Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona available in Hardcover
Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona
- ISBN-10:
- 0253338999
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253338990
- Pub. Date:
- 07/26/2001
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253338999
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253338990
- Pub. Date:
- 07/26/2001
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253338990 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2001 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
Claiming Sacred Ground
Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona
By Adrian J. Ivakhiv
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2001 Adrian IvakhivAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33899-0
CHAPTER 1
Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web
One of the defining narratives of Western culture has been a story of power and of knowledge: that science and technology — the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and its technical application toward human welfare — have established humanity as the reigning power on this Earth. Though this power might not always be equitably shared nor wisely deployed, it is a power, so the story goes, that has been harnessed by human ingenuity from the forces of nature. It is the power of the steam engine, the turbine, the atom, and the silicon chip (and, aiding in the circulation of all of these, the power of the dollar, pound, or yen).
It seems paradoxical that some of those more privileged within this economy of power — relatively educated and, on a global scale, well-off Westerners — betray doubts about this techno-humanist project. Millennial times encourage such doubts: from wide-screen tornadoes, earthbound asteroids, and extraterrestrial invasions, to the real-life escap(ad)es of sects like Heaven's Gate, to the more common lament over the loss of "that old-time religion," the idea that humans are subject to the whims of a higher power, or that we must answer to it for the misuse of our own power, is widespread.
In one of its more recent guises, this power takes on the form of the Earth itself, the body of a being increasingly known by its feminized, ancient Greek name Gaia. This book is about one of the responses to this particular form of power, and about those people who seek out places where one might reconnect with it, feel the pulse of its energy, and allow it to guide one's actions in the direction of some sort of reconcordance of a world gone askew. Many of these people consider themselves part of an emerging New Age of spiritual and ecological awareness. They share a desire to communicate with a numinous, extrahuman Other — a realm of power, meaning, and intelligence found somewhere beyond the boundaries of the ego, and beyond the confines of a rationalist modern worldview. This desire is felt to be part of a broader societal imperative — a refusal of the disenchanting consequences of secular, scientific-industrial modernity, and an attempt to develop a culture of reenchantment, a new planetary culture that would dwell in harmony with the spirit of the Earth.
This desire for contact with an extrahuman Other, if it is taken seriously, raises a series of questions: about the reality of the Other, the different kinds of Others imagined or experienced to be real (such as gods and goddesses, spirits, angels, or extraterrestrials), and the possible forms of relationship between human individuals and such nonhuman intelligences. In their most stark formulation, these concerns revolve around the question: is the Other encountered by these Gaian pilgrims real, or is it simply an empty screen onto which they project their own fantasies and unconscious desires? A religious believer would typically answer this question by affirming the first possibility — that these Others are quite real (and may proceed to make significant distinctions between them, for instance, between benevolent and maleficent ones), while the majority of secular intellectuals would likely deny their reality as such, explaining them instead as wish-fulfillment fantasies or useful social constructs at best.
I will stake out a third position in this book, one that avoids the sterile, as I see it, dichotomies that underlie the terms of the question — dichotomies which separate the human from the nonhuman, and the real from the illusory. My premise, rather, is that both of the opposite poles of these paired dichotomies emerge out of an interactive web that is tangled and blurred at its very origins. This is a tangled web within which the world is ever being created — shaped and constituted through the imaginative, discursive, spatial, and material practices of humans reflectively immersed within an active and animate, more-than-human world. It is a tangled web of selfhood and otherness, identities and differences, relations both natural and cultural; a web through which circulate meanings, images, desires, and power itself (the power to act, to imagine, to define, impose, and resist). I will argue and try to demonstrate that the Earth — actual places, landscapes, and geographies — and imagination — the ways we conceive, narrate, and "image" the world — are thoroughly intertwined within this tangled web of power- and desire-laden relations. And I will suggest a few ways in which we might begin to reimagine our lives, and the landscapes which surround us, from within a recognition of this messy entanglement.
In a sense, the question that underlies all of what follows, is this: If the Earth speaks to us, as Donna Haraway suggests in one of the epigraphs that opens this study — if it speaks to us not in any language familiar to linguists, but as a kind of "coding trickster with whom we must learn [once again?] to converse" — how are we to interpret what it says? How, amid the tangled politics of living in places where the Earth seems to speak louder and clearer than elsewhere, are we to make sense of its speech?
INTERPRETING CONTESTED LANDSCAPES
Making sense of the world, and of the places and landscapes in which we live, is basic to human experience. Philosophers call the art and science of making sense hermeneutics — an allusion to the messages delivered by the Greek god Hermes, the meanings of which were never self-evident but had to be carefully unpacked and interpreted. This study aims to make sense of two landscapes, distinct and unique places on the surface of this Earth, by providing hermeneutic readings of the social, cultural, material, and ecological forces which interact to shape them, and by burrowing into the cultural images and discourses produced by those groups of people who live in close interaction with those landscapes. Much of my focus will be on the interpretive moment in their production: their cultural construction through stories and place-myths, symbols and representations, images and tropes, all of which emerge out of and, in turn, shape the practical and repeated encounters of residents and visitors with the features of the given landscapes. To this task I bring the tools of the social scientist: specifically, those of participant-observer ethnography, hermeneutic phenomenology, social and environmental history, and cultural-constructivist discourse analysis.
At the same time, this book provides a study of the geographies of the sacred in the New Age and earth spirituality movements. By geographies I mean the ways the surface of the Earth (geo) is "written" (graphein), inscribed, and constituted, in discourse, imagination, and practice, and how in turn the Earth constitutes or inscribes itself into the ideas and activities of people. The two places on which I focus, Glastonbury and Sedona, are among the most widely celebrated of sites believed to be sacred by followers of New Age and earth spirituality. As a result of their popularity they have become vigorously contested between competing interpretive communities. These local struggles, in my view, represent intensified versions of broader cultural clashes — struggles between competing worldviews and notions of nature, land, place, and relations between humans and nature. As large numbers of people perceive society to be in the midst of a thoroughgoing crisis, an ecological, cultural, spiritual, and political crisis of an unprecedentedly global scale, attempts are made to reconceive the myths or master stories of society to respond to this crisis. New Agers and ecospiritualists reach out beyond modernity's dominant metanarratives in their efforts to make sense of the world and to facilitate its transformation. They invoke seemingly nonmodern sources, which range from the creatively anachronistic (pagan folk traditions, premodern ethnocultural identities, re-creations of ancient Goddess-worshipping cultures) to the more audaciously speculative, prophetic, and fantastic (alleged extraterrestrial contacts, freewheeling decipherments of Mayan codices, psychic revelations of ancient civilizations like Atlantis, and so on). They attempt to ground themselves within real or imagined "traditions" thought to be older than, deeper than, and thus more universally rooted than those of the modern world.
This search for new or ^modern (Latour 1990) stories with which to build an alternative metanarrative, casts its net closer to home as well in its quest for interpretive resources. In particular, it draws upon scientific ideas that are thought to be compatible, such as Gaia theory and organismic or holographic conceptions of nature. All of these are brought to bear on the actual places and landscapes where the "culture of reenchantment" attempts to take root. As New Agers and earth spiritualists move to such pilgrimage centers, these various representations and beliefs about nature, landscape, and history clash with those of other people living there, and struggles develop over what to do and how to live at these sites.
Ultimately, however, the newcomers' values come up against the two predominant, legitimizing value imperatives of our time: the epistemological imperatives of science, and the economic imperatives of transnational capitalism. The latter, in particular, imposes a monetarization and rationalization onto space and time which is antithetical to certain of the values of New Age and ecospiritual culture. As I will show, the responses which emerge out of the tensions and clashes between these are predominantly the following. With the first (science), there is a range of interactions and negotiations which take place between science and its popular consumption: these include New Age challenges to science, which may take the form of outright rejection, but more frequently involve the selective appropriation of science, or at least of its language and its aura, combined with calls for an alternative or new-paradigm science. With the second (capitalism), there may be attempts to develop an alternative economy of sorts, but more frequently — and usually more successfully — there is the development of a tourist-based service industry catering to the needs of tourists, pilgrims, and spiritual seekers. These attempts in turn affect the nonhuman landscape.
The questions I will raise and try to answer in the process include the following. (1) What accounts for the attraction, or spiritual magnetism (Preston 1992), these specific landscapes hold for believers and practitioners of New Age and ecospirituality? In what lies their charisma or potency? (2) How do these landscapes become so highly charged with a richness of conflicting cultural meanings? Specifically, how are the landscapes themselves — their component features, numinous qualities, and active ecological agents — woven into the activities of diverse groups of people? (3) What are the differences and similarities between the alternative values and interpretations of these landscapes represented by New Age and ecospiritual beliefs and, on the other hand, the values and interpretations held by the other cultural communities connected to them (for instance, evangelical Christians, real estate developers, and others)? How do these differences and conflicts play themselves out in the practice and politics of everyday life? (4) And finally, to what extent do these subcultural conceptions present a viable alternative to contemporary Western society's dominant ideology of nature — nature seen primarily as resource, property, and commodity? Do these ideas and practices facilitate or enable possibilities for developing counterpractices and spaces of resistance to the commodification of the Earth? Or do they merely reflect and perpetuate processes within the dominant society, such as the globalization of consumer capitalism, the replacement of resource extraction industries by tourism and "disneyfication," and the commodification of spirituality or of environmental concern?
THE NEW AGE AND EARTH SPIRITUALITY MOVEMENTS
The concept of the New Age arises from the belief or hope that the present time constitutes a historical turning point inaugurating an era of ecological harmony, personal and planetary integration, and spiritual fulfillment. Over the last thirty years, the term has been used to describe a heterogeneous spectrum of ideas, beliefs, organizations, personalities, and practices, many explicitly religious, others less so, all of which together make up a large and decentralized subculture. Without stretching the term too far, New Age spirituality or, more broadly, New Age culture as a whole, can be seen to include the ideas and practices of several million North Americans and Europeans, affecting many others less directly. While drawing its principal inspiration largely from sources outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, New Age spirituality reworks mainstream ideas into new forms. Its defining characteristics include belief in the primacy of personal transformation; an optimistic and evolutionary (though millenarian) outlook on the future; a monistic and immanent notion of the divine (which brings it closer to Hinduism, Christian Science, or belief in a Star Wars-like universal "force," than to mainstream Western traditions); and a do-it-yourself form of epistemological individualism, whereby personal experience, drawn upon an eclectic and syncretic array of sources, serves as a more important locus for determining what is true than the authority of custom, scripture, or ecclesiastical power.
New Age culture, however, is neither easily identified nor circumscribed. It includes people who identify themselves with a variety of specific religious or spiritual traditions, as well as tens of thousands of more eclectic seekers and dabblers, self-styled gurus, and conspicuous consumers drifting through the contemporary spiritual marketplace. Though my gaze will be limited to the North American and British contexts, New Age culture has increasingly become international, affecting local traditions and giving rise to hybrid forms of religious and spiritual practice and identity. Moreover, the new and alternative spiritualities which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s have proliferated and diversified to the point where significant differences have developed between their related streams. Among these streams are two which will figure prominently within these pages. The first is a broad and loose grouping of orientations which I will be calling earth spirituality or ecospirituality (I will use these terms more or less interchangeably, though they are not, strictly speaking, identical). Earth spirituality overlaps with, but is in some ways quite distinct from, the mainstream of the New Age movement. In this category I would include the women's spirituality movement, the ecopaganism and pantheistic nature mysticism of many radical environmentalists, the whole-earth beliefs of the neotribal "Rainbow family," feminist and environmentalist revisionings of mainstream religious traditions (such as Matthew Fox's and Thomas Berry's Creation-centered Christianity), and various forms of neopaganism and Native reconstructionism and revivalism, such as Wicca, Celtic and Druidic paganism, neoshamanic and Native American forms of spirituality, and syncretistic Afro-Caribbean religions. Proponents of contemporary earth spirituality understand the divine or sacred to be immanent within the natural world, not transcendent and separate from it, and speak of the Earth itself as being an embodiment, if not the embodiment, of divinity.
Markedly different in its emphases is the second stream which will figure prominently here, and which I will call New Age millenarianism or ascensionism. This more otherworldly stream has been more closely identified with the term "New Age" in recent years, and has become particularly well known through the growing body of literature by authors who allegedly "channel" information from "discarnate" and highly evolved spirits of supposedly ancient or extraterrestrial origin. Ascensionism reflects a more dualistic (or neognostic) cosmology, identifying "forces of Light" aligned against those forces which would constrain humanity's spiritual potential. This evolutionary potential of humanity is often modeled on the motif of "ascension" to higher levels or dimensions of existence; and ascensionist literature makes frequent use of quasi-scientific language to describe the "higher frequencies," "vibrations," "light quotients" and "energy bodies," energy shifts and DNA changes, that are said to be associated with this epochal shift.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Claiming Sacred Ground by Adrian J. Ivakhiv. Copyright © 2001 Adrian Ivakhiv. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface and AcknowledgmentsONE: DEPARTURESOne. Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled WebTwo. Reimagining EarthThree. Orchestrating Sacred SpaceTWO: GLASTONBURYFour. Stage, Props, and Players of AvalonFive. Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested SpacesTHREE: SEDONASix. Red Rocks to Real EstateSeven. Vortexes and Crossed Currents: Sedona's Multichannel WildernessFOUR. ARRIVALSEight. Practices of Place: Nature, Heterotopia, and the Postmodern SacredNotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
The case studies of Glastonbury and Sedona are fascinating reading. Further, Adrian Ivakhiv convinces us that what matters about sacred sites is not what makes them sacred but how multiple actors, at least one of which is non-human, struggle, negotiate, and ultimately orchestrate what can and cannot happen there.