Modelos de análisis de las migraciones

The shaman in tribal society is either a singular figure or part of a small group defined by ancestral bloodline or bio-cultural stigmata. His role is constrained by inherited beliefs and rituals and his influence is culturally synchronized to become pre-eminent in relation to cyclical or ceremonial requirements. At feast-time, war, birth, mourning and burial, the shaman’s power is ascendant. At other times it is an understated, immanent element in the life of the tribe.

In contrast, celebrities are relatively profuse in modern society, and their presence is ubiquitous. It is not merely a question of the manifold ranks of celebrity relating to sport, music, art, film, literature, humanitari-anism, politics and the other institutions of modern culture. Within these ranks, upward and downward mobility is a continuous characteristic of the status hierarchy to which celebrity watchers, and the general public, are perpetually attuned. In addition, the mass-media supply a diet of celetoids and celeactors to the public. The very prodigality of celebrity culture in contemporary society suggests an absence.

It might be thought, as Structuralists do, that the cause of this absence is materialism. The desire for wealth creates an overheated culture in which celebrities are constructed as commodities for economic accumulation. The celebrity race is very obviously bound up with the desire for wealth. But material explanations alone cannot explain the prodigality of celebrity in modern culture. After all, celebrity performers do not stop performing after they become millionaires. Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Tina Turner, Joni Mitchell, Barry White, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Elton John, Mick Jagger and Neil Young are sufficiently rich never to have to work again.

Greed alone is not a sufficient motive to explain their readiness to devote much of their fifties and beyond to performing. Yet while they may now pace themselves more carefully, they do not retire from the screen or

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stage. Public acclaim answers to a deep psychological need in all of us for recognition. Acclaim carries the sensual pleasure of being acknowledged as an object of desire and approval.

Despite external appearances, celebrities are perhaps among the most insecure people in our midst. Their appeal is certainly a measure of our own insecurity. The original condition of being in the world is openness.

This is the cause of our vulnerability and our desire to impose control.

Being in the world is always socially interconnected. Hence there is an inherent tension between being and society, for we can never be entirely comfortable in a world where the satisfaction of our desires depends on others, and where the principles of scarcity and human vulnerability pattern our actions and responses. The sociological attempt to integrate being and society around ideology or hegemony is inadequate, for it presents a one-dimensional view of openness in which, for example, being is understood as the reflection of corporate power, the culture industry, capital, the state, patriarchy, money culture or an equivalent directing agency. On this reading, a significant function of celebrity is to enable us to manage vulnerability and cope with the fact of our own mortality.

Certainly the dilemma of vulnerability and immortality is accentu-ated in ‘post-God’ societies. The death of God is the original end of the unifying recognition that we live under one ideological system. Hence-forward, the differentiation of taste and the pluralization of culture become more pronounced in the public sphere. In the absence of a unify-ing deity, some people search for cult figures to give life new meanunify-ing.

From the particularity of a cultural position, universal claims are often made. It is unsatisfactory to view celebrities only as objects of control and manipulation. They are also symbols of belonging and recognition that distract us in positive ways from the terrifying meaninglessness of life in a post-God world. Our desire for distraction makes us peculiarly vulnerable to shamanism.

Both Charles Manson and Jim Jones exerted hypnotic power over their 95 C E L E B R I T Y A N D R E L I G I O N

disciples. Manson was the ringleader behind the murders of Sharon Tate and other celebrities in Hollywood in 1969. Jones was the eponymous head of Jonestown, a religious community in Guyana, who ordered his flock of 913to commit ‘revolutionary suicide’ in 1978. More recently, David Koresh was the inspirational leader at the centre of the Waco massacre. Shoko Asahara was the figurehead of the Aum Shinrikyo (‘Supreme Truth’) move-ment in Japan, who was found guilty of unleashing sarin nerve gas at Matsumoto city in 1994, killing seven people and injuring 144 others, and in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, killing twelve and injuring thousands.

In 2000, at the Ugandan settlements of Rugazi, Buhunga, Roshojwa and Kanungu, the remains of over 900 people were exhumed. The dead were recovered from the headquarters of the ‘Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God’. They were the victims of a sect headed by Joseph Kibwetere, Father Dominic Kataribabo and a former prostitute, Credonia Mwerinde. The millennarian ‘Movement’ predicted the end of the world on the last day of the twentieth century. The sect members were prophesized to be rescued by ‘a chariot of fire sent by the Lord’. When the prophecy failed, the congregation grew restive, and Mwerinde postponed the date of deliverance until March. At the time of writing, the subsequent pattern of events remains unclear. Newspaper reports suggest that 400 cult followers may have been executed, and a further 550 immolated them-selves at the behest of their leaders.

The success of televangelism in the USA is further evidence of the persistence of religious belief. However, without seeking to mitigate the significance of evangelicals, fundamentalists and pentecostals in America’s culture and economy, their public profile exaggerates their power. Their prominence is a symptom of the relative decline of the mainstream churches. The theatricality and emotionalism of Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson draws on the folk tradition of evangelism in America. But tele-vangelism is also an extension of the mass-media, and employs the basic devices of elevation and magic that are integral to celebrity culture.

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Celebrity culture is inherently inflationary. For the impetus is always on being bigger and brighter. Organized religion has itself succumbed to this tendency. By 1995 Pope John Paul II had canonized 276 saints and beatified 768 people. This is more than all the other twentieth-century popes combined. Jean Paul II’s world tours, with the ritual kissing of the soil on alighting from his aircraft, and the staged authenticity of mass rallies and live TV links, clearly borrow many of the ceremonies and devices refined by Hollywood and the rock industry for the presentation of celebrity to the public.

Celebrity culture is no substitute for religion. Rather, it is the milieu in which religious recognition and belonging are now enacted. That this milieu has adapted ceremonies of ascent and descent that were prefigured in religion is beside the point. The ubiquity of the milieu is the real issue.

Today perhaps only the family rivals celebrity culture in providing the scripts, prompts and supporting equipment of ‘impression management’

for the presentation of self in public life. Indeed, a good deal of evidence, notably the high rate of divorce and the rising number of single-person households, suggests that the family is in decline, while celebrity culture seems to be triumphantly ascendant.

The desire to be recognized as special or unique is perhaps an inevitable feature of cultures built around the ethic of individualism. The overwhelming desire for ordinary people to be validated as stars is, arguably, part of the modern psychopathology of everyday life, and is significant only in the age of celebrity culture. For example, Jennifer Ringley, an otherwise ‘ordinary’ person, has constructed a website that consists of scenes from her daily life – eating, reading, talking to friends and sleeping. Her sex life is not shown. In 1998 her site was receiving over 500,000 hits daily.

Some years ago Christopher Lasch argued that the ‘cult of narcissism’

permeates contemporary culture.¹²The narcissistic personality lives in a condition dominated by self-absorption, in which psychic and social

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vance is focused on the practices and wants of the self rather than on the state of society. Narcissism is associated with the hyper-inflation of the ordinary. The musings and experiences of a housewife, an office worker, a student – ordinary people – are invested with cosmic significance. Lasch had in mind the spread of popular psychology and psychic self-help programmes in the late 1960s and ’70s.

Ringley’s website is an extension of the cult of narcissism. It presup-poses not only that a mass audience will find the monotonous, predictable existence of an ordinary person interesting, but that regularly following this routine produces social cohesion. To begin with, spectators are perhaps drawn to the site for voyeuristic reasons. It offers a keyhole into the private existence of someone else. But voyeurism is an insufficient reason to explain the longevity and popularity of the site. In addition the website offers repeated opportunities for identification and recognition. By entering the site regularly, spectators establish a routine in their own lives that is the basis for filling the void of loneliness.

In this chapter I have questioned whether celebrity culture has replaced religion as the focus of recognition and belonging. I submit that the rites of ascent and descent that were originally developed in primitive religion have been taken over and recast by celebrity culture. This is not, however, a one-way process. Organized religion has borrowed some of the forms and styles of retailing and mass communication perfected in the organization of celebrity in public life. Disneyland has been used as a stage for religious recruitment, and Pope John Paul II has turned some aspects of the papal dispensation of sainthood into an Oscar ceremony. I have also submitted that convergence is not total. Organized religion remains committed to producing a general view of social and spiritual order.

Celebrity culture motivates intense emotions of identification and devo-tion, but it is basically a fragmented, unstable culture that is unable to sustain an encompassing, grounded view of social and spiritual order.

None the less, some elements of celebrity culture do have a sacred signifi-98 C E L E B R I T Y

cance for spectators. To the extent that organized religion has declined in the West, celebrity culture has emerged as one of the replacement strate-gies that promote new orders of meaning and solidarity. As such, notwithstanding the role that some celebrities have played in destabilizing order, celebrity culture is a significant institution in the normative achieve-ment of social integration.

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