9. The Village at Lightning in a Bottle, 2014 (photo by author).
The notion of the tribe mirrors one of the fundamental purposes of religion, which is to locate people in time and space and to foster a sense of shared communal identity. Certainly, Native and Indigenous peoples in settler colonial nations do not own the language of tribe; the term was used biblically to refer to the tribes of Israel, in a variety of African contexts, and even in contemporary Christian new religious movements. However, when SBNR communities refer to themselves as a tribe, the Native American context often provides the substantive referent. Problematically, the material and visual practices that accompany this self-identification often recreate essentialized notions of tribal identity, whether in the overt form of donning headdresses or in the more subtle forms of wearing long feather earrings and tribal body paint.77
In the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, groups identified as “tribes” as a way to set their collectives against mainstream white culture and the communal distinctions of mainstream religious identity.78 When the Human Be-In was first announced on the cover of the San Francisco Oracle, the title read: “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” The Human Be-In is one of the most important antecedents to today’s transformational festivals. When the Human Be-In was held on January 14, 1967, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, twenty to thirty thousand people showed up to hear from spiritually eclectic leaders, including Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Baba Ram Dass (who still went by Richard Alpert at the time), and Alan Watts, and to listen to popular music of the day, such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, among others. The event was a unique combination of popular music and psychedelic culture, interlaced with the alternative worldviews of Asian religions, which were reframed, interpreted, and distributed by white American men. Researcher and author Helen Swick Perry wrote, “Afterwards I knew there was an actual day, January 14, 1967, on which I was initiated into this new society, this new religion, as surely as if I had been initiated into the Ghost-Dance Religion of the American Indians.”79 The gathering was framed as a gathering of tribes and centralized Asian religious practices, without actual Native American or Asian American representation.
Similarly, more than twenty thousand people attended the first Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes (aka the Rainbow Tribe, Rainbow Family, the Rainbow Nation) in Colorado in 1972.80 The Rainbow Family is held together by a romantic vision founded on an adaptation of the Hopi prophecy, “When the Earth shall be ill and the humans will have forgotten who they are, then, members from every race of the planet will unite and form one Tribe. It will save humanity and clean what is to be cleaned. The persons constituting this Tribe will be Rainbow warriors.”81
Michael Niman traces the privileging of tribalism to an anti-modernist strain of the American counterculture: “By the late twentieth century, the American ‘antimodern’ revulsion against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism had taken the form of idealizing ‘primitives’ celebrated by Mormonism and anthropology (e.g., Coates 1987, Dentan 1983). Recasting the medieval Golden Age as a Native American idyll fits this tradition.”82 Even at today’s Rainbow Gatherings, Native American spirituality informs the environmental consciousness of the gathering by framing the earth as sacred, and “talk of the universal spirit and oneness are common,” even if Native religions are “not well understood.”83 The very foundations of American countercultural spirituality are deeply intertwined with the adoption and appropriation of Native tribal identities.
CONCLUSION
Without explicit avenues for conversion, participants in SBNR communities express a variety of levels of engagement and commitment. Critics who condemn “New Age” spirituality rarely recognize this wide spectrum of commitment and instead find comfort in the easy condemnation of ignorant consumerism, exploitation, and cultural appropriation.84 These critiques capture low-hanging fruit and evade the more complex (and interesting) questions of the intersections of identity politics and religion. It is easy to condemn outrageous commodifications of postural yoga, drunk white teens wearing Native headdresses at music festivals, and non-Indigenous/Indian entrepreneurs exploiting cultural resources for profit. But in the easy condemnation of cultural appropriation, there are hidden commitments to the impractical ideal of bounded autonomous cultures to which one belongs and thus owns as a commodity. Instead, Michael Brown reminds us of what anthropology has long known: “Many—perhaps most—elements of culture do not answer to a logic of possession and control, to a vision of hermetically sealed social units realizing their destiny in compete autonomy.”85 Furthermore, critics of cultural appropriation condemn whites for adopting the material culture of racialized others (e.g., wearing feathers, beadwork, hoop earrings, and dreadlocks), but they ultimately distract from the larger politics of representation—the systemic racism that makes these cultural appropriations so offensive.
For more serious engagements with religious exoticism, there are deeper roots that far surpass fashion. In a response to critiques of Lucidity Festival’s use of the term tribe and a totem pole, one of its producers, Jonah Haas, wrote,
What we see in the transformational festival culture is individuals beginning to awaken from the societal sleep they’ve been lulled into and are often, for the first time, engaging in a journey of personal discovery. As a mixed-blood of European descent who has been disconnected from his own cultural roots, I can say that I have indeed experienced a yearning for the primordial embrace of my own indigeneity, the knowledge of which was lost long before I was even born. I am sympathetic to the yearning of a connection to tribe and community, and so when I see (and have engaged in) the grasping for symbols of such things, I understand that we’re dealing with cases of misunderstood intentions and misdirected desire for connectivity.86
It is easy to empathize with Haas’s personal feelings of disconnect and loss of cultural roots; this personally felt, emotional experience cannot be denied. Religious exoticists’ questing for authenticity, existential meaning, and connection to a tribe stems from a similar, if not the same, origin. However, such a yearning also brings to mind Renato Rosaldo’s notion of imperialist nostalgia, which he defines as “a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed. . . . In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination.”87 Religious exoticism depends on nostalgia for the imagined worlds of the “noble savage,”88 those who have been murdered, colonized, and confined to reservations and museums at the hands of white imperialism.
In the context of largely white transformational festivals, religious exoticism easily elides into whites performing stereotypes and fragments of other cultures. Entire ethnic groups or religious communities are envisioned as authentic remedies to the crisis of modernity. This positioning necessarily relegates people of color to an existence outside of modernity and obfuscates the lived realities, political struggles, and continued oppression of the colonized in the present.89 In Philip Jenkins’s description of ethnic tourism in the American Southwest in the early twentieth century, he explains, “As so often in American history, the romantic image of the Indian counted far more than the living, breathing individual.”90