Culture-de-Sac

The seeds of scholarship and intellectual inquisitiveness often sprout in unpredictable locations, like over the smoking muzzle of an M-16 rifle in the midst of battle, for example.

David Busch began getting interested in the religions of other cultures during a Vietnam War firefight over a rice paddy. Out of the corner of his eye, Busch spotted five or six Buddhist monks start to walk across a berm along the middle of the rice paddy, directly into the line of fire.

“It was really strange because nobody shot at ’em,” recalls Busch, who received his bachelor’s degree in religious studies, with honors, from Arizona State University in 1993. “They didn’t duck, they didn’t look right, they didn’t look left. They walked straight through,” he says.

“And after they walked over the berm, suddenly, all the fight was out of me. It just didn’t feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting.”

The incident haunted Busch for years.

David Busch
Religious artifacts courtesy ASU Anthropology Museum (Laotian Buddha figure), ASU Art Museum (Huichol mask), and St. Michael’s Monastery.

“I had always been taught that the Christians were the brave ones and everybody else was stupid and cowardly. Here were Buddhists, whom I had no understanding at all about, yet they demonstrated courage that I couldn’t have.”

Busch now has a much greater understanding of the religions of other cultures. Busch wrote an honors thesis on the Huichol people of northwest Mexico. He worked with and among them as a ranch foreman for two years in the early 1970s.

“To be quite honest, I was not particularly interested in them from a religious perspective. They were workers on my ranch,” says Busch, who by that time had already spent more than a year studying transcendental meditation and yoga in India.

“I did have a relationship with the medicine man, but he seemed to be more interested in me than I was in him. He spent a lot of time asking me about India and yoga. He had a little cave that we used to go to. He’d sing Indian songs and I’d chant Hindu mantras. It was a rather strange relationship.”

Don’t get the idea that Busch lost his grip on reality somewhere along the way, or that he has had difficulty adjusting to civilian life back in the states.

He has forged several successful business careers since leaving military service, first as a car dealer, then as the owner of a chain of karate studios. He also operated his own trucking firm. Today, Busch owns Wizard Software, a computer business.

But the well-traveled Busch has a varied background that allows him to bring a unique perspective to ethnographic research. Ethnography is the study of other cultures. His study of the Huichol religion and culture strayed significantly into the anthropological domain.

Anthropological theory has changed over the past century. Busch’s thesis describes how the philosophical underpinning of the theories affected—often detrimentally—what scholars could learn from other cultures. During the past 100 years, anthropologists devoted much effort to studying the Huichol, providing Busch with a ready comparison of how their scientific biases affected their observations.

During the pre-modern period, of last century and the early decades of this century, anthropologists saw themselves as objective observers who were looking at disappearing cultures.

“They were rushing out to get some kind of glimpse of what we were like in our own past. They didn’t view culture as a complete unit in itself, but as a primitive, developing unit leading toward us,” Busch explains. “Naturally, we were at the high end of the scale. They were at the low end.”

Racial overtones mar the research of the pre-modern period, according to Busch.

“That’s when they were measuring racial characteristics to try to determine that the whiter you were, the more evolved you were, and the blacker you were, the less evolved you were.”

The idea that ethnographers should be participant-observers became popular during the modern period that began developing early this century. Scholars believed that to understand another culture they had to immerse themselves in it, to learn its language and nuances, and to become like its people as much as possible.

In the post-modern period of the last few decades, scholars began to realize that many cultures were not entirely disappearing. They were adapting to the external influences.

“The thinking process started to change. Maybe they’re not precursors to ourselves. Maybe they’re complete within themselves,” Busch says.

“We started to change our attitudes about ourselves. You can’t be an aborigine. You may speak the aborigine language, but you don’t think like an aborigine. You think as your culture made it possible for you to think,” he says.

“We began to look at other cultures as collaborators in adding to a body of knowledge, rather than as specimens to be studied.”

Busch examined data on the Huichol gathered by the University of Chicago’s Robert M. Zingg in 1930. He suggested that he could provide a richer, fuller picture of Huichol culture by applying post-modern techniques to the earlier data.

Busch’s own experience with the Huichol and the readings he came across later indicated that the peyote hunt is the central religious expression of the Huichol. Zingg devoted only nine pages of an 800-page work to the peyote hunt.

“Not only does he have no firsthand experience of this particular aspect of their religion, he quotes from someone who did an ethnography 40 years previous to him, who also never saw a peyote hunt. They’re both quoting secondary, third and fourth sources on a central issue to what Huichol religion means to a Huichol.

“The whole year evolves around the peyote pilgrimage. And yet it was only described as if it were some kind of religious pilgrimage in order to make it rain, attached to environment rather than attached to a social and psychological need.”

Zingg too often made the mistake of asking those questions of the Huichol that fulfilled his own expectations about their culture. “You have to formulate the questions in such a way that you allow the people to draw themselves out,” Busch says.

Writing an honors thesis and defending it orally before a committee of ASU scholars is a requirement for graduation from the ASU Honors College. The quality of an honors thesis is supposed to reach far beyond a typical research paper, and Busch’s thesis did just that, according to Honors College lecturer Allison Coudert.

Coudert served on Busch’s thesis committee and also had him as a student in her Race, Class and Gender class a couple years ago. “He’s a maverick. He’s a wonderful maverick,” Coudert says.

Like many of the nearly 1,200 ASU students over 40 years old, Busch enriched the class by relating his personal experiences.

“He shocked the class,” Coudert recalls. “He’d been quite quiet and then he told about when he’d been very young, he’d gone voluntarily to Vietnam.”

He also described how he was terribly prejudiced as the result of social attitudes predominate in the 1950s. “He told the class how he had changed. It was just fabulous. You could hear a pin drop.”—Steve Koppes