Page 169 - Contribution To Phenomenology

162 ALGIS MICKUNAS

in unity, where the pronouncements are identical with the voices of the
forefathers, the flag is the nation, the ritual is the divinity, and the sacral
sayings are curative.
For Gebser, such currently ritualized practices are premised on magical
awareness. It includes ethnic and nationalistic movements. This national-
ism, even under the guise of broader cultures, has its sacral sites to die
and to kill for. They are the concentrated sites radiating all significance.
Thus even the emerging Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian funda-
mentalisms are ready to claim those sites. If there is a mosque sitting on
a sacred site of Rama's birth, the mosque is to be torn down to yield
room for the temple of Rama. Such are the efforts to reclaim an archaic
identity of a Hindu, a Jewish, a Christian, or an Islamic nation in face
of modernizing globahzation. At the same time, each archaization claims
its legitimacy for a sacral site (or land) on the grounds either of
mythological ancestors or divinities. This archaization, manifest in its
virulent form in the regions of former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
appears in the claims by each ethnic nationahty to the right of a
particular place that was "ours" by dint of archeological readings of
excavated potshards.
This is quite different from the modernizing nationalisms, such as that
of the U.S. with its strong fragmentation and minor ritualization (except
during national crises where certain archaic forms are emphasized). The
emergence of archaisms with their mythical expressions in modernizing
processes are designed to restore the undivided unity that became
fragmented by modernity. It is to be noted that restorations are premised
on the disrupted unity of a people, and its dynamism and virulence are
generated by a modernizing presence, required as the point of difference
and oppression. The Soviet insistence on scientific praxis and its capacity
to outmodernize modernity comprised not only a homogenization both
of national and ethnic identities, but became coupled with an unaccep-
table imposition of Russian culture. The discussions that dominate the
nationalities and ethnicities of this region fluctuate between a wish to
reject Marxian modernism since it was imposed by a more or less inferior
culture and the wish to reject that culture while maintaining the
modernizing impetus. Russian nationalists maintain a similar attitude with
respect to Marxism, with some additional clashes between the Russian
slavophilic soul and its orthodox mythology, on the one hand, and the
Marxian Judaic mythology mixed with Western materialistic decadence, on
the other.