Counter-Cultural Egalitarianism: a comparative analysis of New Age and other 'alternative' communities

This paper makes a plea for examining New Religious Movements (NRMs), including the New Age Movement, in terms of contrasting modes of social organisation. NRMs share such contrasting modes with other societies well outside the Western industrial-capitalist world, notably hunting and gathering societies. This means that theoretical discussion relating to the social forms of hunter-gatherers can enlighten the social forms of NRMs. The paper demonstrates the ethnographic similarities between NRMS and hunter-gatherers in relation to the social dimensions of egalitarianism and hierarchy. Egalitarianism as a counter-cultural strategy of opposition is then explicated according to Boehm's idea of reverse dominance. Hierarchy, among NRMs organised quite differently from ‘mainstream’ hierarchy, is meanwhile explicated in terms of distinctive space-time circumstances of social aggregation where people are constricted on limited areas of territory. In counter-cultural strategies, it is concluded, egalitarianism amounts to a ‘witnessing’ opposition, while hierarchy amounts to a ‘symbolic’ opposition.