Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace by Sophia Rose Arjana

Author:Sophia Rose Arjana [Arjana, Sophia Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Mystical Tourism

North Americans and Europeans participate in colonialism in numerous ways. One way is through experiencing or purchasing the cultural capital of other religious communities. In a sense, this functions as a type of tourism where one can visit a culture, experience a religious tradition, or engage in a momentary practice. I can read Rumi, wear an Indian tunic, sit in a coffee bar with Orientalist décor while drinking a soy latte after a yoga class—a kind of transitory experience that crosses many cultures. This has great appeal. As scholars have pointed out: “Particularly for members of dominant racial groups who have felt a lack of ethnic community, identity, or pride, the global New Age movement and marketplace can provide an alternative type of symbolic, holistic (but nonspecific) ethnicity that also certainly marks a position of privilege relative to those who cannot ‘choose’ their ethnic ascription so easily.”134

In the case of mystical tourism, performance is involved with issues surrounding tourist relations with the host culture. As John Frow notes: “It is tourism that destroys (in the very process by which it constructs) the authenticity of the tourist object; and every tourist thus at some level denies belonging to the class of tourists.”135 Mystical tourists do this through claims that they aren’t tourists but students or participants in a spiritual practice. This is a distancing move, as Frow explains: “Hence a certain fantasized disassociation from the others, from the rituals of tourism, is built into almost every discourse and almost every practice of tourism.”136 The very act of denial is colonialism—by creating the illusion that one is not a tourist consumer, the mystical tourist denies all of the colonial attributes of the industry—the gaze, the inequitable relationships, and the stealing of culture, which is often renamed, repackaged, and distributed for the consumer.

The white individual often claims they know more about the practice or ritual than the indigenous person whose life and community are rooted in these very traditions. This claim of expertise, including white “healers” who insist they know more about Lakota ceremonies, is a widespread problem Native scholars and activists call “white shamanism” and “plastic medicine men.”137 Plastic medicine men (and women) who claim expertise in the secrets of Oriental wisdom exist as well, and as we shall see in the following chapters, the claim of expertise is part of a clever marketing strategy that has widespread success.

The clients who purchase a mystical tour of India, Bali, or Morocco are, in a sense, “buying” a culture as a form of entertainment. As discussed in the first chapter, tourism often entails a kind of voyeuristic enjoyment of the Other—including the mystic whose spirituality is dependent in some ways on poverty. Migrants that live in mystical locations like Bali often practice colonialism in profound ways that move beyond a symbolic assumption of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Sufism. European and North American female migrants to Bali often adopt a lifestyle that mirrors the colonial adventures of earlier eras. These include an escape from labor

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