Shamans and Food Stamps: Authenticity, Reality, and the Ethics of Rewilding

[tagonist]

[Note- drafts of this have been shown to friends for the last week. THIS IS THE FINISHED VERSION! If you haven't read a draft of this essay with this header, you haven't read this essay. Thanks!]

Comments

[greyhoundliz]

One thing to think about (whereof more hereafter -- they said we could leave work early today, and I'm SO out of here!) is that there is, after all, overlap between the authentic and the real, and this contributes to their conflation in our minds. Florence Owens Thomas *was* poor in 1936, and she really did look like that. Christian children *do* enjoy jelly beans, etc. on Easter morning, and open their Christmas presents with as much glee as their secular counterparts.

It is also interesting to note how much of the "authentic" seems to be nostalgic. Oh, for a simpler time!

And yet it's also forward-looking, in that we hope to attain it.

(And incidentally, the *fact* of a week off in spring is agricultural. The *specific* week off in spring is tied to the fact that so many teachers and students would be out for Easter/Passover whether or not school was in session.)

[frankiejlh]

It is also interesting to note how much of the "authentic" seems to be nostalgic. Oh, for a simpler time!

This is somewhat in line what I was going to say: that Authenticity often seems like the result of how reality was transcribed into the developing child and/or adolescent brain, with its haziness between tangible and imaginary (or ideal) life: for some people, the authentic seems to be described by how they* remember their own childhoods (the good parts of them, at any rate); for others, it's described by how life appeared in books/other media/historic or anthropological lenses when they* were kids, especially if tangible life required an interior alternative.

*Read: self included

[greyhoundliz]

Yes! Good point. I'm also thinking that some of the gap (?) between Real and Authentic is caused by the inevitable processing time required -- our cultural perceptions of how things ought to be seldom lines up with how things are (at least in all particulars), because it's a moving target.

This dichotomy (although it's more of a Venn diagram, really) also makes the phrase "keep it real" kind of funny. Am I supposed to be keeping it (for whatever value of "it" we are implicitly defining) real or authentic?

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[sophiism]

1.) I did read "Bury Me Standing," so this is the only book I can reference. I don't really remember much about the book, except to say that Fonseca kept getting her feelings hurt by her Roma subjects: They're not very nice to women!!! In light of your book report, it's a wee bit amusing.

2.) Your distinction between the real and authentic reminds me of something that my Eastern Religion Studies professor once said. He said that religion is divided into, can be understood through, 3 main avenues: texts (Bibles, Vedas, Korans) church establishment (popes, priests, Dalai Lama's), and personal (rituals, altars, habits, personal practices).

There's what the Bible tells us to do, the way the church interprets the bible, and the way it actually plays out in day-to-day living.

And the interplay between these things is what is interesting.

3.) I use the same standard to talk about the law. Text, establishment, and actual.

[bustypowderkeg]

This was super duper interesting and cogent. AND FUNNY TOO! Thanks for posting, yo.

Coincidence

[polyparadigm]

I'm not sure there's much coincidence in the timing.

I spent last weekend with my family, and at Sunday's service we sang "now the green blade rises," which treats the Easter story alongside the life cycle of wheat.

I bet a lot of my ancestors buried corn dollys around this time of year, and if new life came up (seed packet says 2-3 days to germination), I bet they eased up on the strict rationing of stored food.

[tagonist]

Its an interesting question. I have a secret theory that Marxism is also a romantic utopia, but somehow (mostly by being incredibly boring and crank-tastic) it was always more of a political utopia than a cultural utopia. Political utopias are based on different systems, within which people can act more or less as they please, while cultural utopias are a way of life for everyone. Political projects are unwieldy, but occasionally succeed magnificently (the US Constitution, for all I do not like this country, actually worked in creating a new country without a king worth deposing, which was an accomplishment at the time)but cultural utopias become hegemonic and destructive almost immediately.

There seems to be a balance between planning a political utopia, on the one hand, that won't go cultural and end up "expelling the interlopers from our homelands" as I mentioned above, but giving people enough of a taste of romance that they feel like something that matters to their Real lives is going on.

Its worth another post, I think.

[greyhoundliz]

The U.S. Constitution is actually pretty cool. For serious. How it's been implemented (and ignored) and some of how it's been amended I don't like, but the underlying document? Really cool, especially given, as you say, the historical context