How is it that Western power is so easily projected upon those it purportedly admires? What is the mechanism behind this cultural imperialism?  A review of Roger Sandall's The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays and Gita Meta's Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East. 

The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays
by Roger Sandall
Westview Press (2000)
Ppbk., 288 pgs.
ISBN: 0813338638

Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East
by Gita Meta
Simon and Schuster, New York (1994)
208 pgs.
ISBN: 0679754334

The French writer may admire the Andalusian muleteer, but the muleteer thinks he’s mad. There may be a brown skinned woman with burning eyes waiting for  Flaubert . . . but the words she whispers are “only for cash.” True Arabs find Englishmen galloping about on camels in the heat of Arabia incomprehensible. True Masai know only that if they stand around long enough, posing with their spears, they will be paid. Ordinary Nepalese are scandalized by hippies. In the good old days, in New Zealand, if these dropouts from civilization had dropped in on the Maori, they would have been killed and cannibalized — probably before the sun went down.

Roger Sandall’s Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays is an unsparing critique of the role non-western culture has played in the reveries and pieties of the western imagination.  While initially harmless, the culture cult in recent years has grown discontent with its reputation as a sort of “aesthetic of cultural difference” and has, through a variety of subtleties, aggressively assumed political significance. These intrusions have caught Sandall’s attention and in the Culture Cult he explains how under the guise of free and innocent inquiry they have become the West’s most insidious form of imperialism. With their exotic trappings, they have also become venues for advancing political agendas at home.

The culture cult, Sandall argues, began in the asocial 18th-century imagination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau envisioned society’s origins as a sort of Edenic affair, where noble savages related to one another by a sort of “affection of the heart,” rather than associations mediated by the rule of law. Rousseau found politics distasteful and in his work the Social Contract recharacterized social relations (quite literally) as familial ones. While the law might be severe, no father could punish without love, Rousseau insisted. In this way, Rousseau believed sensitivity could be imagined to replace impersonal authority and “cold” reason would give way to gentler nature.  Rousseau’s speculations were given historical dignity by his contemporary Gottfried Herder, whose distrust of modern civilization found expression in his belief that cultures, like most consumables, were subject to taste, but not hierarchy. Herder shared Rousseau’s longing for a past free of unpleasantries and these ancient Elysias he shook fiercely (and helplessly) at the stratified and aristocratic world of 19th-century Germany.

The nineteenth century, with its advances in the sciences and widespread industrialization, is often presumed to lie at the origins of European modernity. However, its aesthetic tastes ran (often wildly) in the opposite direction. The Bohemian culture of London and Paris, often artists and impoverished aristocrats, took up the cult of culture with a vengeance. Beset by “bourgeois morality” (including its crass obsession with labour), followers of the Culture cult took to imagining distant lands where public authority was invisible, if not absent; private property, if inaccessible, must not exist, and sexual encounters (at least for men) were more available than bread. That these ideals corresponded ironically to 19th-century, alienated middle class fantasy was lost to its believers. Utopia, if in a different color, still was only a voyage away — and one needn’t dirty one’s hands with the class struggle, either.

The 19th century also gave birth of the discipline of anthropology, which found itself torn between two competing visions of culture. The first saw culture through the lens of civilization and specifically, politics. The division of labor, the free market, the decentralization of authority, print culture and the mechanization of production, provided a perspective through which culture might be viewed critically. It is not enough to wander about the forests: modern man must, well, be modern. He must be able to address the basic inadequacies of life with a degree of measurable success. This was the perspective of Karl Marx, for instance, who dismissed as “idiots” those who idealized rural life. The same was true of John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most important liberal thinker of the century, who thought that socialism, with its idealization of community, perhaps also fell into the same error as Rousseau.

The views of Mill and Marx were quite different from the second vision of culture, which was rooted in the bohemian culture of the urban salon. This vision idealized those societies it sought to understand, seeing them not as stages of a global civilization, but as alternative utopias to the present. Perhaps the most famous heir to this perspective was Margaret Mead, who “discovered” the social values of 1920s Greenwich Village in the native communities of the Samoan islanders. Mead’s efforts were hardly unique. By the 1950s, anthropologists were discovering with great frequency the same catalog of values in virtually all cultures deemed “non-western.” Sandall gives a list:

1. “Salvation by the child.” The idea here is that civilization has “crushed” our potentialities at birth and that if we were instead permitted to “blossom like flowers” the world would be saved.

2. The ideal of self-expression. The purpose of life is for men and women to “express” themselves through creative work.”

3. The ideal of liberty. All laws or rules that prevent self-expression are to be shattered — often because they are a form of “Puritanism.”

4. The ideal of paganism. The body is a temple, a “shrine to be adorned for the ritual of life.”

5. The ideal of female equality.

6. Problems in the West come from psychological adjustment. “We are unhappy because we are maladjusted, maladjusted because we are repressed.”

7. The idea that changing place brings change in one’s being. “By expatriating himself, by living in Paris, Capri or the South of France, the artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely and be wholly creative.”

By the late sixties, Sandall writes, anthropology courses had increasingly become the sites of “hippie vision quests.” Any culture deemed exotic was potentially a project for the anthropological imagination — and if Carlos Castenada’s cult of the peyote was more Southern California than Mexican, then the Mexicans were welcome to read his books too.

The hold the Culture Cult had on the American academy, Sandall argues, could be related to its market. An increasingly affluent American audience had little interest in whether a given culture could provide plumbing and electricity or even housing. What mattered were things such as Shamanism, time travel and sexual initiation rites — and the bloodier the better. Anthropology, or more accurately, its heir ethnology, had never escaped the aristocratic heritage perhaps best described by its 19th-century decadent chronicler, the French writer Huysmans:

[The aristocrat] des Esseintes wanted, in short, [to create] a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive patiently and even vainly to understand.

If the culture cult had gone the way of the old aristocracy, it might have become something like an antique — treasured for its eccentricity, its excesses forgiven as part of a local or provincial charm. However, the culture cult in recent decades has been used to justify the imposition of western values onto other cultures. While the seizure of a foreign capital by military force would be rightly denounced as political imperialism, the grotesque cultural colonization of Saigon during the Vietnam War or Bangkok today was nearly as great a threat to Vietnamese or Thai culture as the presence of the American military. Because the culture cult insists its claims are “innocent” and the product of “free scholarly inquiry,” or “nature” (ie. the nature of capitalism and the sex market), they are not subject to the same restraints of political activity.

Sandall’s book is at times humorous, but his accounts of “New Age” (“the New Stone Age” he calls it) projections of “Designer Tribalism” onto different peoples who have in common only the inability to resist such fantasies has a sinister side. How is it that western power is so easily projected upon those it purportedly admires? What is the mechanism behind this cultural imperialism?

Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East is an account of the effects of western cultural imperialism on India. Like The Culture Cult, it is an equally humorous and painful account of what happens when the Culture Cult leaves the university setting and pursues its imaginings in the countries it purports to be understanding. The setting of Karma Cola is India in the late sixties and early seventies. The subject is frustrated westerners who, having failed to bring socialism to the United States, “have substituted Maya¹ for Mao.” But the subject is also India which, impoverished and unable to defend itself, is unable to resist its suitors' advances.

Having concluded that India is the land of “spirituality,” pilgrims (usually wealthy) from California (often Hollywood) descended in droves into India’s impoverished lands in search of enlightenment. Mehta writes:

The first wave of disciples was really top drawer. They were the nobles of the meritocracy and they were looking good. The women were models, the men were stars, and the massage was the message. When they came out of their spiritual retreats draped in homespun, they glowed with vegetarian good health. They were unbeatable advertisements for the healing powers of India, illustrations that beauty is not just infra-soul, but also skin deep. It was inevitable that those who pursued the goal of eternal youth would follow in their wake, eager to use the unguents of the spirit if these provided the immortal complexion.

However, for those returning from India would not look like Peter Fonda, deeper assurance that one’s soul had partaken in the mysteries of sacred India was necessary. The result was the creation of a curious hybrid, forged from the hippies’ need of release and the Indian’s need for cash: the Guru. While India has always had spiritual leaders, during the sixties their reputations became positively transcendental — especially when driven by western desires (and resources):

The trick to being a successful guru is to be an Indian, but to surround yourself with increasing numbers of non-Indians. If this is impossible, then separate your followers from your Western followers in mutually exclusive camps. This way, one group accepts the orgies of self-indulgence as revealed mysticism and the other group feels superior for not having been invited to attend.

Mehta quotes an Hindu friend whose can make no sense of Westerners' obsession with gurus:

These people are toys. They are fascinated by sex and violence. They all want to feel alive. What, Gita I ask you, does “feel” alive mean? They are alive, aren’t they? And what can India teach them except about Death? [The Guru] gives them games and riddles. He tells them to beat each other, make love, [or] do whatever comes into their heads [because it is “spiritual”].

The Guru is the magician who transforms the western quest for “spirituality” into something beyond pedestrian sex and violence and makes it into something tangible and, what is most important, different. For the price of admission, the Guru makes sex and violence Indian sex and violence. It’s a price he pays to feed his family, and a delusion westerners pay for to escape their boredom.

One of Mehta’s funniest anecdotes involves beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg:

Ginsberg, a self-proclaimed Dharma Bum, had seen the best minds of his generation screaming for release from the American Dream. Presumably this spiritual bedlam led him to take a sabbatical in the city of Calcutta. To most Indians this would seem eccentric if not wholly mad decision.

The poet had reasons. Calcutta, he announced, is the most liberated city in the world. The people have no hang-ups. They go around totally naked. It was a characteristically original view. No one before had suggested to natives that their destitution was a sign of advance. But the Bengali residents of Calcutta love novelty and are predisposed to regard poets of all persuasions with favor.

[After Ginsberg’s arrival] people started arriving from miles around in delicious anticipation of an (western) orgy . . . The indigent could get in with the flourish of a poem, preferably salacious. They published . . . broadsheets describing their combined lusts. The public was kept abreast of each perversion, informed on every orgasm, and the faithful leered at the feet of the master demanding “What is the Answer.” 
 
Alas, Ginsberg was a Western and not an Eastern Master, and as such was preoccupied with his own salvation. He was clocking up time in a personal heaven and probably hadn’t even noticed the vast (and hungry) crowd around his ankles. Finding that even nudity was no defense against a Calcutta summer, he left. The government struck. By popular demand the young poets were busted for violating the obscenity laws. Some of the more unforgiving disciples are still waiting for the master’s return.

Mehta’s stories are tragicomic. Whatever the spiritual realities of India, there is no debate about the material realities of poverty, disease and death. To its credit, Mehta points out, the West has largely solved the first two problems, and might at some point solve the last, with a little genetic tweaking.  India, she argues, must do the same. However, reform is increasingly thwarted by the market for a spiritual subculture motivated by western indulgence. Just as western dollars have made the “Thai sex industry” an important part of the Thai economy, the same is true of the “Indian spiritual industry” (with its unsurprising emphasis on sex).  What India needs, Mehta argues, is to “dump most of our philosophical perceptions overboard and accept the imperatives of history, hoping we will not become exiles in our own land.”

Sandall’s and Mehta’s books point to a larger philosophical issue than the crude practice of turning third world cultures into western designer fantasies. The problem comes from the way Europeans have imagined power and the way it is projected into the world. Since the 19th century, western societies have identified “power” with the state, which is ideally derived from consensual political compromise. An invisible line separates the exercise of illicit power, which in theory is controlled by the state; and the private exercise of freedom, which is in theory disassociated from power.

While this distinction makes sense in theory, Europeans have never been able to agree upon where the state’s “authority” ends and the individual’s “freedom” begins. While private enterprise is generally protected as part of the “exercise of freedom,” a billionaire is generally prohibited from establishing monopolies over industry and commerce. In the first part of the 20th century, obscenity laws existed to protect the freedom of the individual from the “coercion of lust.” Today they are increasingly viewed as restrictions on individual freedom. Laws passed on these issues reflect a momentary compromise — one subject to reversal when a new constellation of cultural alliances emerges.

While western attitudes towards sex and trade are restrained by competing internal interests, such is hardly the case when these interests are projected into impoverished third world countries. Sexual practices curtailed in the West, quickly find opportunities in foreign lands where the law does not apply — or as is more often the case is locally unenforceable. But this has nothing to do with these cultures being “tolerant.” It is because they are unable to afford to maintain the taboos which operate legally or illicitly (“prejudice” in today’s kosher parlance) in the West.

The Culture Cult’s (mis)representation of other cultures as radically different from the West has two motivations. First, in insisting that other cultures are radically different, it creates a counter world where practices deemed odious and restricted by law (or taboo) at home may be practiced with impunity. India, after all, is not subject to Western law. Why shouldn’t Indians be imagined to be sexual libertines? And if they resist? It doesn’t matter — they can’t afford to. Much in the way the Guru transforms sex and violence into “spiritual” behavior, western private capital transforms the impoverished into willing whores — a tangible reality you can see and feel. And you needn’t feel like a John — after all it’s a different culture.

Second, the culture cult insists on the difference of other “Exotic” cultures for a political reason. Because the other culture is wholly different from that of the West, “its” practices may be used to contest the democratically established restraints at home. Hence the libertine act abroad is imagined to be an act of purest freedom — because a genuinely democratic culture at home would permit cultural practices of another culture, such as India. To do otherwise would be chauvinism.

Western cultural imperialism takes advantage of the peculiar way in which the West defines power. In theory, that which is determined by the State represents the exercise of power. That which is not circumscribed by state law is the domain of freedom. However this is how things work in theory, not in practice. Should millionaires be restrained from creating monopolies? Should sexual freedom be unlimited? The laws passed governing these practices change with the vicissitudes of culture. The law at best reflects the consensus of the moment: one gaining momentarily the power to restrain the other. The losing position, threatened by the coercion of the state, adopts the language of “culture” or “individual freedom” to protect itself from legally sanctioned violence. What is important is that the language of culture is also a form of power — just a form not legally sanctioned by law. From this perspective, the culture cult may be properly understood to be one way in which internal western struggles over sexuality and trade continue to find representation, despite being curtailed by law at home.

Sullivan’s and Mehta’s books demand a reformulation of the European theory of power which is based upon the dyad of state power vs. culture/freedom. Is it possible, they suggest, to conceptualize western influence on the world in a way in which power spreads not only from the state, but from its “free origins,” from the power of culture?  The implications of such a project are significant. No longer would “culture” be imagined to exist at the “end of a voyage,” or be the “deepest expression of freedom,” but instead would be seen in its proper western context — as the product of western democratic struggle over political representation. “Culture” would be exposed as the representation of democratic minorities, which, denied access to “political” representation in the state’s democratic mechanism, nevertheless continue to represent themselves through an exotic “nonpolitical” surrogate: “different” cultures.

Endnotes

1. The Sanskrit term for “illusion.”