Discovering The North American Afterculture

This "Anthropology of the Future" is a glimpse of a future being shaped, and even lived, right now. It imagines the culture that might emerge if we fully embraced a completly sustainable, sacred world-outlook. A diorama, crafted artifacts, paintings and photomurals show a NEW NATIVE AMERICAN people whose life-patterns are healing to a damaged land. They look like us: a mixture of races and backgrounds, and there are hints that much of the knowledge gathered in our time remains alive in oral tradition. But they are also profoundly unlike us. They know themselves as part of the web of life. Seeing the natural world as an expression of the sacred, they have simplified their lives the better to move in balance with it. This is a glimpse of "a future that works:" sustainable, simple, sacred--and anthropologically defensible. But it's not the only possible way we could live: the Afterculture signals a return to the rich "cultural biodiversity" that has characterized the human species for most of its sojourn here, and the viewer is challenged to imagine other versions, other tribes."

Be sure to check out the proposed diorama for New York. How September 10th!