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

The paper attends to some remarkable parallels, in terms of social organisation, 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 conceptions of the New Agers themselves, who see, amongst "tribal" people, an ideal 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: that the movement reflects a determined effort, on the part of adherents, to rethink in terms of first principles the very nature of human society.