Journeys to Others and Lessons of Self: Carlos Castaneda in Camposcape
Journal of Transnational American Studies January 1, 2012 Ageeth Sluis 35 citations
Using Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, this article analyzes how place and gender shape race politics in Carlos Castaneda's shamanism series. Castaneda promoted a "separate reality" based on an indigenous worldview, inviting transnational middle-class youth to escape bourgeois values by journeying to an idealized, anachronistic Mexican countryside for spiritual fulfillment. While his work proposed new spaces of difference in Mexico, it inscribed them with a masculinist discourse that neutralized gender tensions within the counterculture movements of both Mexico and the United States.