It’s ours, and you can’t have any

Sabina Magliocco (her last book mentioned here) has a good piece on “Indigenousness and the Politics of Spirituality” in the American Anthropological Association newsletter.

Some quotes:

Cultural tradition is a process, rather than a product; the key quality of many indigenous spiritual practices is their variability and adaptability to different contexts, depending on the needs of their practitioners. Copyrighting spiritual practices would involve freezing them in time, rendering a living tradition static, unchanging, dead and preventing its adaptation by other group members. Not only is this anathema to many practitioners; it is also not how religion works.

My emphasis. And she points a finger at anthropologists who aid and abet the process of limiting spiritual material to only the “right people,” which practice is itself a form of reverse racism.