The Easternization Thesis and the Western Habitus

An exercise in hermeneutical suspicion, this article engages the extent to which the burgeoning appearance of ostensibly Eastern concepts and practices within everyday late-modern discourse and practice can actually be said to represent a thoroughgoing “Easternization” of Western culture. Using insights from Pierre Bourdieu, this article argues that Eastern themes have been appropriated by successive generations in the West relative to a range of hermeneutical dynamics, most relevant of which are technologized conceptualizations of the self, a depersonalized view of the cosmos, and the metaphorization of the modern cultural field. Holding that appropriated Eastern concepts and practices have been tailored to the contours of the Western habitus, the article concludes that what we have is more of a westernization of eastern themes than an Easternization of the western paradigm. The hermeneutics of suspicion detailed in the article thereby raises doubts concerning the extent to which purportedly eastern-looking “counter cultural” movements such as theosophy, the new age, and contemporary mysticisms/spiritualities actually run “counter” to the Western culture they purport to reject. Introduction [1] What follows is an exercise in hermeneutical suspicion. Arising from a sustained academic engagement with the religious field in Europe and South America, this suspicion concerns the extent to which the burgeoning appearance of ostensibly Eastern concepts and practices within everyday late-modern discourse and practice can actually be said to represent a thoroughgoing “Easternization” of the Western mindset. That modern Western society has undergone something of an “Easternization” in its discursive, practical, and aesthetic spheres of existence is, perhaps, now too commonplace an observation to warrant labored assertion. From therapy (e.g., acupuncture and Reiki) to home design (e.g., feng shui), fashion iconography (e.g., yin-yang) to personal belief (e.g., reincarnation and karma), and organized religion (e.g., Krishna Consciousness and Zen Buddhism) to leisure (e.g., meditation, t’ai chi, and yoga), the West has increasingly come under the sway of concepts, practices, and tastes of a distinctly Eastern provenance. Such has been the extent and rate of the West’s growing penchant for things Eastern, Campbell maintains, “that the traditional Western cultural paradigm no longer dominates in so-called ‘Western’ societies, but . . . has been replaced by an ‘Eastern’ one” (1999: 41-42). Speaking particularly of the religious field, Campbell’s “Easternization thesis” asserts the abandonment of the traditional Western conception of the divine as transcendent and personal and its replacement by a view of the divine as immanent and essentially impersonal . . . In addition, the Eastern concept of spiritual perfection or selfdeification replaces the Western idea of salvation (1999: 41-42). I hold Campbell’s “Easternization thesis” as correct to the extent that these developments in Western paradigm have indeed taken place. Campbell is, however, mistaken in holding that this