As I mentioned in the first post of my series, anthropologists and ethnobiologists have played an outsized role in studying and popularizing ayahuasca and Amazonian shamanism, and more recently, attending to its internationalization. This history affords anthropologists a stake in discussions of drug policy issues pertaining to the subjects; one might even suggest it requires their participation as a matter of ethical concern. One topic of interest among scholars and activists right now is whether and how to regulate ayahuasca practices within a framework of increasing legalization and legitimation in the global north. Some scientists and activists seem to believe that legality alone will bring increased transparency and safety by eliminating the need for practitioners and participants to navigate in what is effectively a criminal underground. However, the assumption of legality among the practitioners and participants of the new ayahuasca churches, particularly Ayahuasca Healings, sheds light on numerous other problems that legalization alone will not solve—in fact, may exacerbate. These include the misappropriation of indigenous culture, the hyper-commodification of spirituality, and a rapid increase in demand for the vine, which is already being overharvested in some areas.

As we saw in post #6, a major issue that arises in the face of legalization is how to ensure the physical and psychological safety of participants and the qualifications of practitioners—an issue which remains problematic even in the Amazon. How would ayahuasca practice be regulated and policed if it were legalized in North America—or should it be? Scholars and researchers are beginning to discuss options for such a scenario (Blainey 2015; Haden et al. 2016). However, given the privileged role of religion in U.S. culture and the lack of regulatory oversight of religious organizations and their leadership, even in the face of some of the nefarious practices associated with religion in our country, it is questionable whether legalization under the rubric of religious freedom will provide for the safety and wellbeing of participants—especially given the rise of these new ayahuasca churches, their often young and inexperienced leaders, and the DEA’s lack of regulatory powers with regard to the level of training and experience of “ministers” or “clergy.”

Contributing to this issue is the lack of discernment engendered by anything-goes New-Age eclecticism and the emotional neediness—and therefore, vulnerability—of a population scarred by the excesses and violence of modernity. Such a population is easy prey for a charismatic leader promising transformation, awakening, and freedom. While such leaders, and the dangers they represent, are not confined to ayahuasca shamanism, it may be that ayahuasca use exacerbates the problem. Despite the common wisdom that ayahuasca “dissolves the ego,” the very opposite may be true. One gringo shaman that I know calls it “the ego explosion.” “We warn people about it when they come to visit our center,” he said. The UDV has systems of accountability in place that help keep a lid on excessive egotism and ensure acceptable behavior from leaders and members. Traditionally, the egalitarian social structure of Amazonian culture has performed the same function. However, with the expropriation of ayahuasca use to new cultural settings, particularly the Western world where personal freedom and individuality are cherished above all, social controls over individual transgressions are in short supply. Thus the privileged position of religious freedom in U.S. culture, along with the premium placed on individual freedom, are a recipe for danger when it comes to the legalization of ayahuasca within the current framework.

Whether or not Ayahuasca Healings succeeds in winning their DEA exemption—and most observers believe that they won’t—the controversy has exposed the ongoing rift between the neo-shamanism community in the United States, which invariably lays claim to romanticized images of Native American and indigenous Amazonian spirituality and worldviews, and various sectors of the Native American community, in this case, the Native American Church. It is a humorless irony that the new ayahuasca churches purportedly idolize and seek to mimic those very Native American peoples who have consistently denounced such misappropriation of Native American spirituality and culture, and who have so consistently and vehemently distanced themselves from James Mooney and ONAC.

The disjuncture is not just between New Age and Native American spirituality, but also between Amazonian and Native North American forms of shamanic and religious practice, colonial histories and socioeconomic settings. Contemporary ayahuasca shamanism evolved in a context of interethnic travel and trade. Shamanic power in the Amazon relies on the ability to live, act, communicate, and negotiate across the boundaries between various groups of humans, between human and non-human, and between material and spiritual worlds. Kinship and personhood among indigenous Amazonians are based more on relations of nurturance and reciprocity than on genetic speciation. Jaguars, for example, may be considered people, even kin, whereas members of other tribes may be considered not fully human. Within the field of genetically human relationships, where the social structure is based on colonial ethnic hierarchies, the use of ayahuasca is used variously to index ethnic distinctions, to subvert them, and to blur them in the process of interethnic alliance building. Ethnicity in the Amazon tends to be fluid. This cosmopolitanism, the cross-boundary exchange and multi-ethnic eclecticism that characterizes Amazonian shamanism has made it a good fit for an international audience. Furthermore, due to the interethnic nature of Amazonian shamanism, services have historically been rendered for a fee. This practice was readily expanded to incorporate the current wave of seekers to the Amazon.

In North America, however, ayahuasca shamanism has been juxtaposed onto an indigenous context that is completely anathema to the commodification of anything spiritual, and in which ethnicity is far from fluid. In Native North America, ethnic identity is measured by blood quotient and by registration in a federally recognized tribe, and identity politics are a serious issue with very real ramifications for tribal membership and access to the benefits that it affords. Furthermore, New Age appropriation of indigenous spirituality has been a sore spot for Native American people for decades, and even inter-tribal appropriation (e.g. the Sun Dance and sweat lodge ceremonies), as well as the sale of native spirituality by indigenous people to outsiders, have led to bitter acrimony within the Native North American community (Churchill 2003).

Equally salient are the different religious and colonial contexts that predate contemporary indigenous spirituality in North and South America. Ayahuasca shamanism developed largely within the socio-cultural and economic context of Jesuit missionization, which was relatively tolerant of shamanic practice, even incorporating it into the Jesuit system of indirect governance. Similarly, Amazonian healers often eagerly adopted the symbols and imagery of their powerful Christian counterparts. Some scholars claim that the ayahuasca ceremony itself is a hybrid form born within the missions that later spread to the hinterlands (Gow 1994). To the contrary, Native North American peoples still remember vividly the missionary boarding schools to which their grandparents were abducted, where they were violently stripped of their families, their languages, and their cultures. They also remember vividly the centuries of persecution that they suffered for the practice of their religions. The passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act have only begun to repair this damage, and yet it is these hard-fought and long-suffered victories to which proponents of New-Age indigeneity now lay claim.

One one level, the Ayahuasca Healings story is just one example of many in which non-indigenous people seek to appropriate indigenous culture and in so doing, colonize the territory of the spirit in the same way we have colonized their lands. On another level, the Ayahuasca Healings story is one of youth, idealism, and naiveté, coupled with a millennial culture of narcissism, self-promotion and entrepreneurialism, inflamed by the runaway egotism that appears to be a possible side-effect of frequent ayahuasca use. On all levels, however, the story is a cautionary tale about the practical, ideological, and ethical problems that confront the legalization of ayahuasca, problems that the current framework, based on a religious-freedom exemption, fails to address.

Author’s note: Thanks to Jade Grigori for help with wording. Also thanks to the editors and April guest blogger of Savage Minds for allowing me to overstay my welcome and continue posting until the story was complete.

Works Cited:

Blainey, Marc G. 2015. “Forbidden Therapies: Santo Daime, Ayahuasca, and the Prohibition of Entheogens in Western Society.” Journal of Religion and Health 54(1):287-302.

Churchill, Ward. 2003. “Spiritual Hucksterism: The Rise of the Plastic Medicine Men.” In Shamanism: A Reader, edited by Graham Harvey, 324–333. New York: Psychology Press.

Gow, Peter. 1994. “River People: Shamanism and History in Western Amazonia.” In Shamanism, History and the State, edited by Nicholas Thomas, and Caroline Humphrey, 90–113. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Haden, Mark, Brian Emerson, and Kenneth W Tupper. 2016. “A Public-Health-based Vision for the Management and Regulation of Psychedelics.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 48(4):243-252.

Last week (March 18, 2017), I received an email that read, in toto:

Just like I promised:
Get the free eBook here (right click, “Save Link As…”)
I wrote this back in 2010, and the secrets contained within this eBook, have allowed me to create and live the most beautiful, fulfilling life I could have ever imagined.
It is actually a “channeled” book, are you familiar with what channeling is?
Back in 2010, I met The Teachers who showed me how to create my ideal life experience, no matter where I was at.
(The Teachers are the true authors of this eBook)
Following Their words, led me down a path more magical, more beautiful, more filled with joy, love and freedom, than anything I could have ever dreamt up.
Because they taught me, how to truly follow my heart. There’s no secret, that following your heart, is
the key to creating the life of your dreams.
The question is:
How?
You know you want a life of freedom, but how do you get there?
The mind can be so strong in it’s fears and doubts.
And we can be so controlled by other people’s expectations of us…
So the question is, above all of that, how can you still follow your heart?
This is the key to your most fulfilling life, ever.
And this eBook gives you the answers, and shows you, how you can move forward, to create the life that your heart and soul, so deeply yearn for.
It’s time!
So enjoy this eBook, and I’ll talk to you soon! [To be continued..]
With infinite gratitude, so happy to share this,
Trinity de Guzman & The Ayahuasca Healings Family

About once or twice a week I get a missive like this from Trinity, the messianic young founder of Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church. Since I initiated my membership in the Ayahuasca Healings community (by reluctantly giving them my e-mail address), I have received at least 48 of these love bombs, with subject lines ranging from “Welcome Beautiful Soul” to “Day 6 – How To Choose The Right Shaman” to “…I’m going to be a father!! Yay!!”

Gayle Highpine likens Trinity’s writing to a New Age version of prosperity gospel:

Psychological triggers are his stock in trade. “You can manifest the life of your dreams” is powerful bait, not a religious teaching. Who wouldn’t want to live like Trinity, traveling the world skiing and surfing and having adventures? If he has any metaphysical beliefs, they appear to be “The Secret,” the New Age version of prosperity gospel, which uses the “law of attraction” and the “art of manifestation.”

Prosperity gospel just happens to be the brand of Christianity with which Donald Trump has aligned himself—and one that many Christian groups themselves have a hard time stomaching. The promise of wealth, power, and success in exchange for unlimited and unquestioning faith is a powerful draw for the suffering. Someone ought to do a thesis on the parallels between Trumpism and Trinity-ism—call them legion, for like the biblical demons of the man of Gadarenes, they are many.

A few prelims

In my second post of this series, I mentioned the existence of a set of organizations calling themselves branches of the Native American Church who, under the aegis of the Oklevueha Native American Church (ONAC), claim to be serving ayahuasca legally in the United States. I’ll be calling these groups the “new ayahuasca churches” (to distinguish them from the Santo Daime and UDV). I also characterize these groups as “neo-shamanic.” A complete unpacking of this term is beyond the scope of this discussion, so for the sake of the current argument, I’ll define “neo-shamanism” as any of a variety of novel forms of shamanic practice based on the Amazonian model but modified significantly through their adoption into a New-Age, Western, scientific-industrial cultural context. Changes generally include the elimination of tobacco smoke, the erasure of sorcery, the lack of knowledge or use of the sopla and chupa (blowing and sucking) methods of curing, the use of bottled ayahuasca bought on an underground market, the use of recorded and non-Amazonian music, an ideology heavily influenced by Eastern religion and medicine, and the appropriation and incorporation of idealized elements of indigenous and Native North American religious culture. I’ll also recognize that neo-shamanism and “traditional” ayahuasca shamanism represent points on a spectrum of shamanic practice, as even “traditional” ayahuasca shamanism is adaptive and eclectic.

It’s also important to clarify up front that ONAC is an organization drenched in controversy. They’ve been repeatedly renounced in the press and in the courts by the National Council of Native American Churches, the governing body of legitimate NAC organizations in North America. ONAC’s leader, James Mooney, claims membership in a branch of the Seminole Tribe that, according to the Seminole Tribe, doesn’t exist. Most recently, they’ve had a very public and tawdry falling out with their own lawyer that appears to have culminated in the installment of Howard Mann, pornography and gambling magnate, as head of ONAC. But I’m going to hold off on the ONAC discussion for now, and lead instead with the Ayahuasca Healings story, which brought ONAC to our attention in the first place.

On with the story:

Among the new ayahuasca churches, Ayahuasca Healings, also known as Ayahuasca USA and Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church (AHNAC), is the youngest and newest, has (or had) the biggest ambitions and the most successful marketing operation, and as a result, gathered the attention of the press, the National Council of Native American Churches and, finally, the U.S. federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Ayahuasca Healings came on the public scene in the second half of 2015. They immediately claimed to be the first, public, legal ayahuasca church in America, a feat accomplished, they asserted, through their affiliation with the New Haven Native American Church. They advertised retreats both  in Peru and on their 160-acre retreat site in Elbe, Washington. The domestic retreats were offered in exchange for a “suggested donation” of $1497 to $1997 for a four-day retreat (Ayahuasca Healings 2016a). Their stated mission was to build 30 retreat centers in the U.S. at the rate of two per year until 2032, “the start of our New Golden Age” (Ayahuasca Healings 2016b). [Note: The content of some linked webpages may have changed since the date of research, and thus do not reflect statements made in this post. The bibliography at the end of this post will provide original access dates, and archived pages are available from the author upon request.]

The tone of Ayahuasca Healings’ message and mission are characteristic of the general tenor of public conversation around ayahuasca: That it’s a panacea, that it’s a step to ultimate awareness and personal empowerment, that ayahuasca will change the world:

Just like yoga and meditation have come from the East to help Westerners return back to the essential Truth of Presence & being in the heart…
Ayahuasca has come from deep within the jungles of the Amazon, for the exact same reason.
And I truly believe that Ayahuasca will be just as ‘mainstream’ as yoga & meditation are becoming…
We’re going through a massive, collective Awakening.
[automated email, “Day 2: The Great Awakening & Ayahuasca”]

Ayahuasca Healings is headed by a messianic young leader named Trinity de Guzman who says that in his first ayahuasca session in 2013, “I was curled into a fetal position, crying, shaking, and vomiting. And I knew that at that moment that I was here to share [ayahuasca] with the world” (Rose 2015). Formerly an internet marketer who was making five figures a month by the age of 19 (by his own account), De Guzman is profiled on the website Entrepreneurs for Change under the episode title, “Travel The World For Years While Your Remote Team Does All The Work” (Li 2016). After people began to look more deeply at Ayahuasca Healings, this profile story became the focus of significant criticism, especially de Guzman’s statement that he paid his offshore employees a dollar an hour for their work, saying, “that is actually a normal, good wage in these countries where we’re hiring.”

De Guzman is flanked by Marc “Kumooja Banyan Tree” Shackman, whose now-defunct website (http://balancingbetweenworlds.com)/ billed him as a “contemporary shaman, transformational life coach, inspirational guest speaker and Heart Energy Medicine therapist.” Videos released by the group (here, here and here are but a few) show a small group of young people, working and living together on their land in Elbe, celebrating, sharing food and the warmth of a fire, expressing their joy at the transformations they’ve experienced through ayahuasca and the hope that they feel at being a part of this new spiritual community.

AH’s promises of love, healing and community; the charisma of their leadership and of their young and idealistic participants; and particularly the promise of legal and open ayahuasca ceremonies in the United States attracted a ready following and a significant amount of press coverage both in the local press and online media outlets such as Reset.me, Munchies and The Daily Beast (Rose 2015, Siegel 2015, Malandra 2016). It didn’t hurt that de Guzman has a professional background in internet marketing. In fact, Ayahuasca Healings’ ability to market themselves appears to be one of the factors leading to their downfall, when it brought them to the attention of James Mooney and the ONAC church. On Dec. 3, 2015, in two posts on its Facebook page, ONAC disavowed knowledge of New Haven NAC, under whose aegis Ayahuasca Healings purportedly was operating, and asserted that only those groups and individuals with an explicit relationship to ONAC enjoyed the legal protections they offered. In a Dec. 4 comment to one of these posts, a Facebook user posted a comment which stated (incorrectly) that only two organizations in the United States had the right to administer ayahuasca in their religious sessions: the UDV and ONAC. Following the opening comment was a piece of text entitled “Buyer Beware,” which detailed why Ayahuasca Healings was not protected. The comment appears to be signed by a “Chief Oklevueha NAC,” presumably Mooney, although my queries as to the authorship remain unanswered.

That same day, Dec. 4, 2016, the “Buyer Beware” text appeared on the website of anthropologist Bia Labate, expert in the internationalization of ayahuasca, as an anonymous blog post (Anonymous 2015). Differences between the blog post and the Facebook comment suggest that one was not a cut-and-paste of the other. Instead, they appear to be two derivations of the same source material, making the apparent signature of “Chief Oklevueha NAC” intriguing indeed—and ironic: Did Labate begin her series of anti-AHNAC blog posts with a piece written by James Mooney, head of ONAC, or one of his proxies?

What is clear is that Ayahuasca Healings had attracted Mooney’s attention—and that he was not happy with the fact that they were operating as a branch of his church without his acknowledgement and blessing. On Dec. 4 Mooney issued (via Facebook) a 2-page letter to the New Haven NAC disavowing their relationship to ONAC and demanding that Ayahuasca Healings deal directly with ONAC. Mooney closed by stating that his lawyers would be in touch with a formal cease-and-desist order, and that ONAC would notify local law enforcement of NHNAC and Ayahuasca Healings’ activities. “They will have to decide at that point whether to arrest you and those you participate with, or leave you alone.” (Council of Elders, Oklevueha Native American Church. 2015. “Letter of Distrust.” Posted to Facebook.com/OklevuehaNativeAmericanChurch/, Dec. 4. Accessed May 25, 2016.) The next day, Ayahuasca Healings announced their intention to join ONAC.

By this time, however, ayahuasca watchdogs had had enough. On Dec. 7, 2015, another post appeared on Labate’s blog, this time written by a law expert, exposing the false claims of legality offered by ONAC (Hudson 2015). The post also detailed AH’s market-oriented approach:

The [Ayahuasca Healings] website is a lead generation factory collecting email addresses. The multi-step marketing process…can have the unfortunate effect of entrapping customers in commitment-to-buy. This is Sales 101…It exploits people.

The scary thing is that so many people have bought into this in the past week that Ayahuasca USA stopped accepting applications.

Ayahuasca Healings, however, continued to move forward with their plans. On Dec. 12, they announced a formal affiliation with and blessing by James Mooney, whom de Guzman, in his enthusiasm, described as “literally no higher authority in the Native American Church in all of America” (Ayahuasca Healings 2015).

On the same day, Labate released another blog post, this one entitled “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under the Oklevueha Native American Church” (Highpine 2015a) examining the specifics of ayahuasca law in the US, how the UDV had gained their exemption, and why ONAC’s (and therefore AHNAC’s) claims to the legal use of entheogenic sacraments were false. On December 21, Indian Country Today published an opinion piece denouncing ONAC and the use of marijuana in Native American ceremonies—a piece that drew a swift and sharp rebuttal from Mooney (Hopkins 2015, ONAC 2015). The next day, Highpine published another blog post on Labate’s site examining the legal status of ayahuasca in the United States (Highpine 2015b). These blog posts had become a five-part series targeting Ayahuasca Healings, and they managed to get the attention of some members of the public. Using the blog posts as fodder, moderators of some of the ayahuasca forums initiated conversations about the issue, and the news media, who had previously covered the story uncritically, began to look more closely at the claims and ambitions of de Guzman and ONAC (Malandra 2016).

Finally, on January 11, 2016, a Facebook group was launched called “Ayahuasca Healings Is NOT Legal.” “This group is dedicated to refuting the claims of ‘Trinity de Guzman’, James ‘Screaming Eagle’ Mooney, the ONAC, et al. in regards to illegitimate claims of their ability (and intent) to distribute ayahuasca in the state of Washington legally,” the description reads. Their first post was a link to the Dec. 12 Highpine article, “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under ONAC.” Membership of the Facebook group approached 150 people by March. However, in Elbe, things continued as planned, with the group’s first weekend retreat taking place on Jan. 22 (automated email, “Please Help”).

Towards the end of January, Trinity’s business partners in Peru sent out a press release disavowing any relationship with Ayahuasca Healings and clarifying that de Guzman’s role in their operation was as investor and booking agent, nothing more (Polley 2016). At least one more well-known retreat center in Peru later declined to do business with Ayahuasca Healings after learning of the controversy. And on January 24, a former member of the Ayahuasca Healings inner circle released a YouTube video denouncing the group on the basis of four major complaints: the lack of elders within the operation, the lack of indigenous representation, the excessive price of the retreats, and the lack of support from within the “global medicine community”—in addition to the overarching fact that they were telling people their U.S. retreats were legal, but they were not (Montgomery 2016).

The Ayahuasca Healings controversy attracted the attention of the Native American community as well. On Feb. 18, Indian Country Today published a formal statement by the National Council of Native American Churches denouncing ONAC and the use of any sacrament other than peyote in NAC ceremonies. Although this was the same message they had issued in various amicus briefs and other memoranda in the past, this time they named ayahuasca specifically:

Some of these illegitimate organizations, comprised of non-Native people, are now claiming that marijuana, ayahuasca and other substances are part of Native American Church theology and practice. Nothing could be further from the truth. We, the National Council of Native American Churches are now stepping forward to advise the public that we do not condone the activities of these illegitimate organizations. [NCNAC 2016]

Then, sometime in the end of February, Ayahuasca Healings received a “friendly” letter from the DEA requesting that they file a formal petition for exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (automated email, “Please Help”).

On March 8, 2016, Ayahuasca Healings announced that they had made the decision to go on a “temporary hiatus,” and that they would “not be conducting ceremonies or holding retreats for a limited period of time” (automated email, “Please Help”).  Their stated intention was to bring the operation into full alignment with RFRA, and yet later in the letter, they assert, “Although AHNAC has repeatedly faced criticism from detractors who believe that our interpretation of the law as it currently stands is mistaken, we are 100% confident that what we are doing here is 100% legal.”

The news of the hiatus came as a shock to those “members” who were in the process of packing for their pre-paid ayahuasca retreat in Elbe. No refunds were offered, as the money had apparently all been spent. Besides, as AH’s new representative pointed out, AH’s terms and conditions stated that monies paid would be considered a gift or an investment in the future of the church, not a fee for service (Dylan Ayahealings, Facebook comment, April 15, 2016). Participants quickly discovered that the credit card companies were treating the situation as a case of fraud and refunding payments on that basis. Meanwhile, de Guzman had been in Peru since February, and according to complaints from AH members, neither he nor Shackman were in contact with members or with the public.

As of March 8, according to the new homepage of the Ayahuasca Healings website, information on retreats would be available only to members. The first step in obtaining a membership was to provide your email address, at which time they would begin to send you one email a day for ten days. The welcome letter, which, like all missives from AH, is signed by Trinity de Guzman, reads:

Together, we are going to take a journey. The Inner Journey.
The most valuable, beautiful, rewarding journey we could ever take.
The emails I send you, will be like a map for you. To a treasure chest.
To the peace, love, joy, and happiness you know you came here to live.
A way out of being trapped by society. A way out of any depression or anxiety.
And a way to let go of the deepest rooted fears that keep you stuck.
So please follow these steps to make sure you receive our emails from here on.
If you are using Gmail, here’s how:
[automated email, “Welcome beautiful soul!”]

To be continued.

Works Cited (links without parenthetical citations will be listed, in order of appearance, at the end)

Anonymous. “Let the Buyer Beware: Advertised ‘Ayahuasca Healing Retreats’ Are Not Legal in the United States.” 2015. Bia Labate Blog. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/let-the-buyer-beware-advertised-ayahuasca-healing-retreats-are-not-legal-in-the-united-states.

Ayahuasca Healings 2015. “Ayahuasca Church in America, Video Blog – Week 1, CELEBRATE!” Dec. 12. Accessed April 19, 2016. https://youtu.be/Ek0HtGxQfCo.

——— 2016a. “FAQs.” Accessed May 24, 2016. https://ayahuascahealings.com/faqs/.

——— 2016b. “ONAC of Ayahuasca Healings – Vision, Mission & Philosophy.” Accessed May 24, 2016. https://ayahuascahealings.com/ayahuasca-usa-church-vision/.

Highpine, Gayle. 2015a. “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under the Oklevueha Native American Church.” Bia Labate Blog. Dec. 12. Accessed April 19. 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/the-legality-of-ayahuasca-churches-under-the-oklevueha-native-american-church.

——— 2015b. “Is Ayahuasca Actually Illegal in the United States?” http://www.bialabate.net/news/is-ayahuasca-actually-illegal-in-the-united-states. Published Dec. 22, accessed April 19, 2016.

Hopkins, Ruth. 2015. “Pot and Pretendians.” Indian Country Today. Dec. 21. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/12/21/pot-and-pretendians.

Hudson, Hamilton. 2015. “Don’t believe the hype about the ‘Legal Ayahuasca USA Church’ Going Around Facebook—It’s Not Legal, It’s Dangerous, and Here’s Why.” Bia Labate Blog. Dec. 7. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/dont-believe-the-hype-about-the-legal-ayahuasca-usa-church-going-around-facebook-its-not-legal-its-dangerous-and-heres-why.

Li, Lorna. 2016. “Travel the World for Years While Your Remote Team Does All The Work – Trinity De Guzman.” Entrepreneurs for a Change. Accessed May 25, 2016. http://www.entrepreneursforachange.com/25/.

Malandra, Ocean. 2016. “A Closer Look at That ‘First Legal Ayahuasca Church in America”’ Story You’ve Seen Hyped In The Media.” Reset.me. Feb. 1. Accessed April 19 2016. http://reset.me/story/first-legal-ayahuasca-church/.

Montgomery, Scott. 2016. “USA Plant Med Communities! Ayahuasca Healings: An Ex-Insider’s Fiery Perspective.” Jan. 24. Accessed April 19, 2016. https://youtu.be/Ti_YUXmrF5M.

NCNAC (Native American Church of North America). 2016. “National Council Does Not Condone Faux Native American Churches or Marijuana Use.” Indian Country Today. Feb. 18. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/02/18/national-council-does-not-condone-faux-native-american-churches-or-marijuana-use-163464.

ONAC 2015. “Pot and Pretendians: ONAC Rebuttal.” Indian Country Today. Dec. 29. Accessed May 24, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/12/29/pot-and-pretendians-onac-rebuttal.

Polley, Lara. 2016. “Media Release–El Jardin de la Paz and ayahuascahealings.com.” January 27. Accessed. April 19, 2016. http://www.eljardindelapaz.com/#!Media-Release-El-Jardin-de-la-Paz-and-ayahuascahealingscom/cay8/56a968a10cf215a9bb9eacdd.

Rose, Nick. 2015. “America Is Getting Its First Legal Ayahuasca Church.” Munchies. Dec. 11. Accessed May 17, 2016. https://munchies.vice.com/articles/america-is-getting-its-first-legal-ayahuasca-church.

Siegel, Zachary. 2015. “America’s First Legal Ayahuasca ‘Church’.” The Daily Beast. Dec. 6. Accessed May 17, 2016. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/07/america-s-first-legal-ayahuasca-church.html

Other links:

https://ayahuascahealings.com/

http://www.bialabate.net/news/the-religious-freedom-restoration-act-the-dea-exemption-process-and-ayahuasca-healings

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/13/509558608/with-his-choice-of-inauguration-prayer-leaders-trump-shows-his-valueshttps://www.ncronline.org/blogs/small-c-catholic/beware-prosperity-gospel-trump-administration

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/january-web-only/paula-white-donald-trump-prayer-partner-inauguration.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/15/how-the-prosperity-gospel-explains-donald-trumps-popularity-with-christian-voters/

https://nativeamericanchurches.org/

http://www.newhavennativeamericanchurch.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0HtGxQfCo
https://youtu.be/dAYl3yv4ZGk

https://youtu.be/wp5UlFyBTDw

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Yesterday I sat in on a webinar sponsored by ICEERS (the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service) and organized by anthropologist Bia Labate. Entitled “Myths and Realities about the Legality of Ayahuasca in the USA,” the webinar featured three experts on the subject. The first was Jeffrey Bronfman, a leader of the União do Vegetal church in the US whose shipment of ayahuasca (the UDV calls it hoasca) was seized in 1999, leading to a protracted court battle and, eventually, a supreme court decision in favor of the church’s right to use the tea as their sacrament. The second was Rob Heffernan, member of the Santo Daime church (which also uses ayahuasca as a sacrament) and chair of its legal committee. The third was J. Hamilton Hudson, a recent graduate of the Tulane law school who has been following legal developments surrounding ayahuasca-using groups who are affiliated with neither of the aforementioned churches.

The webinar—and the series of which it is a part—are a response to the apparent confusion regarding the legal status of ayahuasca in the United States. This confusion, and some of the factors contributing to it, came to light over the past year and a half with the rise and fall of a group called Ayahuasca Healings, the self-proclaimed “first public legal ayahuasca church in the United States.” Also known as Ayahuasca USA and Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church (AHNAC), AH is one of a number of groups who use ayahuasca in a neo-shamanic setting and, more importantly, who claim that they have the legal right to do so. Unfortunately for AH, they don’t, and a friendly letter from the DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) was enough to finally convince them of that fact—at least for now.

AH is one of a number of groups under the aegis of a shady organization called the Oklevueha Native American Church (ONAC), which promises its branches and branch members legal protection from controlled substances laws. ONAC rests its claims on the idea that, if such substances are used in a religious context by members of a church congregation, then that use is protected by laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by congress to protect the use of peyote (which contains mescaline, a controlled substance) in the context of the Native American Church. ONAC’s claims, however, are false; thus, the churches under ONAC, which claim to serve ayahuasca legally, are acting in contradiction of the law and endangering the people they purport to serve.

In a series of blog posts this month, I’ll look at this whole story in quite a bit of depth, from the fundamental issue of why ayahuasca is (for most users) still illegal in the United States, to the rise and fall of Ayahuasca Healings and the ongoing developments in that story. I’ll also pull back for a look at the bigger picture of ONAC, its founder and the controversies therein, and the various other groups serving ayahuasca and other sacraments under ONAC’s aegis. Finally, I’ll discuss why all this activity is a kick in the teeth to the Native American Church and to the indigenous people of North America more broadly. Anthropologically speaking, one of the keys to the issue is the incongruity between attitudes toward religion and spirituality, race and ethnicity in the Amazon and in the United States—and how the superposition of an ethnomedical practice from the Amazon onto the religious structures of North America is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

Next time I post I’ll get started with a little more explanation of what goes into ayahuasca that makes it the concern of the DEA, and why some people in the U.S. can drink it legally while others can’t. Stay tuned.

I’m guessing that by now most of my readers will have heard of this stuff called “ayahuasca.” Everyone from Stephen Colbert to the New Yorker is talking about it, some in terms more cringe-inducing than others. A quick primer for those who don’t know: Ayahuasca is a psychoactive (read: psychedelic) brew developed by the peoples of the Amazon for ritual purposes ranging from ethnomedicine to divination. It’s just one in a pantheon of sacred plant and multi-plant concoctions used by Amazonian shamans, but it’s one that has sparked the fascination of peoples everywhere, from the Amazon itself to the distant corners of the urban and industrialized nations. Ayahuasca, along with other “entheogens” such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, is a centerpiece of the new Psychedelic Renaissance, an artistic and scientific movement which has, as one of its primary aims, the legitimization of these currently illegal substances by researching and promoting their efficacy as treatments for intractable ailments, usually psychological, including depression, end-of-life anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Once a footnote in the annals of Jesuit missionaries and Spanish explorers, Western awareness of this mind-altering and nausea-inducing beverage grew slowly throughout the 20th century, with not a little assistance from anthropologists and ethnobotanists such as Richard Evans Schultes, the father of ethnobotany; his student, the golden-penned author Wade Davis; and the well known ethnographer-turned-shamanic evangelist, Michael Harner. In Brazil, awareness and use of the tea spread to urban areas with the development and growth of two syncretic religions that use ayahuasca as their sacrament: the União do Vegetal and the Santo Daime. Elsewhere in South America and the world, Amazonian shamans traveled to urban areas and later, to distant countries to perform healing ceremonies for growing audiences of gringos looking for emotional release, a spiritual experience, or physical healing. Today, numerous US and European practitioners, some trained in the Amazon, some not, have taken it upon themselves to serve the brew and to conduct ceremonies. Therein lies the subject of my guest series for Savage Minds.

To be continued.

In fact, it turns out it is exactly the same. Indian papers recently broke the story that police officers in Ahmedabad have “prepared a dossier on 207 men and women” in the Chhara community – the very community where we shot our film.

Here’s more from that story:

Are Ahmedabad police profiling Chhara community? So it seems as they have prepared a dossier specific to the community that has long been demonised as “criminals”. This, despite the fact that the community members have worked hard to correct the image by producing a number of professionals and artistes.

… Manoj Tamaeche, a senior advocate from the community, said that the way police targeted a single community is condemnable.
“Chharas are always been victimized due a negative mindset of the police and the administration. The community is on the path of social and economical development and the youth are into higher education in a big way. Such discrimination is not acceptable.”

What is particularly disturbing is that the police are continuing 19th century practices of identifying so-called “Criminal Tribes” by their modus operandi:

The dossier says that community members indulge in seven types of crime: chain-snatching, stealing by diverting the attention of the victim, looting people coming out of banks, theft in buses and trains, burglary, illegal liquor trade and stealing from the dickey of two-wheelers. … They often put a tattoo on their hand or they can be identified by the mark of wounds on their body.

This language is indistinguishable from 19th and early 20th century “police ethnographies” collected by the British Colonial Authorities. I wrote a blog post in 2007 describing how these ethnographies were like “bird watching guides, identifying common habits and markings which will help you spot a criminal among the crowds.” Reading these texts in the British Library I became aware of how absurd they were:

Some of the information was gathered from the confessions of convicts, but much of it seems to have been the result of embellishments and variations of previous works (“remixing” might be a polite way of describing it). A fair amount has been written about such colonial practices, but it wasn’t until I immersed myself in descriptions of which tribe ate jackal meat and which did not and which community’s women were faithful to their men (with each book contradicting the previous one) that I became aware of the true absurdity of this literature.

At film screenings it is not unusual for someone in the audience to point out that there is criminal activity going on in the community. True. Just as there is criminal activity going on in every community. Does that mean that every citizen of every community with criminal activity should relinquish their rights? It has been frequently pointed out that the percentage of African Americans in jail does not represent the percentage of crimes committed by African Americans, and that profiling Muslim terrorists has diverted important resources away from the threat posed by “patriot groups” and other domestic terrorists in the States. But talking about such issues statistically never really brings the point home.

This week Roxy Gagdekar, a leading journalist in Gujarat who is one of the “stars” of our film, has an editorial about the police dossier, which I think does a great job of making the point. I’ve excerpted some key passages below:

Do Gujarat police and chief minister Narendra Modi have the courage to profile the Patels, Shahs, Vaghelas and Jadejas [other, more powerful, ethnic groups in Gujarat]? Has the government ever issued a ‘fatwa’ against these communities? But, in case of Chharas it not only profiles the community but also stigmatises it as ‘Chhara gangs’.

As mentioned in a ‘confidential report’ prepared by Ahmedabad police, there is no denying that there are about 207 people accused of petty crimes and brewing illicit liquor among Chharas in the city; but for the acts of a few, how can the government stigmatise the entire community of over thousands in Gujarat?

There are many human rights organisations which protest when a Muslim, Dalit or anyone from a marginalised community is denied a house in the ‘mainstream’ area, but why is there a painful silence, when a Chhara is denied a house in a mainstream locality? This writer was forced to sell off his legally owned house in Ghatlodia area of the city, only because of the community identity that he got from his parents.

…This writer fails to understand whether he and thousands of other Chharas like him are free citizens of a free country. When the constitution gives us the right to equality and freedom, how can the state government invoke a highly discriminatory step against a section of the society and also get away with it? Every instance of the police using the term Chhara Gang decreases the chance of securing a job by a member of the community. The message of the booklet prepared by the police is clear – to keep Chharas as criminals and to let them be identified as criminals. What else would the explanation be for the regressive step?

When a community is forced to stay in ghettos, labelled as criminals, denied all the fundamental rights granted to the citizens of this great country, and are forced to stay uneducated, what do the cops and the government expect from them?

So what do Chharas do? They are lawyers, government pleaders, doctors, journalists, call centre executives, teachers at educational institutions, working with Hindi and Gujarat film industries, film-makers, rickshaw drivers, food-joint owners and petty workers. Imagine you kid being punished for theft in a school by the class teacher, only because he is your son or daughter? Chhara parents are often seen in schools struggling to prove that they are not criminals. What do students do to evade this discrimination – they stop going to schools.

…A Chhara girl, who holds MA and BEd degrees, was asked during an interview for a job whether she was carrying a knife. That was her last interview! People who have been involved in making liquor or petty crimes have no option but to continue. Except a few lucky ones like this writer, whose parents managed to give him exposure along with good education, thousands of others continue to be denied just that, even today.

Read the full editorial.

In this post, I’ll consider the 2012 phenomenon in relation to time and otherness. Naturally, I’m hedging my bets and posting this before the potential end of the world. Although no one can seem to decide when the Maya are, they appear to be sometime between Aug 11, 3114 BC and Dec 21, 2012 AD.

This time frame has less to do with the Maya themselves than with how they are invoked by Westerners (both believers and debunkers). I realize that “West” and “Westerners” — just like “the Maya” —  is an overambitious gloss, but indulge me for a moment.  For the record, my perspective is based largely on the American, British, and Spanish public spheres in the press and internet.  (While there seems to be 2012 interest in Russia and China, I’m not in a position to comment on that in any detail. Please leave a comment if you can.)

In the rhetoric of the West, “the Maya” appear to take quantum leaps between historical moments.  In my previous post I focused on the “otherness” of U.S. spiritualists in the eyes of apocalypse debunkers. It goes without saying that the Maya are also “other” in ways that anthropologists have long objected to.  The precise relationships between The Maya (abstract) and the Maya (ethnographic, historic) is a matter of debate, but regardless they are invoked constantly when it comes to apocalyptic expectations for 2012.  

For some in the West, the Maya — along with many others — are a “People Without History.” Eric Wolf used this ironic title for his book because he wanted to emphasize just the opposite; all peoples do have history, even though Western societies often fail to see that or actively ignore the fact. This pattern holds when it comes to supposed Mayan prophecies.  Some believe that the ancient Maya were trying to tell us something, as if all those intervening centuries of history didn’t exist, and then performed an improbable Mayan Vanishing Act at the end of Classic period.

And it’s not just the Maya who are said to speak to us from the deep past before conveniently “disappearing.” Prophecies of apocalypse are not rare in western societies, and most are legitimated on the basis of ancient texts (the Bible, I Ching, Nostradamus, etc). The temporal and cultural distance between those believed to be predicting the apocalypse and those waiting to experience it is precisely what legitimates the prediction. (In other cases that distance is created by technology, such as with Y2K. I’ll leave those parallels  for another time.) Many scholars respond to this by insisting that we must consider Classic Maya texts in their historical and cultural context, and they are absolutely right.

But if we stop here, we miss some of the contradictions  that emerge in arguments about when the Maya are. Despite claims to historical specificity when it comes to interpreting Classic period stela, many debunkers invoke contemporary Maya to convince believers that Dec 21, 2012 will be a non-event. If arguments about stela translations or astronomical observations do not convince you, they imply, then at least you will agree that if the Maya are not worried then you should not be either.

The Penn Museum “Lords of Time” exhibit, for example, employs this method. After multiple rooms of careful and convincing analysis of Classic stela and archaeological evidence, the exhibit leads to a corridor with multiple video screens. Each is dedicated to a different Maya individual, identified by name, ethnic group, and profession. The viewer can choose to hear their answers to one of several questions, including about 2012. None of these individuals believe that the world is about to end.

Other scholars, such as Johan Normark, echo this.  Such claims about non-believing Maya have also appeared in newspaper accounts (see examples in Slate, National Geographic, International Business Times, among others.)

This move is effective on multiple levels.  It re-positions the Maya as our contemporaries, rather than as “vanished” others.  They become People With Histories, both collective and individual, who can comment directly on their own cultural texts. It acknowledges Maya-speakers as having a long historical presence spanning from before the construction of Palenque to after the Guatemalan Civil War.  It invites their opinions on what might happen on Friday.

But there are contradictions here, too. Calling on contemporary Maya to debunk beliefs legitimated by invoking the ancient Maya relies on forging a temporal connection between the two. It suggests that contemporary Maya should be able to interpret the meanings of Classic Maya despite the centuries of colonialism, cultural change, and historical events that separate them.

This might be seen as a deliberate and strategic move meant precisely to address the beliefs of those who see the Maya as timeless. Certainly it is not because scholars are naive about these issues. Anthropologists are well aware of the dangers of assuming unbroken cultural continuity. While there are certainly links between the past and the present, these are not unmediated by current realities.

Ironically, some western spiritualists emphasize cultural discontinuity to suggest why contemporary Maya might be less aware of ancient Maya wisdom than themselves (which is its own kind of arrogance).  They point to the same historical ruptures that anthropologists do: the Conquest, the massive demographic declines of the 15th and 16th centuries caused by disease, and colonialism. They simultaneously suggest that the ancient Maya may have been predicting events thousands of years in their future, while the contemporary Maya are unaware of that.

What is at stake in these arguments by both believers and debunkers is which Maya — past or present — can legitimately speak for the Maya as a whole in the eyes of Western interlocutors.  In either case — whether we believe that contemporary Maya have a privileged knowledge of their ancestors beliefs, or whether we posit that ancient Maya had important messages for the contemporary world — the Maya are made into a single group that transcends time.

Humor me for a moment while I compare this situation to another western cultural phenomenon that uses the title “Lords of Time”: Doctor Who. I think there is something here about how westerners think about time, and what it means to dominate it.  (This also allows me to follow in the established western tradition of bringing the Maya into science fiction.)

What makes Doctor Who a Time Lord? He cannot control time; time continues moving just as it would without him (season finales aside). He is a Time Lord because he is not bound by time. With his ship the TARDIS, he can jump between places and times, interacting briefly with those spaces before moving on. (Interestingly, he usually moves both temporally and spatially at once.) Within each moment he is bound by conventional understandings of time: time moves forward, and he with it. He does not appear to experience time differently from those around him, although he sees temporal possibilities hidden from others. He just has the option of leaving (so long as there are no Daleks in the way).

This may seem like a digression, but I do not think it coincidental that the Maya have also been termed “Lords of Time.” Like Doctor Who, The Maya — as invoked by the 2012 phenomena — are not bound by time.   In western rhetoric, they make quantum leaps between historical moments and spaces. They are both timeless and historically grounded. They link times and places: Classic Guatemalan stela with Chichen Itza tourism, pre-Columbian texts with Jose Arguelles, and ancient rituals with contemporary fears about climate change.

Being a “Lord of Time” involves space as well as time, technology as well as tradition, and connection as well as alterity.  But most importantly, this says far more about how those in the West view time and what it means to dominate it.

There are opportunities in the apocalypse.  The end of the world has been commodified.  A few are seriously investing in bunkers, boats, and survival supplies. Tourism is up, not only to Mayan archaeological sites, but also to places like Bugarach, France and Mt. Rtanj, Serbia.  But even those of us on a budget can afford at least a book, a T-shirt or a handbag.

There are opportunities here for academics, too. Many scholars have been quoted in the press lately saying that nothing will happen on Dec 21 , in addition to those who have written comprehensive books and articles discrediting the impending doom. Obviously publishing helps individual careers, and that does not detract from our collective responsibility to debunk ideas that might lead people to physical or financial harm.  But neither can we divorce our work from its larger social implications.

It is telling that the main scholarly players in debunking the Mayan Apocalypse in the U.S. are NASA (which is facing budget cuts) and anthropologists.  Both groups feel the need to prove they are relevant because our collective jobs depend on it. I don’t need to go into great detail with this crowd about academia’s current situation. Academia has gone from being a well-respected, stable job to one where most classes are taught by underpaid, uninsured part-time adjuncts, and many Ph.D.s never find work in academia at all. Tuition fees for undergraduates have skyrocketed while full-time faculty salaries have stagnated.

Among the public (too often talked about as being in “the real world,” as if academics were somehow immune to taxes or swine flu), there seems to be a general distrust of intellectuals. That, combined with the current economic situation, has translated into a loss of research funding, such as cuts to the Fulbright program and NSF. Some public officials specifically state that science and engineering are worth funding, but anthropology is not.  To add insult to injury, the University of California wants to move away from that whole “reading” thing and rebrand itself as a web startup.

Articles, books with general readership, being quoted in the newspaper, and yes, blogging are all concrete ways to show funding agencies and review committees that what we do matters. The way to get exposure among those general audiences is to engage with what interests them — like the end of the world.  Dec. 21, 2012 has become an internet meme. Many online references to it are debunkings or tongue-in-cheek. Newspaper articles on unrelated topics make passing references in jest, stores offer just-in-case-it’s-real sales, people are planning parties.  There seems to be more written to discredit the apocalypse, or make fun on it, than to prepare for it.

We need to remember that this non-believer attention has a purpose, and that purpose is not just (or even primarily) about convincing believers that nothing is going to happen. Rather, it serves to demonstrate something about non-believers themselves.  “We” are sensible and logical, while “they” are superstitious and credulous. “We” value science and data, while “they” turn to astrology, misreadings of ancient texts, and esoteric spirituality.   “We” remember the non-apocalypses of the past, while “they” have forgotten.

I would argue that discrediting the Mayan Apocalypse is part of an ongoing process of creating western modernity (cue Latour). That modernity requires an “other,” and here that “other” is defined in this case primarily by religious/spiritual belief in the Mayan apocalypse.  The more “other” these Apocalypse believers are, the more clearly they reflect the modernity of non-believers.  (Of course, there are also the “others” of the Maya themselves, and I’ll address that issue in my next post.)

This returns us to the difference I drew in my first post between “Transitional Apocalyptic Expectations” (TAE) and “Catastrophic Apocalyptic Expectations” (CAE).  I suspect the majority of believers are expecting something like a TAE-type event, but media attention focuses on discrediting CAE beliefs, such as a rogue planet hitting the Earth or massive floods. These would be dire catastrophes, but they will also be far easier to disprove. We will all notice if a planet does or does not hit the Earth next week, but many of us — myself included — will miss a transformation in human consciousness among the enlightened.

By providing the (very real) scientific data to discredit the apocalypse, scholars are incorporated into this project of modernity.  Much of the scholarly work on this phenomenon is fascinating and subtle, but the press picks up on two main themes.  One is scientific proof that the apocalypse will not happen, such as astronomical data that Earth is not on a collision course with another planet, Mayan epigraphy that shows the Long Count does not really end, and ethnography that suggests most Maya themselves are not worried about any of this.  The other scholarly theme the press circulates is the long history of apocalyptic beliefs in the west.  In the logic of the metanarrative of western progress, this connects contemporary Apocalypse believers to the past, nonmodernity and “otherness.”

I now find myself in an uncomfortable position, although it is an intellectually interesting corner to be backed into. I agree with my colleagues that the world will not end, that Mayan ideas have been misappropriated, and that we have a responsibility to address public concerns.  At the same time, I can’t help but feel we are being drawn, either reluctantly or willingly, into a larger project than extends far beyond next week.

Last summer, I traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Penn Museum exhibit “Maya: the Lords of Time.” It was, as one might expect given the museum collection and the scholars involved, fantastic.  I want to comment on just the beginning of the exhibit, however. On entering, one is immediately greeted by a wall crowded with TV screens, all showing different clips of predicted disasters and people talking fearfully about the end of the world. The destruction, paranoia, and cacophony create a ambiance of chaos and uncertainty. Turning the corner, these images are replaced by widely spaced Mayan artifacts and stela. The effect is striking.  One moves from media-induced insanity to serenity, from endless disturbing jump-cuts to the well-lit, quiet contemplation of beautiful art.

Among these images were scenes from Director Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster film 2012 (2009). This over-the-top disaster film is well used in that context.  Still, it is interesting how often 2012 is mentioned by academics and other debunkers — almost as often as they mention serious alternative thinkers about the Mayan calendar, such as Jose Arguelles (although the film receives less in-depth coverage than he does).

I find this interesting because 2012 is clearly not trying to convince us to stockpile canned goods or build boats to prepare for the end of the Maya Long Count, any more than Emmerich’s previous films were meant to prepare us for alien invasion (Independence Day, 1996) or the effects of global climate change (The Day After Tomorrow, 2004).  Like Emmerich’s previous films, 2012 is a chance to watch the urban industrialized world burn (in that way, it has much in common with the currently popular zombie film genre). If you want to see John Cusack survive increasingly implausible crumbling urban landscapes, this film is for you.

The Maya, however, are barely mentioned in 2012. There are no Mayan characters, no one travels to Mesoamerica, there is no mention of the Long Count.  Emmerich’s goal for 2012 was, in his own words (here and here), “a modern retelling of Noah’s Ark.” In fact, he claims that the movie originally had nothing to do with the 2012 phenomenon at all.  Instead, he was convinced – reluctantly – to include the concept because of public interest in the Maya calendar.

This explains why the Maya only receive two passing mentions in 2012 — one is a brief comment that even “they” had been able to predict the end of the world, the other a short news report on a cult suicide in Tikal. The marketing aspect of the film emphasized these Maya themes (all of the film footage about the Maya is in the trailer, the movie website starts with a rotating image of the Maya calendar, and there are related extras on the DVD), but the movie itself had basically nothing to do with the Maya, the Mayan Long Count, or Dec 21.

Nevertheless, this film’s impact on public interest in Dec 21 is measurable.  Google Trends, which gives data on the number of times particular search terms are used, gives us a sense of the impact of this $200,000,000  film. I looked at a number of related terms, but have picked the ones that show the general pattern: There is a spike of interest in 2012 apocalyptic ideas when the 2012 marketing campaign starts (November 2008), a huge spike when the film is released (November 2009), and a higher baseline of interest from then until now. Since January, interest in the Mayan calendar/apocalypse has been steadily climbing (and in fact, is higher every time I check this link; it automatically updates). In other words, the 2012 movie both responded to, and reinforced, public interest in the 2012 phenomenon.

Here I return to Michael D. Gordin’s The Pseudoscience Wars (2012).  This delightful book deals with the scientific response to Velikovsky, who believed that the miracles of the Old Testament and other ancient myths documented the emergence of a comet from Jupiter, its traumatic interactions with Earth, and its eventual settling into the role of the planet Venus. (The final chapter also discusses the 2012 situation.)  Gordin’s main focus is understanding why Velikovsky — unlike others labeled “crackpots” before him — stirred the public ire of astronomers and physicists. Academics’ real concern was not Velikovsky’s ideas per se, but how much attention he received by being published by MacMillan — a major publisher of science textbooks — which implied the book had scientific legitimacy. Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” was a major bestseller when it was released in 1950, and academics felt the ideas had to be addressed so that the public would not be misled.

With the Mayan Apocalypse, no major academic publisher is lending legitimacy to these theories.   Books about expected events of 2012 (mainly TAE ideas) are published by specialty presses that focus on the spiritual counterculture, such as Evolver Editions, Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, Shambhala, and John Hunt Publishing.  Instead, film media has become the battleground for public attention (perhaps because reading is declining?). The immense amount of money put into movies, documentaries, and TV shows about the Mayan Apocalypse is creating public interest today, and in some ways this parallels what Macmillan did for Velikovsky in the 1950s.

One example of this is the viral marketing campaign for 2012 conducted in November 2008.   Columbia pictures created webpages that were not clearly marked as advertising (these no longer appear to be available), promoting the idea that scientists really did know the world would end and were preparing.  This type of advertising was not unique to this film, but in this case it reinforced already existing fears that the end really was nigh.  NASA began responding to public fears about 2012 as a result of this marketing campaign, and many of the academics interested in addressing these concerns also published after this time.

Academics are caught in something of a bind here.  Do we respond to public fears, in the hopes of debunking them, but no doubt also increasing the public interest in the very ideas we wish to discredit?  Should we respond in the hopes of selling a few more books or receiving a few more citations, thus generating interest in the rest of what our discipline does?  As anthropologists we are not immune to the desires of public interest, certainly (obviously I’m not — here I am, blogging away), nor should we be.  Perhaps something good can come of the non-end-of-the-world.  I’ll turn to this question next time.

My thanks to the editors of Savage Minds for allowing me to guest blog this month. Hopefully I will not be among the last of Savage Mind’s guests, given that the End of the World is nigh.

You hadn’t heard? On or around Dec 21, 2012, the Maya Long Count will mark the end of a 5125 year cycle. Will this be a mere a calendrical turn, no more inherently eventful that the transition from Dec 31, 2012 to Jan 1, 2013? Will this be a moment of astronomical alignments, fiery conflagrations, and social upheavals? Or will there be a shift in human consciousness, an opportunity for the prepared to improve their lives and achieve enlightenment?

I am going to bet with the house: I do not think the world is going to end in a few weeks.  That way, either the world doesn’t end — another victory for predictive anthropology! — or the world does end, and nothing I write here will matter much anyway. (More seriously, I don’t think our world is destined to end with a bang).

I am not a Mayanist, an archaeologist, or an astronomer. I won’t be discussing conflicting interpretations of Maya long count dates, astronomical observations, or Classical-era Maya stela inscriptions. Books by David Stuart, Anthony Aveni, and Matthew Restall and Amara Solari all provide detailed arguments using those data, and analyze the current phenomenon in light of the long history of western fascinations with End Times.  Articles by John Hoopes, Kevin Whitesides, and Robert Sitler, among others, address “New Age” interpretations of the Maya.  Many ethnographers have considered how Maya peoples understand their complex interactions with “New Age” spiritualists and tourists, among them Judith Maxwell, Quetzil Casteneda and Walter Little.

My own interest lies in how indigenous timekeeping is interpreted in the Andes. I conducted ethnographic research focusing on tourism in Tiwanaku, Bolivia — a pre-Incan archaeological site near Lake Titicaca, and a contemporary Aymara village.  One of the first things I noticed was that every tour guide tells visitors about multiple calendars inscribed in the stones of the site, most famously in the Puerta del Sol.  These calendrical interpretations are meaningful to Bolivian visitors, foreign tourists, and local Tiwanakenos for understanding the histories, ethnicities, and politics centered in this place. I took a stab at addressing some of these ideas in a recent article, where I considered how interconnected archaeological theories and political projects of the 1930s fed into what is today accepted conventional knowledge about Tiwanakota calendars.  I’m now putting together a book manuscript about temporal intersections in Tiwanaku.  The parallels between that situation and the Maya 2012 Phenomena led me to consider the prophecies, expectations, YouTube videos, blog posts, scholarly debunkings, and tourist travels motivated by the end of the Maya Long Count.

A survey by the National Geographic Channel suggested that 27% of those in the United States think the Maya may have predicted a catastrophe for December 21.  But it is important to note that there is no agreement, even among believers, about what will happen. I tend to think of these beliefs as collecting into two broad (and often overlapping) camps.

Many believe that “something” will happen on (or around) Dec 21, 2012, but do not anticipate world destruction. I think of these beliefs as “Transitional Apocalyptic Expectations” (TAE). Writers such as José Argüelles and John Major Jenkins, for example, believe that there will be a shift in human consciousness, and tend to view the end of the 13th baktun as an opportunity for human improvement.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that the world will end abruptly, in fire, flood, cosmic radiation, or collision with other planets. I think of these beliefs as “Catastrophic Apocalyptic Expectations” (CAE).  While some share my belief that the numbers of serious CAE-ers is small, there are panics and survivalists reported by the press in Russia, France, and Los Angeles.  Tragically, there has been at least one suicide.  And of course, there has been a major Hollywood movie (“2012”), which I’ll be discussing more in my next post.

As anthropologists, we certainly should respond to public fears.  But we should also wonder why this fear, out of so many possible fears, is the one to capture public imagination.  Beliefs in paranormal activities, astrology, and the like are historically common, although the specifics change over time.  Michael D. Gordin’s excellent book The Pseudoscience Wars (2012) convincingly suggests that there are larger societal reasons why some fringe theories attract scholarly and public attention while others go ignored.  The Mayan Apocalypse has certainly attracted massive attention, from scholarly rebuttals from anthropologists, NASA, and others, to numerous popular parodies such as GQ’s survival tips, LOLcats, and my personal favorite, an advertisement for Mystic Mayan Power Cloaks.

There seems to be a general fascination with the Mayan calendar — even among those who know relatively little about the peoples that label refers to.  Some are anxiously watching the calendar count down, others are trying to reassure them, and many more simply watching, cracking jokes, or even selling supplies.  But there is something interesting about the fact that so many in the United States and Europe are talking about it at all.  I look forward to exploring these questions further with all of you.

In her piece Scola claims that Mitt Romney holds essentially the same position as the Norwegian anthropologist Frederik Barth: that (she quotes Eriksen and Murphy’s History of Anthropological Theory here) “Social relationships are ‘generated,’ sustained, and changed as a result of the economic choices made by individuals, each of whom has learned to play and manipulate the ‘rules’ of a social ‘game.'” Mitt Romeny is an unappealing candidate because “it makes people uncomfortable to think about the world reduced to a series of transactions” and because worldview “misses too much of [the world’s] magic and meaning”.

It’s a surprisingly academic idea for someone who is not an academic: people are not turned off by Mitt Romney because he wants to gut medicare, make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and his foreign policy is brought to you by the same guys who came up with the “lets invade two countries at once” plan that Instantly Made The World Safe For Democracy once George W. Bush unveiled it. They’re not turned off because he acts (as one commentor put it) like a robot designed by evil East German scientists to simulate a politician. No, they’re turned off because of his theoretical commitments.

Additionally, Scola’s take on anthropological history doesn’t ring true to me. According to her, prior to 1959 “anthropology had for decades been dominated by structural functionalism’s focus on society’s forms and norms”. Really? In his authoritative history After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1881-1951 George Stocking writes

Although numbering only several dozen, social anthropologists had… by 1951 established a firm institutional base. Other components of a more generalized anthropological tradition still maintained their place at Oxford and Cambridge — and within the Royal Anthropological Institute. But social anthropology was now established as the dominant mode for studying the present life-forms of non-European peoples (p. 431)

So in fact structure functionalism had been dominant in British anthropology for eight years by the time Barth got to work. Indeed, as Stocking argues,

scarcely had the archetype been realized historically than its typological unity began to fragment; British social anthropology was more diverse than Radcliffe-Brown, and it continued to thrive and to change long after he had passed from the scene. The story had always been more complex than teleological retrospect would suggest” (438)

Of course, we are only talking about Britain here. Structure functionalism never had a serious grip on mainstream American anthropological traditions, or those in many other countries. Consider Lowie’s sadly under-read History of Ethnological Theory from 1937:

The grandiloquent use of the term ‘law is most regrettable and in some circumstances leads to absurdity, as when Radcliffe-Brown writes of “a universal sociological law though it is not yet possible to formulate precisely its scope, namely that in certain specific conditions a society has need to provide itself with a segmentary [clan] organization”. Whoever heard of a universal law with an as yet undefinable scope, of a law that works in certain specific but unspecified conditions? Is it a law that some societies have clans, and other have not? Newton did not tell us that bodies either fall or rise. (p. 225)

In conclusion Lowie notes sniffily that he will wait for the steak before he is excited by the sizzle:

If every item of culture has a function, if comparative sociology has valid laws to offer, this will be of great interest to all ethnologists. In the meantime we take cognizance of the message and watchfully lie waiting for what may come in its wake. (p. 227)

And — the ‘big debate’ in the 1960s was transactionalism? That’s a relief — I thought it might have had to do with the Vietnamn War or that other little-known intellectual movement that briefly surfaced its head in the 1960s, structuralism or a new generation of anthropologist’s attempt at Reinventing Anthropology

While Scola’s article get a lot of the history wrong, it does have its up sides: for instance, it reminds us that anthropologists were interested in individual agency long before various reactionary brands of post- whatever began their work. Indeed, it is only by ignoring and essentializing anthropology’s past that they could claim their own work to be groundbreaking.

I’ll save you from a dissection of the claim that Barth’s work is Ann Randian individualism, and I certainly don’t have time to demonstrate that Barack Obama believes we ought all be automatons obeying the rules of the social order attempting to achieve our society’s goal state — I think Michelle Bachman has done enough to popularize this misconception.

Ultimately the real problem with Scola’s article is that it takes anthropological theory and shoves it into a simplistic dichotomy of ‘individualism’ versus ‘collectivism’. This dichotomy is at the heart of angloprotestant culture, which obsessively attempts to collapse these two terms into one another while always framing its problematic in such a way as to render this impossible.

Anthropology — real anthropology — involves trying to free ourselves from the cramped perspective of a single culture, not cramming different viewpoints into it. A real anthropologist would point out that labeling Obama a structure functionalist totally obscures his own faith in human agency (what sort of structure functionalist takes Alinsky seriously?). Labelling Romney — Romney, a Mormon whose entire life is built around community service — an individualist is equally impoverishing. Simplistic dichotomies make for bad ethnography. It’s just that simple.

Forcing anthropological theories into culturally-specific pigeonholes is also bad for theory formation. As Margaret Mead (or Confucius, or Hillel, or Ongka) would tell you, all humans are both autonomous and dependent, shaped by and also shaping their culture. Only a very small number of cultures find this idea somehow contradictory or problematic — the contemporary US being one of them. We’ve spent decades jettisoning our own cultural baggage and developing models of culture which aren’t shacked by the old individual-society dichotomy. The real lesson of anthropology for the election is that our intellectual horizons must be much broader than a choice between radically autonomous freedom versus submission to the welfare state. We should be using our theories to enrich the public debate — not the other way around.

Below I’ve gathered together some of the reactions to the tragic Oak Creek shooting, presented without comment. Feel free to add your own links, or leave comments below. (Respecting our comments policy, of course!)

An American Tragedy, by Naunihal Singh:

The media has treated the shootings in Oak Creek very differently from those that happened just two weeks earlier in Aurora… Sadly, the media has ignored the universal elements of this story, distracted perhaps by the unfamiliar names and thick accents of the victims’ families. They present a narrative more reassuring to their viewers, one which rarely uses the word terrorism and which makes it clear that you have little to worry about if you’re not Sikh or Muslim.

Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others, by Juan Cole:

2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.

How privilege-blindness stops us understanding the roots of terrorism, by Priyamvada Gopal:

This marginalising of the real and present danger of white terrorism at a time when other forms of religious or nationalist militancy are under unprecedented scrutiny has to do with how “whiteness” itself operates.

Wisconsin shooting: Tragic extension of everyday hate experienced by Sikhs in North America, by Kamal Arora:

As a child walking home from elementary school, I witnessed children bullying my brother on a regular basis, calling him ‘teabag’ and taunting him for his long hair tied up in his topknot. I myself was the victim of bullying — my fellow classmates would often pull on my long braid and tell me to “just cut my hair” or threaten to cut it themselves with scissors. On family trips abroad, I witnessed the constant suspicion my father and brother were put under while undergoing security screenings at various airports.

…In an increasingly racialised world, I hope we all continue to stand up against such hate on a daily basis so that perhaps such large tragedies can be avoided and lives can be saved. While I condemn the horrible tragedy in Wisconsin, I refuse to identify myself as ‘not Muslim’ and thus validate hate crimes against Muslims, Indigenous groups and other racial and religious minorities.

We Are All Muslims: A Sikh Response to Islamophobia in the NYPD and Beyond, by Sonny Singh:

The roots of anti-Muslim sentiment in the Sikh community run deep in South Asia, from the days of the tyranny of Mughal emperors such as Aurangzeb in the 17th century to the bloodshed in 1947 when our homeland of Punjab was sliced into two separate nation-states. Despite these historical realities, Sikhism has always been clear that neither Muslims as a people nor Islam as a religion were ever the enemy. Tyranny was the enemy. Oppression was the enemy. Sectarianism was the enemy. In fact, the Guru Granth Sahib, our scriptures that are the center of Sikh philosophy and devotion, contains the writings of Muslim (Sufi) saints alongside those of our own Sikh Gurus. Nevertheless, historical memory breeds misguided hostility and mistrust of Muslims, especially in the contemporary global context of ever-increasing, mainstream Islamophobia.

Beyond Recognition and Misrecognition: the Shooting at Oak Creek Gurdwara, by Amardeep Singh:

But here’s the thing: I don’t know if the shooter would have acted any differently if he had really known the difference between the turbans that many Sikh men wear and a much smaller number of Muslim clerics wear — or for that matter, the difference between Shias, Sunnis, and Sufis, or any number of specificities that might have added nuance to his hatred.

As I have experienced it, the turban that Sikh men wear is the embodiment of a kind of difference or otherness that can provoke some Americans to react quite viscerally. Yes, ignorance plays a part and probably amplifies that hostility. But I increasingly feel that visible marks of religious difference are lightning rods for this hostility in ways that don’t depend on accurate recognition.

‘How to tell your friends from the Japs’ in TIME, 1941 vs. ‘Turban Primer’ in RedEye, 2012, by Sami Kishawi:

Two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, TIME Magazine ran an article titled “How to tell your friends from the Japs”, an arbitrary and insensitive guide on how to differentiate the Japanese from the Chinese. Today, just over a day after the shooting in Milwaukee that left six dead in a Sikh house of worship, Chicago’s RedEye printed a “Turban Primer”, a similarly insensitive guide on arbitrary religio-cultural distinctions between, essentially, Brown people from South East Asia and the Middle East.

Roots of Love: On Sikh Hair and Turban, by Harjant Gill:

In last weeks posts, Deepa and Ali both talked about a professionalized model of fieldwork in which intellectual work happens under certain practical constraints and towards certain ends.  Deepa also pointed to the benefits of doing ethnography on the sidelines, talking about how “parcelable” time working towards someone else’s ends can free up time for other, more reflective work. And in a last week’s post, I, too, talked about the sometimes-sunny side of ethnography-for-hire, as often enabling new forms of creativity and teamwork and as offering clearly-bounded projects, research goals, and timelines that produced results, i.e., got my team and me to write.

Like all of the contributors and commenters in this series, I have a stake in thinking about the possibilities for ethnography and anthropology beyond the traditional forms and institutional contexts of long-term, immersive fieldwork underwritten by graduate fellowships or university tenure-track positions.  But I also believe that as we move on to new ways of imagining ethnography, we must face head-on what we stand to lose as a result of precarity and the increasing trend of the casualization of academic labor.  My research with experimental U.S. choreographers may be a useful backdrop against which to explore the dynamics and effects of job precarity in fields of cultural production.  It has helped me to see how precarity affects not only producers (dancers and choreographers), but how it affects the product itself (the dancing and the choreography).  More dance ethnographic specifics in a bit, but first a look at how the jargon of self-determination and flexibility that often accompanies discussions of contingent positions can disguise power imbalances and modes of domination that precarity engenders.

Who better to explicate the dark, depressing side of social processes than Pierre Bourdieu?  In “Job Insecurity is Everywhere Now,” a talk delivered at a 1997 European conference on precarity, Bourdieu declared:

It has emerged clearly that job insecurity is now everywhere; in the private sector, but also in the public sector, which has greatly increased the number of temporary, part-time or casual positions; in industry, but also in the institutions of cultural production and diffusion—education, journalism, the media, etc. In all these areas it produces more or less indentical effects…Casualization profoundly affects the person who suffers it: by making the whole future uncertain, it prevents all rational anticipation, and, in particular, the basic belief and hope in the future that one needs in order to be able to rebel, especially collectively, against present conditions, even the most intolerable (p. 82).

And as if that were not grim enough, Bourdieu goes on to make the point that precarity not only affects those in explicitly unstable positions, but also creates an atmosphere in which “objective insecurity gives rise to a generalized subjective insecurity,” giving those who do have steady work the sense that their jobs are “a fragile, threatened privilege (pp. 82-83).”  Precarity’s forms, then, are various, but its pervasive social effect is a shared anxiety about the present and lack of ability to plan for the future.

Precarity in the domains of knoweldge and cultural production very often involves processes of deprofessionalization as producers (artists, scholars, lawyers, doctors, e.g.) are decreasingly able to determine the terms and conditions of their own work. In academia, deprofessionalization is not just borne by the adjunct faculty member.  The adjunctification of the university is just the most extreme outcome of the bottom-line logics of managers and administrators’ drives to maximize returns while minimizing long-term investments.  For adjuncts and other part-time faculty, deprofessionalization takes the form of low wages, few benefits, no research stipends, limited access to office space and library privileges, no paid time off in the form of sabbaticals, and, finally, no job security from semester to semester.  For tenure-track faculty, “job creep” in the form of increased teaching loads, heavier service commitments, and reduced support staff are a few features of deprofessionalization.  Faculty unions, some exclusively for adjuncts and others that bring together contingent and full-time faculty, have begun to make inroads in addressing these conditions.  But while the symbolic gains have been great, the real working conditions of adjuncts remain untenable, especially for those who are primary wage-earners for themselves or their families.

It’s not hard to imagine what happens to individuals under these conditions (burn-out, personal economic crises, demoralization, abandonment of research projects), but we should also be concerned about what happens more generally to knowledge production and dissemination under such conditions.  A look at recent developments in contemporary concert dance in the U.S. provides a useful counterpoint as we consider: 1)  how precarity and deprofessionalization affect careers and destabilize narratives of success; and 2) how such conditions can eventually change an entire field, including the products created under its aegis and the very minds and bodies that create these products.    The professionalization and deprofessionalization of modern dance took place in a very compressed span of time, from about 1965, with the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, through about 2000, by which time the effects of national, state, and private funding cuts had firmly taken hold in the field.  In the interim, during the 1970s and early 1980s, a “dance boom” occurred, during which dance companies received infusions of grant money that enabled them to pay dancers for most of the year as opposed to just for performances.  Additionally the sheer number of dance companies grew rapidly as young choreographers were able to win no-strings-attached grants that could be used to rent studios, pay dancers, or simply to “buy” the creative time necessary to build a body of work.  Institutions that supported this growth (college dance departments, professional organizations, and new touring networks) also sprung up, giving rise to a layer of managerial positions in the field.   Consequently, a new narrative of success emerged, one that used institutional stability (i.e., the maintenance of a dance company) as both a sign of success and a way of ensuring its continuation.

This implicit narrative of professional success is  where the connections between dance and academia may become clearer: the attainment of a dance company with non-profit status as a badge of success and “professionalism” is roughly equivalent to the acquisition of tenure in an academic setting.  Professionalism, in both cases, means not only a stable relationship with an institution that materially and symbolically supports one’s work, but also a degree of control over the production and content of one’s work.  Moreover, in each of these cases, it is not only success but also basic professional legitimacy that continue to be measured against a standard attainable by only a very few.

Also comparable are the shifts in how work products themselves (choreography and, in our case, ethnography) are understood and underwritten.  In dance, funding models have largely shifted from general support of choreographers and companies (fellowships and company grants) to the funding of particular projects.  This shift partly reflects a concern with measurable outcomes and accountability, concerns that grew out of  the culture wars of the 1980s and1990s, but also resonate with contemporary corporate modes of thinking.  As choreographers have adapted to project-based models of funding, their ways of making dances have changed.  Because project-based funding is inherently unstable and contingent, choreographers must be able to sell themselves to a variety of funders and audiences and, if successful, must then pull together resources (time, space, dancers) on short notice.  In concrete terms, this means that the vast majority of choreographers can no longer count on a stable company of dancers and that most dancers can no longer count on stable work with a particular choreographer.  So instead of becoming expert in a particular technique (Graham, Cunningham, or Balanchine-style ballet, for example), dancers must be stylistically flexible, i.e., able to take on the styles of a variety of choreographers.  Dance theorist Susan Foster terms this ideal dancer a “body-for-hire” that “train[s] in several existing techniques without adopting the aesthetic vision of any” (254). In exchange for this marketable ability to be literally and figuratively flexible, argues Foster, dancers must give up the depth of knowledge and expression that comes with training in a single technique over an extended period of time.

Foster’s assessment of the effects of workplace flexibility in dance may indeed be a cautionary tale for knowledge workers as a whole.  As Emily Martin famously points out, flexibility is a dominant metaphor in the contemporary U.S., operating in domains as varied as medicine, organizational theory, corporations, and new age philosophy.  The flexible corporation (or dance company, university, or market research firm) is able to cut costs by hiring and firing workers as needed. And the flexible worker (the “free agent” or consultant) is able to attain work by being quick to learn the codes and exigencies of particular workplace and/or project.  But if the flexible worker is adaptable, pliant, and quick, s/he is also necessarily more acquiesent, interchangable and disposable (Martin, pp. 143-158).   The paradox for choreographers and dancers in the contingeny-driven, project-based model is that it takes time and money to literally keep a bodies and minds flexible and agile.  In order to maintain one’s technique, a degree of constancy in working conditions is necessary, namely in the form of a regular place to take classes and rehearse.  In the absence of those conditions, it is nearly impossible to attain, maintain, and build physical skills and expertise.    In this case, as in others, the tropes of flexibility and free agency gloss over the ways in which insecurity can ultimately inhibit creativity and adaptability.

How, then, to translate this rather specialized example into useful lessons for ethnographers working under conditions of precarity?  While we may agree that mobility, changing circumstances, and quick gigs can sometimes stimulate creativity and new ways of thinking, just as often their opposites, stability and constancy, are what we need in order to produce truly innovative and valuable work. (George Marcus examines this predicament in his discussion of the anxiety-provoking tensions between the unbearable slowness of anthropological research and the conditions under which ethnographies are produced these days. Thanks to Deepa for this citation.) Without romanticizing either the classical Western artist-patron relationship or the situations of tenure-track academics, we cannot ignore the real benefits of unimpeded time and space to work in ways not directly and constantly determined by outside interests.  Secure postions with living wages and benefits in academic or other research institutions can free up the mental and physical time and space needed to conduct research and produce rich analysis.  While recognizing that this model of intellectual production has long ceased to be the statistical norm (and admitting that it has always had its own set of constraints), it pays to be attuned to how working conditions of adjuncts, contract workers, and part-timers can create economic and psychic levels of instability that impinge upon the gestation period and access to resources that intellectual work often requires.  As we move bravely into new forms and locations of ethnography, it bears asking indvidually and collectively how we can retain levels of professionalism that enable self-determination or creative co-determination of research questions and goals.

Laurel George is an adjunct assistant professor in New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Gallatin Division, as well as a humanities scholar with The Paul Taylor Dance Company. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 2002.

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways.

This issue is especially relevant to many members of the Muslim community in North America and those who conduct research on/with them. Last year I attended two large conferences: The American Academy of Religion (San Francisco, November 2011) and the Islamic Society of North America (Chicago, July 2011). Religious adherents, spokespersons and academics all converged on the notion that engaging with media (news, entertainment, and social media) was the most vital means to influence public opinion about Muslims. I heard numerous panels where professors, journalists, filmmakers, writers, students, etc. discussed the benefits and pitfalls of media activism. Such a large degree of interest solidified my focus on the anthropology of media and Islam by generating more questions than answers. But what about the everyday?

I share Shryock’s view that ethnographies of the everyday lives of Muslims in North America could add texture to our understanding of post-9/11 Muslim identity formations, while also humanizing the Muslim ‘Other’. Yet, television shows about everyday Muslim lives have reached more Muslim and non-Muslim American homes than any ethnography could dream of. Even though an ethnography of actual lives could provide a much needed point of comparison with televisual representations, it seems just as pressing to ethnographically research the construction and reception of the everyday in tv programs.

An ideal approach would analyze the relationship between the everyday in televisual media and lived realities. But, there is no guarantee that such moments would arise during fieldwork and would probably have to be one dimension of a larger study. For this reason, internet sites could prove useful for analyzing how Muslims discuss such shows and apply them to life situations (more on this in the next post), as well as understanding how non-Muslims make sense of them. Another possibility would be to approach the relationship between the everyday and media in a sideways manner (see my last post). This would entail interpreting one in light of the other without positing an underlying unity.

How do you perceive the relationship between media and the everyday? What are some other fruitful directions to pursue?

(AF) What is New Edge and how did you conduct your fieldwork?

(DZ) The term New Edge fuses the notions ‘New Age’ and ‘edgy’, as in ‘edgy technologies’. In the late 1980s, founder of the ‘cyberpunk’ magazine Mondo 2000, Ken Goffman, used the term to refer both to the overlaps and the incompatibilities between the spiritual worldview of ‘New Agers’ and the ‘geeky’ worldview of the scientists and hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Such interactions were articulated in the overlapping scenes of Virtual Reality development, electronic dance, computer hacking and cyberpunk fiction. I borrowed the term New Edge to study the genealogy of cultural cross-overs between – simply put – the ‘hippies’ and the ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area, beginning with the 1960s and tracing it to the current (2008) moment.

The overlaps that I traced are related to one general idea popular within New Age as well as within hacker circles and relating to current transhumanist notions. This is the idea that humanity is involved in a process of ‘self-evolution’, leading to a future moment when all ‘intelligence’ in the world fuses into one holistic entity. Among others, this notion translates into practices whereby people seek to sensitize their bodies, making it ‘all-sensing’ and ‘all-knowing’ by means of high-tech and/or by practices such as meditation or ecstatic-dance. This idea is also married to a neoliberal image of the autonomous, individual self, who needs to ‘realize’ its true natural self by escaping social conditioning.

There are quite a few moments and places constituted both by hippies and hackers, where they celebrate a kind of common adherence to these ideas and practices. Examples are Virtual Worlds conferences, the Mondo 2000 magazine, the electronic dance scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s, psychedelic events such as the Mindstates conferences and the contemporary Burning Man festival. These ‘New Edge environments’ are perfect places where it can be studied how secular thinking is both a modern ideology as well as a social fact: here we can see how the secularist idea that technology and science are inherently incompatible with spirituality, mysticism or magic is contested. At the same time we can witness here how notions of secularization are still informing modes of distinction-making: the very ways in which hippies and hackers identify themselves to be different from each other, occurs in large part in reference to the alleged incompatibility between the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘technoscience’. While enchanted by the open-ended ways of thinking of New Age, geeks here are just as much distancing themselves from the “wishy-washyness”, the alleged vagueness of New Age. Similarly, those identifying with the New Age discourse, distance themselves from the images of disembodiment, celebration of technological superiority and over-rationality attached to geek-hood.

In my dissertation, I explore such kinds of compatibilities and tensions at various levels. My research for this comprised a period of 12 months, spent in between 2005 and 2008, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while going from scene to scene, place to place and tracing overlaps in people, metaphors, ideas, practices, objects and styles in between the ‘hippie’ and the ‘hacker’ spheres that I here identified.

So, why is New Edge so prevalent in California?

This is a kind of question that has bugged me for a long time and I am open to all kinds of suggestions into the answer. What I am finding the most plausible answer at the moment – and this turns your question a bit on its head – is that New Edge may in fact be a celebration of California.

I can only say this granting that what makes New Edge unique is not necessarily the fact that it allies the ‘rational’ world of science and technology development with the mystical spheres of spirituality and religion. Such alliances can be found all over the globe. Instead, what is characteristic about New Edge, I believe, is the way that it manifests this alliance through its radical performative style and this may be what makes New Edge characteristically Californian. If you have been to Burning Man, and if we take Burning Man as one of the homelands of New Edge, you probably understand what I mean. The clothes, the art-cars, the music, the buildings, the rituals at Burning Man are all aspects of a performance of a way of being that is ‘authentic’, ‘flexible’, deliberately confusing and unconcerned with hegemonic cultural norms. In a larger sense, we can here see the performance of a radical notion of ‘open-endedness’ in terms of what we can do with our bodies, with our minds, with other people, with our material environment and with technology. In my dissertation there are some examples of this celebration of ‘multiplicit style’. Ironic language; the deliberate contrasting of colors, ideas and ways of being; and the celebration of confusion and chaos are all part of it.

In terms of ideas, this performance associates with neoliberalism, which is prevalent in many other places of the world. Yet, in terms of style, it self-consciously identifies, I believe, with (the image of) California. This observation is partially informed by the fact that my New Edge interviewees were manifesting a strong self-consciousness about being Californian, or being located in California, and particularly about knowing what this means in terms of lifestyle, aesthetics and ‘ways of being’ – cacophonous, optimistic, stylistically ‘loose’ – which was often juxtaposed against ways of being in other parts of the world and of the USA in particular. For instance, Jane Metcalfe, co-founder of Wired Magazine, when she arrived in California in the early 1990s, read the alleged open-mindedness of Californians into the colorful, bright, and crazy style of the buildings and the clothes of the people. And so did Mitch Kapor – developer of Lotus 1-2-3 and associated with many other organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation – explain to me the difference between the corporate worlds on the East and the West Coast by pointing to people in Californian offices wearing Hawaiian shirts. I believe that New Edge culture is firmly rooting itself in, and celebrating as such, California by exploiting this association between California and stylistic cacophony to its extremes. Just as the 1960s hippies of California used a particular style of being, of building, of dressing and talking to distinguish themselves from their notion of mainstream America, so are New Edge Californians embracing this style still to distinguish themselves from the ‘conditioned rest of the world’. Of course, this style is also strongly global in its aspirations and has gone global in many ways, which complicates your question yet again.

Your anthropological project is about the confluence of technological and spiritual imaginations. There is little discussion of political and economic power as part of the equation. Why is that and what would your theory look like if you had included power?

I see New Edge as a discourse that travels through and across different kinds of socio-economic and political niches. And being a discourse, New Edge is not something that defines, in any fixed sense, someone’s identity. Just bringing this back to Burning Man, for instance, people go there from different kinds of backgrounds. This is so in economic sense: some participants are millionaires and are funding for entire camps while others save up all year to be able to “come home”. For one camp leader that I met, going to Burning Man was a tremendous financial sacrifice – that she was more than happy to make – since she was in such debt that she had started living in a shed in her backyard while renting out her own house. Within the larger New Edge sphere, there is also relative diversity in terms of political philosophy. Some of my interviewees were quite outspokenly libertarians, others were very much opposed to libertarianism and celebrating social democratic values. The New Edge discourse has the capacity to unite such differences. It does so in its explicit rejection of political debate and its outward refusal to validate formal status roles and in its emphasis on the body, on style and on human consciousness. As such – just as the 1960s hippies did – New Edge quite deliberately manifests itself in non-political terms.

Perhaps because the core of my dissertation is concerned with a discussion of New Edge contested understandings of consciousness, nature, evolution, style, and the body, it may seem not to involve a discussion of politics and socio-economics. It would be good to make this more explicit in further work, but there is quite a lot of implicit attention in my work for the power-politics underneath this New Edge negation of politics. For instance, I give the a-historical self-imaginary of New Edge a history; I root the transcendental aspirations of New Edge in actual physical bodies; I show the material conditions that enable a place like Burning Man to be experienced in non-political, naturalistic ways and I am critical of self-narratives that are explicitly dismissing discussions of socio-economics. For instance, in a newspaper article published after Burning Man 2005, when Hurricane Katrina had hit and some burners had set off to the East Coast to help clear up the mess, the writer was arguing that burners were specifically predisposed to being able to do this work, where official government failed. This was so, he wrote, because burners had understood the “bedrock value of water, diesel, and serviceable tools.” He argued that Burning Man was all about learning such values and becoming self-reliant beings, making burners predisposed to “lead” when the larger socio-economic system collapses. Of course, “water, diesel and serviceable tools” are not values but material goods. Along with the free time that these burners had at their disposal to go to the disaster area, and with the technologies and kinds of jobs that allowed them to work from a distance, these material goods are quite characteristic of the privileged position that these burners are having within the socio-economic system they seek to replace. I have been similarly critical towards the New Edge ideology of radical open-endedness, its celebration of fluidity and of boundary-crossing, arguing how these notions of flexibility are quite gendered and exclusive of people who are socio-economically ‘stuck’ in the bodies and in their material circumstances.

So, in these ways I did bring in discussions of power into the equation, yet, I didn’t feel the need to extend this into a critique of New Edge. This is so in the first place because I have been mainly concerned with understanding New Edge living, and secondly because there is much of this type of self-criticism within New Edge circles as well. To draw a parallel, there is much critique, both from the political right and the left, regarding the alleged ‘hypocrisy’ of Occupy protesters since the system they are trying to transcend is simultaneously giving them the resources to protest. Occupiers are often aware of this paradox themselves, yet it is not stopping them to try and change the system. Similarly, there is a lot of such ‘double-consciousness’ going on within New Edge circles and rather than critique it, I see it as something that is so characteristic of reflexive societies today that it is extremely worth-while to study it ethnographically – in non-normative ways.

Some of your key interviewees are cultural writers just like you. Some anthropologists have discussed the lateral, horizontal, or interface ethnography when the anthropologist and informant share an equal power-field, discursive community, and skill set. What do your methods or research tell us about the ethnographic project not studying up or down but sideways?

Yes, all my interviewees were in fact habitually thinking with me, interested in meta-perspectives, in connections between different kinds of ideas, and some of them – Erik Davis and Ken Goffman most notably – are, indeed professional writers. Furthermore, most of my interviewees had also formally studied, read or been implicitly informed by anthropological literature and anthropological concepts. This was testified by the off-hand way in which the notion of ‘liminality’, or the concept of the ‘homo ludens’ was used to describe the nature of the Burning Man festival and of how people were here behaving. Also, documentaries and books were constantly produced within this cultural environment that dealt with the exact same convergences that I was seeking to study. At one point, I began to take photographs of the many impressively filled bookshelves of my interviewees as a way of visualizing this self-reflexivity.

One of the ways that I dealt with my ‘schizophrenic position’ being a researcher in a highly self-reflexive field, was by becoming alert to the differences in the ways that we handled theoretic, reflexive concepts. I saw it as one of my tasks to make these distinctions explicit. For instance, I noticed that when using the idea of liminality when talking about a place like Burning Man, my interviewees did not so much use it in the Turnerian sense of going through a period of chaos to become part of the structures of society afterwards. Instead, they were striving for a sense of permanent liminality, for a permanent detachment from structure. Anthropology, in this way, in fact became a kind of ‘New Age science’ (Hanegraaff 1996) – i.e. a scientific legitimation for quite mystical ideas.

In general, what my research tells me about the ethnographic project of ‘studying sideways’, first, is that the types of questions one asks as an ethnographer, as well as the types of relationships one builds and the type of insights one gains are quite different from what ‘classical anthropology’ is generally considered to be. Secondly, I believe that there is by far not enough attention to this in the larger academic anthropological sphere, nor for the ethnographic phenomenon of self-reflexivity in general. Most anthropological studies still take for granted that it is the anthropologist who is reflective and that the ‘respondents’ are not at all aware of what they do. This implicit notion, for instance, has led some ethnographers to conceptualize Burning Man as a religious space, where people experience true authenticity – through dance for instance – and where they are genuinely free from the consumer-oriented, artificial, rationalistic larger western society. Yet, what is not accounted for in such studies is not only that there is much consumption, artificiality and rationalistic ideology going on in and around Burning Man, but also that many burners are quite self-conscious about this. For instance, burners generally realize quite well that Burning Man is an artificial environment that may quite well enable the experience of extraordinary things that have a mystical, natural feel to it. This ‘double consciousness’, I believe, requires not so much a “willing suspense of disbelief”, but as Michael Saler (2004) recently wrote about the ironic imagination, a habit of mind that allows people to “willingly believe with the double-minded awareness that they are engaging in pretence.” When, as a researcher, you take into account also such kinds of reflexivity, and the ironic imagination in particular, you ask different – and in my opinion more interesting – questions about the cultural complexity of today’s post-industrial societies – about how people negotiate different kinds of frameworks and perspectives that are logically and knowingly incompatible.

A final comment I would like to make about ‘studying sideways’ is that this notion runs the risk of covering up the cultural complexity of today’s world. The notion suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs. Yet, much of my research in reflexive communities – both in California as well as in the hacker scenes of the Netherlands – still felt like treading on unfamiliar territory. At times it was clear that I shared much socio-economic and intellectual background with my interviewees. At other moments such similarities appeared only superficial and much interpretative and translative work needed to be done to bridge the many subtle ways in which we experienced and conceptualized the world differently.

A number of anthropologists studying digital culture, Biella Coleman and Chris Kelty among them, argue that many manifestations of computer culture can be traced back to classical liberal theory and an emphasis on individuality, freedom of expression, etc. Can you square your research with this ontogenesis?

Yes certainly. In fact, I believe it is this liberal aspect through which computer culture and New Age are related. The emphasis on ‘freedom’ and particularly on ‘liberation’, as well as on the expressive self and the self-evolving and self-realizing human individual, are themes that account in large part for the sympathies between the ‘hippies’ and ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area. These notions translate, for instance, into the celebration of technology as art, of technology creators as artists and into rituals that seek to ‘decondition’ human beings (as well as technology).

Yet, this understanding that New Edge has liberal grounding is only anthropologically meaningful if we understand liberalism here in a broad sense, as similarly understood also by Coleman (and no doubt also by Kelty). Whereas Steven Levy’s notion of the Hacker Ethic, as defined in his 1984 book Hackers, suggests for instance that hacker culture is liberal, this ethic rarely translates into one uniform mode of behavior or political attitude among hackers. As I learned from my research, and as Peter Samson, one of the hackers that Levy wrote about, told me, some hackers translate the notion of freedom into a radical libertarian ideology, whereas for others their engagement with computer technology ties in with their sense of social responsibility. This may be related to the experience of being the creator of a system that users don’t understand the technicalities of. Or it may come from having to agree, socially, on a set of ethics and rules of conduct within computer systems. I think ‘computer culture’, if there is such a thing, is characterized by an interesting tension between these two aspects – a sense of individual freedom and expression and of social responsibility. Such tensions most certainly characterize debates within this New Edge cultural sphere.

One of my observations, for instance, regarded the implementation of the ideal of Doing It Yourself at Burning Man. In self-reflective narratives, Burning Man seems to be all about Doing It Yourself, about creating your own reality ‘from scratch’, quite independent from the cultural notions and social constraints of the larger society. Yet, alongside this fantasy of individual autonomy, both in hacker culture and in New Age scenes, there is also a kind of opposite longing – a longing to fuse, to become one with some kind of larger environment. To put it bluntly, for hackers this is the intelligence of computer networks and for New Agers this is the wisdom of the universe. Yet, this longing for self-transcendence and fusion is often frustrated in the context of everyday life: the people I studied don’t generally find themselves living in systems that they trust. This may be due to the understanding that computer networks are controlled by (opaque) corporations and government agencies and that corporate and ideological hegemonic interests conspire with contemporary media technologies to ‘distort’ people’s ideas about reality and about who is to be trusted. This is why and how an environment such as Burning Man is important for my interviewees. It offers an environment of trust. Here one can give oneself over to a larger environment – to the hallucinogenic substances, the artworks, the food offered, the dances, the light-shows – that is created by people that are known or that can be known potentially. A sense of paranoia, experienced in the context of everyday life, is here transformed into a sense of ‘pronoia’. This term was first coined in the context of raves and refers to the notion that the universe conspires to give you exactly that what you need. Both paranoia and pronoia are rooted in the awareness of being part of and controlled by a larger system, yet, paranoia comes from having to depend on a system that cannot be trusted and pronoia comes from giving oneself over to a system that is trusted. This divide informs much of the social embeddedness of the liberal belief in individual autonomy. This is the case at least in the context of New Edge but I think also in the context of hacker culture more generally.

Your work is mainly about a period of time between 2005-2008. This culture moves fast. If you were to continue this specific project where would you go and what would you do?

While you are right in the sense that technocultural development moves fast, I am quite interested in studying certain continuities within the technocultural landscape of post-industrial societies since the 1960s. What I’d love to continue doing, for instance, is to focus on the historically developed cultural tensions that I observed in this New Edge environment, and to see how these tensions intersect with the kind of technocultural negotiations that are taking place in the Netherlands today – and probably in other places as well.

For instance, one tension that I find characteristic of the New Edge environment is what I just discussed: on the one hand, there is a lot of commentary and experiential testimony of the notion that people today are becoming more and more part of opaque, complex, incomprehensible corporate and technological networks. At the same time, what remains firmly standing in this environment is the ideal of the autonomous self-possessed human individual – expressed in the ideologies of Doing It Yourself, Creating Your Own Reality and the notion that it is possible to use these otherwise complex technologies to have some kind of transparent access to Reality. I think you could say that two different notions of what technology is, are here converging: on the one hand technology is conceived of as an enveloping system. On the other hand it is seen as a tool that one can use to realize one’s individual desires.

This is one tension that I am now seeking to study in the context of technocultural negotiations in the Netherlands today: within New Edge, as well as in the larger context of technology innovation in the Netherlands, the artistic sphere has played a large role in fostering the notion of technology being inherently and ultimately flexible, complex and unexpected in its outcomes. Various tech-art institutions in the Netherlands have been wedded to this notion, and have co-operated with hackers and artists to study the flexibility of technology, to push it to its limits and to solicit unexpected results – the ideals of multiplicity, open-endedness and emergence, are quite important here, and wedded also to the idea that, ultimately, what it means to be human is open-ended. Some of these artistic institutions have received government subsidies for their explorations, sometimes in combination with corporate or private investment. Yet, recently in the Netherlands, a cultural atmosphere has emerged that is extremely hostile towards art, and towards any kind of practice that does not straightforwardly produce a tangible profit-making product. This negative atmosphere is intensified by parties now in parliament that have successfully pushed for extreme budget-cuts, targeting specifically art institutions. So, currently, only institutions that are capable of producing concrete, profit-making products as part of their technological explorations, paradoxically, remain eligible for subsidy.

In this context, the institutions that I am seeking to study are having to intensify their negotiation of two technological frameworks that are different and conflicting in the ontological sense: on the one hand, the notion that technology is open-ended, and on the other hand, the notion that technology is a tool, used to solve identifiable problems, catering to the demands of the markets and able, in this way, to generate profit and to justify its own existence. An overarching question that I have, while seeking to study these ontological and institutional negotiations between different understandings of technology, is regarding the political, material and socio-economic bases for the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, DIY individual – since I believe it is this ideal that is present in both ontological frameworks and that may reveal their common basis – and that may reveal what both accounts leave out of the equation.

And yes, this research does not involve a study of Virtual Reality software but addresses any kind of technology that is now attracting the attention of artists, hackers and corporations – most significantly being new forms of energy-generation tools, new kinds of sensor-based mobile technologies, and bio-nanotechnologies.

In December 2010 Zandbergen finished her PhD dissertation, “New Edge: Technology and Spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area,” on the dynamic relationship between new forms of spirituality and politics on the one hand, and digital technologies on the other, as shaped in the past 30 years in Silicon Valley, California. A book chapter was recently published, “Silicon Valley New Age: the co-constitution of the digital and the sacred” in Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital. She elaborated on her dissertation in a recent post, “Combining Extreme Distrust and Spastic Bursts of Blind Faith… What New Edge Culture has to say about Today’s Schizophrenic Information Society.” Previously she has taught the course “Anthropology of the Information Society” at the University of Leiden. She is presently a Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Leiden in “The Future is Elsewhere” program.