Tribalism as Resistance to Globalization: A Contra-case to Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism can be seen as a direct opposition to the folkish/volkisch logic that animates much of American Heathenry, in which boundaries of distinction are drawn around who can claim Heathen identity and how groups navigate membership. These questions of membership are often determined by qualifications decreasing in racial specificity, from groups requiring European ancestry, to those accepting of adoption (by white Heathens), “oathing” into a group, to those most inclusive for whom racial determinations are meaningless. Yet, many Heathens interact with one another in a limited milieu in which primarily white Heathens have been infected by a culture in which whiteness has, for centuries, conferred upon its bearers racial privilege and accumulative social, political, and economic advantage. Tribalism, to many, implies “indigeneity” and therefore attempts to sidestep this discursive quagmire about “race,” as “indigenous” groups are taken seriously and are legitimate enough to justify excluding some people. Indigenous groups frequently argue for the right to hold themselves apart as different and worthy of protection from the negative consequences of colonization. They are widely seen as justified in celebrating their distinct heritage, and can justify excluding people who are not “one of ours.” As McNallen (2013c) indicates in his article “The Heart is Ancestral and Tribal”:
How arrogant it is to think that joining an organic religion is a matter of mere preference! To take up a tribal religion like Asatru, or Native American belief, or Yoruba or any other native faith is to take up the ancestors themselves. All real, organic religion springs from the deepest recesses of the heart, not from the superficialities of logic and debate. The heart is ancestral and tribal, shaped by the forefathers and foremothers, and beating to the pulse they gave it.
The indigeneity that McNallen (2013c) and others evoke defies clear explanation. Heathens invoke Native American identity in support of their “indigeneity” claims, while the identity over which they claim ownership is a native European one. In terms of scholarly definitions of indigeneity involving generations-long ties to place and space (Adefarakan 2011), Heathens in the United States certainly do not count. On one level, their claims decouple the concept of land and indigeneity altogether, emphasizing instead a biological and “metagenetic” determination of belonging (i.e., racial). On another level, however, this Heathen approach to ethnicity is precisely a claim to the land elsewhere in an effort to be indigenous here, in the United States. The European ancestors of white Americans came from other lands during recorded, and fairly recent, history. Conquerors and invaders of far off lands generally do not qualify for the term “indigenous.” “Indigenous” can also be used, however, as a privileged category of identification that is politically above reproach and justifies those who claim it in maintaining a proud distinction from globalizing, colonial, invading forces. Stephen McNallen (2013b) further defines “folkish” and “tribal,” arguing:
Those who are critical of folkish Asatru seldom extend their criticism to Asians, Africans, South Americans, and the Native Americans of North America. Apparently, folkish religion is bad only if Europeans practice it.
The position of the Asatru Folk Assembly is that all native religions spring from the soul of a particular people. It is the distilled spiritual experience of that people, passed on to them by their ancestors. We respect that special relationship and stand in solidarity with all peoples, anywhere in the world, who seek to protect their spiritual and cultural heritage from appropriation, exploitation, or dilution.
In this regard, claiming indigeneity offers an opportunity to understand oneself not as a global villain, an invading destroyer of distinct and diverse cultures and a spreader of global mono-culture, but rather as a fellow victim of these historical atrocities. Most Heathens recognize that their ancestors were global conquerors. Most of these seem to celebrate the fact as an indication of their people’s potency and power. This allows the maintenance of their settler identity (Razack and Fellows
1998) which is rooted “in romantic amnesic constructions of themselves as benevolent ‘founders’” (Adefarakan 2011: 40). Some, like Mark Puryear, McNallen, and others, recognize the contradiction between being “indigenous” and being globalizing conquerors, and blame the conquests on the influence of the foreign religion of Christianity or the “Roman Paradigm” (Puryear 2006).
