The body’s potential is realised against the threat of toxins through a change in dietary and nutritional habits. Both persons perceive such practices to be against the mainstream grain and therefore alternative. In the secondary academic literature dietary and nutritional therapy is not always considered counter-cultural but might instead be categorised as ‘popular’ rather than
‘alternative’ medicine.384 The ever-present contrast with allopathic medicine ensures that for truth-seekers such practices fall firmly into the latter category even while the opposite point of view might be sustained. Coward pinpoints a ‘fundamental message’ underlying ‘all the advice in the healthy-living circles […] – it availeth nought unless you attend to your diet’.385
The wider turn towards healthy eating has coincided with a greater awareness of potential dangers lurking in diet choices, with the very advent of Beck’s risk society, a sociology resting fundamentally upon increasing levels of reflexivity in post-traditional society. Coward claims that
‘diet is the privileged arena where the sense of personal responsibility for our health can be worked out. ‘No wonder there has been such panic as the facts about the adulteration at source have become widely known’.386 As new pieces of information about possible risks and/or threats are shared between individuals across social spaces, such as Truthjuice groups, individuals reclaim control over their physical well-being by attending to the everyday concerns of diet. This
383 Mol, Identity, p. 5; Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1999), p. 209.
384 Vaskilimi, ‘Introduction’, p. viii.
385 Rosalind Coward, ‘The Meaning of Health Foods’, in Consumption, Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences Volume 4, ed. by Daniel Miller, p. 50.
386 Ibid. Emphasis added.
151 aspect of truth-seeking resembles the sort of domestic or “hearth-based” religion that Myerhoff talks about that manifests itself through everyday practices in the home, thereby attaining its endurance and vitality as a living faith.387
In Mauss’s terms, this is the production of a certain habitus in accordance with a set of counter-cultural understandings of the physical environment.388 Sociologist Max Weber used this same term when talking about the connection between a religion’s conception of the divine and their ideas and practices concerning salvation.389 For truth-seekers, possessed by an ethic of conviction springing from the conviction of conspiracy, salvation rests upon further revealing the conspiracy, and, crucially, remedying its ills; only then is one saved from ignorance and holistic deficiency.
Fundamentally important to the behavioural forms that this habitus takes is the ideational focus of “conspiracy theory” to different modes of power relationships, especially infringements on personal liberty and wellbeing. Here, the work of Michel Foucault on power is useful to aid our analysis because he shares their preoccupation with issues of power and domination. Foucault distinguishes four types of knowledge technologies: technologies of production enable us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; technologies of sign systems enable communication via meanings, symbols, or signification; technologies of power ‘determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination’; and technologies of self ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’, ‘transforming’ themselves in such a way that achieves ‘happiness, purity, wisdom, or immortality’.390 Through altering patterns of consumption, truth-seekers engage in technologies of the self in a way that combats the technologies of power to which they are subjected on an ongoing, daily basis.391 The practices that truth-seekers adopt, whether drawn directly from alternative channels or appropriated from the mainstream, have a subversive quality that explicitly challenges the perceived relations of power between self and society, or truth-seeker and controllers. Truth-seekers’ technologies of the self, contextualised by extrinsic technologies of power, thus become technologies of resistance.
Foucault also helps illuminate the way in which these technologies of resistance assume their significance to truth-seekers because of their greater sensitivity to forms of domination. Just as Foucault argued that modern developments in medicine did not result in the elimination of disease, but rather, ‘the whole dark underside of disease came to light […] [when] what was
387 Barbara Myerhoff, “Jewish Comes Up in You from the Roots”, in ed. by Michael Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 346-7.
388 Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, in Beyond the Body Proper, ed. by Margaret Locke and Judith Farquhar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 50-68.
389 Weber, Sociology, pp. 158-159.
390 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michael Foucault, ed. by L. H. Martin (London: Tavistock, 1988), p. 18.
391 Ibid.
152 fundamentally invisible is suddenly offered to the brightness of the gaze’.392 By revealing previously unseen dangers, truth-seekers have likewise changed the ‘forms of visibility’ and brought fresh dangers to light.393 Similarly, the focus on technologies of power such as Codex Alimentarius reveals a near-perfected system of ‘bio-power’ that Foucault himself perceived as motive force in the development of modern civilisation.394 Yet the important point is that by perceiving ever-greater forms of domination in society truth-seekers also illuminate further avenues of resistance.
With this in mind, the dispositions of consumption are subtle but of crucial significance as to why truth-seekers do not suffer from the ‘disabling’ effect of “conspiracy theory” as stipulated by Fenster, and Hofstadter.395 Only towards the end of my numerous interviews did I realise that I was never given or even offered tap-water; the practice had become second-nature to truth-seekers. The nightmarish concept of Agenda 21 considered as a whole, inferring that social reality is pervaded by threats to health and well-being, might understandably be assumed to disable truth-seekers. However, this deadly ‘whole’, like Bauman says of ‘the total and unassailable prospect of death’ within modern life, ‘has been sliced and fragmented into innumerable small and smaller-still threats to survival’.396 Viewed as such, solutions emerge as a set of practices rooted in individuated patterns of consumption. This is achieved partly through different speakers addressing different aspects of Agenda 21; each week, truth-seekers hear about a selection of threats with concomitant responses.
In my role of participant observer, I therefore stopped drinking tap-water and drank only bottled mineral water. I had never given much thought to drinking water – if anything, I did not drink enough of it – but upon changing to bottled water I experienced a sense of empowerment by knowing that I was drinking pure, “natural” water. Perhaps I was simply more aware that I was better hydrating myself, but the heightened sense of wellbeing was palpable; furthermore, every drink of water reminded me of both the conspiracy narrative behind the action and the holistic ideational framework. In this sense, the greater conspiracy manifested in aspects of the physical universe, while its solutions are embodied in the flesh; and again, my body was the battlefield, only now I understood that I had recourse to claim ongoing private victories from lessons gleaned from the wider movement.
392 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London: Routledge, 2012 [1975]), pp. 241-242.
393 Ibid., p. 242.
394 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 143.
395 See Introduction; Fenster, p. 6; Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, p. 40.
396 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Postmodern Religion?’, in Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. by Paul Heelas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 67.
153 6.4 Spiritual ‘Healing’
Although rooted in physicality truth-seekers repeatedly tie bodily practices to a spiritual dimension. Simone, for example, talked about how “good diet, things of that nature, it enhances your body and people can become spiritual […] your soul and your body are very close so it’s important to look after yourself.” The domain of the natural is imbued with spiritual potentiality, expressing a holistic ontology. Dennis’s remark of “mind over matter” is not meaningless but a statement of the interconnections existing between the material and immaterial universe.
Intentionality amounts to an exercise of power over physical reality.