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from the April 2005 Anthropology News Indigenousness and the Politics of Spirituality Sabina Magliocco Spirituality is one of the most important components of any group’s identity. Dealing with magical experience and defining the sacred, it could be said to lie at the core of identity, or a group’s ethos. Often, it becomes central to how a group is perceived by others. Many associate indigenous peoples’ authenticity with their spirituality, leading to the commodification of indigenous spirituality, reactions against it and various attempts to curtail it. It has also been reabsorbed into indigenous self-conceptions, and used in a variety of arguments for control of land and heritage sites. Commodification of Spirituality Beginning in the 1960s, many westerners seeking alternatives to Judeo-Christian religions sought out the spiritual teachings of native peoples. At first, they turned to books such as those mentioned above; but by the 1980s a growing popular literature on New Age mysticism was emerging, drawing many concepts from Romantic notions of indigenous spirituality, but written predominantly by Westerners, some of whom referenced knowledge they did not, in fact, possess. The best-selling Medicine Woman, Jaguar Woman and the Wisdom of the Butterfly Tree and Mutant Message from Down Under were novels in the pattern of Casteneda: the authors claimed to have stumbled upon indigenous teachers who revealed to them secret mystical knowledge that changed them forever. Many readers, however, took them as fact, and embarked upon their own personal quests for power and enlightenment. Classes and workshops followed, some promising to transform attendees into shamans, or initiate them into the mysteries of the sweat lodge and vision quest.
The commodification of spirituality led to outrage on the part of many indigenous peoples that white “wannabees” were playing at being Indian and appropriating their spiritual traditions. Native Americans were understandably furious that whites were not only peddling phony indigenous spirituality, thus misrepresenting their most intimate traditions, but once again profiting at their expense. At the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, a Lakota delegation read a formal declaration of war against New Agers, Neopagans and all others who were stealing native religious elements. Non-Tangible Cultural Property In a world of endlessly reproducible goods and services, one strategy for distinguishing real from fake, legitimate from unauthorized, involves creating scarcity. In reaction to the proliferation of fake Indian spirituality, some Native American groups decreed that only members of their own tribes, as determined by government-sanctioned tribal membership and descent rules, would be permitted to practice certain traditions. This would keep the traditions genuine, ensure that customs were correctly followed, and prevent impostors from profiting from indigenous spiritual practices. But not all Native Americans took this position. Certain individuals were themselves profiting from the diffusion of their traditions to non-indigenes; others were uncomfortable with directives confining cultural property only to those with a certain percentage of Native American blood. The problem then became determining who had enough blood to practice particular customs. Copyrighting Spiritual Practices? Cultural tradition is a process, rather than a product; the key quality of many indigenous spiritual practices is their variability and adaptability to different contexts, depending on the needs of their practitioners. Copyrighting spiritual practices would involve freezing them in time—rendering a living tradition static, unchanging, dead and preventing its adaptation by other group members. Not only is this anathema to many practitioners; it is also not how religion works. Spiritual praxis is by nature syncretic; it incorporates elements from surrounding contexts when it finds analogous meanings and power in them.
While helping indigenous groups to copyright their religions may sound beneficial, like so many other forms of intervention, it could wind up doing more harm than good. Perhaps the most useful role for the anthropologist is to work in concert with WIPO to craft intellectual property law in a way that is not deleterious to indigenous cultural practices, and to help indigenous communities wanting to copyright their traditions to do so in a way that does not prevent their change or transmission in the ways the group deems legitimate. In the long run, however, the prospect of having all cultural traditions copyrighted only to those groups who originated them is daunting. As anthropologists, we are well aware that cultural traditions are seldom the sole property of any single group. Creative individuals shape traditions, pass them to others under a variety of circumstances, and incorporate new materials into their cultural registers; the movements of people, as well as the fission and merging of social groups, contribute to the diffusion of traditions over broad areas. Traditions that may appear similar may instead be products of polygenesis. Because of the effect of Romantic essentializations, these processes are poorly understood outside the academy. Our best hope is to work towards educating all communities about the process of tradition and the constructed nature of authenticity and identity. More problematic, instead, is the intervention of anthropologists in the process of limiting access to spiritual material only to those whose parentage gives them the right to it. The idea that the right to spiritual practice is determined by blood violates everything we know about the constructed nature of race, ethnicity and culture. As anthropologists, we cannot turn our backs on our most fundamental assumptions, even to protect indigenous groups whose spiritual traditions have been fetishized. Taken to its logical extreme, it leads directly to essentialization and racism. We would not, for example, want to intervene to protect the right of white neo-Nazis reclaiming a pre-Christian Teutonic spirituality to keep people of color from learning their traditions. Yet any workable theory of cultural property must be equally applicable to all groups, regardless of power differentials between them, which can change over time. Sabina Magliocco is an associate professor of anthropology at California State University-Northridge. She has done fieldwork in Sardinia, Italy, as well as among contemporary Pagans in the San Francisco Bay area, and is the author of Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (2004). |
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