Spirits and Culture

Spirits and Culture
The term spirituality has now gained considerable currency in American culture.

Celebrities avow their spirituality orientation, politicians justify their actions on spiritual grounds, and booksellers stock their shelves with little volumes of daily affirmations.

But the use of term has only recently become part of popular parlance, and only in relation to our contemporary pluralistic culture.

In previous generations people found transcendence in the sectarian religious denominations into which they were born.

The trappings of other religious groups were dismissed as misguided even dangerous.

“Spirits” were associated with séances, ghosts and the netherworld. Nor does spirituality appear in anthropologic studies.

“Spirits” are conjured up as ancestral figures that wield power in what some might call “primitive” societies.

They are associated with shamanistic practices that we see as being quite different from our own.

The contemporary perspective on spirituality became evidence following the radical cultural transitions that took place in the United States over the latter part of the twentieth century.

This took place decade by decade following the halcyon days of the “Eisenhower Era,” on through the dramatic social changes of the counterculture, and then toward a tentative resolution on what is meaningful to people in the domain of personal belief.

Consider the changes that disrupted established attitudes over this period in relation to religion, race and ethnicity.

Gender roles and sexual behaviors were also dramatically transformed. Widespread access to contraceptives led to the acceptance of premarital sexual intercourse.

The women’s movement began to erase distinctions between the sexes that had defined home life and work life for generations.

Another dramatic change had taken palace in how people assumed their identities of mature adults, as the developmental norms for adolescence were evolving.

When the twentieth century began, people ended their education to begin work at a relatively young age.

By the latter part of the century, adolescence was prolonged as parents ceded their children to liberal educational institutions where youth could devote themselves to contemplating their direction in life, even their life’s very purpose.

The demand of marriage and child rearing were deferred.

Young people could now take advantage of these opportunities to move away from their families to other parts of the country and to find cultural relativism as they traveled across any continent they chose.
Spirits and Culture

The Starting of Cultural Reintegration

The Starting of Cultural Reintegration
As is often the case, the leading edge of a cultural integration can be highly deviant.

The cultic movements of the 1960s and 1970s emerged as early signed of reintegration around spiritual commitment.

They benefited from the fact that their newly minted religious norms could generate relief from the anomie of the counterculture.

Members of groups such as the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas and – for their elders – Scientology reflected the aberrant consequences of a need to find definition, clarity and strong and binding ties, which had been lost over the preceding decades.

Intensity of commitment was based on deification of dubious leaders who laid claim to people’s material assets, to their option to live as they choose, and even to their choice of mate; this was a radical response to the loss of family ties and traditional values.

These new communities of belief of origin, gave expression to the need to feel a sense of rootedness.

This initial radical response was soon superseded by the search for adaptation more consonant with traditional religious culture.

Fundamentalist belief offered both social stability and a relationship with a religious format that many of the maturing baby boomers’ parents would have understood.

For other it was a less well defined disposition, one that drew on a variety of spiritual tradition and religious, one that reflected a desire to integrate diverse beliefs in a world made smaller by electric media and international travel, and one that reflected the liberal education that had frame the world view of many who were now seeking some of sense of transcendence.

Children of the counter culture generation could no longer sustain sectarian enmity as a cultural norm; they had seem and experienced too much.

Now they would encompass an ecumenical view of life’s purpose, one that legitimated the diversity their country now sanctioned.

Spirituality a seemingly vague term for the pursuit of personal meaning, fit the bill.

It even allowed for mutual respect, or at least guarded acceptance of discourse between fundamentalists and secularists.

It thereby provided a large tent that could house diverse views of transcendence and allow acknowledge of a certain commonality across the country’s many subcultures.
The Starting of Cultural Reintegration

The Beginning of Cultural Reintegration

The Beginning of Cultural Reintegration
As is often the case, the leading edge of a cultural transition can be highly deviant. The cultic movement of the 1969s an 1970s emerged as early signs of reintegration around spiritual commitment.

They benefited from the fact that their newly minted religious norms could generate relief form the anomie of the counter culture.

Members of the group such as Moonies, the Hare Krishnas and for their elders – Scientology reflected the aberrant consequences of a need to find definition, clarity and strong and binding ties, which had been lost over the preceding decades.

Intensity of commitment was based on deification of dubious leaders who laid claim to people’s material assets, to their option to live as they chose and even to their choice of mate; this was a radical response to the loss of family ties and traditional values.

These communities believe, or ad hoc families, constituted by serving ties with the members’ families of origin, gave expression to the need to feel a sense of rootedness.

This initial radical response was soon superseded by the search for adoption more consonant with traditional religious culture.

Fundamentalist belief offered both social stability and a relationship with a religious format that many of the maturing baby boomers’ parents would have understood.
The Beginning of Cultural Reintegration