Symposium of the Whole:

...As Victor Turner puts it, The mere fact that Westerners are now becoming aware of the potency of other traditions of thought and expressive culture is itself an act of "making visible" and at the same time an entering into reflexive relations with peoples, genders, classes;ethnicities,the sick, the marginal and the troubled, all of whom from beyond the pale or beneath our bureaucratic rationality insist that we are them...

...Their presence and their cultural product are "meta-commentaries" on our own life ways-in which we are becoming increasingly disappointed as their lack of grace or blessing becomes more obvious...

...1 am therefore grateful to poet Jerome Rothenberg for having invented this one by coining the term "ethnopoetics" (the poetics of "the others") in the late 1960s...

...The whole world, he says, can be viewed "as one vast initiatory seclusion camp...

...A monoculture which can only mean a terrible impoverishment of human horizons...

...This new focus has brought ethnologists into fruitful alliance with poets, dramatic artists, and (potentially) liturgists-with all those, in fact, who recognize that ancient wisdom has much to tell us about the creation of sacred space and restoring the magic of the word...

...How does one gain reflective distance from one's own culture, be in it but not of it...

...In the current scene, moreover, such a cross-cultural perspective would seem essential to the kind of post-modern contemplative attitude we must have...

...They are not just reminding us nostalgically of the sacred space and time our culture has supposedly lost, but devising ways of reanimating the wasteland...

...In the mode of ritual specialists, the possibility remains that they may reopen the secrets of another kind of membership, "in a 'risen body' of humankindness redeemed through 'mutual forgiveness of each vice' (Blake), forgiveness made possible through radical, existential reflexivity...

...In neither case do we as yet know what use such prolific riches will have...

...the unconscious and the unknown...

...Well, one answer is through the perspective that comes through dwelling on the poetic forms, the myths, and rites of other cultures...

...Among other services, such a Romanticism would insist, as do many of the contributors here, that preserving the vast pool of the world's cultural diversity is no less imperative for us than saving endangered biological species...

...From this perspective, the East-West struggle looks like a battle between two cultural dinosaurs, each in its way blind to the birth-pangs of a new culture-whose mood is understandably subjunctive, full of "as ifs...

...In many ways, this anthology is a sign of the resurgence of what could be Romanticism-come-of-age...

...the criminal and the failure-all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are...

...instead the friction generates intellectual sparks, a current of electricity...

...At such a moment, poets- be they wordsmiths or scientists hypothesizing-resume their role as the "unacknowledged legislators of the race...

...David Toolan THERE are few ventures better designed to restock a faltering imagination and rearrange the mind's furniture than a new intellectual field that crosses disciplinary boundaries...

...As I have said, the special focus here lies on performance and the kind of reflective awareness performance gives access to, one involving not just the head but the whole bodily and cultural organism...

...It is not unusual these days to have an anthropologist conduct you on a shamanic "vision hunt...

...In such anew 'totality,' all the old excluded orders must be included...

...In short, to use Rothen-berg's term, some of these heady experts are becoming "technicians of the sacred...

...The Rothenbergs have put together a selection of studies, essays, proposals, and polemics-Vico, Herder, and Blake juxtaposed with Marx, Rimbaud, Levi-Straus, and Charles Olson, Leopold Sen-ghor, Mircea Eliade together with Anto-nin Artaud and Benjamin Lee Whorf among others -that ought to signal chaos...

...But there is more...

...the animal and the vegetative...

...Carnival, festival, sport, and theater represent the foci of a new generation of anthropologists who have thereby shifted attention from concepts such as structures, equilibrium, system, and regularity to concepts like process, indeterminacy, reflexivity, resilience, and the ritual performance that lets primal cultures know what their subconscious is up to...

...The female, the proletariat, the foreign...

...Our culture, writes Victor Turner in an overview of ethnopoetics in these pages, stands at one of those betwixt and between times, the old frames collapsing, the new constellations nascent and taking shape in aesthetic fantasy rather than by the rule of law and ethics...

...Poet Robert Duncan calls it "a symposium of the whole...

...But ethnopoetics is not just proposing fun for romanticists or antiquarians...

...What is decidedly new in this conjunction is not just that poets are beginning to recover the ritual role of bards reciting an epic before the tribal or castle hearth, but that some academic anthropologists are dropping their scientific hiding places and getting into the act...

...Anthologies do not usually qualify for inclusion in Commonweal's book space, but gratitude for this one compels exception...

...What, then, is this new confederacy of anthropologists and poets up to...

...Specifically, Turner would charge poet-performers with the task of picking up the pieces of that worldwide process through which the sacred body of tribal solidarity breaks into the competitive individual and myriad secular bodies...

...We are dealing here, then, with the cave of dreams, the brewing places of language (and thus self-consciousness), which shaped the cultural forms of "foreigners" such as Australian aborigines, Eskimo, Hopi Indians, the Zulu, and the Balinese among so many others-and what contemporary ethnologists and poets would make of them against the backdrop of the West's drift toward a monoculture...

...what we do know well enough is that our current short-term pragmatism has the idiot cunning of Cyclops...

...Its focus is really on the genre of performance-and that means ritual- and what that can reveal or make visible about what is actually going on beneath and behind our social and political dramas...