> religions when they are under pressure resort to fundamentalism
The best explanation I know of this is Weston La Barre's book The Ghost Dance,
which itself builds on James Mooney's classic anthropological study of the
Sioux Ghost Dance movement of the late 19th century. They're both huge,
sprawling books, but the basic idea is that when your culture becomes
invalidated, the consequent intolerable cognitive dissonance creates a kind of
shared madness, the basic symptom of which is simple hysterical denial: what
has happened to us simply isn't real. If we dance our ghost dance, thought
the Sioux, we will be invulnerable to the white man's bullets; we will be able
to drive the white man away, the buffalo will come back, and we will again
live as our fathers did.
Most typically this cultural invalidation happens when a people's traditional
way of life is rendered untenable by contact with a technologically and
militarily more powerful culture, usually one belonging to an imperialist
exploiter. But it can also happen to any culture which can't maintain its
authority in the face of rapid and radical change. Catholic, Islamic, and
evangelical fundamentalism are all nativistic cults, ghost dances arising from
the simple hysterical denial of the invalidation of previous realities under
the impact of rapid and radical cultural change.
La Barre's book suggests that the shaman is using in a more controlled manner
the pyschic mechanisms seen on a mass scale in a ghost dance. This opens the
way (though as far as I recall La Barre doesn't explicitly develop this
arguement) to seeing poetry as a kind of ghost dance, a way of maintaining
shared values in the face of the absurdity of life by creating a form of
utterance which both accepts and denies the obvious but intolerable conditions
of mortality.
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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