Longing for Animism: Intimacy With Landscapes And Other Dreck
I've suddenly started working seven days a week, which has cut into my thinking time somewhat, and I've been absent from this blog now for longer than I care to think about. I'm also frustrated by an as-yet-unfinished post on Oomoto and the concept of "mazeways"- the techniques people use to accomplish their goals which, while delineated by culture, are intensely personal and hence valued as an extension of the self. An anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania came up with the concept half a century ago, it explains many of the difficulties experienced by the recovery efforts in New Orleans after the floods... why the hell can't I make a good entry come together? Okay, that doesn't matter. This is about animism.
There's this scene I fucking hate in Avatar that also shows up in pretty much every other WTPNIAH movie.
Basically it goes like this: white guy kills something large with superior (and quickly acquired) techno hunting skills. Native person upbraids white guy for being an idiot. White guy seems puzzled. Native person explains that when you kill something, you must apologize to and thank the pained, dying animal, or else you risk offending it. At some later point in the movie, this is revealed as a key secret white guy must learn. In some movies, the "sorry, thanks" lesson (sometimes accompanied by some fear-factor-esque ritual, like eating raw heart muscle) is taught not by a native but by a reviled-yet-wise older white guy, like a favorite, cabin-living uncle who carries the secret of white guy's inheritance... look, I could shoot this fish for hours. Its a bad cliche. We all know it.
What we don't ever see is exactly what difference it makes whether you apologize to an animal or not. Possibly this is because hunting is, in visual fiction, unrealistic- killing a large mammal generally involves a long period of thrashing, horrible noises, and general unpleasantness that inspires even seasoned hunters to cringe, and makes for very disturbing television. Why any animal spirit would accept this in exchange for a whispered "now my family can eat" or whatever white guy protagonist is supposed to offer is completely beyond me. Yet, it persists- which to me implies that there is something about the ritual that is embedded in a Euro-american conception of the "authentic." For some reason, this is something we think we should be doing, even if we express that by projecting it onto the Other. So its worth looking at.
There is a pop-anthro cliche that states that people living in deserts tend to be monotheistic, while people living in rainforests tend to be polytheistic, animistic, or pantheistic. While statistically this may be true, I've never quite bought the justification (expressed in the Discover Magazine article in that link) that "deserts teach large, singular lessons" about environmental hostility while rainforests offer nuance, including "more species of ants on a single tree than one would find in all the British Isles." (What? Is this like "God loves beetles" creationist determinism?)
I think a more likely explanation is that religions develop from rituals, rather than vice versa. Many major religions, including Shinto and Vedic traditions, weren't even considered religions at all until other religions showed up and practitioners needed a conceptual map to distinguish "people who do like we've always done" from "people who are into that new god with the hat." Over time, "doing like we've always done" becomes more self-aware and standardized, and eventually forms a religion in its own right- Shinto, while it retains its splendiferous array of Kami and shrines and local rituals, is considered (mostly) a single religion with a more-or-less unified priesthood, Hinduism has a conceptual basis (the other avatar reference in this post) that binds a diverse range of practices and deities into a single theology. One can see a similar process developing with Native American practices in the US, with the emergence of "intertribal" pow-wows that cheerfully blend dances, songs, and fry-bread from all across the continent into an eclectic but highly-viable mash-up that at this rate will likely outlast the United States. If one swallows one's skepticism hard enough, one can even see a regularization at work in neo-paganism, which accumulates European practices believed to pre-date christianity like a flea market collects unsellable sweaters, but now we're back to the Authenticity question and we don't need to go there right now.
Rituals, however, tend to focus on repeated events or constant locations of importance- a river, the planting date of a given crop, a particular mountain, calving time for hunted or herded animals- and these, in turn, tend to be critical aspects of a productive landscape. If your landscape bleeds productivity (like, say, in a rainforest) there are probably thousands of familiar points in space and time that you, and your ancestors, and your descendants, mark with rituals and recognitions. If you live someplace where there's a lot of scrub between you and the next pasture, or a long wait between growing seasons, you will probably spend a lot more time travelling through a landscape, and hence won't be able to develop the same depth of relationship with a certain standing stone, or a copse of trees. Monotheisms are just more portable.
Interestingly the Discover article mentions rain forest "tribes" that are monotheistic, but doesn't talk about any cultures with a two-register religious system, like the division of Classical Greek practices into Olympian (portable, oligotheistic) and Cthonic (local, polytheistic,) or the Catholic recognition of a monopolar deity paired with a syncretic, localized pantheon of saints, each with their own feast day and weird parade outfits.
There's a crude analogy to be made with the commodity fetishism that underlies globalisation, and the romantic quest for the authentic. The more delocalized and transient global capital becomes, the more consumption patterns tend to favor the portable and the reproducible, and the closer each economic and cultural sector gets to an oligopolar or a monopolar theology. McDonald's is everywhere, Mueller's Barbecue is only on one street in Austin, Texas. Capital and those who spend it favor Mickey D's because they can develop a relationship with it throughout their peregrinated lives- but only because like Jay-Z, or the 16-inch concrete block, its the same everywhere you go. So naturally, the romantic objection to globalization stands in favor of "authentic" local cuisine like Mueller's, which, like animism, requires a relationship with a given, enriched landscape, a relationship impossible in a globalized world.
And guess what, folks: animism is really, really authentic these days.
The problem for people looking for an authentic polypolar alternative to globalization is that all of us are delocalized and (to a great extent) deracinated from any kind of ongoing relationship with a single, non-commodity social landscape. Some writers, like Kalle Lasn (of adbusters have looked to blankness (famously running photo essays of whited-out cityscapes with no logos or text, or even in one issue depicting volcanic wasteland in Iceland) as the "only escape." In a sense this is equivalent to Buddhism, which has no god but a highly developed sense of all the things gods are supposed to provide.
And can we please stop fighting about whether Buddhists are appropriating someone else's culture? Buddhism has been a multi-cultural evangelizing world religion since Ashoka, and it would be weirder to see a belief system that jumped from India to Indonesia in the ninth century fail to make it from Japan to the US in the twentieth. Globalization goes in all directions sometimes, and no cultural gulf today is anywhere near as wide as in the past.
The other approach, however, is the animist approach, which has proven more difficult for Seekers Of Authenticity to take because localized multipolar practices, whether anti-commodity or polytheistic, can't generally be learned from the internet or books. By definition, they don't travel well between settings. If you want something like Shinto, but you aren't in Japan (or aren't Japanese, depending) you're kind-of S.O.L. If you want to patronize the local barbecue joint, but all you've got is starbucks, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Animist practices and traditions can either be copied from some other landscape (which is cultural appropriation) or they can be started afresh, by weird, participatory mythicist rituals aimed at whatever is important to you, and maybe, just maybe, something might stick.
Of course, in keeping with the last few entries, I love weird participatory mythicist rituals. Everybody run their dogs at the dog park? Hey, why not make a little carved dog statue somewhere back in the bushes, and leave a bit of kibble in its mouth every time you go past! Morning of the shortest day of the year? Lets go climb on those abandoned oil tanks and watch for the sunrise! There isn't any reason not to do these things. Right?
But there is a question of what they accomplish, and whether they work with a belief system that works for connecting people to times and places. Neil Gaiman says the key is sacrifice. Barry Lopez says the key is to give a landscape (and the people in it) dignity.
Given that Lopez is a naturalist writer (and a very good one- highly recommended) its unusual that he develops this idea out of discussions with burned out oil workers in Alaska who are speaking, most poignantly, or their own lives of humiliation at the hands of government and company superiors, but he quickly adapts it back to the arctic landscape itself. "Their dignity as workmen, and therefore their self-respect, was not whole." he writes, "To an outside viewer they, like the land, were subject to manipulation. Their dignity was received. It grew out of how well they responded to directions."
Later, he adds: "Without dignity, of course, people are powerless. Strip a person or land of dignity and you can direct any scheme you wish against them or it, with impunity and with the best of motives."
Americans, especially dominant culture Americans, believe strongly in the myth of good intentions- if you "respect" something, or "value" it, it doesn't matter what you eventually do with it. We "respect" the same people, institutions and ecosystems we blast apart every day. When someone says "we value your input" they're giving you the procedural finger. To respect a social landscape gives it no more than apologies give a dying boar. Perhaps, though, the word "dignity" is still unsullied enough by opportunists- or, in fact, is distinct enough in meaning- that little rituals, giving dribs and drabs of it back to the people and institutions we fear to admit matter to us, could someday restore to us a mythic intimacy with our landscapes.
Goddamn I write like an idiot at five AM.
A
There's this scene I fucking hate in Avatar that also shows up in pretty much every other WTPNIAH movie.
Basically it goes like this: white guy kills something large with superior (and quickly acquired) techno hunting skills. Native person upbraids white guy for being an idiot. White guy seems puzzled. Native person explains that when you kill something, you must apologize to and thank the pained, dying animal, or else you risk offending it. At some later point in the movie, this is revealed as a key secret white guy must learn. In some movies, the "sorry, thanks" lesson (sometimes accompanied by some fear-factor-esque ritual, like eating raw heart muscle) is taught not by a native but by a reviled-yet-wise older white guy, like a favorite, cabin-living uncle who carries the secret of white guy's inheritance... look, I could shoot this fish for hours. Its a bad cliche. We all know it.
What we don't ever see is exactly what difference it makes whether you apologize to an animal or not. Possibly this is because hunting is, in visual fiction, unrealistic- killing a large mammal generally involves a long period of thrashing, horrible noises, and general unpleasantness that inspires even seasoned hunters to cringe, and makes for very disturbing television. Why any animal spirit would accept this in exchange for a whispered "now my family can eat" or whatever white guy protagonist is supposed to offer is completely beyond me. Yet, it persists- which to me implies that there is something about the ritual that is embedded in a Euro-american conception of the "authentic." For some reason, this is something we think we should be doing, even if we express that by projecting it onto the Other. So its worth looking at.
There is a pop-anthro cliche that states that people living in deserts tend to be monotheistic, while people living in rainforests tend to be polytheistic, animistic, or pantheistic. While statistically this may be true, I've never quite bought the justification (expressed in the Discover Magazine article in that link) that "deserts teach large, singular lessons" about environmental hostility while rainforests offer nuance, including "more species of ants on a single tree than one would find in all the British Isles." (What? Is this like "God loves beetles" creationist determinism?)
I think a more likely explanation is that religions develop from rituals, rather than vice versa. Many major religions, including Shinto and Vedic traditions, weren't even considered religions at all until other religions showed up and practitioners needed a conceptual map to distinguish "people who do like we've always done" from "people who are into that new god with the hat." Over time, "doing like we've always done" becomes more self-aware and standardized, and eventually forms a religion in its own right- Shinto, while it retains its splendiferous array of Kami and shrines and local rituals, is considered (mostly) a single religion with a more-or-less unified priesthood, Hinduism has a conceptual basis (the other avatar reference in this post) that binds a diverse range of practices and deities into a single theology. One can see a similar process developing with Native American practices in the US, with the emergence of "intertribal" pow-wows that cheerfully blend dances, songs, and fry-bread from all across the continent into an eclectic but highly-viable mash-up that at this rate will likely outlast the United States. If one swallows one's skepticism hard enough, one can even see a regularization at work in neo-paganism, which accumulates European practices believed to pre-date christianity like a flea market collects unsellable sweaters, but now we're back to the Authenticity question and we don't need to go there right now.
Rituals, however, tend to focus on repeated events or constant locations of importance- a river, the planting date of a given crop, a particular mountain, calving time for hunted or herded animals- and these, in turn, tend to be critical aspects of a productive landscape. If your landscape bleeds productivity (like, say, in a rainforest) there are probably thousands of familiar points in space and time that you, and your ancestors, and your descendants, mark with rituals and recognitions. If you live someplace where there's a lot of scrub between you and the next pasture, or a long wait between growing seasons, you will probably spend a lot more time travelling through a landscape, and hence won't be able to develop the same depth of relationship with a certain standing stone, or a copse of trees. Monotheisms are just more portable.
Interestingly the Discover article mentions rain forest "tribes" that are monotheistic, but doesn't talk about any cultures with a two-register religious system, like the division of Classical Greek practices into Olympian (portable, oligotheistic) and Cthonic (local, polytheistic,) or the Catholic recognition of a monopolar deity paired with a syncretic, localized pantheon of saints, each with their own feast day and weird parade outfits.
There's a crude analogy to be made with the commodity fetishism that underlies globalisation, and the romantic quest for the authentic. The more delocalized and transient global capital becomes, the more consumption patterns tend to favor the portable and the reproducible, and the closer each economic and cultural sector gets to an oligopolar or a monopolar theology. McDonald's is everywhere, Mueller's Barbecue is only on one street in Austin, Texas. Capital and those who spend it favor Mickey D's because they can develop a relationship with it throughout their peregrinated lives- but only because like Jay-Z, or the 16-inch concrete block, its the same everywhere you go. So naturally, the romantic objection to globalization stands in favor of "authentic" local cuisine like Mueller's, which, like animism, requires a relationship with a given, enriched landscape, a relationship impossible in a globalized world.
And guess what, folks: animism is really, really authentic these days.
The problem for people looking for an authentic polypolar alternative to globalization is that all of us are delocalized and (to a great extent) deracinated from any kind of ongoing relationship with a single, non-commodity social landscape. Some writers, like Kalle Lasn (of adbusters have looked to blankness (famously running photo essays of whited-out cityscapes with no logos or text, or even in one issue depicting volcanic wasteland in Iceland) as the "only escape." In a sense this is equivalent to Buddhism, which has no god but a highly developed sense of all the things gods are supposed to provide.
And can we please stop fighting about whether Buddhists are appropriating someone else's culture? Buddhism has been a multi-cultural evangelizing world religion since Ashoka, and it would be weirder to see a belief system that jumped from India to Indonesia in the ninth century fail to make it from Japan to the US in the twentieth. Globalization goes in all directions sometimes, and no cultural gulf today is anywhere near as wide as in the past.
The other approach, however, is the animist approach, which has proven more difficult for Seekers Of Authenticity to take because localized multipolar practices, whether anti-commodity or polytheistic, can't generally be learned from the internet or books. By definition, they don't travel well between settings. If you want something like Shinto, but you aren't in Japan (or aren't Japanese, depending) you're kind-of S.O.L. If you want to patronize the local barbecue joint, but all you've got is starbucks, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Animist practices and traditions can either be copied from some other landscape (which is cultural appropriation) or they can be started afresh, by weird, participatory mythicist rituals aimed at whatever is important to you, and maybe, just maybe, something might stick.
Of course, in keeping with the last few entries, I love weird participatory mythicist rituals. Everybody run their dogs at the dog park? Hey, why not make a little carved dog statue somewhere back in the bushes, and leave a bit of kibble in its mouth every time you go past! Morning of the shortest day of the year? Lets go climb on those abandoned oil tanks and watch for the sunrise! There isn't any reason not to do these things. Right?
But there is a question of what they accomplish, and whether they work with a belief system that works for connecting people to times and places. Neil Gaiman says the key is sacrifice. Barry Lopez says the key is to give a landscape (and the people in it) dignity.
Given that Lopez is a naturalist writer (and a very good one- highly recommended) its unusual that he develops this idea out of discussions with burned out oil workers in Alaska who are speaking, most poignantly, or their own lives of humiliation at the hands of government and company superiors, but he quickly adapts it back to the arctic landscape itself. "Their dignity as workmen, and therefore their self-respect, was not whole." he writes, "To an outside viewer they, like the land, were subject to manipulation. Their dignity was received. It grew out of how well they responded to directions."
Later, he adds: "Without dignity, of course, people are powerless. Strip a person or land of dignity and you can direct any scheme you wish against them or it, with impunity and with the best of motives."
Americans, especially dominant culture Americans, believe strongly in the myth of good intentions- if you "respect" something, or "value" it, it doesn't matter what you eventually do with it. We "respect" the same people, institutions and ecosystems we blast apart every day. When someone says "we value your input" they're giving you the procedural finger. To respect a social landscape gives it no more than apologies give a dying boar. Perhaps, though, the word "dignity" is still unsullied enough by opportunists- or, in fact, is distinct enough in meaning- that little rituals, giving dribs and drabs of it back to the people and institutions we fear to admit matter to us, could someday restore to us a mythic intimacy with our landscapes.
Goddamn I write like an idiot at five AM.
A