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Action vs. Archetype
20 September 2004The first round of stories about the Smithsonian's new museum of the American Indian is over, and The Revealer awards first prize to The Washington Post's Libby Copeland for "Guiding Spirit" -- which reveals that "spirit" is relative when it comes to museum-craft. "What's sacred?" writes Copeland. "Words get slippery here..." Indeed. Copeland starts with a noble savage premise -- a real live Indian is going to show her around the museum -- and quickly undercuts the cheap kind of magic that could ensue by mixing tales of commerce and spiritual belief together with advantage given to neither. There's some new-agey reverence here, but there's also skepticism. There are some historical missteps -- the European concept of "religion" applied to the pre-Columbian past -- but there are also the subtle moves of a reporter writing with eyes wide open to both the past and the present. And writing well: "In non-native culture, there are few items considered so holy, so forbidden, that they cannot even be looked at.... But there are religious symbols that maintain their power: crosses, relics, altars. There is our national flag, a secular object with such totemic power that there is substantive debate over whether it should be illegal to burn what is, in fact, a piece of cloth. The Great Pyramid has a magical quality that surpasses its bigness, its oldness, its ingenuity. Certainly, a secular object like the flag is not the same as kachina masks to the devout. But there is a common human reality here." Oh, no -- is Copeland about to sink into a Joseph Campbell soup of meaningless equivalences? Nope. "It has," she observes, "to do with reverence." In other words, it's not about archetypes, it's about actions, the verbs called into being by believers who do things here in this world. That insight makes this a great story, and a model for writing about "religion."
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