The Culture Cult

Designer Tribalism And Other Essays

Roger Sandall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429976346
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Culture Cultis an acerbic critique of that longing widespread in society today to ?retreat from civilization.? From Rousseau and the Noble Savage to modern defenders of ethnicity such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Polanyi, a prominent intellectual tradition has over-romanticized the virtues of tribal life. In contrast, another tradition, represented by Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Ernest Gellner, defends modern values and civil society. The Culture Cult discusses both sides of this divide between "culture" and "civilization," and between "closed" and "open" societies. The romantic insistence on the superiority of the primitive is increasingly grounded in a fictionalized picture of the past-a picture often created with the aid of well-meaning but misguided anthropologists. Such idealizations work to the detriment of the very people they are meant to help, for they isolate minorities from such undeniable benefits of modern society as literacy and health care, and discourage them from participating in modern life. Few will find comfort in The Culture Cult, but many will recognize a valuable criticism of currently popular social politics.

Part I
Romantic Primitivism

The Anthropological Connection

1
The New Stone Age

Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all cost? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices? Cases vary, but the Australian example suggests that the answers are no, no, and no. The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job. In the year 2000 artificially petrified indigenes are doomed.

Since the folly of locking up native peoples in their old-time cultures is obvious, but it is tasteless to say so, governments have everywhere resorted to the rhetoric of "reconciliation." This pretends that the problem is psychological and moral: rejig the public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for the sins of history, and all will be well. Underlying this is the assumption that we are all on the same level plain of social development, divided only by misunderstanding.

This is false. The division is deep—there is a Big Ditch between the tribal world and modernity. Until around 1970 governments In the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand accepted this fact, and they saw their duty as helping indigenes to cross the divide. For that reason they concentrated on better health, education, and housing, and let the chips of traditional culture fall where they may. That was how Western civilization had dealt with its own traditions, creatively destroying those that would not change. Creative destruction is the law of historical advance.

But romantic primitivism swept all such progressive policies away. Planning for the future and looking forward was out. Looking backward became the only proper way to look. Transfixed by the Culture Cult, a hyperidealized vision of traditional life was adopted, and the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating.

On the one hand Australian Aborigines found themselves being used as pawns in political games played for high stakes. On the other hand they became the deluded victims of the extravagances of their admirers. If your traditional way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is "rich," "complex," and "sophisticated," how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? Why not hang up a "Gone Fishing" sign and head for the beach? I might do that myself. In Australia, policies inspired by the Culture Cult have brought the illiterization of thousands of Aborigines whose grandparents could read and write.

The New Age Meets the Aborigines

On the desk before me there's an advertisement for an Easter Psychic New Age Festival dedicated to Alternative Schools, Yoga, and Meditation Groups. One hour from Melbourne in an attractive pastoral setting with "heritage accommodation" and vegetarian meals there will be daily fortune readings, workshops, demonstrations, tastings, healing, health products, crystals, spirit drawing, Reiki, natural skincare, and not only numerous stallholders selling the work of artisans but "pundits with the latest New Age skills."

We are also invited to "Experience the Spirit of India" and be escorted on spiritual journeys, to come and see an exhibit of the "Crystals of the World," and to consult Wendy L. Smith, an astrologer with a mobile phone. Does Wendy offer the latest New Age skills? Or does she offer some of the oldest Stone Age beliefs with a digital upgrade? Neither astrology nor spiritual journeys is exactly new.

But that's how things are today. And lots of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines inhabit this modish environment, too. Seamlessly blending into the Stone Age have come New Age beliefs—beliefs which have influenced both American Indian and Aboriginal selfunderstanding. The result is a synthetic New Stone Age involving bits and pieces from many times and places. And the strange response to all this is one of the more surprising things about Mutant Message Down Under, a book by a Kansas City naturopath, Mario Morgan.

Plainly a work of imaginative fiction, Morgan's narrative tells about her experiences with a group of Aborigines known as the Real People, a tribe created by the loving power of Divine Oneness; how she accompanies the Real People on a "walkabout" across Australia; how the Aborigines refer to all whites as Mutants because they have betrayed the ancient simplicities of True Humanity and introduced poverty, slavery, and disease; how the Real People communicate by telepathy and do not know how to lie; how they practice healing by using lizard and plant oils and by admonishing unruly organs to behave; how after 50,000 years they have destroyed no forests, polluted no water, and endangered no species; how the world is divided into Peaceful Browns and Aggressive Mutant Whites and how the Real People, having had more than enough of the latter, are planning to leave Planet Earth and seek a better world elsewhere.

Standing inside a crystal room as exotic as anything in Coleridge's vision of Xanadu—crystals are very important—and wearing a polished opal on her brow, Morgan learns the ancient Aboriginal art of evanescence, or disappearing into thin air . . . That should be enough to give the flavor of a book in which the lavish use of "'incredible" and "amazing" is entirely appropriate.

The anthropologist L. R. Hiatt wrote that nothing remotely like Mario Morgan's account of Aboriginal life "is to be found anywhere in the reputable literature published since the establishment of the British colony in 1788, If the Real People really exist, they are recent arrivals from outer space pretending to be Aborigines and, for whatever purpose, using Mario Morgan as their agent. If she really traversed the Australian continent on foot without shoes at an average of twenty miles a day in mid-summer, she may even be one of them."¹ American readers in particular seem to have been delighted to find "the central values and aspirations of the New Age movement enshrined in the world's oldest surviving culture."²

But as Hiatt suggests, the Australian response to the book was revealing. Not long after its release an Aboriginal cultural organization tried to get it withdrawn from sale, and the national representative body for Aborigines sent representatives to America to stop any attempt to make a film. Since it consists of the sort of hokum Hollywood would love to get its hands on, that is hardly surprising. But Morgan's absurdities were the last thing Aborigines were worried about. It was not that what she wrote was false (many of them agreed that this was so). What was offensive was that the author had told her story as if she were a fully initiated and paid-up member of the tribe, and was disclosing its secrets to the world at large. About the anthropological untruths in the book they were silent—indeed, they may have rather liked the idea that their ancestors were vegetarian mystics.

You could search a long time before finding anything to equal Mutant Message. Literature it is not. But perhaps we should be grateful to Morgan nonetheless, for her book clarified a number of things. It showed how sadly ignorant of their own traditions many Aborigines are today. It showed their willingness to acquiesce in even the grossest mispresentations, providing the aim is to ennoble and glamorize the past. And it showed what their priorities are. In her naive fashion Morgan pointed to the Big Ditch separating the modern and the tribal worlds.

The Aborigines' objection underlined the point that traditional societies are meant to be closed not open, solidary not pluralistic, aristocratic not egalitarian. For such people the disclosure of secrets is a much worse sin than telling lies. One Aborigine said that for the crime of disclosure, and whether or not what she wrote was true or false or the Real People even existed, Mario Morgan of Kansas City should be put to death.

Sacralization in California

About eighty years ago an American Indian named Maria Solares told a story to anthropologist John Harrington. She said that Point Conception was once the departure point for the souls of Chumash Indians. Solares herself was a Christian who died in 1923, and the last Indians who might have taken her story about Indian souls seriously had all died long before that. Other Indians denied her version—and there were lots of versions.

But in 1978 her tale took on new significance. Ranchers in the area felt threatened by a plan to build a liquid natural gas plant nearby. They got a public relations firm from Los Angeles to help fight the proposal, and local Indians and environmental groups in the Santa Barbara area joined the cause. Before long the Santa Barbara News Press was able to tell its readers that if the gas plant went ahead, Chumash archaeological sites would be ruined. Protests and demonstrations began and continued. Media reporters said that while the name Point Conception was fine, the old Indian name of the Western Gate made better sound bites on the news, and soon a whole transcontinental complex of exit gates was discovered with souls passing through them en route to the hereafter.

The laws of demand and supply brought into play by the ranchers proved highly creative—and also stimulated the Indians themselves. Most of them knew nothing of their old-time culture, but with the "discovery" of the importance of Point Conception they began to feel they should, and without even knowing what they'd lost they wanted it back. To help them get it came scores of regional scholars, eco-activists, New Age zealots, and free-range political demonstrators hungry for a fight. Most of them had no ethnic credentials whatever. As the American Indian writer Rayna Green remarked, the seemingly fathomless hunger for Indian guruism creates wanna-bes who may be neither genetically nor culturally Indian yet are the most marketable bearers of Indian culture. Through such "substitute impersonation," she said, "Indians ... are loved to death."³

Authors Brian D. Haley and Larry Wilcoxon note the influence of New Age beliefs at Point Conception, and while the results are less fantastical than in Mario Morgan's epic the motive is much the same. Both American Indians and counterculturalists have used "popular primitivist imagery and fragments of ethnography to create traditions that are very different in form and content from past beliefs and practices . . . either to appropriate beliefs and practices for a New Age ... or to become Indian Traditionalists themselves." Despite the fact that "the New Age has negative connotations for many Native Americans, [Chumash] Indian Traditionalists and the eclectic New Agers share a conviction of the centrality of nature which is expressly primitivist and countercultural, and there is much syncretic 'mixing and matching' between them."⁴

Beginning around 1978, and for the next two decades, anthropologists helped to spread the Point-Conception-as-Western-Gate story either by silencing their doubts or by repeating the story in their writings. Once it was a public issue, those with reservations about the embroidery and sheer invention they had observed fell silent. Eventually the natural gas installation was canceled.

Why Worry? The Academic View

But why worry about romantic cultural inventions, or muddling New Age fantasies with ethnographic facts? We are expected to all know by now that life is a narrative; words mean only what you want them to mean; embellishment has been with us since the first fisherman told tall tales about his catch; and one man's misinterpretation is another man's liberating myth. Postmodernism calls this wisdom—and who are we to object?

For more than twenty years anthropologists have written about constructing reality as if the world and everything in it were mere artifact, about building identity as if any old self-glamorizing fiction will do, about creating the past as an enterprise more exciting than history, about inventing tradition as if traditions were as changeable as store windows—and about as important, too.

The late Roger Keesing tells us that although fictionalized pasts may be false "their symbolic power and political force are undeniable." And it doesn't matter whether the pasts being recreated are mythical or real as long as they symbolize resistance and revolution. "Perhaps it matters only whether such political ideologies are used for just causes, whether they are instruments of liberation or of oppression." Here Keesing is saying that the end justifies the means: however false, newly concocted tribal myths are justified so long as the cause is just. Myths of struggle are especially exciting:

In Australia, idealized representations of the pre-European past are used to proclaim Aboriginal identity and the attachment of indigenous peoples to the land, and are being deployed in environmentalist as well as Aboriginal political struggles. In New Zealand, increasingly powerful and successful Maori political movements incorporate idealized and mythicized versions of a precolonial Golden Age, the mystical wisdom of Aotearoa.⁵

Much the same thing is going on in Hawaii and New Caledonia, wrote the author in 1989, where "the desperate struggle for political power and freedom from colonial oppression" continues night and day.⁶ For Keesing, something called liberation was always just over the hill or around the corner, while the unmasking or demystifying of colonial discourse preoccupied his lively mind to the end. Nevertheless, some of what he said was useful because he candidly recognized the romanticism involved. "Maori and Aboriginal Australian ideologues are engaged in reconstructing ancestral pasts characterized by Mystical Wisdom, Oneness with the Land, Ecological Reverence, and Social Harmony," he noted, going on to describe the way "warfare and violence (including Maori cannibalism) are carefully edited out of these reinvented pasts." Warfare and cannibalism were found everywhere in New Zealand, but they clash uncomfortably with the "idealization of the primitive" required among the Maori today.⁷

What Keesing was talking about is a key aspect of romantic primitivism—the moral transfiguration of the tribal world. This projects a benignly Disneyfied way of life, all flowers and contentment, all stress-free smiles and communal harmony. Not surprisingly the tales of Mystical Wisdom and Ecological Reverence described above are eagerly adopted by modern indigenes seeking a more tasteful view of their own past. Keesing was aware of this, and he complained that romantic primitivism recklessly deleted "not simply violence, but domination (of women, the young, commoners) and exploitation. The costs in physical pain and premature death of infectious diseases only crudely addressed by magical means are all too easily edited out as well—particularly nowadays, when the Primitive is assigned a mystical wisdom in matters of holistic health and healing as well as ecology."⁸

It's good to be reminded of the traditional cost in terms of cruelty, pain, and disease. But Keesing might also have paused to notice the huge financial costs his "liberating fictions" have imposed on modern citizens in modern states. When, as a result of imaginative lying, contending parties are hauled into courts of law, and the inevitable collision with reality occurs, millions of dollars are routinely squandered as judicial processes try to disentangle fact from fantasy—if not downright mendacity—while indigenes often find themselves swept up and exploited by powerful political forces beyond their control.

The Hindmarsh Island Affair

They weren't ranchers, and they didn't have dramatic views of the Pacific coast. But the residents of Hindmarsh Island were fond of their sleepy lagoon. They liked their distance from Adelaide, their isolation, their peace, and their water views. And the absence of a bridge joining this secluded refuge to the mainland was an added attraction.

Others however wanted development—two of them with land on the island in particular—and they very much wanted a bridge. Neither environmental law nor Aboriginal interests had been ignored in their proposal, and one inquiry after another had cleared the project. Archaeologis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I ROMANTIC PRIMITIVISM: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONNECTION
• PART II ACADEMIC PRIMITIVISM: THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
• PART III CIVILIZATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS: THE ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS
• Appendix: The Four Stages of Noble Savagery
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index