Back to the future - The New Age movement and hunter-gatherers

The paper attends to some remarkable parallels, in terms of social organisa tion, concepts of the person, and cosmology, between contemporary New Agers in Glastonbury, England, and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies such as the Bushman and Inuit Eskimo. Such objective observation complements the conce ptions of the New Agers themselves, who see, amongst "tribal" people, an id eal way of living. An interpretation of the New Age movement, as a counter- cultural way of life in the present-day West, may accordingly be offered: t hat the movement reflects a determined effort, on the part of adherents, to rethink in terms of first principles the very nature of human society.