Reviews. 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse. Edited by Joseph Gelfer. Equinox, xi pages. $99.95 cloth.

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1 Review: 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse by Joseph Gelfer Review by: Kevin Whitesides Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 16, No. 1 (August 2012), pp Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: Accessed: 11/08/ :59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.

2 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse. Edited by Joseph Gelfer. Equinox, xi pages. $99.95 cloth. As the December solstice of 2012 nears, millions of people worldwide are turning their attention toward the conclusion of a large cycle in the Long Count calendar of the Classic Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. Despite the influence of this constellation of ideas on popular culture and its significance in a variety of fringe subcultures, humanities scholars have given little sustained attention to this rapidly diversifying improvisational millenarian milieu. Joseph Gelfer s anthology provides a breath of fresh air in the academic treatment of an incredibly significant and pervasive contemporary millennial phenomenon. As the first critical anthology to address the topic, it brings together a satisfying array of interdisciplinary approaches, which, though by no means exhaustive, is an excellent initial step in moving toward a rounded analysis of the 2012 phenomenon. Gelfer begins by acknowledging that the volume does not present a singular view on 2012 and that there are some internal contradictions between the presentations of different authors (3). I am of the opinion that this lack of a coherent viewpoint is one of the strengths of this volume rather than a weakness. Topics such as the merits and demerits of cultural appropriation and the proper attitude to take toward addressing pseudoscience are complicated and it is important to highlight the lack of consensus between different scholars and the inconsistent goals of different disciplines. Up until the release of the present volume, the state of academic attention to 2012 has been dominated by astronomers and Maya scholars who have, understandably, primarily adopted a debunking approach with an emphasis on correcting inaccurate understandings of scientific knowledge and of Maya culture. Though the value of such corrective measures should not be undermined, and are especially important for alleviating public fears and misapprehensions, I find that they tend to provide minimal analytical insight into the nature of the cultural phenomenon itself and do little to hinder its propagation. It is into this void of close academic treatment of the 2012 phenomenon in its own right that 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse brings some fresh insight to the discourse on this popular countercultural apocalypse. The preface by renowned Mayanist Michael Coe is short but worth examination as it speaks to scholarly complicity in the development and intensification of popular apocalyptic fervor. Coe is frequently cited as 110

3 having initiated the 2012 phenomenon with his 1966 popular treatise, The Maya, where he suggested that the Classic Maya would have viewed the closing of the thirteenth bak tun of the Long Count as Armageddon. In the present volume, he admits, I was probably out to scare my readers a bit, and suggests that he didn t actually initiate the 2012 phenomenon because the annihilation date was totally wrong (viii). He is referring to the fact that his 1966 text used a miscalculated date of 24 December 2011 rather than the current primary focus on 21 December 2012, ignoring several early proponents who explicitly utilized his erroneous date for their millennial projections. Further, though his book explicitly states that the Maya believed our present universe would be annihilated at the end of the cycle, he here acknowledges it is certain that they did not [believe this]. Nonetheless, he tells us that in all subsequent editions of the book I saw no reason to change the wording of my destruction scenario, and will not for the eighth, which is now in preparation (viii ix). Early scholarly speculation about a matter is healthy. Persistence in propagating a message that is known to be inaccurate even after realizing that the misinformation has spawned an apocalyptic milieu seems careless. Fortunately, most of the chapters greatly improve on Coe s ambivalence. Robert Sitler s chapter is an updated reprint of his seminal 2006 article in Nova Religio. He argues that those contemporary Maya who have assimilated expectations for 2012 are the exception rather than the rule and that these have gained their beliefs via hermeneutic feedback from interactions with Western counterculture. Sitler demonstrates that while a few contemporary Maya have taken over the role of culturally legitimating the 2012 phenomenon, the inclusion of crystal skulls, Pleiadian Masters, and connections with Atlantis in their narratives belie influence from the West more than they demonstrate a continuity of tradition from the Classic Maya ( C.E.) to the present. Mark Van Stone s contribution provides a thorough overview of both the sources of information for our understanding of the Maya and their calendrical systems (glyphic inscriptions on monuments, post-classical codices, and post-colonial accounts), as well as the sources for misunderstanding that have led to skewed views of what the Maya knew and believed proponents have looked for a cohesive message about what the Maya thought about 2012 despite the fact that the Maya possessed no entirely unified cosmology among their disparate city-states. Maya texts are fragmentary, often contradict each other, were deliberately manipulated, especially dates, included uncorrected errors, and calendars in various cities were not synchronized with each other (33 34). John Hoopes develops the concept of Mayanism as an eclectic collection of beliefs [about the Maya] that grow out of what has been variously identified as the esoteric tradition, New Age thought, and metaphysical religion (39). Though his approach to the topic is sometimes 111

4 Nova Religio undergirded with a pejorative tone, Hoopes nonetheless provides an invaluable historical account of the development of Western romance with our own projections of the Maya. He traces apocalyptic interest in the Maya all the way back to Christopher Columbus, who considered his discovery of the New World as an integral part of usher[ing] in the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world (43). Following the thread of Mayanism through nineteenth-century adventurers and novelists up through the early development of the 2012 phenomenon, Hoopes has done a great deal of detective work that will benefit future researchers, and he does an admirable job of connecting the contemporary 2012 phenomenon to a long history of esoteric and theosophical speculation on the Maya that stretches back to the very first encounters between Europe and Mesoamerica. Pete Lentini contributes the most analytically fruitful chapter to the volume in which he examines 2012 in light of existing scholarship on countercultural millennial movements and asks whether the 2012 phenomenon can be analyzed as an aspect of the cultic milieu that Colin Campbell proposed in the 1970s (including Michael Barkun s more recent notion of stigmatized knowledge ). He does this through a detailed analysis of a large sample of 2012 YouTube videos. While Lentini sactual data-collection and analysis are among the most theoretically rewarding contributions, his conclusion suffers from a conflation between mainstream and authoritative accounts. He suggests that due to the inclusion of clips from the History Channel and Roland Emmerich s 2012 film (produced by Sony Pictures), the boundaries between the underground and the mainstream are blurred in many of the 2012 YouTube videos (77 78). As a result, he says that the videos can be considered representative of a cultic milieu lite, because they rely on commercial sources of information (78). While it is worth distinguishing between strictly countercultural sources and the influence of more popular sources, Lentini seems to misunderstand Barkun s treatment of the cultic milieu as embracing claims that have been marginalized by mainstream institutions. By this understanding, there is no inherent conflict between stigmatized knowledge that is propagated through the counterculture and knowledge that filters through the counterculture into popular media as long as both perpetuate claims that have been stigmatized by intellectual authorities, especially to the degree that the mainstream sources are themselves presenting information derived from the counterculture. The chapters by Graham St. John and Joseph Gelfer provide very thorough ethnographic accounts of how 2012 functions in different cultural milieus. St. John examines the propagation of certain strands of 2012 through psychedelic trance music albums, events, and festivals. Gelfer looks at the significance of 2012 in Australia and New Zealand, including the appropriation of Aboriginal culture (alongside that of the Maya). This sort of regional and ethnographic approach provides 112

5 an invaluable service to theorists who require accurate information about the situation on the ground in order to develop coherent models of the phenomena as they play out in the real world. Undoubtedly the most controversial inclusion is the final chapter by John Major Jenkins who is himself a proponent of While the inclusion of an insider in an academic anthology might seem to legitimate Jenkins narrative, I believe it is a valuable contribution, which Gelfer mitigates with the qualification that readers may be interested in comparing some of the statements in the chapters about John Major Jenkins with his own concluding chapter (3). Indeed one finds quite a variety of opinions on Jenkins throughout the volume. Sitler considers him by far the best-researched among 2012 proponents with a solid understanding of Maya calendar systems and astronomy (14); Hoopes claims that Jenkins develops new myths and fallacies in the service of truth (55); and astronomer Kristine Larsen treats him as consistently dismissed by academic experts and undaunted by inconvenient fact (98 99). Jenkins portrays himself as a misunderstood amateur scholar whose goal is merely to reconstruct what the ancient Maya thought about 2012 (166). Since his treatment of himself is not taken for granted, given Gelfer s early qualification, the inclusion of an insider provides a valuable perspective not otherwise available through a strictly phenomenological lens. Despite a couple of weak chapters (including what is essentially a glorified film review of Roland Emmerich s 2012) and a few sketchy conclusions along the way, 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse provides a much-needed interdisciplinary analysis of a pervasive phenomenon that has received very little critical attention despite a longstanding history of academic interest in millenarian activity. Though it is necessarily nonexhaustive in its coverage, this volume has set the bar for future work on the 2012 phenomenon. Anyone with an interest in a critical examination of the 2012 milieu (or of popular millenarian movements more generally), or in patterns of cultural appropriation (both from and by indigenous cultures) would do well to spend some time with this volume. Kevin Whitesides, University of Edinburgh Dying for Faith: Religious Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World. Edited by Madawi Al-Rasheed and Marat Shterin. I. B. Tauris and Co., Ltd., pages. $94.00 cloth; $30.79 paper. It seems a bit surprising to the reviewer that connections haven t been more widely articulated between the recent (now somewhat fading) discourse on cult violence and the more topical discourse on suicide bombing including the ramifications of the 9/11 event. However, the linkage has now been made and is embodied in the provocative volume, 113