Journeys to Others and Lessons of Self: Carlos Castaneda in Camposcape

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.

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Abstract

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this article examines the importance of place and gender within constructions of race politics in Carlos Castaneda’s series on shamanism. Championing a “separate reality” predicated on an indigenous worldview, Castaneda’s lessons invited transnational middle-class youth to "journey" alongside him to camposcape—an anachronistic and idealized countryside—as a means to escape the bourgeois values of their homelands and find spiritual fulfillment in a timeless and "authentic" Mexico. Castaneda’s work proposed new viable spaces of difference in Mexico, yet inscribed these spaces with a masculinist discourse that served to neutralize the gender trouble within the counterculture movement in both Mexico and the US.