananda to practice mediation and breathing exercises. Several decades later, South Asian swamis and yogis crisscrossed the United States, drawing large audiences as interested in their mystical personas as in their yogic techniques. Even at that time, whites quickly positioned themselves as representative authorities of yogic traditions. Oom the Omnipotent (Pierre Arnold Bernard from Leon, Iowa), for instance, built his Tantric utopia first in San Francisco and later in the sanctity and seclusion of rural upstate New York. Following the model of white appropriation of Native religions, whites have instrumentalized Indic religious forms to find direction and to craft an outlet for their critique of the existing status quo.¹²

In the wake of World War I, the bohemians of the 1920s flocked to the American Southwest and founded intellectual and artistic communities from which they critiqued assimilationist policies and Christian missionaries; some even argued for the supremacy of Native culture. World War II revealed the fragility and moral failings of European culture, and the subsequent destabilization of Europe called into question Euro-American claims to cultural superiority; subsequently, the 1940s saw a notable popularization of Native American traditions. Similarly, in the 1970s, massive public distrust in government fueled another turn toward Native American traditions. Philip Jenkins’s careful historical account of white engagements with Native American religions reveals that one of the primary errors of the 1960s counterculture was to assume that “all previous generations had shared the racist contempt of the early settlers, the dismissal of native religions as crude devil worship.”¹³ Instead, the 1960s exemplified only the twentieth century’s latest expression of a counterculture deeply informed by religious exoticism.

Once again, as a result of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the counterculture of the 1960s was partially constituted by the commonplace practice of modern Anglos “searching for primal authenticity.”¹⁴ Employing the modalities of religious exoticism, the leaders of the counterculture embraced symbols and practices extracted from Indic and Indigenous religions. While Frank Waters may have made “the Ganges flow into the Rio Grande” in his writings in the 1950s, as Jenkins suggests, the 1960s counterculture easily blended the Indic and Indigenous, creating a confluence (sangham) of distinct cultural rivers. Gary Snyder protested the war in Vietnam by identifying with Native religion and cursing the white man in the San Francisco Oracle, penning the famous lines:

As I kill the white man

the “American”

in me

And dance out the ghost dance:

To bring back America, the grass and the streams,

To trample your throat in your dreams.

This magic I work, this loving I give

That my children may flourish

And yours won’t live.¹⁵

The following year, the Beatles sat at the feet of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, which would lead George Harrison to take the māhāmantra¹⁶ of the Hare Krishnas to the number-twelve position on the UK singles chart in 1969 and again in the chorus of the major hit “My Sweet Lord” in 1976. Jimi Hendrix wanted the cover of his 1967 record Axis: Bold as Love to reflect his Cherokee heritage, but in an impactful miscommunication, David King, the commissioned cover designer for the Track Records label, misinterpreted his notion of “Indian” and found a mass-produced image of the Hindu deity Vishnu in a London shop and superimposed Hendrix’s face (alongside Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell) over the image. The resulting famous image of Jimi Hendrix in the omnipresent form of the incarnation of the Hindu god Krishna (virāt puruṣan viśvarupam) became one of the most iconic album covers in rock history.¹⁷ While centuries had passed since Columbus’s infamous error of mistaking Native Americans for Indians, 1960s counterculture blended and sometimes conflated the two seamlessly.

The turn to the exotic is the response of a population seeking a solution to feelings of malaise and dislocation derived from “feeling uprooted from cultural traditions, community belonging, and spiritual meaning.”¹⁸ It begins with a salient critique of hegemonic Western modernity, but instead of tackling those challenges through reform, rebellion, or revolution, this population looks to inhabit other social models for alternative solutions, and, more predominantly, to find existential meaning. Its solutions are often therapeutic rather than political, aimed to alleviate the feeling of “rampant alienation that characterizes modernity—the sense of being rootless and adrift, cut off from tradition and history.”¹⁹ The exotic other is established as an unsullied premodern subject and diametrically opposed to the “cold conformity and ecological devastation of white America, the ‘dead city,’ ”²⁰ whose “own cultural heritage of meaningful ritual seems like a well run dry.”²¹ Religious exoticism romanticizes racialized others as unsullied, exotic, premodern subjects whose cultural products supply practical, therapeutic tools. Exoticism is a mask for utopianism.²²

This book employs the framework of exoticism as a theoretical tool to define a set of relations between segments of the “spiritual but not religious” populations and those deemed as radically other. As a category, exoticism has been discussed primarily in cultural studies, the arts, and anthropology in reference to the ambivalent portrayal of others as both alluring and repulsive. In her recent work, the French sociologist Véronique Altglas introduces the term religious exoticism, which I build upon in this book. She writes,

[Religious exoticism] suggests an attempt to grasp otherness, yet what is exotic is not an “inherent quality” of particular social groups, places, ideas or practices. Indeed, no one is intrinsically “other.” Exoticism is instead relations; it is a “particular mode of aesthetic perception” that emphasizes, and to a certain extent elaborates, the otherness of groups, locations, ideas, and practices (Huggan 2001, 13). Moreover, the exotic is attractive because it is seen as being “different” (Todorov 1993, 264); exoticism makes otherness “strangely or unfamiliarly beautiful and enticing” (Figueira 1994, 1). Yet it is less about accounting for cultural differences than formulating an ideal, by dramatizing and even constructing differences. . . . Furthermore, Todorov (1993, 265) argues that, to elaborate and maintain the representations of idealized others, it is necessary to ignore the “reality” of other peoples and cultures.²³

Thus, exoticism is a constructed representation of the other in service of the production of the self. In his seminal work on human diversity, Tzvetan Todorov explains that exoticism is the antithesis of nationalism. While nationalists valorize the values of their own country as superior to those of others, exoticists retort that “the country with superior values is a country whose only relevant characteristic is that it is not my own.”²⁴ Its allure is also dependent, at least at the outset, on a lack of knowledge about the other. He writes, “The best candidates for the role of exotic ideal are the peoples and cultures that are most remote from us and least known to us. Now it is not easy to equate unfamiliarity with others, the refusal to see them as they are, with a valorization of these others. It is a decidedly ambiguous compliment to praise others simply because they are different from myself. Knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be. This is its constitutive paradox.”²⁵ In the ethnographic fields of transformational festivals discussed in this book, behaviors exhibiting appropriations of the exotic often correlate to the place on the spectrum of knowledge that participants occupy. Those enraptured with the allure of the exotic but holding little knowledge may be seen in exotic costumes playing at inhabiting the imagined identities of radical others. Those who have more experience in proximity to those radical others tend to exhibit a more tempered realism in their dress and behavior. They may still maintain the ideals of exoticism, but they are more serious in their identifications. In the religious field, this identification often takes the form of full lifestyle modifications, conversions in all but name.

Altglas notes that Orientalism, a term introduced famously by Edward Said, follows this same pattern and can be regarded as one example of a larger paradigm of exoticism.²⁶ The adoption of religious exoticism substantiates claims of a new self, one that is autonomously governed and free from regulatory boundaries and institutional affiliations. As Altglas recounts, “[Pierre] Bourdieu (1984, 370) viewed individuals’ involvement in Transcendental Meditation, yoga, Zen, martial arts, holistic and post-psychoanalytic therapies, as well as esotericism, as ‘an inventory of thinly disguised expressions of a sort of dream of social flying, a desperate effort to defy the gravity of the social field.’ ”²⁷ Bourdieu argued that in their attempt to break free of their finite social station, the petit bourgeoisie perform a “practical utopianism,” “which predisposes them to welcome every form of utopia.”²⁸ The turn toward alternative utopias, including the adoption of the practical spiritual wares of religious others, is the result of a therapeutic process of self-definition and class distinction. The petit bourgeoisie engages in religious exoticism to garner distinction in efforts to “detach itself both from the non-cosmopolitan working classes and the conventional fractions of the bourgeoisie.” This process employs the domestication of otherness in efforts to “produce an emotionally and culturally competent self.”²⁹

In this vein, the Dakota scholar and historian Phillip Deloria argues that in postmodern spirituality various codes are reformulated into complex amalgams suited to particular therapeutic desires. The dislocation of codes from their Indigenous cultural context and their amalgamation into a spiritual self becomes an index for an alternative aspiration of wholeness, established in contradistinction to the fragmented self of postmodernity. In fact, in Deloria’s view, New Age religion is greatly informed by a crisis of meaning generated by postmodernism, which abolished metanarratives while relativizing claims to truth. He explains, “Heavily based in self-help and personal development therapies, its [New Age’s] proponents await a large-scale change in human consciousness and a utopian era of peace and harmony. In New Age identity quests, one can see the long shadows of certain strands of postmodernism: increasing reliance on texts and interpretations, runaway individualism within a rhetoric of community, the distancing of native people, and a gaping disjuncture between a cultural realm of serious play and the power dynamics of social conflict.”³⁰ The New Age further dissociated from real actors in favor of a romanticized imaginary, creating indices more malleable and controllable than their flesh-and-blood referents.

White Utopias argues that the commonplace ideals and practices of religious exoticism are directly related to the overwhelming whiteness of alternative spiritual communities. Although she does not directly address this white majority, Altglas argues that religious exoticism is dependent on feelings of entitlement. She writes that “exotic representations and discourses are overwhelmingly elaborated by the observer, not the observed (Todorov 1993, 264). This presupposes the entitlement and the power to do so (Figueira 1994, 2). . . . Practicing yoga or meditation, joining Native Americans in a sweat lodge, studying Kabbalah while expressing disdain for Judaism . . . are all contemporary practices that unavoidably presuppose a sense of entitlement.”³¹ As will be discussed in a forthcoming section, this entitlement aligns easily with neocolonial logics of white possessivism.