Reclaiming The Sacred: A Festival Experience as a Response to Globalisation more

75 Reclaiming the Sacred: A Festival Experience as a Response to Globalisation Karin Mackay University of Western Sydney Abstract Pressures of globalisation such as the focus on the growth of productive economies, consumerism, and long work-hours have fragmented cultural beliefs and practices worldwide. Devaluation of deeply held soulful, creative, and nature-based practices in the dominant neoliberal capitalist discourse has challenged the way cultural and spiritual wellbeing are lived. Instead of being completely subsumed into the neoliberal global discourse, local responses incorporating global themes are emerging in the form of the ““neo-tribal”” festival experience. Although festivals have primarily been seen as places of consumption, this misunderstands the drive to participate in a festival experience. This article investigates a women’’s arts and ecology festival held in The Blue Mountains, Australia, where members of the local community celebrate the return of spring. Findings suggest that this festival was a site for reclaiming a localized sense of connectedness, where participants reclaimed what was sacred to them. I will argue that consumerism is secondary to the desire for a sacred synergy of connectedness at this festival where critical creative action challenges the neoliberal and patriarchal discourses in the negotiation of global culture. On a sunny Sunday morning, on 30 August 2009, I stood on the path leading to the local community gallery in Springwood, a small town in the world-heritage listed Blue Mountains of Australia. To one side of me, Gaia was setting up his brilliant red tent, where he and his wife Eleanor would serve chai tea on tribal rugs and colourful cushions. Inside the gallery, sixty women’’s artworks were displayed, accompanied by personal poems and stories, exploring the ““Ancestral Connections”” theme of this year’’s art exhibition. Today was EarthSpirit festival 76 RECLAIMING THE SACRED day, where converging local women’’s art groups, performers, and an eclectic audience celebrated the return of spring. This year, instead of taking an upfront role introducing performers, I was behind the video camera to record what was happening at the EarthSpirit festival as part of my doctoral research into women’’s wellbeing. My involvement in the arty, ecology, spiritual and natural birth communities of The Blue Mountains led to my questioning the assertion that new spiritualities and neo-tribal movements were narcissist consumerist practices impotent in creating change (Featherstone 1991; Bruce 1998, 2002, 2006; Voas and Bruce 2007) or that we no longer share religious experience together, but believe without belonging to a particular religious community (Davie 1990, 1994). The global neoliberal discourse of productivity and progress permeates every aspect of contemporary life, and would seem to be inescapable. As Bauman notes, most factors that determine local living conditions are a ““conglomeration of processes, that operate beyond nation-state borders, where capitalism acts as a parasite using local resources, until they are exhausted”” (Polychroniou 2009: 110). Dislocation and powerlessness is characteristic of modern societies, with a central organizing principle being a ““marketplace of anonymous strangers where these strangers are mobile and disconnected”” (Turner 2001: 148). Depressing and disenchanted as these views may be, the phenomenon of global sub-cultures is emerging in an attempt to rewrite local experience and resist neoliberal aspects of globalisation (Mayo 2005; Starr 2005). St. John contends that the neo-tribal festival movement is one such sub-culture, which has emerged as a form of globalised dance and spiritual practice, where people converge for an event combining visual arts, drum, dance, performance, and communal ritual in a sensory participatory transcendence of liminal space and time reminiscent of Victor Turner’’s communitas (Partridge 2006; St John 2006, 2008, 2010a, 2010b; Ryan 2010). In contrast to most neo-pagan and neo-tribal festivals, the EarthSpirit Festival did not take place far from the city (Pike 2001) but on a main street at the front of a community gallery, suggesting a desire, not to retreat from the world, but to become visibly part of it, in what Erick Davis (2005) would call a collaborative effort to reclaim visual space. Festivals are not without their own political tensions and it is precisely this dynamism, which makes them significant for the study of political-cultural dialectics (Cohen 1982: 198). While consumer practices are an intrinsic part of festival culture, perhaps the focus on consumption has misrepresented other motivations of festival participants. I will argue that participation in the festival experience was an attempt by women to take back local control over personal and global processes that made them feel disempowered and disconnected. Discussion will include how women made themselves visible and reclaimed what was sacred to them in a negotiation of their local and global worlds through: (1) consumption and the RECLAIMING THE SACRED 77 not for sale; (2) making visible through critical creative action; (3) remaking and reclaiming the sacred; and (4) coming together in a sacred synergy. Multiple Roles, Centering and De-centering My investigation of The EarthSpirit Festival focused on how women’’s stories, art, and performance influenced participants’’ sense of belonging and wellbeing. The festival was an annual event where artists, performers, stallholders, partners, family, and friends, along with members of the local community, gathered to celebrate the return of spring. The festival had grown from a series of creative process groups at The Women’’s Room. This was a local grass roots community group that I had founded for women to explore their ““deeper soulful selves”” using a creative process and where I had been the president since its inception in 2004. Typically, women in the study were between the ages of twenty-five and sixty, with at least a basic secondary education and came from diverse ethno-religious backgrounds such as Hindu Pakistani, Ghanaian, Earth Spiritualist, Maori, Indigenous Australian Aboriginal, Polish Lutheran Christian, Spiritualist Catholic Pagan, Anglo Australian Buddhist and Tree worshiper. These women could be loosely described as artists, performers, homebirthers, spiritualists, environmentalists, teachers, social workers, nurses, and mothers who were interested in creativity, spirituality, and ecology. The six women who comprised The Women’’s Room Committee of 2009 met monthly at the Vice President’’s house to discuss the festival organization. Women were invited to exhibit through word of mouth, email lists, Facebook, The Women’’s Room’’s website, advertisements placed in the local newspaper, and through fifteen-hundred printed invitations distributed to local shops. Exhibition of artworks was open to any women who paid an entry fee of 20AU but besides this there were no formal selection or rejection criteria for artworks. Women who exhibited were from The Women’’s Room Mother’’s Group, The Wisdom Tree Earth Based Spiritual group, the Katoomba Homebirth group, and individual artists from The Women’’s Room. Five dance groups were invited to perform on festival day. These were; Burranglang Aboriginal Dance Group, Wollemi Dancers, Hands, Heart and Feet African Drum and Dance, Ghawazi Caravan Tribal Style Belly Dancing Troupe, and Qabila Belly Dancers (see fig. 1). Men were involved in some aspects of the festival as performers, volunteer helpers, or audience members, but the main focus was on women’’s performance and art. 78 RECLAIMING THE SACRED Figure 1: Participants at the EarthSpirit Festival Key w = women m = men c = children I performed multiple roles at this festival, such as artist, speaker, mother, wife, friend, group member, organizer, and researcher. As a participant, I exhibited artworks and was also part of The Wisdom Tree group. As an organizer, I liaised between community groups, committee, gallery, and local council, and undertook associated administrative tasks. As a researcher, I observed my community, reflectively journaled about the festival, analyzed the artworks and stories, noting themes. On festival day, I videoed the artworks and performances and informally interviewed eighteen participants and asked why they attended the festival. RECLAIMING THE SACRED 79 The video camera became the central lens through which I viewed the festival. I used the video camera to signal to participants that I was in research mode, rather than as organizer or friend. My focus was on capturing performances and asking participants why they attended the festival. I filmed from before setup and intermittently until the last performance. Although videoing was intended to capture the views and perspectives of participants, it still captured only a partial view, seen through my own lens and influenced by what I filmed, where I walked and who I interviewed. The viewing of participants through the video had undertones of the voyeur. Parameswaran (2008: 413) draws upon Wiegman’’s critiques of the ““seeing eye”” as being intricately linked to the ““peep hole”” of imperialism’’s racial and gender oppressions, historically used as a ““rationalized vision,”” which artificially ““detaches from other senses to produce disengaged scientific observation.”” I experienced my initial naivety regarding ““the seeing eye,”” when I asked Fleur, from Burralgang Dancers, if I could film their performance on festival day. Fleur explained to me that she would have declined permission if I had not approached her about this before festival day as there were strict protocols surrounding viewing and distributing indigenous images. The discussion with Fleur prompted a realization that my Anglo ethnicity, behind the camera, represented an historical voyeuristic colonial oppression that had consequences far beyond the festival day. Fleur wanted to know how it would be used, who it would be shown to, and requested permission be sought at any stage of this process. The videoing problematic had opened up a dialogical space where ““the seeing eye”” could be renegotiated to incorporate more critical understandings and, as Harvey (2004: 171) suggests, opportunities to disrupt unchallenged assumptions. It was important then not to disconnect from my other senses or hide behind the camera in an attempt at pretend objectivity but to fully engage with my participant insider status and the multiple roles that it afforded me. What was captured on the video could be played and replayed as I moved in and out of various roles. I used the video data to later reflect on, and journal about, the festival day. As researcher, I would edit this video for presentations at conferences but as President of The Women’’s room I looked for a different selection to report back to the festival community on the Facebook site. I noticed different things that I thought I already knew upon each viewing of the video. Apart from the video, I also analyzed the artworks and stories by noting the occurrence of themes, such as what was considered sacred, global themes of another place, and birthing and motherhood. The role of participant observer was challenging, as I knew many of the people that I filmed and interviewed. Like the centre of the lotus blossom in figure 1, the groups, artists, and performers surrounded me, making it difficult to discern boundaries when looking out from the centre, making either myself, 80 RECLAIMING THE SACRED or others, at times invisible. The centre for me became the place of negotiation of self and other, local and global, where stepping in and out of multiple roles of researcher participant, mother, and friend gave me alternate perspectives. This at times painful process recognized that de-centering is important in gaining new perspectives but that re-centering is just as necessary for these perspectives to be brought to light. The performance of multiple identities created tensions that could not be easily resolved as my roles, such as artist-mother-researcher or friendspiritual seeker-researcher, were performed concurrently, creating hybrid forms of knowledge that would not have been possible with a myopic perspective. Similar to Colic-Peisker (2004: 93), I found the insider’’s view helpful as it provided deep background knowledge of the women’’s values and reasons for attending the festival, but this was also problematic as it was easy as an insider to align my thinking to participants’’ ways of thinking and possibly overlook perspectives from an outsider’’s view. I used journaling as a way to continually challenge my perspectives through de-centreing and re-centring. Consumption and the Not for Sale The festival was held in an historic commons building owned by The Blue Mountains City Council, intended as a space for local artists to exhibit their work. The cost to hire three rooms and the small garden was prohibitive for most non-professional artists as it cost 900AU. The gallery’’s exhibition agreement stipulated that all artworks must be for sale. Works sold would incur a 37% commission for professional artists or 27% commission for non-professional artists. While it was standard practice to be charged commission at commercial galleries, many women commented that this was rather expensive for a community gallery. On several occasions, I had raised the issue of holding the exhibition at another venue because of the difficulties experienced with the size of the venue, the cost, and the resistance from the gallery to the whole festival experience. The gallery benefitted from the festival, as it raised considerable income for them, but they were not supportive of its explicitly feminist and process-focused content. The Women’’s Room committee staunchly affirmed that they wanted to continue to exhibit here as they felt it was a commons space in which they had the right to exhibit. Although The Women’’s Room Committee had advised all artists that artworks needed to be for sale, thirty-one of the sixty artworks were not for sale. The choice not to sell could have been due to the low value that the women placed on their own artworks as most were listed at less than 200AU. If a woman exhibited an artwork at this price, as a non-professional artist, she would receive 146AU, less any costs she had incurred for canvas and paints. Weighing up the personal versus monetary value, she may decide that it was not worth RECLAIMING THE SACRED 81 selling. Like over half of the other women exhibiting at the festival, Glenys’’ ““Red Shoes”” artwork was also not for sale. The artwork looked at the life, birth, and death cycles of an older women reflecting upon what was to come in her future. Glenys had been inspired by ““The Red Shoes”” folktale, about crafting an authentic handmade life, at The Wisdom Tree Spiritual Group. On festival day, she proudly showed me the handmade red shoes that she purchased from one stallholder and explained that they reminded her to be true to herself. Artists like Glenys were exerting their own power and control over their production and consumption, which demonstrated a resistance to the gallery and The Women’’s Room committee requests to list works for sale, and a consumption that was conscious of personal meaning. The decision to list their artworks as ““Not For Sale”” suggested there were reasons other than financial reward for exhibiting their artworks. Artists and performers may have used the festival as a way to promote their work rather than sell their production outright. Some artists were commissioned to produce works for interested buyers after the festival. Performers also may have used the festival as rich ground to recruit for the classes they held during the week. However, Hands, Heart and Feet Group, which had volunteered to organize the Goddess Parade, had performed multiple times on festival day and returned each year without payment or mention to the audience of their classes. Ghawazi Caravan Belly Dancers also performed at the festival without payment, even though they were a professional troupe that commanded high fees elsewhere. Dale, from Qabila Belly Dancers, had volunteered to act as master of ceremonies on the microphone all day as well as perform without payment. Both the Indigenous Aboriginal dance groups, Burralgang Wiradjuri Dancers and Wollemi Aboriginal Dancers, were clear that they required payment for their performances, however both groups offered a community rate as they knew the Women’’s Room had little funding. While some artists and performers benefitted financially from the promotion and sale of their work, this did not completely explain the commitment of time and effort invested in the festival over several years by many of the performers and artists with reduced or no financial reward. Participants’’ decisions to sell or not sell their artworks, to perform without fees or at reduced rates, seemed to suggest a conscious consumption where consideration was given to other aspects, such as, ““Who am I supporting?,”” ““Can they afford to pay?,”” ““What is the purpose or symbolic significance of the service or production?,”” and ““What is my relationship with this person or group?”” Immense value was placed on personal meaning and relationships, unlike a typically neoliberal agenda of profits over people. However, this conscious consumption only extended to the local and did not appear to consider the global implications of where the shoe leather came from, or where the artwork canvases were made, 82 RECLAIMING THE SACRED or who made the fake plastic flowers in the dancers’’ hair. Even so, Fontenelle (2010: 272) argues that ““responsible consumption,”” in the form of purchasing or not purchasing consumables, implicitly contains concerns about global, social, cultural, environmental, or economic impacts. Consumption clearly occurred at the festival but it was less like the narcissist consumerism that Featherstone (1991), Bruce (1998, 2002, 2006), and Voas and Bruce (2007) identify and more like what Moghadam describes as ““projects of people”” (2005: 357). Even when an attempt was made to resist aspects of neoliberal consumerism, the organisers, gallery, and participants were inescapably caught in its web. Making Visible and Critical Creative Action Processes of globalization have been linked to the breakdown of cultural traditions and a rewriting of human relationships with the environment (Shiva 1993, 2005). Dominating the globalized world are patriarchal and westernized systems of capitalism which focus on transnational corporations, and the benefits of free trade across boundaries, where the person is seen as a unit of production, for the beneficial growth of developed-world economies. Local processes, people, spiritual concerns, and cultural knowledge can become invisible, absent, overshadowed, colonized, or not acknowledged (Prigoff, 2000: 122). Mies (1998) and Marchand (2003) have identified women’’s caring role, the production of life, and unpaid housework as an invisible undervalued resource in the global economy. They argue that both women’’s free labour and the exploitation of natural resources by westernized industrial systems, have been pivotal in wealth creation and success of global capital markets. Feminist perspectives, addressing invisibility and acknowledging female biological experiences, were prominent in many artworks displayed at the festival. Thirty-eight of the sixty artworks explored themes of single womanhood, fertility, birth, motherhood, or aging, and consistently addressed the unacknowledged disjunctions between their own value systems and what they perceived was valued by the patriarchal productive citizen focus of globalised society. The ““Mothers Mandala,”” painted by The Women’’s Room Mothers Group, was an illustrative example Figure 2: Mother's Mandala of women expressing frustration at a RECLAIMING THE SACRED 83 system that did not acknowledge their multiple roles in society. In response to their invisibility, they sought solidarity through a critical creative expression of the lived reality of their existence. Each woman painted an individual segment within the whole mandala circle, depicting placentas, embryo-like eggs, fertile wombs, and tribal-like hands and feet (see fig. 2). The mandala was like a global world unto itself, symbolizing a larger community but also clearly delineated individuals’’ creative efforts, making human production visible. The Eastern mystical concept of the mandala had been modified to codify their own type of sacred balance in life and was used to express the challenge in maintaining multiple expected societal roles. This demonstrated a critical creative action that moved beyond the individual, to become a communal creative practice, addressing issues of connectedness with self, others, place, and universe. The story accompanying the mandala clearly expressed a negotiation between the localized self and global processes of the productive citizen to make these women visible, as it read: The Mandala is about uniting our experiences as individual women, mothers, and all the other diverse roles we have in our lives. It also recognizes the connection our individual experience has with our ancestors, our future, our children, and also our place in the natural world. The Women’’s Room Mothers group meets fortnightly to share our varied experiences as women, workers, mothers, artists, daughters, friends, aunts, sisters and so on, through making art. The group focuses on valuing and respecting our parenting role in a society that often doesn’’t recognize the importance and value of mothering. The Katoomba Homebirth Group was more strongly politicized than The Women’’s Room Mother’’s Group, as they had met considerable resistance in their efforts to birth their children at home. The system of surveillance, imposed by the westernized medical health system, had made their actions of homebirth illegal and expensive, as midwives that attended homebirth, under Australian law, could not be covered by insurance (Starr 2009). Michelle, one of The Katoomba Homebirth group, explained to me that she Figure 3: Belly cast with birth labyrinth 84 RECLAIMING THE SACRED had shown her belly cast at the festival to make others aware that birthing at home was about choice and regaining control over her body at the local level, instead of experiencing what she viewed as an impersonalized and hostile medical system. It might be expected, then, that the belly casts were painted with angry slogans, claiming ““Our choice; Our way.”” However, the belly casts depicted spiral birth labyrinths, trees, rivers, fish, stars, and moons, symbolically linking birth to natural processes of growth and fertility. One of the belly casts was painted with realistic pink nipples and fleshy skin tones, juxtaposed by a birth labyrinth on the belly (see fig. 3), which created a visibility of changes and strains on a woman’’s physical body but which also alluded to the underlying spiritual transformation of becoming a mother. Homebirth was a critical endeavor that resisted dominant discourses on how to birth and be a ““good mother,””embodying a deeper philosophical value system of birth as a natural, spiritual, and heterosexual act, which incorporated these women’’s sense of identity and belonging. While the festival opened up the possibilities for the anti-establishment ideology of homebirth to become visible, this group had also excluded women who could not, or did not wish to, identify womanhood with birth. This was evident in the story that accompanied their exhibit titled, ““Birth——The Link Between all Women.”” Birth is the common thread from the beginning of everything. When we bring forth new life we remember all the mothers before us and those yet to come. In the negotiation of western patriarchal controlling paradigms of birth and motherhood, the exhibition of the belly casts served as a critical creative action, expressing homebirthers right to birth in a way that reflected their value system. However, this was limited by conceptions of who was a mother and what was natural, which inadvertently contributed to the maintenance of the patriarchal hegemony they were resisting. The Burralgang Dancers also used a critical creative action to resist and incorporate the globalised western system that had impinged on the expression of local cultural beliefs. On festival day, Fleur from Burralgang Aboriginal Dancers spoke about the meaning of the dances and Wiradjuri words to the mostly western audience before each performance. She explained that she had met resistance concerning her interpretation of cultural knowledge and that while the dances and language were based on traditional knowledge, traditions were not static but changed over time. The complex interplay between maintaining the local cultural traditions and incorporating the global influences was evident in the group’’s performance of both traditional and contemporary genres. In the more traditional performance, dancers painted with ochre symbolically gathered RECLAIMING THE SACRED 85 seed (see fig. 4). The second dance was a contemporary hip-hop number with girls wearing black pants with the Aboriginal flag on their t-shirts. The festival became a place to negotiate aspects of global culture through the re-education of the western audience and the remaking and reclaiming of culture by the Wiraduri dancers. Figure 4: Burralgang Aboriginal Dancers Remaking and Reclaiming the Sacred Wuthnow (1992) argues that the quality and location of the sacred has been influenced by processes of globalisation, which is deeply embedded in human experience. The sacred, as experienced at this festival, was a diverse and fluid concept, so defining what festival participants held as sacred was complex, because they did not follow a universal religious doctrine, but individually defined what was sacred to them. Aupers and Houtman (2006) would describe this as selfspirituality, as spiritual seekers draw upon multiple traditions, styles, and ideas simultaneously. Self-spirituality has mostly been seen in consumerist terms, such as Lyon’’s (2000) ““spiritual supermarket,”” Possamai’’s (2003) ““religion a la carte,”” and Hamilton’’s (2000) ““pick and mix religion.”” In some respects, scholars’’ who argue this ‘‘pick and mix’’ religion is a consumerist practice, narcissistically focused upon the self, have an entirely valid point. From an outsider’’s viewpoint, the individualized beliefs and the search for spiritual transcendence at neo-tribal festivals would appear to remain self-focused or at times indulgent. However, an insider’’s view uncovers the underlying motivation for participants to make things sacred at such festivals in a desire to create community ritual (St. John 2006, 2010a; Pike 2011; Gilmore 2005). Even though there was no universal religion binding the participants, the artworks, stories and performances drew upon similar spiritual themes of the natural, earthy, or ““tribal”” that pointed to 86 RECLAIMING THE SACRED an underlying value system that bought these artists together to explore spiritual understandings of their life and place in the cosmos. Dance performance at the festival was one way of reclaiming the sacred through a negotiation between the intensely personal inner world and global symbols of the neo-tribal, mystical, and natural. Caitlyn, from Hands Heart and Feet African Drum and Dance Group, performed what could be described as a solo ““lotus birth dance”” to the beat of the West African style drums. She wore a full black skirt, with beads slung around her neck and adorning her ankles. Bright pink fake flowers were swung around her hips, accentuating her pregnant form. A singular pink lotus blossom was painted on her exposed naked belly. As she performed in front of the crowd that encircled her, she cupped her breasts, raised her arms to the sky, and with legs apart in a semi-squatting pose, she swung her arms to touch the ground (see fig. 5). The lotus blossom seemed to be a reference to a natural birthing philosophy, where a spiritual and physical opening up in preparation for the birth was highly encouraged. Ina May Gaskin’’s (1975) homebirth community, from the 1970s, had popularized ““lotus birth”” by drawing upon the Eastern mystic symbolism of opening to ever greater levels of consciousness to assist women in visualizing the baby emerging through the birth passage. The local homebirth group had further modified the lotus to symbolize the physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation for a new stage in their existence. Caitlyn’’s actions in the dance alluded to the forces that were beyond her control, a plea to the sky, the touching of the earth, which spiritualized the everyday act of birthing and mothering and reclaimed this as a sacred process that embodied the transformations she would experience. Figure 5: Lotus birth dance A sacred family or an earth mother was a consistent theme in the artworks and stories as was an imagined global ““tribal”” family. Evoking global themes by using the word tribe was particularly evident in the non-indigenous dance performers, RECLAIMING THE SACRED 87 like Qabila Belly Dancers’’ use of ““Qabila,”” a word associated with tribe in Arabic, or the wearing of full skirts and veiled heads by Ghawazi Caravan Tribal Style group who drew on Bedouin imagery, and finally Anglo Celtic Hands Heart and Feet Group who identified with ““African tribal drums.”” Of the sixty artworks and stories, eighteen sacralised the family and forty-five depicted earth mother or sacred earth. Tribal Maori Moko designs and curved swirls were evoked by one woman artist, who expressed mystical ancestral connections that claimed my tribe, my people, my mother earth in her artwork titled, ““The Hill Where I Belong.”” Karen Maber, an Indigenous Australian woman, exhibited her painting and poem, reifying her ancestors and linking this to the cosmos. Part of this read: The Rivers are my ancestors they give me fish to feed With the wisdom of the ages deep with a planted seed When in times I feel alone, my ancestors lost from me I remind myself they live again in the stars, the land, the sea. Another artwork, ““Walk Gently On Me,”” similarly linked the universal globalized image of earth with a sacred quality, depicting a woman walking on the oceanic hair of an anthropomorphized beach headland Goddess (see fig. 6). This artist sees that she is part of a larger earth family and writes; My blood, body cells, skin and bones have been born through millions of years of the earth’’s journey. The trees, the mountains and the oceans have made me; they are my skin, bone and hair. I have come from the once swirling oceans, from the fish that swim there, from the birds, reptiles, grasses and trees. I am ancient but I am here now. We are one. Walk gently upon me. Figure 6: Walk Gently On Me 88 RECLAIMING THE SACRED Remaking and reclaiming the sacred through connecting to an imagined global community was one way for the women to feel a sense of belonging and to take back control over their deeply soulful practices, which had been challenged by a dominant neoliberal discourse. Using the tribal and natural by some artists to evoke images of a global family was embedded with unacknowledged issues of western power and skated perilously close to the old racisms of Orientalism (Said 1985) and Rousseau’’s image of the perfect pure primitive life (Alley 1978), which made the ““other”” non-western realities invisible. In the case of the festival, the other was not located elsewhere but within the self, as participants grappled with their own intra-personal struggles and continually experienced the tensions in their multiple local-global identities such as indigenous-non-indigenous, western-consumer-earth lover, and mother-artist-worker. Artists and performers created hybridized sacralised forms of the ancestral, tribal, or nature family, because they perceived an inadequacy in the value placed on family (Wilkenson 2001) and nature (Plumwood 2002) in western neoliberal society. Exerting local control over what was sacred extended to the resistance of exhibiting some items in the public domain, as these were considered too sacred. The Wisdom Tree Earth Based Spiritual Group met once a fortnight to meditate, create, and share their everyday life experiences. This group used a creative process that would generate journal entries and artifacts, such as spiritual bark protective mats, wands, brooms, clay talismans, and poppet dolls. Initially, group members wanted to exhibit a selection of their artifacts. However, they eventually decided that because the artifacts were infused with powerful energies they should not be displayed or handled by the public. A group member said about these items, It feels to me if you put energy into an inanimate object anyone can use it and then there is no control as it then has a life of its own and may be misdirected. It is not in my power to physically place energy into something unless I have charge of it. The everyday experiences of birthing, mothering, and being and growing older drew upon global themes through art, story, and performance to connect to an imagined global community at the local level. By reclaiming what was sacred, participants took back local control over processes that were beyond their control. Responses to the sense of disconnection experienced in the globalized world, like invisibility, focus on being a productive income-producing citizen, and challenges of living a life deeply connected to natural cycles, were negotiated through the expression of what was sacred to them. The stories, artworks, and performances from the festival seemed to indicate that participants sought to redefine, sanctify, or spiritualise aspects of their ordinary life experiences. Pargament (2000) warns that just because something is considered important RECLAIMING THE SACRED 89 does not make it sacred. However, when it is invested with sacred character by community, self, or world, it will then be transformed into sacredness. The festival participants took the everyday important things in their life and made these sacred by identifying, articulating, maintaining, and experiencing the sacred as transformation. This often manifested in sacralising nature, natural processes, the tribal, and the ancestral. An underlying value system seemed to connect participants together in the desire to make a sacred process of life by linking these to processes that occurred in the cosmos. In this way, participants were reaching for a sense of connectedness and spiritual belonging in a localglobal renegotiation of embodied sacred experience. Sacred Synergy Synergy is when the parts of the whole come together and in so doing create something more than the sum of the individual parts and in this way create a greater force than what all forces might achieve separately (Jaffe 2010). The festival was a container for shared experience, bringing together diverse art, performance groups, stallholders, and audience members from the local community. Vachereet and Joubert (2008) describe how the group becomes the container of experiences founded on a common imaginary, drives, and desires which develop trust. The shared imaginary was performed, painted, written about, and experienced in embodied improvised moments and ritual-like acts. In the contemporary struggle to seek what is sacred, Hill (2000) identifies four stages in the search process: (1) identifying what is sacred and worthy of devotion; (2) articulation of what has been identified as sacred; (3) maintaining the sacred with religious or spiritual experience; and (4) transformation into sacred by the search process. With the coming together of participants at the festival into the communal space, a common imaginary was created in a greater force than what each could experience alone. Although different ideologies abounded among those performing and exhibiting at the festival, there was a clear indication that connectedness was thought of as being special and while not specifically stated as sacred seemed to correspond to Hill’’s (2000) first and second stages of seeking the sacred, while the third and fourth stages were in the processes occurring on the day. Sheryl and Glenice, two of The Women’’s Room Festival Management Committee, when asked what they thought was the best part of the festival, replied, At the end [of the day] all the woman dancers coming together, the impromptu getting up and having a bit of a go . . . that was so special . . . big beaming grins, kids and everyone getting in there and doing it, that was nice . . . that was good. 90 RECLAIMING THE SACRED The coming together validated each group’’s global imaginary more than if they had performed this only in their own groups. The Goddess Parade was a ritualized performance at the start of the day, celebrating the return of spring, which brought together participants from The Women’’s Room Mothers group, The Women’’s Room Artists, The Wisdom Tree Spiritual Group, Hands Heart and Feet African Drum and Dance, and community members. Four women from EuroAnglo backgrounds led the parade with their handcrafted Goddesses of straw, decorated with hand printed fabric, clay jewelry, flowers, and symbols sacred to them (see fig. 7). Behind them were Hands, Heart and Figure 7: Goddess Parade Feet African Drum and Dance group, who, despite the name, were not African but white Anglo-Celtic men and women. Although the leaders of the group had learnt this style of drum and dance from their West African mentor living in Australia, the group had created their own unique style. They wore an eclectic mix of tulle skirts, beaded headdresses, and flowered hair accessories, tassels, and pom-poms, that were not West African, but a creation of what group members conceived as their kind of ““tribal”” (see fig. 8). Indigenous Aboriginal dancers met the Goddess paraders at the gallery in a symbolic act of two tribes meeting. An Aboriginal Indigenous elder performed a welcome to country, naming the land as Aboriginal and speaking of land as sacred. While this does not make right the colonialist oppressions generations of Aboriginal Australians have experienced, it was a significant symbolic act, which shifted the holding of power in the performance moment. Participants in the Goddess Parade and the Indigenous dancers took back local control by performing their sacred and renegotiating global processes that had impacted on their lived experience of the sacred in their local community. The festival space was not just a place for individuals and groups to reclaim their sacred. By these groups coming together in a mutual celebration, the festival space gave multiple permissions to enact the sacred in a localized hybrid way. Instead of bringing forth a fragmented clash of ideologies, the festival was the container for a cohesive but diverse whole. This is not to deny that tensions RECLAIMING THE SACRED 91 existed between or within groups, as this was part of the whole that contributed to its structure. What each group brought to the festival was their own idea of what was sacred to them. For some, this was connection to ancestors, for others a Goddess or God, the process of birth, or being part of a larger cosmos of past, present, and future. What the performance and artworks indicated was an underlying belief in the sacredness of nature, which manifested in various forms like the tribal, the ancestral, the neo-romantic, and the cyclical process of life, birth, and death. Although the sacred was conceived of individually, the bringing together of these ideologies created something greater than its parts. This was elusive but could be described as a ““spirituality of connectedness,”” which acknowledged that something sacred happened when individuals and groups connected at the local level and ritualized everyday acts deemed as sacred. This would be contrary to Davie’’s (1990, 1994) belief without belonging thesis, as the festival was a container for a spirituality of belonging and coming together. Davie’’s modification of her thesis to ““vicarious religion”” is an important acknowledgement that shared religious practice is still important at particular significant times in people’’s lives (2010: 263). Figure 8: Coming together of dancers and audience Conclusion Although contemporary festivals have often been viewed primarily as places of commodification (Crespi-Vallbona and Richards 2007; Getz 2009), this may disguise the inherent complexity in the neo-tribal festival movement where consumerist practices, co-exist alongside anti-capitalist agendas, creativity, 92 RECLAIMING THE SACRED and spiritual practice. Consumerist practices are present at the neo-tribal events. However, participants also engage in an ““alternative political activism”” through the creation of a world apart from their usual institutionalized reality, allowing for possibilities of temporary power and control (Riley, Griffin, and Morey 2010). Pike (2011) also acknowledges the complex interplay between consumerism, counter-culture, and new forms of spirituality that arise at neotribal festivals and events. While consumer practices seem to be an intrinsic part of festival culture, perhaps the focus on consumption has misrepresented other motivations of participants, such as to become visible players in a globalised world that recognizes the sacredness in the everyday and the need to share this within community. The multilayered experiences of festival culture would seem to challenge the assumptions that festivals and the spiritual practice occurring here are as consumptive and narcissist as Featherstone (1991), Bruce (1998, 2002, 2006), and Voas (2007) would suggest. Reclaiming the sacredness in their lives, from their own local experiences, is not a form of inward narcissism but is deeply engaged with global and local issues. Women at the festival showed their artwork or performed their dance because of a desire to take visible action and become part of a local community, not only for personal empowerment, but also from the desire to share their work and inspire empowerment in other women. Effectively, they were reclaiming a space, which had been colonized by the practices of patriarchal neoliberal globalisation, where the local had become invisible (Mies 1998; Shiva 1993, 2005; Marchand 2010). In response to this invisibility, women used the global process of increased interconnectedness to make communication between these smaller groups possible, in this case via The Women’’s Room website, email and social networking sites such as the EarthSpirit festival Facebook page. The common imaginary for participants at this festival was fuelled by access to ethnic cultural imagery, global food, music, dance, spiritual concepts, and migration. However, the festival participants were not only receptors of global culture but critical agents in their own lives. The festival experience became a place for participants to comment upon their lived reality in the neoliberal world and ask questions such as, ““How do I exist and in this world, how will I birth, how will I believe, where have I come from, and what kind of a world will my children be living upon in the future.”” No longer was it about individuals exploring their inner lives alone but a coming together of a community to share and be in dialogue with other women and the larger community. The festival experience validated participants’’ multiple conceptions of the sacred by performing these in a communal space. The sacred was not one universal agreed upon concept but multiple scattered viewpoints that, when bought together, formed a unique pattern in a cohesive but diverse whole. In bringing together the multiple aspects of the festival experience, a new picture RECLAIMING THE SACRED 93 was formed, a new performance was made, and a new story was created, which became the sacred to them. The sacred experience was not static but performed moments in time, as participants were continually questioning, creating, changing, and remaking the sacred. This is consistent with a postmodern global perspective, where there is not one ultimate truth, the centre continually shifts, boundaries are breached, flows and networks of knowledge and people increase, and a new time and space continuums are experienced. Conceptions of the sacred were looser than traditional religions, as the power in defining what was sacred was not centralized by one body but by the synergy of the groups coming together to form and reclaim their own sacred reality. The festival experience was one of re-centering, remaking, and reclaiming what was important to participants, which became sacred by the act of sharing ideas of their sacred within community. Instead of Davie’’s (1990, 1994) concept that communities believe without belonging, the festival was a place where groups and individuals came together in various stages of the search process to create a shared imaginary in a sacred synergy. The sacred synergy of connectedness in the festival experience was not just about artists or performers coming together in their own tribe but about bringing together groups with diverse political and artistic persuasions, which would not normally come together, in a creative tension, opening a dialogical space that required new creative ways of communication. Works Cited Alley, Ronald. 1978. Portrait of a Primitive: The Art of Henri Rousseau. New York: Dutton. 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