Wayback in the wayback machine with Mr. Peabody, a compatriot and i were working on a discussion of ritual time as that construct related to shamanic rituals and ceremonies. At one point we were presenting some of our theoretical work in our graduate seminar with Jacques Maquet, a professor of Anthropology. Maquet was a colleague and peer of the French philosophers of the period (50's and 60's), and he was prone to interjecting critiques that were later to be memed as deconstructionist/ post-modernist in academia and beyond. If Dawkins and Dennett are found to be ultimately correct, then the PoMo meme was a consensual human packet of information making its presence cognizant to many of us at about the same time around the world. I would later, in my own teaching and furtherance of my doctoral work, discover that my own understanding of the history of religions and philosophy was indeed informed by the contemporary continental thinkers of my time, rather than the more accepted and common peer based views grounded in pragmatism and realism (later analytical and rationalist).
Professor Kees Bolle was my doctoral mentor during this period and for a while felt that my split work with Maquet was possibly detrimental to my own efforts to more fully comprehend the religions of the indigenous peoples of the north american great plains. I mention this because decades later, Bolle in one of his last efforts dedicated his book THE ENTICEMENT OF RELIGION, to Jacques Maquet. Yet back in the early 70's there was a rift, and the debate regarding ritual and ceremonial time was critically important in both fields.Now that i have tangented sufficiently from the initial point, i return (hahaha that time thing again--as in Eliade's Myth of the Eternal Return) to that day in the seminar. My colleague and i argued that from conversations with shamen (male and female) in the americas, ritual time was viewed to be cyclical, as were the seasons and wake/dream rhythms and so forth. Suddenly Maquet got up out of his chair, walked over to the blackboard (yes the days of real blackboards and chalk) picked up two pieces of chalk, one in each hand, and in moderated by his seductive franglais drew two overlapping spiraling figures from one side of the board to the other saying that time was not cyclical, even to these people, but spiralling ever spiraling. It was the perceptions that limited the criteria for the shaman forcing them to express the completion of cycles into circles. I never forgot that, and went on to craft a chapter on that for my friend's own dissertation and book a couple of years later.
So what has this got to do with the proposal? Nothing and everything that may have to do with paradigm shifting and cultural change. Last night i watched a replay of the GLAAD media awards. I came across it when channel surfing and witnessed Jessica Alba give out the tv drama series award. I pondered for a bit why it was that we have a professed heterosexual "sexiest" female presenting an award for a tv series that is rooted in the homosexual agenda. This led to my thinking that we have media award programs, funded by all manner of interest groups and identity politics, from GLAAD to NAACP, from hispanic to disabled, from asian to indian, and that we don't have a WASP award program. We need that. Really. Think about it. Without one, we are left with the assumption that the dominate awards are the WASP ones: the Oscars and the Golden Globes, the Emmys and the Tony's, the Grammys and the People's Choice. If we had a very clear white american english speaking male-dominated protestant awards program, then the big ones could rightly be viewed as those that are culturally free from their relativistic baggage of being those belonging to the dominant culture. We could complete the circle of identity politics, and by doing so, reinstill the diversity and liberated signifiers to our mainstream awards. We need to start thinking that if the Oscars need to have GLAAD or NOW awards then the Oscars are WASP only awards. And if the Oscars are not WASP only, then where are the WASP awards themselves. Getting the population to comprehend that we have a diverse multi-gendered, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual culture in the US that celebrates not only its greatest attributes of diversity individually, but that we can also put all of that aside and celebrate singular accomplishments that rise above and beyond the identity. If we can't do that, and there are certainly huge systemic infrastructure impediments to that, then we fall further out of the ability to close the spiralling circle. That leads to destruction and devastation.
