The New Age in New Zealand

Abstract

Analysis considers the variety of beliefs and practices which collectively comprise the manifestation of the New Age movement in New Zealand. The New Age is an environmentally ambiguous and individually affirmative collection of ideologies, which value the late twentieth century as a period demanding the integration of an individual's body/mind/and soul into a spiritually potent Whole Self. The specific focus of analysis has been upon gender roles, and it is asserted that despite implying the establishment of a New structure to gender relations, the New Age reimposes culture/nature, control/empowerment, and knowledge + wealth = power dichotomies upon gender roles. The ultimate result being the idealisation of the Whole Self as male. The New Age, then, is revealed as fallaciously/phallaciously 'new' - since it does, in fact, retain primacy of the male from previous patriarchal religious and cultural institutions. Such conclusions were reached after detailed content analysis of advertisements and articles in three New Age journals (two of which are published in New Zealand). Amongst other findings, content analysis revealed gender differentiated practitioner interests in both the type and purpose of advertised health/healing/and spiritual services: men showing a tendency for involvement in cultural, client-controlling practices; and women tending to be involved in nature-oriented, client-empowering services. Twenty-five New Age groups and centres advertised in the two New Zealand journals were contacted for information on their services. Information was further supplemented by attendance at a New Age conference, and revelations made by channeled entities on audio tapes. In critiquing New Age gender relations, and the more general interests of the movement (particularly its commercial orientation), the post-structuralist deconstructive a/theology of Mark C. Taylor was utilised. And feminist theory - particularly that of Luce Irigaray - underpins much of the analysis. Both the deconstructive a/theological and feminist theories emphasise that, as with previous patriarchal religion, in the New Age male primacy is legitimated and sustained through the subjectification of woman as Other - a less-than-complete Male Whole Self.