I totally get where you’re coming from, and I agree Christianity did snuff out a lot of that, but not necessarily the way you may be thinking of it. Christianity was a face, tool, and motivation of empire, and empire seeks to standardize culture for the sake of stability. Christianity has deeply powerful cultural performances too. There are traditional catholic rituals that by their nature as a force of colonizing power and as part of globally dominant cultures (and as part of our own cultures) we see differently from this.
This haka was powerful and beautiful, and part of that is by its own merit, but part is that it is people and culture resisting colonial power.
Also, the modern era has been immensely destructive to culture and ritual except where it is intentionally preserved. While it would be easy to pin it on Christianity and the protestant reformation, the reality is that it’s also caused by the formation of nations (the unification of Italy for example created a shared culture between Venice and Rome for the first time since the fall of the western empire), the advent of mass travel and communication, the rise of industrialized lifestyles, and the shift from generation after generation living in the same spot to the normalization of living somewhat far from your family, all of which combined to more or less radically weaken local cultures.
You make sense, it’s easy to reduce these things into a couple of easy “villains” to point my finger at, but in reality things are always much, much more complex.
For whatever reason, it’s a touchy topic for me and often takes a few steps taken back to see it straight so to say.
I totally get where you’re coming from, and I agree Christianity did snuff out a lot of that, but not necessarily the way you may be thinking of it. Christianity was a face, tool, and motivation of empire, and empire seeks to standardize culture for the sake of stability. Christianity has deeply powerful cultural performances too. There are traditional catholic rituals that by their nature as a force of colonizing power and as part of globally dominant cultures (and as part of our own cultures) we see differently from this.
This haka was powerful and beautiful, and part of that is by its own merit, but part is that it is people and culture resisting colonial power.
Also, the modern era has been immensely destructive to culture and ritual except where it is intentionally preserved. While it would be easy to pin it on Christianity and the protestant reformation, the reality is that it’s also caused by the formation of nations (the unification of Italy for example created a shared culture between Venice and Rome for the first time since the fall of the western empire), the advent of mass travel and communication, the rise of industrialized lifestyles, and the shift from generation after generation living in the same spot to the normalization of living somewhat far from your family, all of which combined to more or less radically weaken local cultures.
You make sense, it’s easy to reduce these things into a couple of easy “villains” to point my finger at, but in reality things are always much, much more complex.
For whatever reason, it’s a touchy topic for me and often takes a few steps taken back to see it straight so to say.
Thanks for the perspective!