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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [143], (1) Lines: 0 to 22 ——— 0.719pt Pg ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [143], (1) 6. revitalization as catharsis The Warm House Cult of Western Oregon Michael E. Harkin Revitalization Movements The revitalization model has proved productive in the ethnohistorical interpretation of religious cults and nativistic movements. Under this model, revitalization movements are viewed as collective responses to negative conditions ranging from deprivation to severe trauma. The “index case,” the Handsome Lake movement among the Seneca described by Anthony F. C. Wallace (1970a), has been seen as a holistic response to exogenous stressors. The movement involved all aspects of Seneca culture and its relation to the physical and social environment and was focused equally on the individual and on collective cultural practices. Such movements establish a micro/macrocosm relation more explicitly than do most religions and attempt to affect the condition of the universe by localized actions. In these points, Wallace extends and sharpens the ethnohistorian’s understanding of cultural reactions to extreme stress. However, the model is not without problems. As other contributors to this book have mentioned, one difficulty with Wallace’s theory is evident in the name usually attached to such phenomena: “revitalization movements.” This assumes a teleology in which a culture is in a state of decline and is destined to rise again (see Brown [ch. 4] and Martin [ch. 2]). In the case of the Warm House movement such an assumption of cultural decline is less problematic than the assumption of reinvigoration . This places, a priori, entirely too optimistic a reading on events. Of course, we all know of cases where these have not been successful, and Wallace did too, for he wrote an introduction to a modern edition of The Ghost Dance (Wallace 1965). However, on this view we can only see such events as tragically blocked revitalizations.1 Indeed, ironically, the most famous revitalization movement of all ended in a bloody massacre. 144 harkin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [144], (2 Lines: 22 ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal PgEnds: [144], (2 Revitalization, like all universal models in anthropology, such as totemism or the incest taboo, suffers from the Popperian demands of a generalizing science. It is all too easy to find atypical or even contradictory cases that seem to constitute falsification. Since the days of Franz Boas, American anthropologists have rejected generalizing theories almost as quickly as they could be invented. Revitalization seems destined to a similar fate. And yet the value of the revitalization concept is such that we simply should not reject it entirely. Indeed, it is one of those productive concepts that spread quickly beyond its origins and ushered in a discourse in the form of “X as revitalization movement.”2 Perhaps it is better to view revitalization not as a scientific theory, subject to endless empirical critiques, but as closer to a literary genre, in which common elements combine to constitute a basic structure, which is then subject to transformations. A useful model here is the formalist study of folklore pioneered by Vladimir Propp (1968), which influenced Levi-Strauss’s (see 1978) somewhat more rigid structuralist analysis of American Indian mythology. Such a model allows for, indeed assumes, transformations of basic elements. (However, we need not buy into the more mechanistic assumptions of structuralism itself.) Thus, the optimistic teleology of Handsome Lake may be transformed into its opposite without overthrowing the underlying “mytho-logic.” Indeed, as they move through place and through time, revitalization movements, like narrative forms, almost always change in some important ways. A second important sense in which revitalization movements are like narrative forms involves the centrality of mimesis. Mimetic structures pervade revitalization movements. Participants mime the dead of their own culture, an imagined spirit world, Europeans, or some combination of these. Mimesis is not a simple passive copying but, rather, a creative mirroring of the relevant other, as well as a modeling of connections between self and other (Lattas 1998:xxiv). By such a poetic logic, identity and alterity are symbolically represented in ways that are less...

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