By: Benjamin Geer

Benjamin Geer — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:53:36 +0000

All this reminds me of the petit-bourgeois habitus described in Bourdieu’s Distinction. “Authenticity” looks to me like a kind of symbolic capital that’s particularly accessible to people with a modicum of education but not much cash. What do all the groups that the New Agers categorise as “indigenous” have in common? They’re all dominated groups, or rather groups that are not conceptualised as having exercised any sort of domination. The New Agers see Americans as having “no vibrational tone of their own” because the US is the dominant state in the world. “Shamans” are conceptualised as dominated by organised religion. Native Americans must seem like an especially good source of authenticity for American New Agers, since they’ve been dominated by the very state that these New Agers live in. Identifying with dominated groups is a convenient way of advertising your own moral superiority, and it costs nothing.

As for the use of scientific jargon, if your habitus includes a smattering of half-understood scientific concepts that are recognised (but not mastered) as cultural capital, you can use that kind of language to make your New Age beliefs sound plausible to people who have a similar habitus. As Bourdieu argued in The Logic of Practice, it doesn’t matter if your beliefs are actually logically coherent; they just have to appear “coherent enough” to people who have the relevant habitus.

By: Kate

Kate — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 04:25:00 +0000

I can’t wait to read this book! The quoted paragraphs are written in the deft, calm, and bluntly honest tone that I admire so much and have come to expect from Courtney. And working with the subjects she chose sounds like it was probably a lot of fun.

Comments on: Grasping for authenticity

By: Benjamin Geer

By: Kate