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brushwolfLupa decided to run her P-Con panel by giving a brief run down on who she was, what she was doing, and why people might be upset by that. She stressed that she wanted this to kick off discussion more than be all the discussion and then opened things up to questions or comments. There were enough questions and comments that she decided to facilitate discussion simply by going clockwise around the room, and where I was sitting meant I never got a chance to talk before time was up. Which is cool; I have some idea of what I think, no idea of what other people think, and I most wanted to be was so there'd be more friends in the audience.
What that does mean is I got more chance to think about what I wanted to say. I think basically anything I wanted to say falls into trying to balance where simplification is helpful to where it becomes an oversimplification harmful towards all sorts of people.
One of the unfortunate things about human nature is the exoticism of the alien other. We know what mainstream American culture is like, and we are naturally drawn to the seemingly exotic, especially if it seems more enlightened. I do see it with the appeal of animist trappings, but I also see this in the appeal of Buddhism and Hinduism, in the appeal of neopaganism in general, in what I know of African-American experience of Islam. And it's not just us; I think you can look back into history and see the same thing among Roman citizens, with their fondness for Kemetic gods, Mithraism, and eventually the splinter-Jewish ecstatic cult which became their formal state religion.
The reason it's unfortunate is that there's always more to this stuff than just exoticism, and as easy as it is to get into this because it looks badass or is not associated with the apparent sterility of our own background, that's just a little too pat. My hope here is based on how it feels easy to be drawn towards Buddhism by the combination of strong visuals and oversimplified overidealization, and yet there's enough depth there that once made more familiar, even when disappointingly unenlightened, it's still good stuff. It's still worth poking at. And if that's true, I think we can say the same things about animism and actually researching animist traditions.
This gets us towards where I feel even more ambivalent about neoshamanism, and first worlders playing around with older animist traditions.
Animism is sort of the least dogmatic spiritual path out there, historically very reliant upon the personal gnosis of the individual practitioner. I think this creates flexibility - there are still going to be legit shamans among us in a few centuries. A similar "flexibility is good" thing is that someone living in the first world has an incredible access to information which has never existed in the past - if I want models for ways to regard animism in a chunk of world far different from where my ancestors lived, I can not only look to my ancestors for models for seeing the world, I can not only draw off my own background in the sciences, and I can not only draw off the immediate local indigenous people for ways to interpret the immediate area, but I can also pull ideas from other sources. Again, historical; I know there are traditional Buryat and Mongol divination methods based on Chinese coins or western playing cards, neither of which were always a part of Mongolian culture.
While I think it's really useful to have the simplification of seeing commonalities between cultures and how they practice animism, I kinda worry about being too simplistic about that. This is one of the biggest things that drives me nuts about Joseph Campbell, whom I admire a lot - he's so eager to see all of humanity united in the big Jungian language of archetype that he's really quick to ditch what makes Tamil culture distinct from Lakota culture distinct from Yoruba culture. And I think this is one of the things I find offensive in how people treat "Native American" stuff, there's this homogenization by outsiders such that a huge continent, home to thousands of cultures, has suddenly become all "Indians," this exotic idealized/dismissed other. This is sort of like saying that "Europeans" - that is, the people indigenous to the areas between Sicily and Lappland - share similar cultural values like saunas, strong cups of tea, Lutheranism, and the French language.
Again, cultural appropriation more as kind of insulting oversimplification. I've read up on Dene stuff an okay but not huge amount and honestly you can't just grab a chunk of Dene mysticism - let's say the Arrow Way ritual, that's pretty documented. As a biligaana who's never lived in Deneteh I kinda sorta get that this stuff has a resonance, complexity and worth and also that there's a ton of it which I just don't understand. If I grabbed my books and tried to do this, it'd either be this really hollow mockery of what the real thing is; or I'd have to know so much about Dene culture and language and land that it would no longer risk cultural appropriation because I'd pretty much be Dene; or it'd be real and resonant only because both the source material had a beauty and resonance, and I'd bring in other stuff which I actually knew to fill in for the stuff which I couldn't possibly know. Oh and if you believe in that sort of thing it's hugely inviting being very ill. Not good.
And that's just one example. So, I feel like maybe the best, most honest way of dealing with this stuff is to charge ahead and make your own tradition, looking to older traditions for models and citing sources all the way, even if that source is deeply personal. Risking being New Agey and flakey is a lot better than risking stomping other peoples' toes while not really "getting" their stuff.
In my above example, I think it'd be more honest to do something described up front as "vaguely based on the Arrow Way ritual especially as documented by Fr. Haile, but drawing on what I know of Buryat/Mongol animism, and some other things - this is not really the Arrow Way ritual, I am not the person to go to if you want that exactly, you want a real hataali and I'm not one." And honestly I don't think I'd do that; it's enough that I have the general modality that yeah, some very specific people do X and Y and Z as part of this really specific ritual, and I can maybe tuck that in the back of my head for when I do my own hopefully different stuff.
My ambivalence about simplifications, oversimplifications gets into language use too. I do like the idea of having words like shaman, shamanism, and totem be kinda vague and less specific. Shaman means this big tent definition, English noun separate from say, the Evenk roots of the word "shaman," inclusive of everything from neopagan personal gnosis to incredibly traditional hataali to incredibly traditional angekok to a lot of traditions where I don't even know the appropriate words. That's useful, sure. That said, shaman is a great example of oversimplification because most cultures with the concept also have some concept of shaman-sickness, a shamanic ordeal. Using the title "shaman" to describe anyone who's vaguely doing animistic tradition stuff to me feels a little like using the term "doctor" to refer to anyone vaguely involved in medicine, from a first year pre-med student to an experienced surgeon to a radiographer. Do I really want to be doing that? And right now the answer is "yes," but it's not an entirely comfortable "yes."
What that does mean is I got more chance to think about what I wanted to say. I think basically anything I wanted to say falls into trying to balance where simplification is helpful to where it becomes an oversimplification harmful towards all sorts of people.
One of the unfortunate things about human nature is the exoticism of the alien other. We know what mainstream American culture is like, and we are naturally drawn to the seemingly exotic, especially if it seems more enlightened. I do see it with the appeal of animist trappings, but I also see this in the appeal of Buddhism and Hinduism, in the appeal of neopaganism in general, in what I know of African-American experience of Islam. And it's not just us; I think you can look back into history and see the same thing among Roman citizens, with their fondness for Kemetic gods, Mithraism, and eventually the splinter-Jewish ecstatic cult which became their formal state religion.
The reason it's unfortunate is that there's always more to this stuff than just exoticism, and as easy as it is to get into this because it looks badass or is not associated with the apparent sterility of our own background, that's just a little too pat. My hope here is based on how it feels easy to be drawn towards Buddhism by the combination of strong visuals and oversimplified overidealization, and yet there's enough depth there that once made more familiar, even when disappointingly unenlightened, it's still good stuff. It's still worth poking at. And if that's true, I think we can say the same things about animism and actually researching animist traditions.
This gets us towards where I feel even more ambivalent about neoshamanism, and first worlders playing around with older animist traditions.
Animism is sort of the least dogmatic spiritual path out there, historically very reliant upon the personal gnosis of the individual practitioner. I think this creates flexibility - there are still going to be legit shamans among us in a few centuries. A similar "flexibility is good" thing is that someone living in the first world has an incredible access to information which has never existed in the past - if I want models for ways to regard animism in a chunk of world far different from where my ancestors lived, I can not only look to my ancestors for models for seeing the world, I can not only draw off my own background in the sciences, and I can not only draw off the immediate local indigenous people for ways to interpret the immediate area, but I can also pull ideas from other sources. Again, historical; I know there are traditional Buryat and Mongol divination methods based on Chinese coins or western playing cards, neither of which were always a part of Mongolian culture.
While I think it's really useful to have the simplification of seeing commonalities between cultures and how they practice animism, I kinda worry about being too simplistic about that. This is one of the biggest things that drives me nuts about Joseph Campbell, whom I admire a lot - he's so eager to see all of humanity united in the big Jungian language of archetype that he's really quick to ditch what makes Tamil culture distinct from Lakota culture distinct from Yoruba culture. And I think this is one of the things I find offensive in how people treat "Native American" stuff, there's this homogenization by outsiders such that a huge continent, home to thousands of cultures, has suddenly become all "Indians," this exotic idealized/dismissed other. This is sort of like saying that "Europeans" - that is, the people indigenous to the areas between Sicily and Lappland - share similar cultural values like saunas, strong cups of tea, Lutheranism, and the French language.
Again, cultural appropriation more as kind of insulting oversimplification. I've read up on Dene stuff an okay but not huge amount and honestly you can't just grab a chunk of Dene mysticism - let's say the Arrow Way ritual, that's pretty documented. As a biligaana who's never lived in Deneteh I kinda sorta get that this stuff has a resonance, complexity and worth and also that there's a ton of it which I just don't understand. If I grabbed my books and tried to do this, it'd either be this really hollow mockery of what the real thing is; or I'd have to know so much about Dene culture and language and land that it would no longer risk cultural appropriation because I'd pretty much be Dene; or it'd be real and resonant only because both the source material had a beauty and resonance, and I'd bring in other stuff which I actually knew to fill in for the stuff which I couldn't possibly know. Oh and if you believe in that sort of thing it's hugely inviting being very ill. Not good.
And that's just one example. So, I feel like maybe the best, most honest way of dealing with this stuff is to charge ahead and make your own tradition, looking to older traditions for models and citing sources all the way, even if that source is deeply personal. Risking being New Agey and flakey is a lot better than risking stomping other peoples' toes while not really "getting" their stuff.
In my above example, I think it'd be more honest to do something described up front as "vaguely based on the Arrow Way ritual especially as documented by Fr. Haile, but drawing on what I know of Buryat/Mongol animism, and some other things - this is not really the Arrow Way ritual, I am not the person to go to if you want that exactly, you want a real hataali and I'm not one." And honestly I don't think I'd do that; it's enough that I have the general modality that yeah, some very specific people do X and Y and Z as part of this really specific ritual, and I can maybe tuck that in the back of my head for when I do my own hopefully different stuff.
My ambivalence about simplifications, oversimplifications gets into language use too. I do like the idea of having words like shaman, shamanism, and totem be kinda vague and less specific. Shaman means this big tent definition, English noun separate from say, the Evenk roots of the word "shaman," inclusive of everything from neopagan personal gnosis to incredibly traditional hataali to incredibly traditional angekok to a lot of traditions where I don't even know the appropriate words. That's useful, sure. That said, shaman is a great example of oversimplification because most cultures with the concept also have some concept of shaman-sickness, a shamanic ordeal. Using the title "shaman" to describe anyone who's vaguely doing animistic tradition stuff to me feels a little like using the term "doctor" to refer to anyone vaguely involved in medicine, from a first year pre-med student to an experienced surgeon to a radiographer. Do I really want to be doing that? And right now the answer is "yes," but it's not an entirely comfortable "yes."
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-02 04:13 pm (UTC)That adequately describes my ideas as well. As well as the ideals of, I think, Kemetic Reconstructist religions. Really, my pseudospiritual beliefs don't have any true analog (aside from technoshamanism, I suppose), they just draw on all sorts of things, from ancient Egypt to Aztec culture.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-13 07:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-13 07:09 am (UTC)