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Summary: WESTERN THOUGHT CHALLENGED
Review: This book is worth the read. It is a refreshing viewpoint about life. It is a journey true or not that awakens the spiritual side of all of us. It is easy to read and a pleasure. An oasis from the modern day routine and suppression of life. The bigger house, faster car etc.
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Summary: An exquisite narrative of an experience beyond imaganiation.
Review: Marlo Morgan's book is a vivid tale of a journey that we all can take with her as we travel through her book. This is a book all women should read as we explore our own being and existence. Morgan and the people she meets can teach us all something.
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Summary: amazing insights
Review: The book is certainly not ethnographically super correct. However, despite the lack of detailed info about the tribe and the culture, Marlo Morgan comes up with a number of really amazing conclusions and insights about human existence and esp. western culture. Any chapter she closes with some philosphical thoughts that I can easily understand. She made me contemplate life in anew way. Some ideas I am attepting to incorporate in my view on life. Some of the critical reviews are focussed on the fictionous contains of the book. My opinion is that the book is not entirely true and not entirely fiction. M.M. has probably lived with the tribe and after all added some fiction to her diary to make the story more interesting and exciting. For me that's okay. After all she describes the Aboriginals very gentle and talks with a lot of respect of them. Don't read the book to know more about the australian native culture. Read it open minded and the mutant message will hit you like a hammer.
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Summary: A typically ill-formed representation of Aboriginal people.
Review: Much of the material contained in this work by Morgan, is an ethnographic perception of indigenous Australian humanity from a superior if not lost western life-form. As an Australian Aboriginal I find it most embarrassing to read about my people, especially if they (we) are innaccurately presented to the intended audience. Much of the stuff that Morgan claims to have been exposed to as an "initiated" outsider just would not happen. Her "intiation into the tribe" and many of the secret ceremonies she claims to have been a part of are alien concepts to me and many other Aboriginal people. The tribal structure of indigenous Australian lifestyle is very restrictive of participants for many rituals and ceremonial practices, (inclusive of members of the tribe let alone outsiders). If you decide to read this work, please keep this in mind: 1. Women are mostly excluded from rituals of indigenous Australians (except rituals that have been developed and maintained for females:ie: birthing, rites of passage, marriage, preparing young girls for their adult life etc., 2. You can never really develop an appreciation of any ones' culture by spending four months with them (you may develop a sense of introduction, not the sense of total knowing that Morgan claims). 3. "Walk-about" is itself a RACIST term applied to Australias' indigenous peoples by anglo-saxons to explain the Aboriginals apparent unwillingness to be controlled by the conformist expectations of the invading British migrants. 4. Most tribal territories and boundaries in Australia are protected by the spirits of our ancestors and as such outsiders are rarely afforded the opportunity to be there let alone cross several in succession and over a period of four months. 5.When the author claims it to be a work of fiction, I personally feel that it was the only true statement that she made throughout the entire effort. cheers enjoy for the work of FICTION that it is and by no means take it to be a definitive work of Australias' Aboriginal peoples, their spirituality, their social organisation and more respectfully their cultures (there exists over 500 different Aboriginal cultures in Australia).
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Summary: Mutant Msg.down under is the perfect compainion to Ramtha.
Review: If you have read the book of Ramtha than you know what I amtalking about. Words can hardly describe the feeling you get fromreading these two books. The belief structures between the teachings of Ramtha and the system by which Marlo Morgan describes the Aborigines as living by is outstanding. A truth to be remembered.
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Summary: A journey for westerners into the culture of the Aboriginies
Review: This is one of the best books that I have read in a long time. Although at first I did not like the style of writing, Morgan redeems herself with a fantanstic story of the natives of Australia. I have always been interested in Native cultures, but Morgan outdoes herself as she teaches Westerners how the "original people" live from day to day. As the main character makes her way from present-day Australia to the outskirts of what we call civilization, she learns the customs of the Aboriginies. I learned how far us humans have come from living with (not against) mother earth. The Aboriginies live a different, and possibly a better existence on earth than I have ever known. All people will gain a sense of what it means to live when they finish this book. I ask all peoples of all cultures to learn about this beautiful culture.
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Summary: This book lacks ethnographic authenticity.
Review: Ms. Morgan implies that no primitive Australian tribe has been previously studied. For her information, the native tribes of Australia have been the focus of intensive study by anthropologists since the 1880s, studies which have generated not only an impressive body of detailed ethnographies, but which have also been at the center of major theoretical essays, from Durkheim's ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE to Levi-Strauss's ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP. She makes no reference to this literature; the historical sources which she does cite are exclusively 19th century, which explains (but does not justify) their extremely racist character. Now, Morgan chooses to label her work "fiction", in order, she says, to protect the identities of her friends and informants. Thus, the reader is left with the implication that, aside from the issue of privacy, this work is genuine ethnography. My knowledge of native Australians is based on having done field research for my doctoral dissertation among native peoples of Cape York Peninsula, followed by keeping up with the Australian ethnographic literature for the subsequent thirty five years, in order to maintain the integrity of the university courses that I taught during that period. If, indeed, Morgan's is genuine ethnography, then it follows that her people ought to share with other Australian tribes certain cultural characteristics, as follows: 1. Australian tribal peoples live in a world overwhelmingly dominated by kinship; that is, in a world where people deal with each other as kinfolk. Personal names are rarely used; people call each other and refer to each other by kin terms; the full range of interpersonal behavior, including both fighting and sexual encounters, take place between and among kinfolk. Morgan's tribe apparently was an exception; the names given in her book are not kin-based. Furthermore, they do not appear to engage in sexual encounters. There is one brief reference to "marriage ceremonies", which have never been reported for other native Australians. 2. Conflict management has been a major focus of Australian ethnographies; Morgan's people appear to live in a state of blissful harmony. 3. For the most part, in traditional Australian tribes, the management of the ritual life was exclusively in the hands of adult males; women were peripheral to some ceremonies, and completely barred from others. Rituals were exclusively tied to bodies of ancestral tales specifically owned by designated kin-groups, and performed only with the expressed consent of the adult male members of such groups. 4. It is hard to know what to make of Morgan's "initiation" into this tribe; published accounts of initiations are not into tribes, but rather, into adult statuses. Such accounts never include "tests": such as Morgan claims to have been subjected to. 5. Travel by local groups over long distances, through other tribal territories, is highly unlikely. Contrary to Morgan, native claims to land ownership have not vanished in Australia; the Outstation movement has sucessfully reaffirmed such claims in a number of cases. Volumes of fiction have been written based solidly on ethnographic fact, from Laura Bohannan's RETURN TO LAUGHTER to Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries. Morgan seems to be trying for Hillerman's vivid and authentic sense of ethnographic presence, but as I see it, her book has more in common with Carlos Castaneda's fantasies.
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Summary: An opportunity to deepen your understanding of spirituality.
Review: Mutant Message is, for me, in a category with several other books I have deeply enjoyed. Books that have shed light into areas that can help us all see a better way to live, a better way to be. I like that the spiritual principles are shared in a story. Somehow it helps learning about people's personal accounts, it gives faith, hope, and encouragement to others learning the same truths. I understand there's a great deal of contraversy over the validity of Morgan's material and yet I chose to hear her message and feel it is cooberated by other authors. If you read "Initiation" by Jenkins and/or "Entering the Circle" by Kharitidi, M.D. I think you'll understand the universality of what Marlo Morgan shares. These stories are also about a woman who has a spiritual adventure, and although one account takes place in South America, the other in Russia and Morgan's in Australia they all have major consistancies that lend support to each other, not to mention the reader. Enjoy them all with an open heart and mind, and I hope you'll be sincerely blessed.
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Summary: Shaky at best...
Review: I had hoped for much more from this book. It is, in fact, very new age, and very _very_ far from interesting outside of that context. Inside that context it is questionable at best. Just not a readable book.
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Summary: This book is not about Aboriginal people!
Review: I read this book with great dismay and white-hot anger. I am an anthropology graduate student (soon to have my phd) who has worked in Australia for 8 years. This is about a white woman "mining" her own version of Aboriginal culture for financial gain. It is an excellent study about the ways in which the West tries to understand it self through using an inaccurate, distored picture of a cultural "other". That practice denies Aboriginal people, Native Americans and others who are considered "exotic" and "primitive" by the mainstream, their full humanity. If you gained something "spiritual" in this book, then you have participated in a system that continues to deny a full and complex humanity to non-Western peoples. The last Pintupi came out of the desert in 1986. They were not lost. There is no "secret" kin group out in the desert. To buy into Marlo's vision is racism, it is colonialism whether it is unde! r oppressive government policies or under the cover of the new age movement. For Shame! Underneath it all we are not all the same. Cultural understanding is difficult, it is hard-work. Hard work she did not engage in. Listen to the voices of REAL Aboriginal people. They write their own books, poetry and make their own films. You want to know about Aboriginal people? Then make an effort and listen to their voices not the exploitative, inaccurate voice of Morgan. Aboriginal people across Australia have organized against her. Hear Them! Listen to Them! Ask Amazon to carry their works. Do your homework! Do not take the easy route. And do not mine other cultures because you feel a "spiritual void." That is your problem. Your uses of other's cultures impacts them. Aboriginal people, for one, have plenty of struggles of their own (for social justice, for cultural integrity, for land rights). Do not make your problems with the modern world one more burden! for them to solve. They do not owe you that.
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