Tribal Revival: by Erik Davis

The anthropologist Victor Turner famously used the word liminal to describe the passageway between the known and the unknown, the path that takes you to a nomadic territory that lies in-betwixt and in-between. Turner was interested in traditional rites of passage, those tribal ceremonies that guide participants through the process of social transformation—from childhood to adulthood, say, or from novice to shaman. Such rites are important inspirations for today’s neotribalists as well, both consciously and not. For though the festival rarely marks its participants with the obvious cuts and tattoos of a puberty rite, it does hold out the potential for real change, and this potential lies in the liminal: the deeply felt sense that the normal rules are suspended or warped, that a possible world is emerging, and that a new self can rise to greet it.

[....]

At that moment I knew, with almost unbearable conviction, that this exact moment had occurred before, that it echoed back through a thousand years of a thousand dusty stomps, and that all festivals were really just one festival, eternally recurring.

This feeling itself, I would come to learn, is an ancient one, and in it lies the seed of renewal. In his book The Eternal Return, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade described how certain rituals allow mythic time to erupt inside mundane history. In particular, Eliade talked about annual tribal ceremonies that stage the recreation of the cosmos. The idea, which is found throughout primal societies, is that by ritually returning to the chaos at the beginning of things, and then reenacting the emergence of our ordered world, the cosmos itself is renewed. Such ceremonies give us an insight into the deep impulses of the festival, within whose electronic noise and psychedelic chaos stir new forms of living and being together on this planet.

A heavy dose of....propaganda?

How to Save the World

Derrick Jensen suggests (in A Language Older Than Words) that we listen to the land, and in time it will tell us just what we need to do.

I am trying to believe this, but I'm not sure I do. As Quinn says, you need to be ready to listen, to reconnect. Although I don't much like the analogy, it's a lot like being ready for a religious conversion. I understand that most people are indoctrinated into their religious beliefs from a very early age, but many still need some event to trigger a true realization of that belief. And others who come to religion later in their lives do so because they're ready -- some combination of events and support from other believers is sufficient to take them past a tipping point, and bring about a major worldview change. A heavy dose of propaganda needs to be applied at just the right time, by more than one person, in the context of the convert's own community and situation. This is not easy stuff.

Organized religions do this very effectively. They provide the tools for evangelism, and the infrastructure to keep the flock in the fold. Whereas some of them are con-men and criminals, others are generous and sincere. Gladwell has described the "cellular" organization that enables many evangelical churches to convert and retain members, using a bottom-up outreach and support process coordinated by a top-down hierarchy that supplies the tools of conversion and retention.

Perhaps the Transition movement and the Permaculture movement, both community-based networks, are the analogue of the local cells of religious groups. Perhaps these are the networks that we can use, instead of debates, conferences and books, to do the same thing to organize those who are, as Quinn and Jensen say, ready to listen, to reconnect, and to start to do the much more radical work that will be needed to:

* learn a better way to live and make a living,
* disrupt and bring down our industrial growth economy and the civilization that depends on it, and
* create new models to replace them that are healthy and sustainable.

Yet I'm troubled by this. If we create cellular networks to organize the work of reconnection, learning, action and creation needed to enable a better world, could these not easily become, as so many religious networks are, vehicles for indoctrination and exploitation? Will we end up with sects who think that better world can and should be built now, in the shadow of our teetering civilization, and others who think we should focus on undermining existing civilization and that nothing very useful can be accomplished until that work is done? I can see myself agreeing with both viewpoints.

Embracing the darkness..

Transition Times » Article » Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities? The Color of Movements or the Color of Life?

Since the beginning of human history, the wisdom of ancient traditions has reiterated that life is not always as it seems. That which appears dazzling is not always desirable, and that which appears dark is not always wisely averted. Sometimes that which we fear most is our redemption. The greatest minds of human history: Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare, Jung, Einstein—to name a few, were not repelled by dark realities, but rather embraced them, however reluctantly, as conduits to deeper truth and more exquisite creativity.

Spin it as we will, the human race is precariously poised on the cliff’s edge, hanging by its fingernails. Our challenge is not to try to prevent the collapse of the larger systems, but to respond with resilience and self-sufficiency and to ask the kinds of questions that wisdom traditions and the greatest minds in human history have always asked: Why is this happening? What meaning can I and my community find in this unfolding of events? What do I and my loved ones and my community need to do to prepare? And perhaps most importantly, what is my purpose in being here at this time? What have I come here to do? What can I contribute?