Ghost Dancers

From Savage Minds, a joint anthropology blog, some thoughts on Ghost Dancers of the 21st century.

[S]such movements are never about a pure “return to the past” but are, rather, an attempt to “rescue” the past and re-deploy it to create a more satisfying present and future.

The Ghost Dance and its political-spiritual cousins are distinctly modern phenomena, in both their goals and their methodologies. As Saffo writes, “Embracing coveted portions of what one opposes in the service of returning an old order is a signature of the Ghost Dance.” Thus we have nuclear technology, the Internet, and the modern transportation system drafted into service in the interest of restoring the social order—even when the desired social order is Muhammad in Medina, the Jerusalem of the Second Temple, pre-contact North America, or even the New Primitivists’ pre-agricultural nomadism.

It all sounds very much like what Martin Marty and Scott Appleby were saying with the Fundamentalism Project, that fundamentalists use the tools of modernity.

Frankly, I think that most current religion in America is Ghost Dancing–and in a secular but equally mythological way, I live surrounded by Ghost Dancers. Most of them have trophy homes with gates proclaiming the Something-or-other “Ranch.”

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