Dr. Layne Little emphasized that LERP was founded to help people on their own terms. The community at risk sets the terms of assistance, and if that means a sacred text is not made available to scholars, so be it. This effort to respect and empower traditions at risk "opened a thousand doors for us," Little said.
Although still small and under funded, LERP has already made some significant contributions to the survival of threatened religious traditions. Sometimes this is within our own country, as when a small Yezidi community in Lincoln, NB, was provided with their sacred text. While still surviving in parts of the Middle East, many hd immigrated to fell widespread persecution, and some who had immigrated had lost their sacred literature.
Much farther afield, the Devadasi of Southern India had long held a special status as sacred dancers and ritualists. Dr. Archana Venkatesan explained they were the only significant class of literate women, and were often multi-lingual as well. They were also uniquely self-governing. In a society where women were deeply subordinated to their husbands the Devadasi were married to Gods, but could and did take human lovers, with whom they even raised families.
Their destruction began with Victorian colonialists, who listed them as prostitutes, and then sought to 'help' them by destroying their livelihood. These attitudes transferred over to the secular elites who came to control India's independence, criminalizing them in 1947, when the country gained independence. The government even outlawed public religious dance if the dancers were a member of this tradition. Today only a few remain, elderly and living in poverty. They do not presently want to revive their traditions, but are willing to pass on what they know. LERP is assisting these women in their final years, while reserving their knowledge should future generations seek to recreate their tradition.
Male religious dancers in South India were is similar catastrophic decline, their traditional hereditary communities extending back to the 11th century survive today in only three temples. Here LERP's sympathetic interest has helped to revitalize some dancers, and new apprentices have begun to learn the tradition. LERP has been given permission to restore and digitalize degraded records of their songs, making them available to their original community as well as to future scholars should the community fail to survive.
One might wonder why make the effort to protect traditions so close to extinction. I think we are uniquely able to answer this question. Because the sacred is immanent within the world, each tradition represents a way of approaching it, a way valuable because it sacralizes human life in a unique way. Were these traditions to die out because their members have found something more satisfying, I for one would have no problem with that development. But that is not what happened. They were suppressed or destroyed either by secular moderns or by people acting in the name of a monotheistic religion. The West in particular has taken so much from these people, LERP is an opportunity to give back.
Long may it flourish.
Note: I am a very biased reporter. I have long been a member of LERP's academic advisory board.
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Albert, LERP isn't saying (if I understand correctly) that scholars have no right to indigenous scriptures. They're saying they will take no part in disclosing same, and this seems to give them an inside track with the survivers of nearly-lost and endangered religions. It lets them do good work; let them continue to do so.
I've always considered the War on Drugs to be secular moralism run amok. Though some of the drug warriors were religiously educated, they always present secular reasons for what they do. The problem is that the government gets its thumb on the scales of justice and science, and prevents a full-throated debate about WoD claims. I think the basic, original motive for the WoD was to suppress the altered states of consciousness that became available in the '60s that let us look at *all* institutions, secular and religious, with new eyes. It was an attempt to stuff us all back into suits and ties or corsets and sensible shoes, mentally speaking. Now it's got a momentum of its own because forfeitures are a main source of income to law enforcement.
Baruch Dreamstalker is on target regarding LERP. Because it is quite expensive doing some of this rescue work, they have asked for the right to make things public if they have not been used for 50 years or more,which could help defray costs, but beyond that the recipients of LERP's assistance have the final say. Given that those involved are often scholars, they would probably prefer to have the right to examine and analyze historical documents, but that would be only by permission.
Th motives of the WoD are complex. There is a racist element- marijuana was initially suppressed when it was primarily a drug of the Black and music communities. Many Republicans like it because by targeting Black Americas mostly, they can reduce he voting ranks of the Democratic Party. (Never underestimate the venality of Republican leaders. They are generally worse than you think.)
But as a national crusade I think Baruch has it right. It is secular modernity's attempt to crush the 60s, with "Christian" right back up.
"It is secular modernity's attempt to crush the 60s".
Why should secular modernity as such have any antipathy towards the counterculture of the 1960s? Surely the extension of individualism to youth, to women, to sexual minorites are fulfillments of Enlightenment principles. And I've seldom seen self-conscious secularists respond with the visceral hostility to drug use common among both Catholic and Protestant traditionalists. What I do see is a structure of state and corporate managerialism deeply hostile to individual freedom- including the freedom to alter one's consciousness. But I see this as far less a natural result of secular reason than the Religious Right is a natural result of the social normalisation of Christianity.
I see the 1960s as a further development of bohemianism, in a democratic form made possible by the period's hitherto unprecedented mass prosperity and mobility. Bohemianism has been a consistent phenomenon in the high periods of relatively liberal civilisations, and while there has been a (to my mind wholly unnecessary and destructive) division between the romantic and rational approaches to life, both derive from a common principle of human liberation decisively at odds with the closed societies which have unfortunately dominated most of human history.
I think we would do very well to seek a mutually just alliance between reason and romanticism. I do not think that attempted alliances between counterculture and conservative religion will work to the advantage of counterculture, any more than the collaboration of Dworkinite feminists with the Christian Right has worked to empower women.
Aster, a sometimes unstated premise of modernity is that there is one right answer that will come to us if we are logical enough and follow the evidence. That is why the modern sense that there sometimes is no single best answer is called "post-modernism."
The altered states of the '60s were another way to seek alternative answers, sometimes presented as alternative universes! Scary to the modernists, secular or religious.
Gus is right in that all sorts of drugs were originally banned because of their connection with racial minorities. LSD is the exception -- it was banned because of association with hippies.
I seem to recall that the Prose Edda was recovered from the last person who knew it as an oral tradition.
Regarding the War on Some Drugs, Industry has often been the force behind the move for prohibition, with racism and Puritianism being merely the tools used to attain that end. The war on marijuana was more a war on industrial hemp when it began financed by Hearst and DuPont. As for LSD and MDMA, Any single dose drug that can wipe out a liftime of societal conditioning terrifies the government.
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