I am sure that I share this experience with many people who work in Native Studies, or in the study of indigenous religions at least. I often find myself meeting people and then having to field their inappropriate responses after hearing what I “do.” To be more specific, people seem to have absolutely no idea how their responses evidence a totalizing colonial mindset. A sample dialogue:

Oh, a professor, how interesting! What do you teach?

I primarily teach courses in Native Studies, or courses about indigenous peoples around the globe.

That’s interesting. I also feel deeply connected to American Indians. I love Sedona and Santa Fe. I guess I’m just a spiritual person.

The last sentence has some variation, including “I like how they have a spiritual connection to the earth.”

What makes this, in my mind, one of the most challenging of colonial mindsets is that such perceptions of native people are fostered by how indigenous people around the world represent themselves. Due to the on-going theft of native lands, indigenous people have used the linguistic framings of “sacred” property and “spiritual” connections to the land and to “nature” as key articulations of their own sovereignty. The thought was that such framing devices would help land claims cases. Whether a serious matter of internal colonization or simply the attempt to communicate to cultural outsiders in terms the outsiders might better understand, the connection between spirituality and indigenous people runs deep in history. Over and over, scholars have shown that the earliest representations of native people that circulated throughout the 17th and 18th centuries were that they lacked civilization and therefore were somehow untainted by the material concerns for possessions, laws, and capitalism. During these same early reports, indigenous peoples of the Americas (and other lands), were portrayed as some sort of animal-human hybrids, close to nature, more wild than fully evolved people. In the worse cases they were cannibalistic monsters; in more romantic characterizations, they were children of nature. Michael Taussig demonstrated how such projections excused the othering and killing of indigenous peoples in South America in one century, and then provided the “magic of primitivism” in a later era, both parts constituting the project of colonization. And yet, in the first quarter of the 21st century, little has changed. One can draw fairly quickly a direct line from the earliest and most racist views of indigenous peoples to the mascots, Navajo designed fashions of Urban Outfitters, Halloween costumes of American Indians, and the continued legal theft of indigenous lands across the globe.

Historically, we can now look back and see how modernity was perhaps defined by a yearning to make sense of everything in categorical and typological fashion. From Darwin’s desire to categorize everything to the creation of academic disciplines, the world not only could be understood, but there was a category for everything and everything belonged in its place. The most basic of these categorical distinctions is a binary: mind/body, body/spirit, us/them, knowledge/belief, black/white, straight/gay, etc. These dichotomies are often a sign of elementary thinking: we begin with basics, including basic ways to differentiate between two things.

But as our own lives prove time and time again: life is messy. Boundaries break down. Borders are porous. And still, these false binaries continue to frame legal practices and the sciences, and therefore have serious consequences for subjugated or marginalized peoples. Western man has logic; ethnic people have beliefs. Western man has History and Science and other people have folklore, mythology, and superstition.

I want to be very careful about terms that imply dichotomies, or binaries that falsely construct an order that then divide the world into one thing and then (vs.) another. Allow me to use a binary myself, that of spirit vs. matter, to illustrate my point. When non-indigenous people claim a connection to indigenous people due to their spirituality, they are almost never connected to indigenous people due to their materiality. In fact, this is exactly the allusion that people unconsciously mean to accentuate. They are saying that they are interested in, reading about, and consuming indigenous non-materiality: spirits, dreams, beliefs, legends, and myths. They are rarely interested in reading or sharing indigenous struggles for sovereignty, water rights, or political recognition. (I am adding here to the important work of both Andy Smith and Lisa Aldred).

I believe there is considerable force to Sherman Alexie’s argument that the market of non-Indian readers leads many writers (including indigenous authors) to continue misrepresenting Native Americans in romantically religious terms. There is real danger to this representation. Indians died in higher numbers than other soldiers when serving in Vietnam. They were put in the front lines because they were thought to be able to listen to the wind and have a natural ability to track prey. A market for Indian spirituality enables both retailers and consumers to feel good about supporting a subjugated group. They can sell, wear, perform, or symbolize their care for others by buying, consuming, and profiting from the Other, rather than real labor for human rights. They do not have to fight for native rights; but they can buy native purification for a weekend in a sweat lodge. Imagine if every dream catcher purchased also entailed a letter written to request Leonard Peltier’s freedom from prison. If we think of native peoples as somehow more spiritual, and thus less material, than we have to care less about their material needs.

Not considering the materiality of native communities helps colonial settlers (most readers of this essay) ignore the realities of life for the original Americans. Like an American version of the movie, Sarah’s Key, we choose not to look at those histories which evidence our continued complicity in the displacement and subjugation of humans. Frankly, it is a downer. Then again, so is living in dire poverty. Unemployment and poverty rates are higher in reservation communities than for any other group in the United States, four times the rate for the average American. Even among gaming tribes, unemployment afflicts a quarter or more of reservation populations. The image of the “rich Indian” was used to combat pro-gaming ballot initiatives in the ’90s, particularly in California. How could real Indians also have large houses and cars, plural? The contrast between a “real” Indian as spiritual and a “fake” Indian as a rich Indian was portrayed to some comic relief by Seth McFarland’s Family Guy episode, “The Son Also Draws.” However, as with other popular representations, I believe the laughs provide relief mostly for the colonizer. The main non-Indian characters have a gambling problem but try to convince the tribal casino management that they are from that tribe. The tribal members in the cartoon are mocked as being pretend Indians since they cannot simultaneously be rich, dress in contemporary fashion, AND also be indigenous people. Indians cannot win. They are invisible out on the reservation, or no longer Indian if they attempt to work within the capitalist system. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street movement has enabled me many chances to point out how Indians were the first that were, and generally speaking still are, left out of the system. And when they “occupied” Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, members of the American Indian Movement experienced the blunt repercussions of living in a police state.

The other side of the material/spiritual binary is that it elevates the Indian to a position of civilizational healer. Thinking of native people as having more access to all things spiritual, we fail to recognize that no one has the upper hand on deeply cosmological questions (not Buddhists, not Hindus, not Southern Baptists). However, settler colonizers do have the upper hand in legal and academic structures. And if we think of Indians as spiritual people, then their land claims and wisdom traditions are about sacred matters rather than rational science, and we have seen how those battles are lost. They are lost in courts of law and they are lost in what gets to count as History with a capital “H,” and Truth with a capital “T.” The real life implications of representing my research on native rituals and mythistory as “spiritual” are that I would be continuing to simplify the importance of indigenous lifeways as matters of the otherworldly. Because my first book dealt directly with the Yaqui people’s views of dreams, myths, and the afterlife, I committed myself to writing also about how such matters related to their struggle for land and the current debt-peonage in Mexico.

But of course, in colloquial settings, it gets a bit tricky; highlighting why settler colonialists might want to think of kokopelis and dream catchers makes people uncomfortable. Still, I like to do it. When I tell someone that I teach about indigenous peoples including American Indians, and they respond that they have visited a vortex or use Native American Tarot Cards, I graciously respond, “That’s interesting!” And then I immediately follow with a question about the last time they visited the tribe near to where they live. My point is that I want them to know, and I want them to consider, living Indians, not just the ones showing up to psychics in channeling sessions. I tend to ask if they agree with the indigenous contentions regarding Occupy Wall Street. I might throw in a trick question or two, such as “What do you think those Indian spirit guides have to say about that Keystone Pipeline?” Or laughing a bit maniacally, “I bet all those Indian spirits want back their land you’re living on!”

You can imagine why I do not get invited to a lot of new age events. I sent a PR letter to every new age bookshop in Los Angeles when my book was coming out, and not one bookstore replied. Yet their weekends are packed with presenters on Indian spirituality. I did wiggle my way into a book fair session in Tucson on spirituality. I felt a bit like an infiltrator, but to a packed room I was able to introduce the subversive idea that if you want to learn about Indians, you must encounter living Indians and their political struggles to be heard above the din of their commodification.

The conundrum is quite complex. On one hand, Indians probably do have ghosts just as any other human population does. And, I do think indigenous religiosity is important to study and understand for both native and non-native peoples. For all I know, dream catchers even work. I am even willing to admit that perhaps the Indian spirits roaming the forests and new age bookstores are laughing at me now. Perhaps they are able to see what really matters for us poor living folk and that we should pay more attention to the spiritual aspects of our lives.

I also know that indigenous people, even some well-meaning scholars, seemingly cannot help themselves from using “sacred,” “holy,” “spiritual,” and the like, when talking about indigenous worldviews and land claims. When asked during the research of the famous Maine Indian Land Claims case, a Passamaquoddy woman told a professor of mine that her relationship to the land was spiritual. As the conversation continued, she explained that she needed to communicate with the land, feed the land, and dance with the land. And she explained that if she did not do such activities, the land would cease to be in relation with her. But as my professor relayed to her, these very real, very physical responsibilities are not included in the concept of “spirituality.” “Spiritual” and “spirituality” do not get at the actuality of that relationship and those words often fail to address what is at stake. She agreed but added that there was a not direct translation for the word she used in her language to categorize such activities. When taught how to pick sage at sunrise, I was told by a Navajo friend to verbally ask for permission, to breathe on a pinch of corn pollen, and to put that pollen at the base of the plant where the sage comes out of the ground. He said these acts were “holy.” But, these are intensely physical acts that establish relations. And how does “holy” make sense in a generative linguistic system (as opposed to a representative linguistic system) that does not have a word for “profane” or “non-holy?”

One more example is in order from my own fieldwork. When Yoeme collaborators tell me about visiting ancestral worlds, or “aniam,” in the hills, they are talking about actual physical entrances. And if a visitor to these worlds fails the tests therein, the affects are physical in the most real sense, including sickness and death. The Yoemem characterize such worlds as “yo,” which earlier ethnographers translated as “enchanted.” But my research into this syllable has shown it means “ancient, respected, and/or elder,” which characterize aspects of culture without implying other aspects as profane. Rather than a dichotomous designation and evaluation, “yo” denotes importance in the spectral terms of something or someone’s aboriginalness or traditionalness.

The Passamaquoddy, Navajo and Yoeme examples, though only briefly described here, tell us that however respected, vital, and religiously considered, many indigenous connections to land are not without materiality, physicality, and substance. Many indigenous peoples do not maintain “spiritual” relations with the land if that term, “spiritual,” is in some way defined or co-constructed as non-physical. Indeed, one can argue that Indians and allies who use the word “spiritual” have been selling the boat to keep the sail. I have been thinking for a while now on the absurdity of calling something “spiritual” or “sacred” to win a land claim in a colonial court of law. Have you seen how non-Indians commodify, represent, and sell their sacred things? Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity covers this latter ground quite well.

All of this reminds me when “spiritual” made it to the big time, when it had its own commercial practically. When Extra made it’s 1996 commercial for sugarfree, extra-lasting gum, viewers had to watch this poor woman miss her life-time dream of seeing the “elusive blue-back whale.” While looking for a piece of gum with more flavor, the crass lady who is portrayed to be doubtful of the whale’s impact, ends up having a moment of rapture and yelling out, “Oh, that is soo spiritual!” It still cracks me up. And like that lady who misses it, I am at a loss for how “spiritual” can come to mean so much and therefore mean so little. “Spirituality,” the term, has become my great white whale. This essay is just one part of my hunt.

“Spirit” has meant breath courage, desire, mind, soul, spirit, demon, energy, and succubus. The inability to use the word with specificity makes it all the more dangerous in a colonial context. If the post-Cartesian turn among the sciences is to mean anything, it should mean to “escape the materialist-spiritualist dualism that mistakenly constructs some humans as rational, and others as not.” Kenneth Morrison wrote that in a forthcoming essay. He adds, “Utopian dreams constituted a romantic impulse to ‘spiritualize’ both nature and indigenous peoples, and might be dismissed (as has animism) as unreal fantasy.”

We are served well to think about how non-Indians, and Americans in general, like their Indians. They seem to like them talking as Indian guides to psychics. They seem to like them as brave chiefs leading a football team to victory. They seem to like them as sad, downtrodden and droopy, losers on the Trail of Tears. They like them with six-pack abs and holding up half-naked princesses on top of ancient temples. They like them crying about pollution. And they like them selling hand-blown pipes and rolling papers on the Venice Beach Boardwalk.

But most of all, they like them spiritually. Like the blue-back whale, Indian spirituality comes to non-Indians, to remind them of something gloriously wild and free, something unfettered by materialism and modern day life. Like an eagle calling out its screech of liberty, the spirit of the Indian lets us know: we are a nation meant for great things. You can make this country better, just keep shopping. If only the living Indians, with their daily lives and struggles, would stop reminding us of reality.

In all places and all epochs human beings have used some such word as “Spirit,” to designate the animating, world-moving force within them; the relations with ancestors, demons, totems, ghosts and other “spirit-beings”; and the Supreme Being, the godhead that permeates the universe and creates the world and is bound together in our religions. In sum, what has been known as spirit relates the human self to the universe and all its beings and forms of being. Spirit is no residual category, then, but an ontological potential of humanity, a vital part of being human. It is as essential for human nature as building a web is for “spider nature.” For all creatures are inserted into nature at a certain point and with a certain internally articulated set of relationships. These frame the possible arrangements that creature has with the rest of nature. Spirit belongs to the relationships of human nature, then, along with phenomena such as childhood, language, the capacity for rational thought as well as speculative thought, a peculiar emphasis on the role of sex, the making and chronicling of history, and above all for humans, the power to produce, that is, to consciously transform nature to meet needs that are both universal and yet also peculiarly human, one of which is the spiritual. From this angle, spirituality is the production of spirit, and like all forms of production, is a function of history. Thus there is no spirit as such, there is only spirit in various historical contexts, arising from historically prepared ground and transforming that ground.

The present epoch is historically unique in that the spirit-side of life can no longer be taken for granted. It appears both in innumerable fragmentary shapes and as massive blocs of fundamentalist and totalizing conviction, and quite often it seems to not exist at all, as though there were some kind of systematic power at work to drive it out of our lives.

Albert Einstein wrote that humans are born connected with the cosmos. We become separated from this ground of being as we develop and we therefore have the choice of whether to rejoin this universal ground—not, of course, in the original manner attendant upon birth, but consciously, according to personal history and what we have done with our life. We all rejoin the universe when biological life is over and our substance re-enters the great natural cycles of material exchange. But this need not occur blindly. We are endowed with human consciousness and thus the option also exists for us to live and be conscious of our path from universal being and back to universal being. This path is of spirit and traverses the self—and it is the self and its relation to the world that can both shape and impede the path of spirit.

As an internal representation of the person, the self exists between the person and the world, and is a kind of boundary between the person and the universe. If the boundary is relatively rigid and impermeable, we would call this the ego-form of the self; and if the boundary is relatively fluid, permeable and differentiated, we would call this the soul-form of the self. Thus the ego-form is hostile to the emergence of spirit. It posits the person as a fixed and discrete individual, and prioritizes the forms of reasoning that reinforce this, including the Cartesian splitting between mind and body and the various technical and bureaucratic practices that naturalize this.

Soul-consciousness overcomes this splitting and differentiates the human being and nature, that is, sees each as part of the other. This openness allowed by infusion of spirit—manifest in far too many forms to be even summarized here—is therefore an overcoming of ego, an overcoming of separation of self from universe, and a transfiguration of the flesh, or body under the name of spirit. The language of death and resurrection is apposite here:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.
It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.
It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. (I Cor: 15, 42-44)

My reading of Paul is that he insists on the resurrection of the death-in-life inherent to normal egoic existence. The spiritual moment overcomes the separation from the deadly splitting from nature which sees us alone in the universe of dead matter, and opens upon the perspective of universal being. This may be tied to the saying of Jesus: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). And it presupposes the faith in a living God.

The emergence of Jesus Christ as the intermediary between the human and divine, and hence as the essential configuration of spirit opening upon a radically new path of human existence needs to be evoked here. I do not claim that Jesus is the only authentic path of spirit: that sort of sectarian splitting and chauvinism is precisely the anti-spiritual way. I do claim that his emergence was the sort of thing that could only have happened at a certain moment in history—and that such a moment has most definitely not gone away, although the forces that would hold it back—dare we call them Satanic?—are presently in the ascendant.

The Jesus phenomenon occurred as the expansion of Rome’s empire into Palestine destabilized the existing Abrahamic religion and introduced new class configurations into traditional Judaic society. The quisling King Herod and the quisling elite-priesthood of the Sanhedrin represented the infiltration of a foreign body into the command structure of Judaism. This was accompanied by severe dislocation and dispossession in the countryside and it reached its grim apogee in the introduction of money exchange into the Great Temple. I see Jesus as a peasant revolutionary who emerged in dialectical reaction to this and conceived of a transformation in the spiritual sphere that could also nonviolently transform the secular sphere. The key passages bearing witness to this in the Gospels are Jesus’ magnificent and soulful imprecations against the money power. Non-violent to living beings, he actively throws over the money-changing tables in the Temple, and thereby seals his fate on the Cross.

From another angle, this core spiritual event is also a critique of idolatry: that abiding propensity of humanity to make false gods out of its own productions and submit to them. Without this insight we fall victim to the shallow view of spirituality which sees it as something missing in contemporary materialist life—which is by and large, true—and concludes that what we need is more spirituality—which is both stupid and dangerous. How can we forget that some of the most malignant features of modern history—Nazism, for example, or the various fundamentalisms that blight our landscape—have many of the essential hallmarks of spiritual experience, in particular, the breaking down of ego boundaries and the sense of reunion with some larger whole? In fact it may be said that right-wing movements energized by pseudo-spiritual power are much more dangerous than the stodgy and prudent secular right.

No, we do not need more spirituality as such; indeed there is no such thing but only spiritualities mediated by their social vision and relations. We need more authentic spirituality: not just a simple breaking of egoic chains but also an overcoming of the corruptions of idolatry. This occurs in context of a righteous striving toward justice and universality, beyond the strictures of racism and gender oppression. In respect to this we should bear in mind that money power is the pure form of idolatry: money power, that is: not the simple form of monetary exchange but the endless expanding of value, dissolving the integrity of nature and human being. The word for self-expanding value is capital, of course; and the struggles of Jesus against the money-changers initiate not only a new moment in religious history, but were the first, anticipatory, instances of an anti-capitalist campaign, when capital was only lying nascent in its cradle. Today, capital has become hegemonic and world-destroying at the same time. Its society of rampant egoism—because the ego-form is the only model of self suitable for capitalist relations of production—along with the astounding panoply of idolatry known as consumerism, poses the greatest threat of all history to the survival of our species and innumerable others. It is this massive weight that burdens spiritual existence today—and demands that we find new ways of spiritual realization.

Jesus and the first Christians have been called the first communists—that is, in class society, in contrast to the primitive communism that graces original, pre-class and pre-state society. We are now in another context requiring a spiritual revolution. Will a renewed power of soul resurrect us from the abyss?

From feng shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, from Christian mystics to New Age gurus, spirituality is big business. We now see the introduction of modes of spirituality into educational curricula, bereavement and addiction counseling, psychotherapy and nursing. Spirituality as a cultural trope has also been appropriated by corporate bodies and management consultants to promote efficiency, to extend markets and to maintain a leading edge in a fast-moving information economy. Spirituality is celebrated by those who are disillusioned by traditional institutional religions and seen as a force for wholeness, healing and inner transformation. In this sense spirituality is often taken to denote the positive aspects of the ancient religious traditions, unencumbered by the ‘dead hand’ of the church, and yet something which provides a liberation and solace in an otherwise meaningless world. However, is this “feel good” term always what it is advertised to be?

Capitalist spiritualities involve the subordination and exploitation of religious themes and motifs to promote an individualist or corporate-oriented pursuit of profit for its own sake. They have emerged in response to the rise of global finance capitalism, the shift to post-Fordist modes of production and the growing cultural influence of transnational corporations and neoliberal models of governance. Like the individualist or consumerist spiritualities of the 1960s and 1970s upon which such trends have developed, they tend to be ‘de-traditionalized’ and syncretic in nature. Use whatever you like, as long as it works. As the postmodern spiritualities of globalization and new information technologies these trends mirror the deregulation of economic markets and the easy transfer of electronic data across national boundaries. Unlike the individualist spiritualities of the Sixties and Seventies however, such trends remain institutionally embedded and represent an uncritical assimilation of business values into their rationale. What characterizes such trends is a subtle shift beyond an exclusive emphasis upon the individual self and towards a concern with making the individual employee/consumer function as effectively as possible for the benefit of corporate organizations and the global economy.

Many scholars have suggested that what we have seen emerge in the last few decades of the twentieth century is something new, which has been variously described as “New Age capitalism,” “millennial capitalism,” or, as David Loy has written, “the most successful religion of all time … the religion of the market.” Yet, in many respects the ‘free market’ values embodied in these ascriptions are not particularly new. In 1944 Karl Polanyi traced similar tensions and issues to the Industrial Revolution. However, the intersection of such an ideology with the collapse of Soviet communism, the rise of globalization, the proliferation of new communications technologies, and the possibility of mass advertising saturation through corporate-owned media outlets have moved the free-market agenda onto an unprecedented scale. However one chooses to characterize these developments they now offer a significant challenge to the indigenous civilizations and ancient cultures of the world that they are in the process of colonizing, strip-mining and transforming. Harvey Cox describes the long historical arc of markets and their relation to religion in this passage:

Since the earliest stages of human history, of course, there have been bazaars, rialtos and trading posts—all markets. But The Market was never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning, other “gods”. The Market operated within a plethora of other institutions that restrained it. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated in his classic work The Great Transformation, only in the past two centuries has The Market risen above these demigods and chthonic spirits to become today’s First Cause.

It is in this particular market moment that we consider the meaning of the term spirituality. For historians, the term “spiritualité” seems to have first emerged in seventeenth century France (as did its close relation–“la mystique”) where it was associated with the devout or contemplative life in general and it is from this word that we derive the modern English term “spirituality.” By this time, the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis upon the individual’s unmediated relationship to God and the importance of an interior faith had created a climate within European Christianity which allowed the first steps towards the privatization of religion to occur. Thus, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, influenced by figures such as Madame Guyon (1648-1717), a new sensibility began to emerge which specifically associated spiritualité with the interior life of the individual soul.

The development of the modern notion of spirituality as an interiorized experience was inflected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the European colonial encounter with Asia and the growing influence of the science of psychology as an authoritative discourse of the human condition. There have been countervailing trends that associated “spirituality” with the struggle for social justice. Yet the predominant trend has been to see the “spiritual” as a discourse associated with the private, individual self.

By the second half of the twentieth-century, religion had entered the marketplace of human choice and experimentation, resulting of course in the development of that eclectic and amorphous phenomenon known today as ‘the New Age.” All of these factors have had a profound impact upon the reception of Asian religious traditions and philosophies in the western world where they have overwhelmingly been translated into introspective and otherworldly spiritualities concerned primarily with the achievement of individual enlightenment with little in the way of a social conscience or orientation to change the world in which that individual lives. Indeed, for someone like Paul Heelas, this individualistic focus means that the New Age movement can best be characterized as a loose network of “self-religions” or “spiritualities of the self.” We might call this process the individualization of religion.

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It is often recognized that, since the Enlightenment, organized religion has been subjected to an erosion of its social authority with the rise of scientific rationalism, humanism and modern, liberal democratic models of the nation-state (a process often called secularization). In modern western societies, to varying degrees, this has usually manifested itself as the relegation of “the religious” to the private sphere. What has not been sufficiently appreciated by contemporary social theorists however is that the later stages of this process have become intimately intertwined with the global spread of corporate capitalism. We can describe both of these trends as the privatization of religion, but in two distinct senses.

In the first instance, the European Enlightenment led to an increased tendency to exclude religious discourse from the public domain of politics, economics and science. In the main this was achieved by representing ‘the religious’ primarily in terms of individual choice, beliefs, and private states of mind. For philosophers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant, it was important to demarcate the precise domain in which religion should be located, in order to preserve the secular space of liberal political governance from the conflicts, intolerance and violence arising from the conflict between competing religious ideologies and groups within European societies. Religion in this context becomes a matter of personal assent to a set of beliefs, a matter of the private state of mind or personal orientation of the individual citizen in the terms set out for it by modern (i.e. Enlightenment-inspired) liberalism. A consequence of this approach is that, in different ways and variegated forms, religion has been formally separated from the business of statecraft in contemporary Northern European societies (though with different inflections and degrees of smoothness).

In the late twentieth century, however, there has been a second form of privatization, and this has been largely ignored in the sociological literature on the subject. This trend partially builds upon the previous process, but also has important discontinuities with it. It is linked to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the end of the Cold War and the global emergence of a triumphalist form of corporate-oriented capitalism, intent on spreading its influence across the globe. The second privatization that this cultural phenomenon represents partially builds upon the previous individualization of religion, but also has important discontinuities with it. Generally speaking, it can be characterized as a wholesale commodification of religion that is the selling off of religious buildings, ideas, and claims to authenticity in primary service to profit.

In the context of this unprecedented cultural bombardment of information, images, and advertising through the various mass media we are witnessing a wholesale commodification of our varied cultural histories and traditions. The practices, texts, and belief-systems of ancient traditions are now routinely exploited for their cultural capital with the purpose of increasing consumption and corporate profit. Much of the conceptual work for achieving this is carried out by the modern concept of spirituality. Marketing the spiritual allows companies and their consumers to pay lip service to the rich and historically significant religions of the world whilst at the same time distancing themselves from any engagement with the specific world-views and forms of life that they represent. Religion is re-branded as “spirituality” and the net result is the vigorous promotion of the ideology of capitalism. This emerging phenomenon is what Jeremy Carrette and I have coined “capitalist spirituality.”

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We do not need Karl Marx or Max Weber to tell us that those traditions classified as ‘religions’ in the modern consciousness have always been bound up with economics and more generally with modes of exchange. However, a fundamental ground shift has taken place in North American and British cultural politics in the last twenty years, one specifically tied to the deregulation of the markets by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and this is changing the relationship of cultural forms to the market. At the beginning of the twenty-first century what it means to be human has been increasingly influenced by a discourse of rational choice, game theory, and the notion of homo economicus. The language of the market, of competition, consumption, of built-in obsolence and auditing has exerted an influence upon more and more dimensions of life in capitalist societies. Passengers, hospital patients, students become customers, citizens become consumers, and employees become “human resources.”

How has this general cultural shift affected the realm of “the religious”? With the emergence of capitalist forms of spirituality we are seeing a shift in relation to the ethico-cultural space traditionally inhabited by ‘the religions’ in terms of its increasing subordination to a particular economic ideology. Entering public institutions that provide education, health-care and professional expertise within society as a whole, the ideologies of consumerism and business enterprise are now infiltrating more and more aspects of our lives. The result of this shift has been a curtailment of the social and ethical concerns associated with religious traditions and communities and the subordination of “the religious” and the ethical to the realm of economics, which is now rapidly replacing science (just as science replaced theology in a previous era), as the dominant mode of authoritative discourse within society. Capitalism and consumerism have become, for many today, a powerful life-orienting ideology—a new world religion, and “spirituality” is at the frontline of the missionary activity to spread this religion and its impoverished view of the human around the globe.

Artist Richard Prince (b. 1949) is at once an observer, purveyor, and critic of an American spirituality shaped through promiscuous borrowings from the everyday world. Prince is best known for his technique of “rephotography,” a formal descendant of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in which the artist takes pictures of pre-existing photographs. In these and other works, Prince mimics and critiques the spirituality of his context, employing a range of appropriation strategies in order to recycle, reshape, re-contextualize, and re-purpose the flotsam and fragments of American life: advertisements, car parts, cartoons, dime-store novels, and even other people’s jokes. As critic Nancy Spector has remarked, Prince’s art is thus “stolen but original, ironic but sincere, illusory but real,” something that might be said of the “spiritual America” he invokes.

Among Prince’s most recognizable images are his re-photographs of iconic cowboys against the great American landscape portrayed in the famous Marlboro cigarette ad campaign. By appropriating and recontextualizing these images, Prince reveals that the quintessence of “authentic” American machismo is as constructed as the advertisements themselves. In fact, as Spector has illuminated, the “founding myth of the sanctity of individual freedom” is itself a commodity, a spiritual ideal packaged and sold to consumers. This incarnation of American spirit is thus a product, in every sense of the term, of what David Loy has called the “religion of the market” and its auxiliary consumerist-entertainment complex. Any “pure” American spirituality, in other words, is always already contaminated, polluted, impure; it is an admixture of patriotism, capitalism, and popular culture.

The wild bricolage of desires, dreams, and sentiments that characterizes Prince’s notion of American spirituality ranges from the familiar to the outrageous. In seeking to disclose the full amplitude of this spirituality, and to expose the contradictions therein, Prince not only de-familiarizes the banal—advertising images and the like—but also elevates the obscene to critical visibility.

Shot at the outset of the American “culture wars” of the Eighties, Prince’s most famous and controversial re-photograph carries the title “Spiritual America.” This name itself is an appropriation; it was first attached to a 1923 photograph by Alfred Steiglitz that excerpted the harnessed hindquarters of a gelded horse. Steiglitz saw his photo as a “bitterly ironic critique of the American puritanical ethos.” Prince’s “Spiritual America” is an appropriation of Garry Gross’s lascivious photo of a nude, ten-year-old Brooke Shields. The all-American girl stands in a deep bathtub, with thick, almost seminal, steam swirling at her feet. Her face is heavily made up, and her body, glistening with oil, is turned to highlight at once the curves of her buttocks and her pre-pubescent chest. Shields’s face, as critic Michael Newman describes it, captures the contradictory nature of American spiritual values and longings, showing “both the fearfulness of the child and the total control of the temptress.”

That Prince saw his work in a religious register befitting this strange spirituality is clear. In 1983, he arranged an entire exhibition under the title “Spiritual America” in a gallery by the same name. Here the re-photograph of Gross’s image of Shields “hung alone—shrinelike—in a cheap gold frame beneath a diminutive picture light at the end of an otherwise unlit, or dimly lit, narrow room with exposed brick walls.” Newman develops this comparison, suggesting that “gallery meets church” in the exhibition of “Spiritual America.” Prince, he says, “could be making a critical point here at the expense of art-lovers: we go to worship at a gallery or museum and that constitutes us as a certain kind of passive spectator…. It’s an image which panders to the fantasy that the object is complicit with the viewer’s desire to see.”

Prince’s gesture, however, is leveled not only at “art-lovers,” but at an American spiritual tendency more broadly, at the American proclivity for privately reveling in what it loudly condemns. In fact, “Spiritual America” met with controversy and confusion for its spectacular sexualization of a minor, soliciting at once desiring gazes and outraged condemnation. And this was just the point. In Prince’s hands, the pedophiliac image provided a way of unlocking the paradoxical nature of this country’s collective spiritual disposition. If, as Newman suggests, there is a “religious power” to Prince’s photo, it has to do in part with its function as an icon of American spirituality and a corresponding contradictory moralism. Engaging the gaze of the viewer in a manner at once complicitous and critical, the piece thus exceeds what Walter Benjamin called the modern artwork’s “exhibition value” and partakes of the “cult value” of religious art. At once ironic and iconic, Prince’s work illuminates a spiritual America that takes pleasure in conjuring what it condemns, loathing what it longs for.