Introduction

I have a hunch that if an individual studies cultural anthropology long enough, they at some point or another will stumble upon the (almost certainly) undeniable “truth” of cultural relativism. My epiphany occurred on the island of Trinidad in Spring 1989 during my initiation into the Orisha religion (a New World, African-derived religion). Sometime during the three-day ordeal—and it was an ordeal—I was psychologically transported from my own cultural space to that of my initiators. As a result of a rather harrowing and disturbing “religious experience,” I began to see the world in Trinidadian or, more specifically, Orisha terms.

Of course, to state the obvious, I was pre-adapted for a meaningful cultural experience given my knowledge of the religion, the intense and lengthy period of sensory deprivation, and the highly suggestive nature of the various rituals in which I was involved. Nevertheless, in retrospect, I began to appreciate the degree to which such experiences could engender in an individual a heightened sense of the validity or emic truth of their own culture; if they weren’t hooked or convinced before that, if they weren’t already team players in the game of cultural absolutism, if they were not previously inauthentic in the Kierkegaardian sense, they certainly would be now.

What, then, about me, a classical outsider, the quintessential Other reeking of alterity? Well, to be honest, my response was not cultural; that is to say, I was no more willing to stake an absolutist claim for the Orisha religion after my experience than before. I am, after all, a cultural anthropologist. Nevertheless, I was left with a greater appreciation for the ethnocentric mindset and, more particularly, a genuine sense of empathy for the ethos of the Trinidadians with whom I worked. But appreciation and empathy do not necessarily entail, and in my case did not entail, agreement or consent. In fact, if anything, my experience left me even more convinced of the truth of cultural relativism. After all, with the exception of iconoclasts, heretics, and geniuses, for most folks (the statistically prevalent bunch that swallows whole the cultural ideology fed to them without choking), proper culture is all that stands between them and the existential angst of finitude and annihilation.

It seems, to most people anyway, to be a fair trade: the true individual mindset (existence sans cultural essence, Sartre might say), the ideologically unfettered ego, which slowly fades away as his or her culture is gradually internalized, is exchanged for the sanity of normality. The fact that most willingly embrace any number of rites, rituals, customs, traditions, etc. to not only perpetuate but substantiate  their cultural truths is understandable. It’s a tough world out there. Thus, we humans dress up the stark reality of finitude by resorting to a variety of cultural stratagems. Once these are sufficiently internalized, we manage to fight off what should be a natural tendency toward suicide, immersed as we are in a world so devoid of apparent purpose (or meaning) that there would, in fact, be no purpose (or meaning) if not for the fact that we ourselves give it one.

This is all, of course, quite troubling. Do logical positivism, the rule of falsifiability, naturalism, and scientism have the last word? It certainly seems so given that, while it is true that both naturalists and religionists (theists, believers, etc.) are making absolutist claims (e.g., there are no spirits or gods at work in the world vs. there are spirits and gods at work in the world), only the latter are asking us to go beyond the parameters of corporeal existence. The naturalists, in other words, aren’t really asking for much in the way of credulity, whereas the same cannot be said for the religionists, what with their gods, demons, angels, saints, spirits, and so on—all of which seem to be so hopelessly emic that their ontological status is roughly equivalent to that of the Loch Ness monster. These sober observations notwithstanding, however, is there room for hope and optimism, meaning and purpose? And if so, how do we justify this response?

Statue of theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in
Copenhagen, Denmark.

Well, if there is any hope of extracting ourselves from this naturalistic morass, one could certainly do much worse than turning to Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, a brilliant student of the human condition, existentialist, and severe critic of the “normal” or statistically prevalent cultural response to finitude and mortality. Don’t get me wrong; there are several great thinkers who have given us well-argued and ingenious responses to the challenge of naturalism, including Paul Tillich, Peter Berger, C. S. Lewis, Hans Küng, Martin Buber, and William James, to mention only a few. But only Kierkegaard grounds his response in the existential angst of finitude; only Kierkegaard, in other words, uses the same naturalism and religio-cultural iconoclasm of Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre as a starting point in a psychological growth process that gradually transforms a “cultural lackey” (Kierkegaard’s inauthentic man) into a sort of theistic Nietzschean Übermensch. Existentialism, then, is a tool, an instrument for Kierkegaard that one might utilize in their transformation from an obsequious foot soldier for proper culture to an individual qua individual. Then, and only then, Kierkegaard argues, is one ready to connect with the absolute in terms that are meaningful to himself or herself, rather than to the culture of which one is part.

The starting point of Kierkegaard’s recipe for reclaiming meaning and purpose in this ostensibly absurd world is an awareness of objective uncertainty. The path of objectivity (roughly, the scientific method) winds and wends its way from one approximate truth to the next. To travel this path, Kierkegaard argues, is to commit oneself to a manifestly nonteleological process—there is no absolute truth at the end of the path, only an infinite series of truths, with each being only a slightly improved facsimile of the big-T Truth. Thus, Aristotle and Ptolemy gave way to Galileo, Copernicus, and Isaac Newton, who gave way to Albert Einstein, who gave way to … well, you get the point. Thus, almost by default, Kierkegaard is left clinging to subjectivity, and he makes the best of it. That very instant, he argues, that the individual acknowledges the futility of the objective process, he or she connects with the Absolute. There is a (conceptual) mechanism whereby an individual traverses the chasm separating objective uncertainty from a full realization of the Absolute is referred to as a “leap of faith.” This is, at least according to Kierkegaard, the only way to cross this chasm. The unspoken assumption here is, of course, that when one leaps, he or she will actually alight on something substantial. Of course, transcendentalist claims of this sort always involve assumptions; bold, insightful, and clever though they may be, they remain and, alas, perhaps will always be only assumptions.

Kierkegaard was a scholar, theologian, and thinker with few peers, and one should not dismiss his ideas lightly. Nevertheless, why do I (and, no doubt, many others) find myself standing just at the edge of the precipice of the cliff of objective uncertainty unwilling to jump? With all due respect to Master Søren, I am at least standing on solid ground, and, furthermore, I am for the most part willing to live in this world of contingent truths; a small amount of something (small t truths) is better than what could quite possibly be a large amount of nothing (the presumed validity of big T Truth). After all, if I jump, I might not land on anything. I wish it weren’t like this; I really do, but wishing doesn’t make it so. Heck, even one of the most profound and capable Christian apologists of the modern age, C. S. Lewis, admits that one who believes (or has faith) can embrace certainty on a psychological (subjective or personal) level but cannot rule out the fact that dispute on purely logico-empirical grounds is still within the realm of plausibility. Also consider Immanuel Kant, who in his moral argument for the existence of God argues brilliantly for a rational world where virtue leads to happiness and the moral necessity of a god to make it so but, nevertheless, refers to his argument as a “postulate” rather than a “proof.”

It is true, of course, that there are other transcendentalist solutions to the meaning-and-purpose problem than the ones noted here, but they all seem to share an unjustifiable optimism in our ability to connect with a world (a space?) that is, by virtue of its very nature, beyond the one we inhabit, if it exists at all. Put another way, while it is true that both the believer and the naturalist embrace an absolute truth (a preternatural realm of gods and spirits exists vs. a preternatural realm of gods and spirits does not exist), given the nature of the claims, the burden of proof, in my mind, lies squarely with the believer; the naturalist is assuming little more than what we actually know about our world. There is, of course, the “contingency problem” that must be addressed, but really, which is more or less absurd? The notion that a God has always existed or that matter and energy have always existed, or, for that matter, that nothingness gave rise to somethingness? Anyone who wishes to embrace the “God solution” can offer nothing in the way of sound argument, only faith, idealism, and obfuscatory metaphysics. Nevertheless, in any debate, both sides must argue their case, and, as far as I am concerned, the best case can be made by the naturalists.

Opening Salvo

Culture, by which I mean that symbolic matrix of adaptive responses—be they psychological, ideological, or merely biological survival-oriented—that unequivocally differentiates one’s conceptual space from that of the Other is necessarily a fictional construct, a contrivance in the strictest sense of the term. The religion one embraces, the diet one craves, and the language one speaks are all clever stratagems that do little more than facilitate our desire to remain sane and meaningful in an absurd world. A universe of infinite possibilities threatens to swallow us whole, so we fight back by carving out a small, manageable piece of it and by defending our particular cultural response, with our lives if necessary. It’s a damned shame, though, when it goes this far, because one version is just as good (or as bad) as any other. The Durkheimian aphorism “There are no religions which are false,” i.e., they all work in their given cultural context, properly contextualizes the utter meaninglessness of the blood shed by tens of millions in the cause of elevating one cultural absolute over another. This entire process has been an exercise in utter futility as attested by the growing number of contrasting and variegated religious groups, which number in the tens of thousands.

I was raised in the bayou country of south Louisiana, an area where cultural absolutism is as pervasive and suffocating as the heat and humidity. So, eventually I found myself, as some of us do, all grown up, indignant, and irate once I came to the realization that I had passed the first couple decades of my life living in a cultural dream state where White, male, Christian, heterosexual Americans were privileged and supposedly innately superior to their binary counterparts: ethnic, female, secular, homosexual, and foreign. Derrida! Where were you when I needed you?

* * *

In their classic study of cross-cultural color perception, Basic Color Terms (1969), Brent Berlin and Paul Kay argued that when tribal/indigenous peoples have only three terms for color, they are virtually the same three: the two ubiquitous colors, white and black, and, for those who add a third, red. (The discussion regarding whether or not cross-cultural color perception can be attributed to naturalistic factors [i.e., the colors are “out there”] or cultural factors [i.e., “perception is reality”], notwithstanding, I will adopt Berlin and Kay’s model here. In my mind, this issue is not particularly problematic anyway because we are dealing simply with the three basic colors representing “light” [white], the absence of “light” [black], and that which does not fit in either of those two categories [red].) There is a kind of (accidental?) wisdom here that could be easily overlooked by the citizens of the so-called developed world, and it is this: anything and everything truly germane to our symbolic struggle with the contingencies of our biological existence, i.e., our cultural response to nihilism and annihilation, is found in the red, the white, and the black.

Red is blood; red is organic; red is biology; red is digestion and defecation; red is copulation; red is predation. In a word, red is nature, corporeal, unadulterated, and relentless. White is sexual continence; white is romance; white is the “eternal time” of play; white is Brahman, Jehovah, the Tao, Jesus, and Muhammad; white is ebullient idealism forged in the fires of hope and optimism; white is the happy-faced mask we wear to conceal the terror-laden physiognomy that lies just beneath; white is, of course, culture. And what of black? Black is the dark emptiness of intergalactic deep space; black is the void of nothingness; black is the inevitable denouement that concludes all we do; black is futility; black is hopelessness; black is death.

Red, white, black; nature, culture, death. In one way or another, all things are contained therein. The red and the white, nature and culture, exchange vicious blows in a pointless struggle (this interplay is much too violent to be called a “dance”) that both are ultimately destined to lose to the black, which stands, waits, and observes, patiently and confidently, like a gladiator that has never lost a battle waiting for his next victim. But the fight perseveres, nevertheless, because the white, always vibrant, hopeful, optimistic, can never seem to grasp the certain futility of its predicament. Buddhist, Christian, humanist, Muslim, materialist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, it makes no difference; all will succumb to the red, which will, in turn, succumb to the black. All the while, the black laughs, the black taunts; the black waits, the black haunts.

* * *

We are, astronomers tell us, star stuff; the one truly frustrating and sobering fact of our existence is that the material firmament is both our origin and our destination. One’s biography (anyone’s!), in starkly adumbrated form, reads like this: eons of oblivion briefly interrupted by a flash of consciousness followed, yet again, by eons of oblivion.

One of the tragic yet certainly understandable flaws of our species is that we feel as though we can change the natural, ultimately meaningless order of things if we simply continue whistling past the graveyard of reality, doing our best to “carry the tune” of cultural truth (our truth, of course). In fact, there is a truth out there, or, as any good postmodernist would say, truths, but in matters of culture, it is the truth of cultural relativity, which is in a sense no truth at all. There is, then, no universally valid culture, only islands of cultural specificity grounded in the hope, faith, and optimism of cultural absolutism.

Herein lies the dilemma: unless you are willing to embrace the mythology of ancient traditions, unless you are willing to tailor your diet, clothing, and behavior to the dictates of some culture’s god, unless you are willing to relegate most individuals to an eternity of suffering for not believing as you do, and, most important, unless you are willing to exchange the freethinking spirit of unfettered inductive reasoning for the a priori pathology of obsessive deductivism, you must embrace cultural relativism, warts and all, because there are no viable alternatives.

Red

In the 1960s and 1970s, many of those who experimented with psychoactive substances also explored and crossed the boundaries of so-called proper sexual behavior. I think I know why. The one essential truth about mind-altering pharmaceuticals is this: for at least a short while, the draperies on the window that looks out on a world of infinite possibilities are pulled back a bit, and the view is at once both terrifying and exhilarating. The full range of possibilities, the cosmos of unlimited potentialities that cultural orthodoxy has shrunk down to fulfill the rather pedestrian, “missionary-positioned,” dictates of God-fearing, apple pie–swilling Americana suddenly becomes visible; all things are now possible. No longer constrained by a sectarian ethos largely shaped by historical accident and guarded by sanctimonious and power-hungry egomaniacs far too impressed with their own inherent worth, one is now free to roam and linger a bit in this universe of everything.

Let us not, however, forget Jean-Paul Sartre’s warning that with freedom comes the very real risk of existential angst driven by the condemnation of circumstance: one cannot escape the responsibility of their choices or the world they have fashioned. A potentially liberating existentialism can certainly be found in psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, or blotter acid, but unless you follow it with a dose of agnostic indifference, this “universe of everything” will expose one’s feeble immortality project for what it actually is: the dying sigh of an animal that thinks he is a god. There is, though, no turning back for some brave souls; once the child in us gets lost in a boundary-less room with an infinite number of new toys, they want to stay, or, at the very least, visit quite often.

Continuing in this same vein, it follows that in an acultural universe of human sexuality, everything is possible, but, in our manifestly cultural world, few things are permissible. Sex is, on one level, strictly a biological act. The simple act of copulation, though, can be transformed into something spiritually meaningful by controlling or reigning in, if you will, our mere animalistic tendencies. So, for example, a dog will happily and publicly defecate on the front lawn, leaving the residue for anyone to see. As for ourselves, however, the guilt of anality (the purely biological or animalistic aspect of humankind, as opposed to the purely symbolic aspect) impels us to culturize this excretory activity by confining it to a closed, private space (i.e., the bathroom)—a veritable temple devoted to the deanimalization of our species—and then attempting to destroy all the evidence with special soft paper, flush toilets, and air fresheners. The “culturization” of what the zoologist would refer to as copulation is a similar process, involving in this case candlelit dinners, romance, engagement rings, marriage, and other similar cultural accoutrements.

The complete range of human sexual behavior is quite large but not infinitely so, mind you, given that the total number of permutations of the various components is certainly finite. But, nevertheless, this range is undoubtedly much larger than most of us, attuned as we are to one particular cultural version of our world, are aware of. An hour or two surfing the more sexually creative or perverse (depending, I guess, on one’s personal sexual proclivities) regions of cyberspace will surely convince one of this if he or she is having any doubts. “Proper” culture, of course, prohibits most of these activities. In some of the more puritanical times and locales, for example, the ideal (ideally!) consisted of heterosexual sex between husband and (dutiful and sexually frustrated) wife in conservative orientations with the intention of siring scions. Today the range of proper sexual behavior has been expanded to include other activities, but, nevertheless, the entire range of what is possible is only rarely explored.

Human sexual behavior, then, has been “culturized”—the possible has been reduced to the permissible. This, then, is the secret of culture; we can avoid the bleak, meaningless, brutal world of the animal only if we control all that which is possible by restricting our choices to those activities that serve to reinforce our sense of human dignity. With sexual relations this is very difficult to do, for sex is an innate, essential, and necessary biological act that is arguably one of the most pleasurable organic or natural behaviors of which we are capable. Thus, our culturizing efforts must be pushed to the limit just to keep us one step ahead of the sexual animal that is constantly chasing us and snapping at our heels. This is precisely the point where the white becomes germane.

White

As was noted above, it is culture and our culturizing efforts that strive to keep anality at bay, at arm’s length so to speak, or “out of sight, out of mind.” Looked at in this way, culture is a trick we play on ourselves to make ourselves feel better about our uniquely human predicament: we are animals who are aware of that fact. This awareness crashes down upon us the realization of the essential finitude of our condition; we are born, we live, we grow old, we die, and we are subsequently interred in the ground to be again reunited with the “star stuff” from whence we came, as the earth slowly absorbs our decomposing remains.

There is, however, more to this story, primarily because we choose to add another chapter, namely, a chapter on our cultural response to this apparently hopeless predicament we are facing. Of all cultural responses, and there are many, perhaps the one that most directly deals with the problems of mortality and finitude is religion. Religion is, in my mind, the only cultural response that actually reaches beyond the immanent, corporeal world in which we live our lives to a preternatural realm in an attempt to find some meaning and purpose for our existence. Religion, in other words, is the only truly transcendental cultural response to anality. One might add that given the ubiquity of religion cross-culturally, it is arguably the most effective cultural response. This does not mean, however, that this particular cultural response is without its problems.

For some of us, religion is a burden that we carry on our (psychological) backs that gets heavier as time passes and the culture-specific nature of one’s faith grows ever more apparent. Religion trivializes this fascinating, diverse, and sometimes phantasmagoric world we live in by, again, eliminating the possible and replacing it with the permissible. But worse than that, religion demands that we give up the freedom to accept or reject religious beliefs without being obsessed with the eternal consequences of our decision. What if we simply choose not to play the game? After all, I didn’t ask for this; did you? Sartre reminds us (“existence precedes essence”) that a window of opportunity does exist for us to make ourselves; in other words, we can simply choose to stand on the sidelines while others battle it out on the field of cultural orthodoxy.

There are thousands of religious sects, denominations, and other assorted groups in the world. Thus, rites and ceremonies, mythology, gods and spirits, theologies, liturgies, dogma, and so on can be and, in fact, have been tailored to suit a variety of subjective sentiments, historical accidents, and socio-political agendas. Let’s face it: chances are one is a Christian, Muslim, Shintoist, Hindu, Jain, Parsi, or whatever simply because he or she was born in a geographical region where that particular religion is statistically prevalent. The inescapable and undeniably absurd conclusion here is that within the context of an exclusivist or absolutist religious ideology, a major factor, if not the most important factor, determining the fate of one’s soul is geography.

There is, of course, much more to this story, but suffice it to say that the religion an individual practices is about as contrived as the language one speaks, the diet one craves, and whether or not one drives on the right or the left side of the road. “Yeah, but …” one may be inclined to interject, “my religion is the one true religion!” Unfortunately for this confident individual, that is the battle cry of religious exclusivists everywhere. Here’s yet another sobering thought for our ethnocentric friend: not one of these happily devout individuals can offer a shred of evidence to substantiate their claims of absolutism short of admittedly impressive claims of a highly subjective and hence personal nature (religious experiences and the like). With all due respect to the putative reality of their mystical experiences, the rest of us are not privy to them.

It is claimed by some that Mahavira (the twenty-fourth Tirthankara of Jainism) fought off the greatest temptations and hardships the world has to offer, Jesus walked on water, Vishnu manifested himself in the form of Krishna, Muhammad was magically transported into heaven during his lifetime, and Gautama Buddha discovered the truth to end suffering after sitting under the Bodhi Tree. Again, for those of us not privy to these events (that would include just about everyone past and present), we are left with a faith grounded in hope and optimism, on the one hand, or doubt grounded in the sober reality of our mundane existence, on the other. Not only that, but these alleged events were recorded, I should add, by individuals who also were not privy to the events themselves. One could reasonably argue at this point that a just god would not expect us to accept these miraculous events on little more than the rough equivalent of anecdotal hearsay. If we were, in fact, made in the image of God, as the Judeo-Christian tradition claims, a rationalist agnosticism becomes a reverential gesture that signifies to God that we do not think that he is dimwitted.

Certainly, the individual who penned the third chapter of Genesis did not for one minute think that future readers of his text would believe that snakes could converse with human beings. If he had, he would have probably resorted to a footnote for the more gullible among us, explaining that this and the many other obviously symbolic and metaphorical passages should not be taken literally because, I can imagine him writing, “Snakes, in point of fact, do not actually talk.” The writers of these and other ancient religious texts might have lived in a simpler and less sophisticated time, but they had the good sense to know that the ineffable truths of spiritual beings and metaphysical experiences could not be couched in anything other than symbolic and metaphorical terms. Why have we forgotten that?

The way I see it, any god that would expect us to believe unsubstantiated and, more important, nonfalsifiable claims that, furthermore, repudiate everything we do know about the natural order of things would be a naive god with no appreciation of or, worse, no concern for the general level of awareness or perspicacity of the human mind. Or God simply could be a trickster who seeks to confuse humankind by transgressing the laws of nature from time to time. Neither of these options seems credible or reasonable.

This leads us, then, to the crux of the problem: How can any one religious ideology be considered legitimate and valid vis-à-vis other versions? There is not now and, given the state of things as we have always known them, never will be any empirical test that will allow us to do any more than (to invoke the apologist C. S. Lewis once again) exclude psychological doubt yet not rule out logical dispute. In other words, we feel pretty darn good about our chosen ideology because we feel we have no good reason to doubt it. Yet on the other hand, if we are honest and rational about it (most of us, by the way, are not), we accept the possibility that disconfirming data might become known in the future or, perhaps, that other ideologies might offer valuable insights on the human condition as well. But for the time being anyway, that’s where it stands: the intellectually timorous continue to hope, and the intellectually sincere continue to doubt.

Black

Everyone, of course, must deal with the problem of death on some level; those solutions that seem to be the most promising for most individuals—religions—have a relatively long shelf life. For others, however, the myopia, intolerance, stilted (and intellectually stifling) dogmatism, and uncompromising conservatism of religion have pushed them toward other solutions. But as prominent Catholic theologian Hans Küng says, one has to do something; some choice has to be made. After all, few individuals can wallow in the conceptual equivalent of the fecal matter of unadulterated biologism; few, that is, except for Nietzsche’s Übermensch or Camus’s Meursault. Such individuals traditionally have been institutionalized, supposedly due to their insanity (which, lest we forget, as Michel Foucault reminds us, is culturally defined) but in reality for challenging the finer points of the ultimate collective immortality project: culture. Unfortunately, many of these individuals are rarely heard from; it’s a damned shame that they haven’t been standing behind a pulpit somewhere on Sunday mornings—talk about a rude awakening from spiritual slumber!

Religion, of course, offers humankind a solution to the annihilation of finitude (eternal life in the presence of God in the west or an indefinite series of rebirths in the east and various and sundry other notions in between) and, of course, the ultimate transference object (Jehovah, Allah, Brahman, Amitabha Buddha, and so on). It should also be pointed out that the focus of religion is transcendental rather than immanent.

Nevertheless, religion is not our only option. There are alternative solutions to the problem of our sure and certain mortality, including artistic creativity, political ideology, humanism, existentialism, and so forth. Who’s to say that such endeavors are any less valid than, say, Islam, Shintoism, Judaism, Hinduism, or Sikhism? None of these ideologies has what one would call a monopolistic stranglehold on empirical substantiation that would allow them to escape the sectarian fetters of cultural absolutism. Besides, what can you say about a cultural response—be it political, religious, economic, artistic, or whatever—that facilitates sanity (even if it is culturally defined) in a world that is perpetually poised and ready to eat us alive at any moment? Here’s what you say: it works, in a psycho-functional sense, of course.

* * *

So, now then, bow down ye frustrated and troubled masses to the only real god: pragmatism. If you’re looking for truth with a small t, then major in physics; if, however, you’re looking for truth with a capital T, then you’re in trouble for the very simple reason that such truth can only be glimpsed subjectively and even then will only be accessible for the individual who is fortunate enough to be blessed with mystical or revelatory insight. However, anyone who is metaphysically body-slammed on the road to Damascus (or Dallas or Delhi) or who has a (private) audience with God should know better than to expect others to uncritically embrace the details of their highly subjective and personal experience. But, sadly, they don’t “know better.”

Certainly, the low point of the human adventure has to be the shameful slaughter of those who prefer not to accept a particular cultural response to immortality based on the highly subjective (not to mention culturally specific) blathering of an individual from a “faraway land.” No doubt the first European “crusaders for Christ” probably didn’t think of that as they gleefully slaughtered tens of thousands inside the walls of old Jerusalem in 1099 CE. As they sloshed around in the blood and carnage of bodies that lay dead or dying at their feet, I doubt they considered or were even aware of the inherent subjectivity of religious experience; cretins who slaughter human beings in the name of Christ (or Allah for that matter) are not known for their philosophical acuity.

The biological, corporeal aspect of human existence is like an arrow shot out into deep space; it proceeds doggedly in a linear fashion, never pausing to contemplate, never stopping to reassess its options; its time is marked by the relentless tick-tock of a cosmic clock that never strikes midnight. Culture, on the other hand, continuously loops back on itself and, in the process, makes no headway whatsoever. It is a futile struggle that we engage in simply because we must do something in the face of our terrifying finitude, our certain mortality, although in the end our fight is pointless; for all intents and purposes, a culturally enriched life is no better or no worse than the acultural life of the postmodern iconoclast. In the end, the animal in us, the organic sacs we inhabit, inevitably pass on, and the biological matter that is all of us returns to the firmament from whence we came. When all is said and done, when the dust of our futile struggle clears, the scoreboard reads, as it always has and always will: mortality one, culture zero.

Introduction I have a hunch that if an individual studies cultural anthropology long enough, they at some point or another will stumble upon the (almost certainly) undeniable “truth” of cultural relativism. My epiphany occurred on the island of Trinidad in Spring 1989 during my initiation into the Orisha religion (a New World, African-derived religion). Sometime …