Castaneda, Carlos (1925-1998)
Little consensus has been reached about Carlos Castaneda, whose books detailing his apprenticeship to the Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan Matus have sold over eight million copies in 17 languages and contributed to defining the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s as well as the New Age movement. Castaneda's anthropological and ethnographic credibility together with his intellectual biography and personal life have been a constant source of puzzlement for critics and colleagues. Castaneda himself contributed to complicate the mystery surrounding his identity by supplying false data about his birth and childhood and by refusing to be photographed, tape recorded, and, until a few years before his death (which was kept secret for more than two months), even interviewed. In spite of (or perhaps thanks to) Castaneda's obsession with anonymity and several blunt critical attacks on his works by anthropologists his international fame has been long-lasting.
Born in Cajamarca, Perú (not in São Paulo, Brazil, as he maintained), Castaneda became a celebrity almost overnight thanks to the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in 1968, when he was still a graduate student at the University of California. In The Teachings of Don Juan as well as in nine other books, Castaneda described the spiritual and drug-induced adventures he had with the Yaqui Indian Don Juan, whom he maintained to have met in 1960 while doing research on medicinal plants used by Indians. During the course of the books, the author himself becomes an apprentice shaman, sees giant insects, and learns to fly as part of a spiritual practice that tends to break the hold of ordinary Western perception. Castaneda defined his method of research as "emic," a term that was used in the 1960s to distinguish ethnography that attempted to adopt the native conception of reality from ethnography that relied on the ethnographer's conception of reality ("etic"). Because of several chronological and factual inconsistencies among the books and because Don Juan himself was never found, many scholars agreed that Castaneda's books were not based on ethnographic research and fieldwork, but are works of fiction—products of Castaneda's imagination.
Jay Courtney Fikes pointed out that Castaneda's books "are best interpreted as a manifestation of the American popular culture of the 1960s." The works of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Gordon Wasson stirred interest in chemical psychedelics such as LSD and some of the psychedelic plants that Don Juan gave his apprentice Castaneda, such as peyote and psilocybin mushrooms. These psychedelics played an important part of the counterculture of the 1960s as a political symbol of defection from the Establishment. Castaneda's books contained exactly the message that the members of the counterculture wanted to hear: taking drugs was a non-Western form of spirituality. Several episodes in The Teachings of Don Juan link taking psychedelic plants to reaching a higher spiritual realm: Don Juan teaches Castaneda to fly under the influence of jimsonweed and to attain magical powers by smoking a blend of psilocybin mushrooms and other plants. Castaneda's books met the demands of a vast audience that was equally disappointed by anthropology as well as by traditional religion.
In the early 1990s, Castaneda decided to become more visible to the public in order to "disseminate Don Juan's ideas." He organized New Age seminars to promote the teaching of Tensegrity, which he described as "the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indian shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest." Castaneda, who at the time of the seminars was dying of cancer, claimed that "practicing Tensegrity … promotes health, vitality, youth and general sense of well-being, [it] helps accumulate the energy necessary to increase awareness and to expand the parameters of perception," in order to go beyond the limitations of ordinary consciousness.
Carlos Castaneda's death was just as mysterious as his life. His adopted son claimed that he died while a virtual prisoner of the cult-like followers of Cleargreen Inc., the group that marketed his works in his late years. Castaneda was described by George Marcus and Michael Fisher in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences as an innovative anthropologist whose books "have served as one of several stimuli for thinking about alternative textual strategies within the tradition of ethnography." However, Jay Courtney Fikes, in Carlos Castaneda: Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties, called him a careless ethnographer who "didn't try diligently enough to distinguish between what was true and what was false." Others condemned him as a fraud and religious mythmaker for our post-modern era. Definitions are difficult to apply to such an elusive personality. Paradoxically, the best representation of Castaneda can be viewed in the portrait that Richard Oden drew in 1972 and that Castaneda himself half-erased.
Further Reading:
"Carlos Castaneda's Tensegrity, Presented by Cleargeen Incorporated." http://www.castaneda.org. May 1999.
DeMille, Richard. Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory. Santa Barbara, Capra Press, 1976.
Fikes, Jay Courtney. Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties. Victoria, Millennia Press, 1993.
Marcus, George, and Michael Fisher. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
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