an adaptation of the Hopi prophecy, “When the Earth shall be ill and the humans will have forgotten who they are, then, members from every race of the planet will unite and form one Tribe. It will save humanity and clean what is to be cleaned. The persons constituting this Tribe will be Rainbow warriors.”81
Michael Niman traces the privileging of tribalism to an anti-modernist strain of the American counterculture: “By the late twentieth century, the American ‘antimodern’ revulsion against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism had taken the form of idealizing ‘primitives’ celebrated by Mormonism and anthropology (e.g., Coates 1987, Dentan 1983). Recasting the medieval Golden Age as a Native American idyll fits this tradition.”82 Even at today’s Rainbow Gatherings, Native American spirituality informs the environmental consciousness of the gathering by framing the earth as sacred, and “talk of the universal spirit and oneness are common,” even if Native religions are “not well understood.”83 The very foundations of American countercultural spirituality are deeply intertwined with the adoption and appropriation of Native tribal identities.
CONCLUSION
Without explicit avenues for conversion, participants in SBNR communities express a variety of levels of engagement and commitment. Critics who condemn “New Age” spirituality rarely recognize this wide spectrum of commitment and instead find comfort in the easy condemnation of ignorant consumerism, exploitation, and cultural appropriation.84 These critiques capture low-hanging fruit and evade the more complex (and interesting) questions of the intersections of identity politics and religion. It is easy to condemn outrageous commodifications of postural yoga, drunk white teens wearing Native headdresses at music festivals, and non-Indigenous/Indian entrepreneurs exploiting cultural resources for profit. But in the easy condemnation of cultural appropriation, there are hidden commitments to the impractical ideal of bounded autonomous cultures to which one belongs and thus owns as a commodity. Instead, Michael Brown reminds us of what anthropology has long known: “Many—perhaps most—elements of culture do not answer to a logic of possession and control, to a vision of hermetically sealed social units realizing their destiny in compete autonomy.”85 Furthermore, critics of cultural appropriation condemn whites for adopting the material culture of racialized others (e.g., wearing feathers, beadwork, hoop earrings, and dreadlocks), but they ultimately distract from the larger politics of representation—the systemic racism that makes these cultural appropriations so offensive.
For more serious engagements with religious exoticism, there are deeper roots that far surpass fashion. In a response to critiques of Lucidity Festival’s use of the term tribe and a totem pole, one of its producers, Jonah Haas, wrote,
What we see in the transformational festival culture is individuals beginning to awaken from the societal sleep they’ve been lulled into and are often, for the first time, engaging in a journey of personal discovery. As a mixed-blood of European descent who has been disconnected from his own cultural roots, I can say that I have indeed experienced a yearning for the primordial embrace of my own indigeneity, the knowledge of which was lost long before I was even born. I am sympathetic to the yearning of a connection to tribe and community, and so when I see (and have engaged in) the grasping for symbols of such things, I understand that we’re dealing with cases of misunderstood intentions and misdirected desire for connectivity.86
It is easy to empathize with Haas’s personal feelings of disconnect and loss of cultural roots; this personally felt, emotional experience cannot be denied. Religious exoticists’ questing for authenticity, existential meaning, and connection to a tribe stems from a similar, if not the same, origin. However, such a yearning also brings to mind Renato Rosaldo’s notion of imperialist nostalgia, which he defines as “a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed. . . . In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination.”87 Religious exoticism depends on nostalgia for the imagined worlds of the “noble savage,”88 those who have been murdered, colonized, and confined to reservations and museums at the hands of white imperialism.
In the context of largely white transformational festivals, religious exoticism easily elides into whites performing stereotypes and fragments of other cultures. Entire ethnic groups or religious communities are envisioned as authentic remedies to the crisis of modernity. This positioning necessarily relegates people of color to an existence outside of modernity and obfuscates the lived realities, political struggles, and continued oppression of the colonized in the present.89 In Philip Jenkins’s description of ethnic tourism in the American Southwest in the early twentieth century, he explains, “As so often in American history, the romantic image of the Indian counted far more than the living, breathing individual.”90 Instead of turning toward “living, breathing” Native peoples, the exoticist turns toward the imagined authenticity and “magical holism” of the colonized as an antidote to the fragmented self, entrapped within modern systems of alienation and social isolation.91 As a result, it operates within and revivifies Orientalist and colonial frameworks that reinforce whiteness as the principal progressive, scientific, modern subjectivity.
The recognition of contemporary Indians (both East Indians and Native Americans) complicates, and even renders impotent, these processes of romanticization. Native American struggles against poverty, substance abuse, and domestic violence and their resistance to continued colonial oppression sit uncomfortably within the nostalgia for magical holism. Similarly, the nuclearization of India, its environmental degradation, and the co-option of yoga into the various militances of Hindu nationalism problematize the notion of Indic religiosity as an unsullied alternative to rationalized and industrialized modernity. Instead of furthering the political fight to remake society in solidarity with Indigenous and Asian peoples, the turn toward religious exoticism depoliticizes the critique into a quest for personal development and therapeutic experience.
White embodiments, adoptions, and performances of Indigenous and Indic cultural forms represent a globally ubiquitous form of cultural contact and exchange. But they also enact a particular form of white possessivism. Even the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century were successful in introducing cultures to each other;92 but they too were dependent on the ambivalences of white attractions to the exotic other. As Eric Lott writes in the afterword to the twentieth anniversary edition of Love and Theft, “Fairly soon, ‘love and theft’ became a kind of shorthand for the dialectic of white racial attraction and repulsion, cultural expropriation born of cross-racial desire, that first arose in public commercial terms in the antebellum minstrel show but is plain today wherever you look.”93 Discussions of cultural appropriation run warp and woof through online forums, college campuses, and art museums in the English-speaking West. Practices of cultural appropriation are most frequently criticized when whites appropriate the culture of the oppressed and thereby profit from it.94 In William Crane’s bald summation, “Appropriation of culture never happens without a corresponding appropriation of labor and human lives.”95
How might it be different if the affection, and even love, expressed through religious exoticism echoed the sense of what Leela Gandhi refers to as an “affective community,” meaning an unlikely community of affinity based in a tentative ideological proximity to the other? Religious exoticism, which is dependent, at least at the outset, on a lack of knowledge about the other, cannot accomplish the political solidarities of what she refers to as “the politics of friendship,” if friendship is, as Aristotle says, “the bond that holds communities together,” which I will discuss in the next section.96 In fact, in many cases, religious exoticism seems to create disaffection from members of the appropriated culture. It simultaneously creates relatively homogenous communities of whites, who build solidarities primarily among themselves in their shared affinities for religious exoticism.
Конец
