Exotic Fetishism

I have always wondered just how much of this French stereotype is true!

Making the words and lives of other people into objects of obsession conveniently places self-realization upon a high, impossible shelf. The life of the revered person or people becomes a Wendigo — a monster that cannot be satisfied and that always cannibalizes its own tribe and eventually itself. Westerners have had a long time fad of fetishizing Eastern religions and (bastardized) Eastern meditation. Eastern religions often act as a Wendigo to someone born and raised in the West. Their practices, divorced from the land, become poisonous. Much of this is because of the conflict with the spirit of the land in which they are adopted.

 

Exotic fetishism is a syndrome that results from feeling embarrassed about one’s humble origins, feeling unmoored or uninspired by one’s traditions, and longing for someone else’s birthright. Exotic fetishism is a way of displacing the appreciation of the here and now for the cherished other, who always lives in another land, another time, another social class. For instance, a Westerner who throws himself into Buddhist transcendental meditation while holding down a salary class job and while living in the West is likely to piss off the land spirits without knowing it depending on how grateful or ungrateful he acts in his daily life. If he’s lucky, the beings of the unseen ecosystem around him will be forgiving or at least ambivalent. If he’s not so lucky, he will be beset with personal tragedies, unhappiness, and misfortune. Buddhism is a religion of ancestor worship and if he leaves that part out, he’s missing too huge of a chunk of that religion to be doing it right. If he’s a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), he isn’t likely to understand ancestor worship on a fundamental level because he will not have been raised that way. There are hard limits to where and how he was born and he did not accept them or work with them; instead he pretended they weren’t there and supplanted his potential with a mantle of faith that wasn’t appropriate to him or the land from whence he came. He rejected the spirits of the land as they were, refused to work with them, and never thought they could do the same to him.

 

A Little Thing Called Self-Worth

 

There's a woman I know who has always been tortured by exotic fetishism. Like many exotic fetishists, she has traveled the world. Though she has an interesting ethnic background and is not entirely white, she is ashamed. She is embarrassed by her family's wealth but also embarrassed that they are not filthy, Hollywood mogul rich. She loses all self-worth when she is around celebrities and is the sort who would camp out in dreadfully uncomfortable and potentially degrading circumstances for days if it meant she could spend five minutes chatting with a rock star or top-tier politician. She name-drops insufferably, always presuming that other people are just as impressed by famous people as she is. She has spent her life wondering why she is so miserable, yet it has been under her nose this entire time.

The Land Can Reject Us Too

The land reaches out to us all the time, but if we make fetishes of other times, lands, and cultures, the land spirits around us have no choice but to show us the same rejection we show them. By fetishizing the foreign, we become foreigners on our own soil: anchorless, nomadic, here today, gone tomorrow. We become unworthy of investment. When we refuse to communicate with the spirit of place where we are, the spirits don’t give us much in return: they ignore us and we ignore them.

Obsession with technology is its own sort of exotic fetish. When I walk in the forest preserve, I often see joggers and bikers dressed to the nines in the latest style of designer spandex suits. Their bikes likely cost more than my 16 year old car is worth. They wear sunglasses, noise-cancelling headphones, Apple watches, helmets, and special designer shoes as if they were going to be photographed by paparazzi during or after their bouts of exercise. They don't go through the forest preserve slowly enough to connect with the spirits of the land. They huff and puff too much to notice details like hummingbird moths or wild roses and blackberries. Their headphones cancel the calls of rare sandhill cranes and the distinct song of red winged blackbirds. They wouldn't know a red sumac from a poison sumac until it was far too late and it doesn't occur to them to learn. At least they manage to get to the forest preserve though, because for every one of them there are five of their peers glued to a screen who rarely go outdoors at all.

The Ungratefulness of Exotic Fetishism

 

There's another irony in that we can make fetishes of our own culture and background and alienate the spirits around us that way. For instance, if I decide my German grandparents, now deceased, are the pinnacle of human transcendence, and I make a fetish out of their lives and become a snob about how great they were, once again I fail to listen to the spirit voices around me and the land that gently guides me every day. I ignore the love of my family who are alive now. I become uncaring about the Earth that generously offers me spaghetti to eat and black tea to drink because it does not exactly match the spaetzle and beer of the past that I imagine my grandparents had. I fail to love the Eastern red cedars and the maples because my grandparents had hawthorns and black pines. I spend my life studying German when I could easily learn Spanish, which is what half my neighborhood speaks.

If I put my head in the clouds of an imaginary land, I am also prone to make stupid mistakes. I could make a small mistake, such as wearing clothing that does not suit me, but I wear it because it is from a culture I admire. I could easily spend too much money, buying trinkets and doodads from the exotic land I am obsessed with, or I could spend thousands traveling. The worst outcome is if I make a major life choice based on my exotic fetishism: marrying someone not because they are right for me, but because they suit the fetish, or wallowing in the fetish as if it is an all-consuming addiction and becoming useless and dependent.

 

Like it or not, we are spirits in the material world tasked with learning the onerous burden of being human so we may one day free ourselves once again to rest in the arms of God. I can deny my burden and rail against it all I want, but my refusal to learn my lessons will not enable me to pass the class without the usual groundwork.

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