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.

I started farming at 38. Sick of the city, the mountains of trash, the race to consume, I found myself agreeing to an overnight getaway at a farm run by nuns. I’d stopped going to church at 15, furious with the politics and the histories, but I’d married someone who’d been able to see beyond the Church’s transgressions. Through her, I’d made an uneasy peace with a version of Christianity, and so there I was, at a convent-cum-farm. With a snarky, world-weary antipathy, I informed my partner that I would not go to chapel, and that I just couldn’t imagine hanging out with nuns. Left to my own devices, surrounded by quiet, I slept late, and long, nearly 12 hours. Maybe my resistance was lowered after that marathon rest, but I couldn’t help but notice, at the communal lunch with the sisters, that these were whip-smart, witty, visionary women with dead-on sociopolitical analyses. 

I started to relax. And then I got introduced to the garden. Week after week, I returned to the farm, taking the train out of the city, happy to join the throngs of commuters I had once sneered at. In the quiet of the fields, digging out rocks or planting celery or hand-picking bean beetles, I felt part of something immense, something thrumming with life. That sense of connection was more gratifying and nourishing than earning my PhD, than keeping my salary and 401k, than wearing my funky shoes and getting my passport stamped. I left my job, moved to the guesthouse, and have never regretted it since.

Now I’m in the middle of my third season as a farmer, no longer at the convent, but at an even more rural location in western Massachusetts. Here I’m learning to build as well as farm, to see myself as a “maker.” City friends have asked me if I ever get bored, out here in the hills. It’s hard not to laugh at the question; there’s so much to learn, and I’m contentedly exhausted each day. No more Ambien—it’s just no longer necessary.

But it’s not sufficient to say that I’m just busy learning. The truth is I’m not bored because I’m deeply satisfied. I think, now, that all those cocktails and fancy shoes were signs of a kind of spiritual malaise, masked as a consumerist cosmopolitanism. It might seem silly, but the satisfaction of growing your own potatoes, making your own yogurt, or building your own shed cannot be underestimated. (For a substantial exploration of this notion, by a political philosopher and bike mechanic, see Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work). There’s a part of me, a deep-down-primal part of me, which recognizes these activities as part of what makes me human. I recognize my drive to create as part of my creatureliness. And feeling more truly human, at some kind of cellular soul level, somehow awakens my sense of the metaphysical.

Even at this small scale, on less than an acre of land, working primarily with hand tools and muscles, I feel more connected to life, to Earth, to the stars and the Moon, than I ever had before. In the pews, the chapels, the churches big and small, God always seemed like a thing apart, someone separate, distant from myself. In the fields, I can feel the whole Universe vibrate, and I feel that I am part of it all. I can marvel at the symmetry and beauty of a slice of tomato, of a head of cabbage halved. 

Some clichés hold true: Working in the field can be meditative. You can get into a Zen-like state while weeding. Looking up at skies that are threatening hail can be humbling. But, more than any cliché, realizing that the farmer doesn’t really grow food—that it grows itself, and we are just handmaidens to the harvest—can be revelatory. The drive of life to reproduce—to flower, to set seed, to die and to bloom again—is overwhelmingly powerful. Farmers try to shape a little bit of that life force to our own purposes, to glean a little from the abundance of the Earth. To know this is far more than humbling, it is awesome.

The spirituality of farming takes many shapes, is spoken of by many voices. Theologian Ellen Davis writes of the role of agriculture in the formation of the Bible; author Wendell Berry has written essays and poems about agrarianism, the environment, our local communities and our souls; farmer-activist-educator Joel Salatin does not shy away from speaking in spiritual terms about farming. And across the US, young people are coming together to create communities dedicated to farming and living out spiritual values—some with chapels and service missions, like Good Earth Farm which grows specifically for food pantries—and others less overtly religious or programmatic.

For me, it began with just being thankful for the chance to align my values with my actions—rather than sending a complaint to a company about wasteful packaging, I could harvest my food without using any plastic at all. Without needing to scan labels and boycott certain producers, I could be assured that my food was healthful and pesticide-free. I could use my dollars to support seed companies committed to preserving open-pollinated, rare varieties. I didn’t have to weigh the pros and cons of local conventional produce against organics trucked from California. It might not look like spirituality to some, but being able to leave behind those decisions and conflicts has been good for my soul. But most of all, growing food gave me a chance to feel like a part of the whole, in the flow of the Universe.

I could put my anthropologist’s hat back on, and do some research about the growing numbers of young people eschewing more conventional paths for farming, the growing interest in homesteading, in permaculture. I could point you to a couple other farmers who’ve also left successful knowledge-economy careers, who have similarly found farming more satisfying, more meaningful. You could join me and we could interview the Greenhorns, the WWOOFers, those seeking land and experience through Landlinks, the folks moving to Detroit and other post-industrial cities to help build urban farms, the organizers of BeginningFarmers.org, those agitating against GMOs, lobbying for a better farm bill, a better food bill, more land trusts. Some of them, I’m sure, would speak of their passion in spiritual terms. There’s work to be done, interesting analyses to be made. But I’m going to leave that to someone else. I’m going out to weed the back field, repair the fence where the rabbit got in, and uncover the mounds of squash plants that are pressing up against their row covers. Six a.m., birdsong, and dew—these are like prayers, they rub away my calluses, they make me raw, make me new.

The rumor was that someone had booked the wrong place for my all-girls Catholic high school class retreat. We were in the desert, hours away from home, in a monastery laden with the goriest images of Christ available. The statuary was tucked in corners, hallway niches, bleeding over doorways. We were to be quiet. We had to remain locked in our individual cells and were told that monks would be patrolling the hallways to make sure we didn’t visit each other.

In my cell, with only a Bible and my overnight bag, I sat nervously on a little cot. This was hostile territory, so I didn’t take off my clothes or shoes. I lay down, gingerly, and looked at the mid-blue curtain covering the window. I couldn’t hear any scuffling outside, any giggles or sounds of doors opening or closing. It was completely quiet. Everyone was clearly just putting the night-peeing on hold. We had no cell phones, no computers, no way at all of communicating “Help! We’re being held in the desert by insane blood-focused monks!” There was only silence.

The Catholic Church used to run a spiritual and educational monopoly, guaranteeing an almost seamless cradle-to-grave Catholic experience. We wore uniforms to school, marched in lines to masses, prepared for sacraments, and learned many, many songs in the process. That Catholic bubble only really lasted for a few decades. What with the fall-off of the American nun population (which did most of the teaching for free), and the rise of mass media, and moms going to work, faith’s most dedicated soldiers—women—had other things to do than to keep it alive. The bubble burst.

But those of us who experienced a full twelve years of Catholic education bear its marks forever. Some of us return to the faith. Some of us return and leave time and time again. Some of us search in vain for something to replace it, or reject the notion of God altogether, since what they told us, and insisted was absolutely true, was so ludicrous as to be absolutely laughable if you actually paused to consider the contradictions inherent in their tales—which you weren’t really supposed to do, since at some point, everything depended on these “mysteries” of faith.

Our class retreats usually involved having to be in camp-like situations with bunk beds and horrible “bonding” sessions involving passing candles and/or bags of M & M’s and girls being moved to tears about what great friends we all were—so there was that to be grateful for, I supposed. I was hungry ‘cause the dinner seemed like Contrition Food and I didn’t eat much. It was the wateriest, limpest “spaghetti” I’d ever encountered, and, being the youngest of six children at the tail-end of the large-family Catholic boom, my palate wasn’t demanding in the least. I liked plain food. I had never eaten such oddities as bagels or hummus until I went to college.

I opened my eyes from a light sleep to the sound of pounding on the door. We girls were rounded up by robed monks and led on a moonlight hike through the monastery graveyard and surrounding hillside. I was fully-clothed and wearing shoes, but most were in their Lanz nightgowns or pajama sets with their Keds or flats thrown on, sweatshirts and cardigans protecting Southern Californian skin against the desert chill. I concentrated on the ground in front of me, which was glowing softly in the silvery night. I thought, “They’re trying to scare us but it’s not really working.” Then, “Maybe it is.” Then, “Okay, this is fairly terrifying. These people are nuts.” Then, “All I have to do is keep my mouth shut and watch where I’m stepping and I’ll be home soon. It’s really not that different from anything else.”

A lot of us young people no longer just accepted everything our elders told us. The religion was obsessed with sinning and salvation, but we no longer felt that we needed to be saved. We were told that Jesus died for our sins, but we wondered, “Why on earth would someone need to do that? We’ve never done anything that bad!” What sort of God would do such a thing in the first place, and why would anyone want to sing “His” praises? The beauty of ritual was no longer enough for lots of us, who couldn’t get over the actual content contained therein. Reenacting the Last Supper of a sacrificial God-Man, whose dying body was the focal point of our rituals, never got any less weird, and the host never seemed magical in my mouth, only dry and gluey.

One could feel the frustration of lay teachers and clergy trying to impart this sacred knowledge to us, test us on it, make us understand and believe it. To which they were greeted with mostly blank stares and “Is this going to be on the test?”

The night of the abduction, I looked down at the glowing rocky soil and thought about other things. Things I liked, like men in leather miniskirts, and colors of hair dye, and cookies. Years of Catholic education had prepared me well for this kind of thing. I was very good at keeping my mouth shut and sending my soul elsewhere; it’s what I did every day of my life. I stared down the monks’ moonlight walk of terror and I did not flinch. I strapped on my imaginary Walkman and listened to some imaginary Depeche Mode, whose dreary synth-heavy dirges reflected my worldview to a T. I trudged on. They did not break me or cause me to ask Jesus for mercy. I knew that, despite the fact that we were being held captive in the desert, it would end.

On the bus ride back I showed my (real) Walkman to my seatmate. It was a rare one my dad had brought back from a golf tournament that had two outputs for headphones. I also said that I had a Depeche Mode tape. She plugged her headphones in next to mine. We sat, grateful that we could listen together but did not have to speak. The album was A Broken Frame. To this day, the song “Leave in Silence”—a minor masterpiece, to me, anyway—always evokes an odd sense of desert-y, moonlight-ish monasticism, and defiance in the face of institutional hostage-taking.

The problem is, I got so good at packing off my soul for long stretches of time that I now struggle to remain in the moment, so to speak. I’m still daydreaming my way out of life even though I have long-since been freed from the institutions that made me wear polyester-blend uniforms and do strange things like eat my God and tell my secrets to strange men in small cubicles. I’m like a caged wild animal, who, once freed, still paces a 12×12 foot space. In some ways, I remain the most Catholic of people. Death-obsessed? Check. Guilty? Check. Ever-hopeful and believing in fresh starts and trying to see the best in others and myself? Also, check. But it’s hard for me to get over the Catholic fixation on Jesus’ death and suffering for “our sins,” resurrection and eventual return. It has been over 2,000 years since he promised to come back; if someone doesn’t call you back after that long, you can reasonably guess that they just aren’t that into you. Humanity, I hate to say it, but: I just don’t think Jesus is coming.

As an adult, I mostly feel for the monks. We were probably their least-favorite kind of retreatants—spoiled teenage girls—hence their dour demeanor, short words and scare-tactics. I still retain some fantasies about a cloistered existence and communing with God in pure silence, and I might even be happy to take another crack at that desert retreat. A few days in a cell and silent moonlight hikes sound fairly dreamy at this point. I’ve always wanted to know that God is there. I’m available any time you want to make yourself known, God. I am here, waiting for you, just as I have always been.

Every summer, tens of thousands of experience seekers from around the world descend upon a desolate and otherwise obscure corner of northwestern Nevada known as the Black Rock Desert. This utterly empty expanse of dried alkali clay—known as the playa—is transformed into a pulsating cultural laboratory in which participants—known as Burners—deliberately experiment with art, symbol, ritual, and community.

Burning Man presents a restive nexus of complex spiritual narratives. Participants in this extravagant and kaleidoscopic festival have created a theater in the barren desert in which to play reflexively with culture. This pageant of artistry and ritual performance presents a captivating paradox of decadence and ostentation that is simultaneously a studied testament to impermanence and flux. Participant narratives highlight themes of self-expression, personal transformation, communal bonding, and cultural renewal, and many describe Burning Man as providing a sense of “spirituality,” while explicitly disclaiming that the event is “religious.” For their part, the event’s founders and organizers likewise hope that the event will “produce positive spiritual change in the world,” even while they also stop short of characterizing the event as a “religion.” But Burning Man is perhaps less about spirituality—intangible and ineffable—and more about the immediacy of ritual. The hybrid ritualism of Burning Man challenges normative assumptions about the location of lived religious practice and spiritual expression, and points to challenging questions about the tensions between these constructs.

Burning Man started as a small impromptu gathering among a handful of friends on a San Francisco beach in 1986 who would eventually move the event to the desert in 1990 where it grew steadily into a globally renowned phenomenon drawing around 50,000 participants annually. Dubbed “Black Rock City,” this encampment temporarily becomes Nevada’s fifth largest metropolis, complete with roads, street signs, peacekeepers, medical services, and a downtown coffee house. However, the infrastructure remains minimal and requires that all attendees bring everything they need to survive—including all food, water, and shelter—in an extremely dry and harsh physical environment. Daily temperatures can range from the low 40s overnight to well over 100 degrees, and winds can exceed 75 miles per hour, occasionally fomenting intense dust storms and white-out conditions.

At the center of Black Rock City stands the towering wooden icon of the Burning Man. Crisply lit with multicolored shafts of neon and ultimately packed with fireworks and other incendiaries, this ostensibly genderless sculpture stands over the city at once helpless and defiant against the dusty night sky, awaiting its climactic detonation. Arrayed around this axial and enigmatic effigy are hundreds of other works of art created by festival participants. Often constructed on colossal scales, these artists—both professional and amateur—go to great length and expense to create and transport these works to the desert. And at the festival’s conclusion, the entire city is completely dismantled and removed until the following year, such that within a month’s time no trace of the event remains on the playa’s surface.

Temple built on the playa by Burning Man participants

Detail image of the temple

This hyper-spectacle generates an energetic and continuous flow between chaos and order. Concepts and symbols originating within diverse cultural and religious traditions are playfully and creatively converged, forging ritualistic pathways towards catharsis, ecstasy, and insight. In addition to the definitive ritual bonfire, numerous other rites—both sincere and satirical—have transpired here: massive ephemeral temples dedicated to memory and mourning; anti-consumerist parodies of Christian evangelism; operatic performances invoking Vodou lwas; Shabbat services conducted in the skeleton of a gothic cathedral; reiki attunement sessions; labyrinths; yoga, meditation and kabballah classes—the list could go on and on. At Burning Man, the random flotsam of human history and global cultures washes up on the shores of the Black Rock playa for one week, and then washes back out as participants return to what they call the “default world,” having shared in an experience that often leaves residual traces on their sense of self and notions of culture. Burning Man renders the native hybridity and plasticity of cultures transparent, revealing the extent to which religions are not static, historically bound institutions, but rather lived, fluid constructions. Syncretism and bricolage are nothing new in the history of religions as the defining and transgressing of boundaries seems definitional to community. While conservative traditionalists tend to see such mongrel developments rather unfavorably, history shows that whenever diverse cultures and religions come into contact they inevitably adopt ideas, symbols, and performative modes from one another, while also retaining or rejecting other core elements—a process of retrenchment that is itself a dynamic response to change.

An installation at Burning Man

At Burning Man, embodiment and experience are emphasized over doctrine or ideology. For example, Burning Man’s founder and ongoing chief visionary, Larry Harvey, speaks of “immediacy” as akin to a sacred power, writing that through immediate experience “We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.” In the beauty and essential simplicity of the Black Rock Desert—as well as in the visceral experience of its arid and demanding environment—Burners often report a transformative sense of the numinous. The desert evokes a potent mix of limitlessness and mystery, as well as time-honored themes of hardship and sacrifice that are deeply embedded in the Western cultural psyche. This juxtaposition between the vast, vacant landscape and human, artistic abundance fosters unique perceptions of space and time, both embodied and imaginal. Participants also frequently speak of community, self-expression, and self-reliance—echoing a set of ethical principles articulated by the event’s organizers—as interrelated themes. These dynamic encounters between self and other—in tandem with embodied experiences of the desert—coalesce to generate critical transformations for many participants, leading some to ascribe spiritual significance to this event.

For Burners, spirituality is fundamentally experiential (based on the primacy of personal experience and personal authority in framing those experiences), reflexive (inspiring reflections on self, self/other, self/nature, and self/culture), and heterodoxic (constituted by multiply-layered, fluid, and non-centralized constructions of meaning). But troubling any simplistic conclusions, many other participants state most emphatically that Burning Man does not entail any sense of spirituality—even while some of these same individuals also engage in expressive, ritualized quests for self-discovery through the event, but which they elect not to cloak in mystical terms. Furthermore, some observers and participants alike deny that this festival has any redeeming qualities whatsoever, seeing it as merely an excuse for debauchery and a license for transgressive behavior that is disconnected from any overt spirituality. Yet while the event is undeniably rife with opportunities for hedonistic indulgence, it would be mistaken to understand hedonism as anti-religious. Dismissals of Burners as pleasure-seekers reveal the deep and lasting imprint of America’s ascetic Protestantism. Furthermore, religious traditions that are utterly bereft of some opportunity for joyous, and occasionally excessive, celebration as part of the package deal are comparatively rare.

Installation piece at Burning Man

Competing perspectives are the engine that drives Burning Man, as it is through an ongoing and idiosyncratic process of argument and dissent that participants define, refine, and perform their collective notions of what this event is all about. Burning Man sits at the vanguard of contemporary anxieties around meaning, identity and experience that resist easy classification. People increasingly seek after eclectic, hybrid, dynamic, and reflexive spiritualities that whisper of deep and direct connections to an elusive “more,” while conceptually positioning these quests outside the rubrics of what they understand to be “religion.” But to say that Burning Man is “spiritual” or “spiritual but not religious,” only goes so far. Burning Man speaks to the persistence and importance of ritual as a vehicle through which humans connect with one another and as well as with that mysterious “more”—an ineffable sense of something larger than ourselves—while also showing us how these expressions seep beyond the comfortable bounds of both academic and popular concepts of either “religion” or “spirituality.”

Perhaps it is in the nature of freedom that things can be different than they are. Considered in terms of will, one can celebrate this possibility of difference (or not) as a victory of individuals, democracy, and the market. But it does pose a problem for the nature of reality, and one that becomes increasingly acute insofar as the possibility of difference infuses the actual. The increasing complexity of society, expressed both economically and culturally through the trope of capitalism (e.g., the free exchange of money and information), manifests just such an infusion. For one who would understand the social, this historical event and trend does not just make for a finer-grained puzzle, although it does do this. It makes for greater difficulty of seeing the puzzle. Thus the increasing complexity of society has its objective dimension (increasing fragmentation) and its subjective dimension (graying of outlines). These two dimensions, further, are linked, distinct, and asymmetrical. They constitute one another, cannot be reduced to one another, and do not accord with one another.

In this way a logical, or more specifically, phenomenological problem comes to characterize a historical epoch and social condition: the secular. When the freedom to choose extends into lifestyle and worldview, the mechanism of freedom—its motives and operation—becomes radically opaque. Religion’s address of this problem, a component of multiple and varied traditions, enters into a realm of both higher stakes and paradoxical logic. I am reminded here of Niklas Luhmann’s theorization of religion, one born out of his contemplation of the secular: “In the realm of the observable (where else?), the difference between the observable and the non-observable must be made observable. [Religion] does not deal with the one or the other side of this distinction but with their form: with the distinction as such.”

Enter Spirituality

Seeing me alone one evening in Joshua Tree National Park, some campers invited me to join them around their campfire. When they asked me what I did, I told them that I studied religion. My neighbor’s eyes lit up. He made a broad, sweeping gesture toward the tumbleweed, cactus, red rock, and sand of the surrounding desert and said, “This is my church.”

The somewhat theatrical nature of the pronouncement betrayed a more-than-constative intention. It was a statement that recognized its oblique character, presenting that obliquity in full frame. I had the sense of being an audience. I am reminded here of Laurie Anderson’s description of her religious upbringing. She discussed her early encounters with the Bible whose “stories were completely amazing, about parting oceans and talking snakes. And people really seemed to believe these stories and would sit around and discuss them in the most matter of fact way. So in a way, I was introduced to a special local form of surrealism at an early age. And so there was always a question in my mind about what is actually true and what is just another art form.”

Of course there are many ways the sentence “This is my church” can make sense. But what if we interpret the sentence as absurd, something closer to “This is not a pipe”? What if we read the phrase “This is my church” when there is clearly no church in sight as an expression of surrealism of whatever special local form? What if our question is not about whether and how the statement is “actually true,” but instead about what kind of art form such a statement constitutes?

Not only did the man point to a church where there was no church. He also claimed a religion that was not a religion. He described himself as “spiritual” as opposed to “religious.” Again and of course, there are many ways that this distinction can make sense. But what if we take it as a paradox, a contradiction meant to stand unresolved? What then might it mean to have a church that is no church, a religion that is no religion?

Following Luhmann, “consider the rhetorical understanding of paradox as more fundamental than the logical one. It is simply a matter of communication that wants to use simultaneously what is incompatible…. For the communication of paradoxes, the operative effect is decisive: it causes communication to oscillate, because each position makes it necessary to assert the opposite, for which the same holds in turn.”

It’s a church. I belong here. This is my home. It’s my church. It belongs to me and I to it. It gives me myself.

It’s nature. It’s not me. It’s beyond me. It’s not my nature. It belongs to everyone and everyone belongs to it.

Flexibility? More efficient exploitation of the resources of logic? Having it all, or at least both ways? But why now and why in this way? Capitalism and greed have been around much longer than churchless cathedrals and barren fonts of life. The free flow of ideas, the ideological expression of capitalism, has never been bound by the dictates of reason. But this is different—a higher level of disjuncture; not a new page, but a page torn out of the narrative of progress and the increasing perfection of humanity through freedom. Is this the start of a new book? The destruction of an old one? Or do the two constitute a single expression?

For Andre Breton, surrealism was anything but an escape from reality. He saw it as a desire to “deepen the foundations of the real; to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses.” That world was two-sided, and not essentially but as a result of historical circumstance: “Interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow the pre-eminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from each other than they are…, but one after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same.”

When a church is a church and not a church and a desert is a desert and not a desert, then a desert can be a church and not a desert and a church a desert and not a church even as a desert is a desert and a church is a church.

How does paradox—in this case, the freedom to make a desert a church—constitute the form of contemporary society? What contradiction between interior and exterior reality thereby comes to expression? How does one understand such paradoxical unity without resolving the paradox?

A different man stood in a forest in northern California. He explained that his brother considered nature to be his church. I asked him if he would say the same thing. He said, “I’d call it my temple, just to be different.” The social references here are familial and communal: brother and church/temple. The identity of the first brother and the identity of the second (it does not matter which is which) are constructed through the paradox elaborated above: the church that is not a church and the (functionally equivalent) temple that is not a temple. But the form of society here expressed arises through the unity of the difference of the two contradictions: a church that is not a church is/is-not a temple that is not a temple—just to be different. This is how brother expresses unity with brother. The identity of each is here expressed in terms of difference (“to be different”) and community (“church,” “temple”) conceived paradoxically (church that is not a church; temple that is not a temple) and serially (“his church… my temple” and the “just” that indicates a unity limited only by the principle of difference itself).

As studied in religious studies, “spiritual but not religious” is, more often than not, studied as religious. Scholars seek the contents of collective consciousness, the communities that affirm the contents of consciousness collectively, the practices that reflect the conscious content of the community, and the codes that condition the collectiveness of the collectivity. In other words, scholars study the religion that is not a religion as a religion by taking it as a form of society. In principle I follow this instinct. But when the form of society is paradoxical, then scholarship must reflect this paradox rather than resolve it. To say that spiritual but not religious means a focus on the self rather than the collectivity and interior feeling rather than statements of belief is true enough. But to say this and leave it at this and then to proceed with yet another this-is-this and that-is-that is to resolve paradox into juxtaposition, indeed, into contiguity.

There are many concrete results that can be gained by taking paradox seriously. Breton’s activity as an artist and communist and Luhmann’s corpus of social analysis are only two examples. Paradox is productive, an expression and negotiation of social forms. For those who would understand contemporary society, this means that paradox need not be treated as an analytical threat, a glitch in cognition that must be resolved in order to grasp truth. In fact, such paradox might call for paradox in response and in analysis: a matched and juxtaposed sociological surrealism. Above all one must resist the apprehension at engaging unresolved tensions in a way that leaves them unresolved. Faced with those who would regard such tensions as fatal for analysis, and who would iterate those tensions by way of criticism or dismissal of paradoxical expressions of social reality, one may recall Breton’s call to arms: “The deplorable inspectors who pursue us even after we leave school still make their rounds of our homes and our lives. They make sure that we always call a cat a cat and, since after all we accept this to a great extent, they refrain from sending us to the galleys or the poorhouse or the penitentiary. Nevertheless, let us get rid of these officials as soon as possible.”