Exploitation Sells

[shanmonster]

For my most recent religious studies homework, I was assigned the reading Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality by Lisa Aldred. This reading was provided as a followup to the reading I did on Carlos Castaneda a little while back. Castaneda's works, although allegorically valuable to many, are fictions and not anthropologically accurate.

Lisa Aldred's article discusses the misappropriation of North American aboriginal spirituality. It is being mixed up in the hurlyburly that is New Age commercialism. For one example, you can purchase Native American Tarot Cards. As another example, the sun dance, held as one of the most spiritual undertakings by certain native tribes, is being sold as a sort of instant salvation package even while being held on astroturf. I can understand why this irks the tribes from which the practice has been "borrowed." It is being marketed as the real thing when it should be obvious that it is a bastardization.

I can draw a parallel with my own dance experience. If I were to do one of my experimental dance routines, wearing a mix of various multicultural costume elements, dancing to heavy metal music and then call that raqs sharqi, I'd be lying. And there are plenty of dancers out there who put their own personal slant on the dance and call it the real thing. This confuses the issue for people with no educational/cultural background in the field, and when they go on to become dancers and teachers themselves, they continue disseminating the misinformation. So when people like Carlos Castaneda come along and claim to be sharing the ancient wisdom of the Yaqui Indians, well, that's willful misrepresentation at best. It would have been much more ethical to have labelled his works as allegorical, or, at the very least, say they were inspired by various aboriginal teachings.

However, exploitation sells, especially when it's the marketing of a disenfranchised group like North American aboriginals--those noble, noble savages. Castaneda's acolytes offer workshops on tensegrity, "the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indian shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish Conquest." Now, I'm not saying people aren't getting something out of these workshops. Maybe they are gaining insights into their own psyches and "sorcery." However, they aren't getting ancient practices. They're getting something else by way of false advertising.

How much do you suppose the Yaqui are getting from this? I sincerely doubt they're collecting any royalties on the Castaneda workshops. Instead, they're getting a whole lot of misinformation disseminated.