Real People: Authenticity and Aboriginality in the Australian Holistic Milieu

ABSTRACT

For many alternative spiritualists, it is axiomatic that indigenous peoples offer a radical alternative to Western materialism and alienation. Such a vision served some of the Australian alternative spiritualists in this research as both an auto-critique of modernity and a profound truth that could serve a range of personal and political projects. In practice, however, faith in this vision had to be reaffirmed in the face of Australian Aboriginal people who did not match the ideal. Maintaining faith in a useable Aboriginal alterity thus required negotiating the tensions between competing constructions of the genuine as either personal authenticity, adherence to tradition, or genealogical essence. Indeed, it was the movement between these different iterations of authenticity that ensured that the search for the real maintained its value as a framework for self-making at the same time as it tied Aboriginal people to a restrictive notion of culture and personhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative spirituality
• Australian Aboriginal people
• authenticity
• romantic primitivism

Notes

1. Seven of the 28 spiritual practitioners identified as Aboriginal although my research focus was on non-Aboriginal spiritual practitioners.

2. See Possamai (2005) on the demographic composition of alternative spiritualities in Australia. In his survey of the ‘New Age Movement’ in the UK, Rose (1998) argues that there is no particular ‘type’ of person involved in alternative spiritualities.

3. The ‘New Age Movement’ is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘alternative spiritualities’ but the term refers to only one part of the larger phenomenon; see Possamai (2005) for an extended discussion.

4. This popularity was in spite of Tacey's (2000) professed distaste for ‘New Agers’ and ‘Neo-pagans’ (177).

5. See Moreton-Robinson (2003) for a critique of the non-Aboriginal quest for redemption through the erasure of difference.

6. Parallel to demands for Aboriginal traditionalism are the claims advanced by critics of Aboriginal self-determination policies, such as Sutton (2009), that adherence to an outmoded culture is the source of Aboriginal disadvantage.

7. This echoes a strand of Aboriginal identity discourse that describes Aboriginality as both a genetic inheritance and a set of practices (see Tonkinson 1990).

8. It is worth noting that Aboriginal responses to such performance were more complex in my main fieldwork area of Victoria. Although some ‘ordinary unskilled Aboriginal’ people (Cowlishaw 2011: 178) questioned the authority of particular individuals to represent Aboriginality, others recognised the performance of ‘culture’ as both driven by non-Aboriginal desires and a legitimate part of being Aboriginal. Further, such performers were not always as removed from the mundane life of local Aboriginal communities as Cowlishaw suggests.