Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World [1 ed.] 3031102932, 9783031102936

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Contents
Chapter 1: Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World—An Introduction
Relating Through Rituality
Ritual Creativity and Contemporary Spiritual Practices
Circulations and Refracting Rituals
References
Part I: Living with More-than-Humans: The Role of Daily Rites
Chapter 2: Inter-species Interaction Rituals in Yak Herding Practices in Nepal
Introduction
Interaction Rituals
A Yak Older than the Shepherd, When a Yak Shapes the Shepherd
From Aggression to Cooperation
Cycles
Avoidance Rituals: The Snow Leopard
A Short Typology
Rituals of Identification
Confirmatory Rituals
Maintenance Rituals
Are There Funeral Circles?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Urban Wixárika and More-than-Human Beings: The Case of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) in Western Mexico
Kinship Relations
Methodology/Methods
Literature Review
Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”)
Kinship Relations
Plants Personhood
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: The Peasant and the Soil in Southwestern French Biodynamic Agriculture: A Ritualistic Creative Relationship Entangled in a Holistic Commitment
Ritualization and Spiritualization Within a Global Commitment: The Biodynamic Silica Preparation
Relational Approach to Ritual in Anthropology and the Analogical Way of Thinking Applied to Agriculture
Daily Ritualization: Gesture(s) as Technique(s)
References
Part II: More-than-Human Politics: Belonging, Identity, Indigeneity and the Rights of Nature
Chapter 5: Human-Resource Connections as Articulations of Belonging in Buriatia
Introduction
Articulations of Indigenous Belonging
The Sacred Landscape of Oka
Graphite as a Symbol of Natural Richness
Gold as the Outside Threat
Jade as a Part of Sacred Landscape
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: “Behind-the-curtain Work”: Animal Ingredients, Divine Collaboration, and Ritual Substitution in West African Healthcare
Introduction
The Awinon Community, Their Markets, and Their Clients
Housodji Markets
Animal Ingredients and Their Uses in Awinon Medicine
Globalization, Spiritual Illness, and Mimetic Hybrids
Mimetic Hybrids
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks
Introduction
Indigenous Performances and Imitations at the GARN Conference in Quito
Ritual Innovation at the European Headquarters of the UN in Geneva
Recurrences and Circularities at the Earth Rights Conference in Sigtuna
Beyond Rights of Nature
Hybridization, Institutionalization and Embodiment of the Ritual
Relationality, Personification and the Limits of Ritual Animism
Conclusion
References
Part III: More-than-Human Spiritualities: Liminality, Embodiment and Intimate Experiences of Personal Transformation
Chapter 8: Escaping the Modern Predicament: Nature as Refuge and Community in Contemporary Health Practices in Wales, Sweden, and Finland
Introduction
Nature Connection as a Health Practice: The Western Zeitgeist
Two Contemporary Ethnographic Studies of the Nature/Health Intersection
Wales
Sweden and Finland
Notions of Escape
Escaping from But Also to
A Community Full of Life
Liminality and Communitas
Wellbeing Through Contact with Earth Beings
Conclusions
References
Chapter 9: Crossing Thresholds with Nature Spirits: Ritual Design, Liminality, and Transformation in Northwestern France
Introduction
The Megaliths of Carnac as an “alternative healing mecca”
Actor’s Notions on a “living” World
A Ritual Design for Interacting with More-than-Humans
Crossing Thresholds with Nature Spirits
Experiencing Transformation
Conclusions
References
Chapter 10: Crystals as Other-than-Human Persons for New Spirituality in Estonia: Phenomenological Relationality in Animist Materialism
Introduction
Crystals as Powerful Matter
Involvement in Everyday Life
Modes of Communication with Other-than-Human Persons
Processual Relationality
Bodily Intimacy as Phenomenological Relationality
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Afterword: In Among the More-than-Humans
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUSTAINABILITY

Relating with More-than-Humans Interbeing Rituality in a Living World

Edited by Jean Chamel · Yael Dansac

Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability Series Editors

Marc Brightman Department of Cultural Heritage University of Bologna Bologna, Italy Jerome Lewis Department of Anthropology University College London London, UK

Our series aims to bring together research on the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability: on local and global understandings of the concept and on lived practices around the world. It publishes studies which use ethnography to help us understand emerging ways of living, acting, and thinking sustainably. The books in this series also investigate and shed light on the political dynamics of resource governance and various scientific cultures of sustainability.

Jean Chamel  •  Yael Dansac Editors

Relating with More-than-Humans Interbeing Rituality in a Living World

Editors Jean Chamel Université de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland

Yael Dansac Université Libre de Bruxelles Brussels, Belgium

ISSN 2945-6657     ISSN 2945-6665 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability ISBN 978-3-031-10293-6    ISBN 978-3-031-10294-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ueuaphoto / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This publishing project was born in a house lost in the hills that surround Lyon, where we convened in July 2020 the panel “(Re)connecting with Earth Beings: Ritual Innovation and Affective Entanglements in Contemporary Ecopolitics”, hosted by the 16th EASA Biennial Conference. The congress was supposed to be held in Lisbon but went online due to COVID-19 pandemic. We thank Maria Dębińska and her friends who hosted us in this magical retreat. We also thank her, as well as Bertrande Galfré, for their involvement in the organization of this panel and in the start of the volume publishing. We are also grateful to the scholars who participated in this panel for their contributions and the productive discussions that followed. Editing this multi-author volume was a long but also very rewarding process. It would not have been possible without the support and trust of the publishers, especially Elizabeth Graber, and the series editors, Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, who stood by us all along. We are especially grateful to the authors. Each one of their chapters offers the reader insight into a specific cultural context, illustrating the great variety of modes of interaction between human and more-than-­ human. The peer reviewers shall also be thanked for their assistance in helping us to improve the quality of the volume and the content of every chapter. A very special thanks to Michael Houseman, for bringing his expertise and contributing with an Afterword that makes this volume’s contributions resonate harmoniously. To our families for their loving support, reassurance and encouragement. v

Contents

1 R  elating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World—An Introduction  1 Jean Chamel and Yael Dansac

Part I Living with More-than-Humans: The Role of Daily Rites  19 2 I nter-species Interaction Rituals in Yak Herding Practices in Nepal 21 Théophile Johnson 3 U  rban Wixárika and More-than-Human Beings: The Case of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) in Western Mexico  41 Cyndy Margarita Garcia-Weyandt 4 T  he Peasant and the Soil in Southwestern French Biodynamic Agriculture: A Ritualistic Creative Relationship Entangled in a Holistic Commitment 65 Bertrande Galfré Part II More-than-Human Politics: Belonging, Identity, Indigeneity and the Rights of Nature  87 vii

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CONTENTS

5 H  uman-Resource Connections as Articulations of Belonging in Buriatia 89 Anna Varfolomeeva 6 “  Behind-the-curtain Work”: Animal Ingredients, Divine Collaboration, and Ritual Substitution in West African Healthcare109 Degenhart Brown 7 R  itual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks137 Jean Chamel Part III More-than-Human Spiritualities: Liminality, Embodiment and Intimate Experiences of Personal Transformation 163 8 E  scaping the Modern Predicament: Nature as Refuge and Community in Contemporary Health Practices in Wales, Sweden, and Finland165 Ed Lord and Henrik Ohlsson 9 C  rossing Thresholds with Nature Spirits: Ritual Design, Liminality, and Transformation in Northwestern France191 Yael Dansac 10 C  rystals as Other-than-Human Persons for New Spirituality in Estonia: Phenomenological Relationality in Animist Materialism213 Tenno Teidearu 11 F  ragment of Afterword: In Among the More-than-Humans237 Michael Houseman Index

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Notes on Contributors

Degenhart  Brown is a teaching fellow and a doctoral candidate in Culture and Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA. His research interests centre on how the production and consumption of power objects inform epistemologies of cosmology, corporeality and materiality in West Africa and its diasporas. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the ontological roles that sacred arts and religious syncretism play in medical pluralism across southern Togo and the Republic of Benin. Jean  Chamel  is an anthropologist and a senior Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) researcher at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, from which he holds a PhD in Religious Studies (2018). His thesis examined the discourses and practices of the precursors of the theories of collapse (collapsologie) in French-speaking Europe. After investigating the global movement for the rights of nature that promote the attribution of legal personality to non-human entities, with the invention of ritual practices connecting humans and more-than-human persons, he works on sensitive, ritualized and aesthetic relationships with the high Alpine mountains  and glaciers. Chamel has taught at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the University of Lausanne and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City. Yael Dansac  is a postdoctoral researcher at Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Secularism, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. She holds a Doctorate in Social Anthropology and Ethnology from the ix

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École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France. Her research interests centre on the cultural, structural, creative, somatic and emotional dimensions of contemporary spiritual practices held in archeological sites. Her recent publications explore the relationships between ritual creativity and ritual design, alternative spiritualities’ particular aesthetics and modes of representation, and the experience of the sensing body as a culturally constructed phenomenon. Dansac has also conducted ethnographic research in Mexico and has taught at the University of Guadalajara. Bertrande  Galfré  is a PhD candidate at the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (LESC) at Paris-Nanterre University, France. She studies biodynamic agriculture practiced in southwestern France near the Pyrenean mountains, with the lenses of ritual anthropology and anthropology of gestures. Cyndy  Margarita  Garcia-Weyandt is Assistant Professor of Critical Ethnic Studies at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, USA.  She has taught courses such as body, land and labour, and plant communication/kinship. She also teaches a writing seminar exploring dreams, storytelling, poetry, art activism and personal narratives as sources of knowledge and social change. She is the coordinator and co-founder of Proyecto Taniuki (“Our Language Project”), a community-based project in Zitakua, Mexico. In the Taniuki, she collaborates with urban Indigenous communities in language revitalization efforts. She is part of La Red para el Fortalecimiento de las Lenguas Indígenas de Nayarit (FOLINAY). Her research areas include Indigenous knowledge systems, land pedagogy, urban Indigenous peoples of Mexico, Indigenous art and performances, languages ideologies, corn relations and ontology. Cyndy’s ancestral homeland is in San Juan Sayultepec, Nochixtlán, Oaxaca, México. She is a mother, a poeta, an immigrant, a first-generation college student and former community college transfer student. She holds a PhD and Master’s Degree in Culture and Performance, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology, all from the University of California, Los Angeles. Michael  Houseman,  anthropologist, is a Professor Emeritus (chair of African religions) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université Paris Sciences & Lettres (PSL), France. He has undertaken field research among the Beti of Southern Cameroon, in Bénin, in French Guiana and in France. He has written extensively on kinship and social organization,

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and on initiation and ritual performance. His current areas of interest include ceremonial dance and emergent forms of ritual practice. His publications include Naven or the Other Self. A Relational Approach to Ritual Action (1998, with C. Severi) and Le rouge est le noir. Essais sur le rituel (Presses Universitaires le Mirail, 2012). Théophile Johnson  is an anthropologist and photographer who works on pastoralism technical systems and their influence on human-animal relationships, particularly in yak herding extensive systems in Manang, Nepal. He is a PhD candidate at the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (LESC), Paris-Nanterre University, France. From an anthropological point of view, he aims to search what humans and animals share at a fundamental base for communication and dwelling and how multiple species are able to build hybrid communities into domestication processes. Using ethology’s methods, he also studies the behavioural responses of the animals in human action and their influence into the herd’s social organization. With photography and writing, he aims to document the variety of pastoralist cultures. Working as a shepherd himself since teenage, he uses his own experience as a way to gain competence on his fieldworks. Ed  Lord  is Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing at Swansea University, Wales, UK; his teaching is mostly focused on nurse education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His research interests are in the intersection of social theory, environmentalism and mental health. He completed an MSc by research in Geography and Social Theory prior to commencing a PhD in 2016. Ed Lord’s PhD research was funded by a fellowship from RCBC Wales and explored the experiences of people taking part in ecotherapy as an intervention for mental health in South and West Wales. Prior to his move into research and education Ed Lord worked as a nurse in National Health Service (NHS)’s acute inpatient mental health settings in England and Wales for over a decade. Henrik Ohlsson  is a researcher and lecturer in the study of religion at Södertörn University in Sweden. He is interested in human-nature relations from historical, ethnographic and phenomenological perspectives, with a focus on the spiritual or existential dimensions of those relations. For his PhD thesis, he conducted field research in the Nordic countries among people engaged in organized practice for a deepened connection

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with nature. His thesis was connected to a larger project studying nature relations and secularity in the Baltic Sea region and includes researchers in Sweden, Estonia and Denmark. His earlier academic interests include issues concerning secularization in general and a particular focus on state policies towards religion in post-Soviet Central Asia. Tenno Teidearu  is a researcher at the Estonian National Museum and a PhD student of Ethnology in the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His PhD research concentrates on the use of crystals, especially the practice of wearing crystals in New Spirituality, and their commerce, and esoteric shops in Estonia. His anthropological research focuses on New Spirituality in the theoretical framework of material religion, vernacular religion and consumption of religious commodities, and the theoretical and methodological approach of his research is influenced by the fields of material culture studies and consumption studies in anthropology. His research concerns human interaction with crystals as objects and natural materials, which is based on practices and embodiment, their material agency and commerce and purchasing of crystals at esoteric shops, and esoteric shops as significant material and sensuous environments in general. Anna Varfolomeeva  is a postdoctoral researcher at Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) and Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her postdoctoral project focuses on Indigenous conceptualizations of sustainability in industrialized areas of the Russian North and Siberia. Anna received her PhD (2019) from Central European University, Budapest, and previously worked at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, Russia. Anna is the co-­editor of the volume Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at the Russia– Mongolia Border (with Alex Oehler, 2019), and has written on indigeneity in Russia, care in human-resource relations and the symbolism of stone extraction.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1

A cauri is negotiating her dominance with me. (Photo: T. Johnson) 26 The snow leopard in the yak pasture area. (Photo: T. Johnson) 31 Phurba and Dorze are milking a cauri that wouldn’t cooperate. Dorze is petting her flank and calming her by whispering. (Photo: T. Johnson) 34 Phurba is approaching a bacca that is hard to catch. His hand is catching the young’s attention. (Photo: T. Johnson) 36 El Buruato offerings with the Carrillo family. (Photo: C. Garcia-Weyandt, July 2021) 50 Yuimakwaxa (“Drum Ceremony”) at Y+rata. (Photo: C. Garcia-Weyandt, October 2019) 55 George in his garden, hoeing. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020) 71 Jean on the “weeding bed” in the leeks. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020) 72 Dynamization of the Silica Preparation; George teaches Noé the woofer. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020) 73 The gesture of the dynamization: the vortex. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020) 75 Minibus passengers stopping near a sacred site on the way to Orlik from Ulan-Ude. (Photo: A. Varfolomeeva, 2021) 95 A view from the Sailak recreation area; Huzhir Enterprise is visible next to the mountains. (Photo: A. Varfolomeeva, 2021) 101 Awinon étalage display. Lantassapé market. Lomé, Togo. (Photo: D. Brown, October 2021) 114

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.2

Awinon pharmacopée display. Lantassapé market. Lomé, Togo. (Photo: D. Brown, October 2021) Fig. 7.1 Water ceremony, Earth Rights Conference, Sigtuna. (Photo: J. Chamel, May 2019) Fig. 7.2 Waters closing ceremony in Gordon Square during the Flourishing Diversity Summit, London. (Photo: J. Chamel, September 2019) Fig. 8.1 Finding a ‘close-but-remote’ niche in the woods with an EcoConnect group. Pembrokeshire, Wales. (Photo: E. Lord, September 2018) Fig. 8.2 The interaction of elements, beings, and hardware/tools involved in making a hot drink in woodland. Gower, Wales. (Photo: E. Lord, April 2018) Fig. 8.3 Forest bathers entering the portal to the forest in reverent silence. Evo, Finland. (Photo: H. Ohlsson, July 2019) Fig. 8.4 The tea ceremony ending a forest bathing session, where experiences are shared and gratitude expressed to the forest. Karjalohja, Finland. (Photo: H. Ohlsson, August 2018) Fig. 9.1 A group practicing at Carnac megaliths. (Photo: Y. Dansac, December 2015) Fig. 9.2 Participants touching the local megaliths. (Photo: Y. Dansac, April 2018) Fig. 10.1 Daisy’s magnetite on the left and tourmaline on the right, which is not finely polished and has a small bulge. (Photo: T. Teidearu) Fig. 10.2 Christina’s bracelet with tiger’s eye stones. (Photo: T. Teidearu)

115 145 148 173 174 176 178 195 202 226 229

CHAPTER 1

Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World—An Introduction Jean Chamel and Yael Dansac

There is little doubt that the formidable scientific revolution that took off in the eighteenth century—after several centuries of early developments— significantly increased the capacity of the Moderns to know and understand their world, their Earth and its inhabitants, or what they used to classify as “nature”. But it seems that the more we, Europeans or North Americans of the early twenty-first century, know about nature, thanks to the most advanced tools and methodologies of modern Western science, the less we are able to relate with nature. Many factors can explain this predicament, such as the position of exteriority taken by science, defined by observation and not engagement, that implicitly engenders distance

J. Chamel Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] Y. Dansac (*) Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_1

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and separation. The modern Western ontology that splits the world between the cultural realm of humans and the rest, “nature”, can also explain such estrangement. Radical environmentalists, however, increasingly challenge this “Great Divide”, by contesting the exteriority of humans—a position that can be summed up by their famous motto “we are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself”. They also find inspiration from debates within academic circles, especially those concerning the “ontological turn”, though it remains a contested concept. What is no longer debated, especially thanks to the seminal works of Bruno Latour (1993), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), and Philippe Descola (2013), is the plurality of nature. The idea of one unique nature, along which many cultures are organised, is gone. Following the provincialisation of the concept of nature has emerged the need for a semantic redefinition to designate beings that are not human. The expressions “non-humans”, “other-than-humans”, or “more-than-humans” (Abram 1996) have the important advantage of containing in their plurality a multiplicity of forms, which are not limited to the “living”, nor even the “visible” (or the “physical”). But they also have the great disadvantage of designating what is not, or not only, human. These terms remain thus somehow anthropocentric and fail to really supersede the concept of “nature”, which stays hidden in the closet. To go beyond “nature”, since looking for its semantic substitutes is not enough, our aim is to explore how humans, in various cultural contexts, relate with other entities. A first version of the title of the book was actually “Relating to More-than-Humans” but we decided to replace the preposition by a “with”. It may appear to be an error of translation as we are not native English speakers, but it is a deliberate change to underline our intended focus on more horizontal relationships, though asymmetry will always remain, nolens volens. Words matter and it is crucial to challenge familiar expressions, whom obviousness implicitly reproduce power imbalances. We also aim at following the path opened by Tim Ingold, for whom life is not a feature to be attributed to existing objects or subjects but is instead what emerges from their interrelations (2006). The processual approach that characterises the “ontology” or “poetics of dwelling” Ingold promotes and his insistence on relationality (2000) advocate for focusing on relations between “Earth Beings”—if we humbly adopt the expression popularised by Marisol de la Cadena through her work with Runakuna in Peruvian Andes (2015). In fact, many indigenous worldviews and Western contemporary spiritual practices create different

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realities by sharing the world with more-than-human beings. Critically, through such relationality, other-than-human beings bestow their human counterparts with knowledge, agency, and reflexivity.

Relating Through Rituality Interbeing relationships can take many forms, but we decided in this book to focus on rituality, because rites and rituals can constitute an important component of daily life and a specific space to observe and understand relationships with more-than-humans. Above all, rituals, contrary to appearances, never remain unchanged and are constantly evolving to take into account changes in societies. The starting point of this book is the panel “(Re)connecting with Earth Beings: Ritual Innovation and Affective Entanglements in Contemporary Ecopolitics” that we coordinated at the 16th European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Biennial Conference in Lisbon in July 2020 (following a first panel co-organised by Jean Chamel and Bertrande Galfé at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Inter-Congress held in Poznan, Poland, in August 2019). We actually came across two case studies during the panel that perfectly illustrate our point on rituality. Since they are not part of the nine ethnographies that constitute the content of this volume, we briefly present them here to discuss several recurrent issues of the volume. The first ritual case study was presented by our colleague Maria Salomea Dębińska who co-organised the EASA panel with us (after we met in Poznan). This case study was featured in her 2021 article “Witnessing from Within. Hyperobjects and Climate Activism in Poland.” Dębińska had been involved in an “Interspecies Community”, a collective of artists, academics, and activists that had the objective to create in Warsaw a registered religious organisation in order to instrumentalise the legal privileges granted to Polish Churches to protect the environment. As she explains, “to have a religion legally recognized one has to prove that one has a doctrine and a form of worship” (2021: 457). Therefore, the collective decided to invent a composting ritual called Mszak. Face masks, costumes, banners (all made of recycled materials), and scripture and litany were invented for an event that took place in May 2019 in the Botanical Garden on Museum Night:

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At 11 p.m. we took the wheelbarrow to the temple. We hid under a piece of plastic foil, recycled and sewn together, representing all things slimy and oozing, without which life is impossible. It felt very intimate to be lying together under this thin layer separating us from the crowd. We were folding, waving, breathing, and laughing. Then we put on black masks and stood around the barrow, while one of us sat on top of the temple announcing that on the sixty-sixth Saturday of the Great Compost (a play on the Polish word post which means “fasting”) the time has come for the Mszak (a play on the words msza, meaning “holy mass,” and mszak, meaning “bryophyte” or “moss”). (457)

The ritual went on with the recitation of their “composting litany”, which combined an anti-capitalist discourse “with a celebration of decomposition and rot”: It imitated the style of Polish folk religious songs, which made it sound a little frivolous. The litany summoned the powers of decomposition by invoking images of rot, mold, putrefaction, and decay. It was trashy and funny; it recognized death as a necessary part of life and turned composting into the central element of the ritual. The metabolic processes that make up the circle of life were juxtaposed to capitalist exploitation of bodies and ecosystems, but also to the Western drive towards classification, both processes that arrest change and produce the illusion of a stability of categories. (2021: 457–458)

Invented and performed by a group of artists, academics, and cultural animators, the Mszak ritual turned out to be more than a parody of Catholic rituals, in a political attempt to challenge the privileges of the religious status that solely benefits the Catholic Church, to become a profound and sincere kind of “playful spirituality” (458). The second ritual took place during the EASA conference, in the afternoon following our panel: Maria Dębińska was staying with a few friends she had met within the Interspecies Community in a house lost in the hills that surround Lyon, and she invited us and Bertrande to join them in order to enjoy exchanges “in real life” since the conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A young female Polish artist who was staying in the house had created a mobile of found objects, suspended and linked by an old hemp rope, and forming a tetragon. Among the objects comprising the tetragon were an animal skull and the rusted section of a farm tool. The young artist suggested we perform a ritual for

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Arnica, an endangered species. The ceremony would also be driven by the idea of celebrating nature, with the involvement of the mobile. The choice to mourn for Arnica remained a bit enigmatic, but we understood that the idea of mourning derived directly from the Mszak ritual, during which a speaker recited a list of species that had become extinct. A photographer within the group also wanted to install a camera trap in the woods near the mobile to automatically photograph humans (our group to begin with) and non-humans alike that would pass by, but some technical issues made it impossible. For this Arnica ritual, there was no litany, no prepared sequence of gestures, and no rehearsal. The motto was improvisation. We started by walking down under the house towards a wooded ravine, following the mobile in single file, before climbing up a little bit on the opposite side of the ravine. We were quiet and tended to adopt a collected attitude, though we didn’t forbid ourselves to speak sometimes, in hushed voices, and to laugh at funny situations. Then the mobile was hung from a branch, and we stood still and quiet in front of it. So far, not much had happened. Then one of us decided to get out of line and came silently close to the mobile, touched it very smoothly with the ends of his fingers, kind of danced very slowly with and around it, making it turn around itself as well and finally came back to the line of the ritual participants. This inspired a few others to approach the mobile and to improvise some corporeal ways of relating with it, also silently and smoothly. We then left the mobile there and came back to the house, down and then up again in the woods, with more small talk, debriefing informally about the ritual. One of us was not really convinced that the exercise had meaning and potential effects, and preferred to observe indirectly rather than participate. Deeply involved in biodynamic agriculture, she explained that for her powerful rituals are not crafted out of creativity and improvisation, but are rather part of a whole system of meaning, with gestures that practitioners do not even consider as rituals. Were the parodic performance and the improvised happening actually rituals to start with? Aren’t rituals dependent on calendric repetition, collectively agreed-upon effects, and some form of structure or choreography, questioned very accurately our colleague Degenhart Brown after reading a first draft of this text? A first answer is yes, they are rituals since their initiators define them as such. “Mszak ritual” and “Arnica ritual” are emic terms and therefore they cannot be discarded that easily. Their

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one-­off nature, even improvisational for the second, is neither problematic if we adopt the definition proposed by Catherine Bell, for whom ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities. As such, ritualization is a matter of various culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors. (Bell 1992: 74)

In both cases, the distinction with quotidian activities is well marked and “orchestrated”, notably with the clear inspiration from religious ceremonies.

Ritual Creativity and Contemporary Spiritual Practices What did we learn from these two cases? First of all, rituals and ritual creativity are not limited to indigenous, religious, or alternative spiritualities contexts, but can be also found in political, artistic, and even academic milieux. Both cases also illustrate how rituals are generally forged from bits and pieces of existing ceremonies. Indeed, since the 1960s, anthropologists began to focus on the emergence of spiritual practices that challenged their common idea of rituals as non-dynamic phenomena rooted in traditional beliefs and techniques. It was at this time that Victor Turner (1969) highlighted the creative and innovative potential of rituals, emphasising their flowing, processual, and subversive effects. According to Ronald Grimes (1992), this reinvention of ritual called into question the very criteria that defined an action as ritualistic. Engaging in a revisited theory of ritual, he suggests that traditional features can be understood as both invented and creative without losing sight of their historical and cultural processes. Grimes’ analysis attempts to conciliate tradition and invention by emphasising that they are engaged in a dialogical relation rather than mutually exclusive. In this sense, he calls for rituals to be conceptualised not as timeless and motionless structures but as dynamic phenomena that draw continuously on their sources and tributaries in order to reinvent themselves (Grimes 1992: 23–24). Taking an innovative approach to ritual as both conservative and transformative process, Catherine Bell (1992:

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25) has identified the social relationships and dichotomies rituals support: continuity and change, collective and individual experience, as well as thought and action. Bell also calls our attention to the roles that the body and structural power play in ritual, inviting us to ponder what makes us identify some acts as rituals, and what such a category does for the production of knowledge about other cultures. The composting ritual is conceived as parodic and therefore intentionally copy Catholic features, with shifts and wordplays. It is less evident with the arnica ritual, but still participants attune themselves to a collected attitude, as it is required during formal ceremonies, which are often religious but can also belong to the political or civic realms (Bellah 1967). The arnica ritual was also presented as a moment of mourning, like the Mszak, and that explained the choice of a relevant attitude. We can actually note that mourning is a recurrent feature of many invented rituals, for instance, present in the practices associated with ecopsychology, such as the Work that Reconnects developed by Joanna Macy (Chamel 2021: 450), but also central to the ceremonies organised in Iceland, Switzerland, or Oregon for disappeared or disappearing glaciers. It is true that rituals are often thought of as practical ways to enact transformation, following the classical works of Arnold Van Gennep (2013) and Victor Turner (1969), and funeral is the most evident ritual to acknowledge the end of an epoch or any loss. Dębińska does not give details on how litanies and gestures emerged to build up the Mszak ritual but the processes of improvised invention were obvious during the arnica ritual, through specular interactions. The attitudes and gestures of one person influence the attitudes and gestures of all, through an immediate and perpetual adjustment that makes the outcome of the ritual somehow impossible to anticipate. The arnica ritual offers a privileged window upon the processes of ritual uncertainty and doubt highlighted by Fedele (2014) in her analysis of contemporary crafted rituals. During practice, both emerge as powerful tools against meticulous ritual structures and rigid patterns of behaviour, allowing participants to feel less restrained by long-lasting religious traditions and talk more openly about their doubts. The Mszak ritual and the arnica ritual represent just a glimpse of a far-­ larger phenomenon taking place in plural, increasingly secularised Western contexts and beyond. In the last 40 years, the emergence of alternative spiritual practices has continued to shape our understanding of rituals, confronting scholars with contemporary holistic ideologies,

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self-­development practices, and body-mind techniques, which mobilise aesthetics and modes of representation characterised by the idiosyncratic and unexpected juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements (Houseman 2016: 213–215). Drawing from different religions, indigenous traditions, and esoteric ideologies, “alternative spiritualities” have challenged traditionality as a fundamental value, driving scholars to conceptualise their innovative and creative processes as ritualistic features. Several chapters of this volume provide fieldwork accounts of their diversity, instability, and exposure to secular influences, highlighting how these rituals transform and adapt to multiple cultural contexts (Fedele 2013). The identification of their ritual structure provides insights into many aspects related to their transformation processes (Houseman 2011a: 700). In fact, “the conscious elaboration of new rituals, or the reinterpretation of existing ones” is associated “with the expressly subversive aim of bringing about cultural change” (Magliocco 2014: 1). In her exploration of ritual effects, Dębińska quotes David Graeber, for whom Pagans often “seem to be engaging at the same time in a ritual and the parody of a ritual; the point where laughter and self-mockery are likeliest to come into the picture is precisely the point where one approaches the most numinous, unknowable, or profound” (Graeber 2009: 220–221, cited by Dębińska 2021: 458). As noted by Houseman (2016: 221), the playful nature of these practices allows participants to engage in creative enactments without holding back, leading to changes in perception through which newly generated realities are experienced as subjectively real. Lineage associations, fabricated traditions, and revitalisation of ancient practices, among other creative strategies, often serve the purpose of conjoining the spiritual dimension of contemporary rituals with social and political activism. They also provide innovative usages concerned “with knowing how to behave appropriately toward persons, not all of whom are human” (Harvey 2005: 17). For example, advocacy efforts to protect more-than-human beings repeatedly reappropriate indigenous traditions and animistic worldviews as means of providing legitimacy to specific demands such as legal personality attribution. Therefore, ritual creativity acts as an instrument of transformation and production of values, behaviours, and practices regarding more-than-humans. Our focus on multi-­ species ritual interactions considers the ways rituals create their own realities. Social relationships between humans and more-than-humans are often organised by hierarchies, protocols, and objectives, which grant a function or an ability to each participant within a collective. The capacity

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for non-humans to communicate (Descola 2013), to cure a physical or spiritual illness (Turner 2006), or to recreate ways of relating to the Earth and all its inhabitants (Harvey 1997) simultaneously determines morethan-humans’ intrinsic properties and roles in a given cultural context. For example, Native American Ojibwe considers animate and inanimate beings as persons with whom they relate (Hallowell 1960: 24). Nayaka huntergatherers of South India perceive their environment as an assembly of sentient beings who provide and need care, therefore overriding the subject/object divide of Cartesian lifeworlds (Bird-David 1999). The Nayaka establish shared relationships with non-human beings, stressing the connectedness of everyone. In nature-based spiritualities practiced in Western societies, non-human beings’ attributes and roles sometimes seem contradictory. Practitioners pursue a symmetric relationship with non-human entities by considering them as their partners, while simultaneously seeking a sense of connection and belonging to nature sometimes personified as a transforming power (Taylor 2000: 277). Therefore, they conceive their ceremonies as structurally organised spaces where humans and non-humans can achieve common objectives, from the re-establishing of harmonious relationships to the re-implementation of a sensory communion between the two. However, as noted by several authors in this volume, the ultimate objective—or at least consequence—of such rituals is the accomplishment of individual and collective goals related to personal development. In this sense, more-than-humans are often instrumentalised as tools for human ends while simultaneously being regarded as partners. There is therefore sometimes a discrepancy between discourses about horizontal, egalitarian, relationships, and the reality of practices that are ultimately not so different from the usual unequal intercourses.

Circulations and Refracting Rituals Another aspect to be considered is how cultural, social, and economic reconfigurations taking place across the globe are accentuating the multi-­ faceted dynamics of rituals. Frontiers within spiritual practices are increasingly porous and permeable, allowing the exchange of heteroclite elements and producing eclectic and hybrid rituals. Thomas J. Csordas has addressed this issue, highlighting that spiritual practices deriving from foreign contexts and often lacking a grounding in  local culture and traditions are crossing geographical and cultural spaces, conveying what he defines as

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“transportable practices” and “transposable messages” (Csordas 2009: 4–5). Both terms refer to ritual forms that can be easily transmitted and require limited knowledge of the original context. Circulations of ritual forms are therefore common between socio-cultural contexts and are also increasingly diverse, with a growing trend of Western practitioners drawing inspiration from indigenous cosmogonies and ceremonies, while rituals that could be, at first glance, perceived as “traditional” are in fact deeply influenced by the Western world. In all cases, these circulations always give rise to new and unexpected forms. Michael Houseman (2011b: 261–263) explored the ritual mode of attentiveness that allows participants to experience alternative spiritual practices as emulations of ceremonies that are perceived as “traditional”. He proposed the terminology of refracted rituals, to be opposed to the more “traditional” rituals that he described as condensed. The latter are made of complex actions performed by the participants whose sense and purpose remain mysterious to them because of their ambivalence: the same action can express contradictory objectives and relations. Houseman gives the example, in some regions, of the mother traditionally slapping her daughter when come her first menses: the exact meaning of the slap is never explicated but it still produces effects and is reproduced from generation to generation. Refracted rituals also contain structural indeterminacy and ambivalence, but they concern the participants’ attitudes and feelings rather than the activities they execute. For example, in alternative spiritual practices, summoned entities—archetypal figures held as exemplary and often ascribed as pre-Christian, indigenous, or non-Western— are presumed to affect the participants’ personal attitudes and beliefs rather than the actions they performed. Refracted subjects experience different, contrasting identities at once. On the one hand, those of summoned entities whose emulations are embodied through ceremonial actions, and on the other hand, those of participants themselves, affected by the performances derived from these emulations (Ibid.: 262–263). Distinguishing condensed rituals from refracted rituals, Houseman focuses on the qualities that mark them as distinctive kinds of actions and experiences. He explores patterns of behaviour and the nature of relationships created through the enactment of ritual condensation, and acknowledges personalised creativity, self-aware reflexivity, and prevalence of immaterial representations of summoned entities as concomitant characteristics of ritual refraction. Interestingly, the parodic purpose of Mszak does not make it fit with what Houseman (2011b) calls “refracting rituals”, since

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apparently participants come without the expectation of being touched by the process. But at the end, some are, somehow against their will, which can be more easily associated with “ritual condensation”. This may be an effect of the contradictory combination (“condensation”) of mockery and experiences of communitas. A contrario, the arnica ritual looked more like a “refracting ritual”, but without much effect following probably a lack of preparation, expectation, and projection. Are invented rituals influencing day-to-day life, and therefore changing the nature of relationships between humans and more-than-humans? Or are new rituals—or ritualised activities—involving more-than-humans just the consequences of deep changes within human communities? Given the paradoxical complexity of this question, we posit that the way rituals are framed and reconfigured cannot be distinguished from how human societies see and interact with non-humans. This volume comprises nine case studies that illustrate how humans relate to non-human entities in a large variety of cultural contexts. Aiming to provide a global understanding on the ritual processes involved and to emphasise the particularities and junctions among these case studies, we divided the volume into three main sections: daily interactions, political implications, and spiritual engagements. Part I is entitled “Living with More-Than-Humans: The Role of Daily Rites”. It highlights the day-to-­ day relationships between human and non-human beings through the analysis of cooperative interactions, knowledge systems, kinship relations, and ritual practices across societies located in the Nepalese Himalayas, Mexico, and south-western France. Chapter 2 by Théophile Johnson on yak herding systems in Nepal as cooperative interactions constructed over time is a very useful introduction to contemporary negotiations with more-than-humans. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and detailed ethnographic descriptions, Johnson places the reader at the centre of ritualised and daily repeated interactions between the herder and the yaks. Seeking to explore local practices of pastoralism and bio-semiotic behaviours, he scrutinises interaction rites existing between various species and analyses the negotiations taking place between those species during domestication processes. Importantly, Johnson pays attention to different practices showing the collaboration between the shepherd and the yaks and proposes a typology of interactions between humans and non-humans, including ritual identifications, confirmatory ceremonies, maintenance practices, and funeral events. He also explores the non-violent strategies set in place by the

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shepherds to protect the yaks from predators who are also part of this living environment. In his chapter, Johnson shows that yak pastoralism is an extremely rich case for studying domestication and its possibilities in terms of animal agency in bio-semiotic mechanisms. Cyndy Margarita Garcia-Weyandt’s (Chap. 3) sharp analysis on Tatéi Niwetsika or “Our Mother Corn” among Wixárika families living in West Mexico offers a framework on how to live life in relationality with non-­ human beings. Using descriptions regarding ritual practices where relationships with Tatéi Niwetsika are maintained and analysing how more-than-human beings such as maize shape Wixárika’s personhood, being, and existing, Garcia-Weyandt takes us into the core of kinship relations organising Wixárika daily interactions and examines the agency of maize in Wixárika systems of knowledge. She convincingly argues that becoming a devout kinsperson of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) in the Wixárika context entails that families maintain her genealogy through cultivation practices, produce and consume culinary representations based on maize as main ingredient, pass down oral tradition, remember Tatéi Niwetsika’s teachings through memory and embodied practices, and make bodily offerings during the cultivation and harvesting cycles. Part I of the volume ends with Chap. 4 by Bertrande Galfré based on her fieldwork among biodynamic peasants living in south-western France. She centres on the ritualised preparations of soil advanced by biodynamic agriculture, a practice which was developed by an esoteric movement called Anthroposophy founded in the early twentieth century and promotes an agriculture of care aiming to reach a symbiotic welfare for human and non-human beings. Using detailed descriptions of biodynamic practices performed in a collective farm in Pyrenean’s piedmont, Galfré carefully analyses how peasants interact with more-than-humans through specific gestures and actions. She also shows how practices are driven by the peasant’s social, political, and spiritual commitments, and how links are built and maintained among different actors engaged in the welfare of the agricultural organism’s foundations. Analysing the farmer’s role in the improvement of the harmony and equity between animal, plants, humans, cosmic, and terrestrial forces, Galfré offers an understanding of biodynamic agriculture as a practice to preserve and improve the farm’s general welfare. Part II of the volume is entitled “More-than-Human Politics: Belonging, Identity, Indigeneity and the Rights of Nature”. It centres on the cultural and political dimensions emerging through human and

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non-­human interactions through detailed analysis of senses of belonging, traditional healing techniques, and non-human beings’ legal personality attribution in Buriatia, West Africa, and during events for the rights of nature mainly taking place in Europe. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork among the residents of the South-­ Central Siberian landscape of Oka, Chap. 5 by Anna Varfolomeeva focuses on the influence of mineral resources in local societies’ sense of belonging, creation of patterns of ritualised interaction, and establishment of affective bonds between ‘Okans’ and their landscape. Using both semi-structured and unstructured biographical interviews, Varfolomeeva discusses how Okans simultaneously articulate their connections with a specific place and their sense of belonging when addressing local resource extractions or when engaging with minerals directly. She carefully analyses how minerals such as graphite, gold, and jade are animated and related to non-human beings considered to inhabit this particular territory. Varfolomeeva illustrates how Okans relate to more-than-humans in a context permeated by political tensions and calls for rethinking local conceptions of belonging beyond the established dichotomies of dominance or mutualism. She also addresses mining as an activity which permeates identity configurations and ritual interactions and does not restrain to economic and political relationships. Chapter 6 by Degenhart Brown offers insight into specific animal ingredients markets located in Togo and the Republic of Bénin and calls our attention to one of the key topics of animal-derived medicine practices in West Africa today: their role in the interpretation and reconfiguration of human and other-than-human relationships. Drawing on detailed analysis of interactions taking place in Awinon community markets, Vodun systems of knowledge regarding illness, and diverse ritual practices involving animal parts consumption, Brown elucidates how animal-derived medicines provide salient ways for West African populations to assert their identities, traditions, and healthcare requirements in the face of rampant globalisation. He analyses the ritual and creative strategies used by Awinon merchants to accentuate the spiritual and healing potentials of animal ingredients and highlights the crucial role of these practices in local communities. Brown also questions a research corpus which regard multi-­ species relations and traditional healing practices as mystical frameworks, superstitions and archaic beliefs, and demonstrates how in this uncertain context where economic inequalities between societies across the world

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are exponentially growing, communities across West Africa turn to traditional knowledge and valorise ritual interactions with non-human beings. Jean Chamel’s (Chap. 7) enquiry carried out at the heart of networks seeking to promote the rights of nature provides a useful introduction to interbeing ceremonies, ritual animism, and alternative spiritualities. His discussion centres on the ongoing efforts to grant legal personality to non-human beings such as water bodies, forests, or the Earth as a whole. Observing ceremonies organised within rights of nature events taking place in Europe but also in Quito, and involving more-than-human entities, Chamel analyses how participants seek to re-establish their relationships with the non-human beings whose legal personality is being defended. Using detailed descriptions of animism-inspired rituals that draw inspiration from diverse indigenous cosmogonies, he identifies how these practices draw on the legitimacy of indigenous leaders, and how they become reformulated and institutionalised through ritual creativity processes. Chamel also questions the core argument of the movement for the rights of nature as a multi-sited and online initiative seeking to re-establish animistic and holistic relationships with the living world and invites the reader to understand this movement as a banner to promote an ecocentrism that is no longer fully naturalistic, without being truly animistic. Part III of the volume entitled “More-than-Human Spiritualities: Liminality, Embodiment and Intimate Experiences of Personal Transformation” illustrates contemporary forms of relating to more-than-­ humans in Western societies. It focuses on the liminal interactions, transformation experiences, and phenomenological relationalities constructed among humans and non-human participants in alternative spiritual practices in Wales, Sweden, Finland, north-western France, and Estonia. Searching to contribute to a re-evaluation of the classical and widely used terms liminality and communitas in ritual studies, Chap. 8 by Ed Lord and Henrik Ohlsson explores participants’ relations with non-human beings in the context of therapeutic nature practices, such as ecotherapy, forest bathing, and forest therapy. Their fieldwork was conducted in three geographical and cultural contexts with much in common but also notable differences: Wales, Sweden, and Finland. Applying a comparative analysis of their respective fieldworks, Lord and Ohlsson call our attention to one of the key values granted by practitioners to alternative spiritual practices performed in natural environments: their capacity for providing them with experiences regarded as having the potential of momentarily dissipating the pressures and tensions of modern life. For interviewees, nature takes

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the form of a liminal space where the burdens of social structures temporarily dissolve, and practitioners can access a living world inhabited by more-than-human beings. Lord and Ohlsson accurately demonstrate that the concepts of liminality and communitas contribute to our understanding of the practitioner’s experience of more-than-humans in alternative spiritual practices. Chapter 9 by Yael Dansac centres on alternative spiritual practices performed in the megalithic landscapes of north-western France. Her detailed analysis of the ritual design followed by different groups explores the construction of intimate experiences of personal transformation resulting from the practitioners’ interaction with non-human beings considered to inhabit this territory. Drawing on interviews, observations, and descriptions of the rituals’ organising principles, Dansac demonstrates how practitioners engage in different bodily techniques whose purpose is to create liminal spaces in which humans relate to non-human beings regarded as the guardians of the restorative and beneficial powers of the megaliths. Seeking to identify how participants assimilate summoned entities, she highlights collective strategies applied to reflect on them as animated beings who are equal to humans in diverse aspects while simultaneously being distinct because they have non-human powers and capacities. In her case study, interbeings interactions are first and foremost activated when the practitioner displays body postures and behaviours related to a state of “openness”. The volume’s tour of the world finishes in Estonia with Chap. 10 by Tenno Teidearu on crystals as other-than-human persons in New Spirituality. Teidearu takes us to the heart of the problem of what the purpose of animist materialism is and how it illustrates another dimension of human and more-than-human interactions. Using both interviews and ethnographic observations in  local esoteric shops, he discusses how Estonian women who have embraced alternative spiritualities incorporate semi-precious stones considered to have spiritual qualities into their everyday lives. Teidearu convincingly argues that bodily engagements with crystals allow these women to support their human capacities and qualities to solve personal problems and bring change to their lives. He also highlights that the combination of corporeal perception, interaction, intimacy, bodily proximity, and dependency can produce and shape the subject’s phenomenological relationality with these objects regarded as living beings. Drawing on the practice of wearing crystals, Teidearu demonstrates that relationality and communication between humans and

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more-­than-­humans is not static, rather, it evolves over time and through continual interaction and therefore has temporal and material dimensions. Acknowledgements  A grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation awarded to Jean Chamel made the writing of this introduction possible.

References Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a Morethan-Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellah, Robert. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96 (1): 1–21. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (S1): S67–S91. Cadena, Marisol de la. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Chamel, Jean. 2021. “Waiting for the Ecological Apocalypse: From New Age Millenarianism to Collapsologie in French-Speaking Europe.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 15 (4): 441–461. Csordas, Thomas J. 2009. “Introduction: modalities of Transnational Transcendence.” In Thomas J.  Csordas (ed.), Transnational Transcendence. Essays on religion and globalization, 1–29. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dębińska, Maria Salomea. 2021. “Witnessing from within: Hyperobjects and Climate Activism in Poland.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11 (2): 445–60. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fedele, Anna. 2013. Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. “Doute et incertitude dans les nouveaux rituels contemporains.” Social Compass 61 (4): 497–510. Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh; Oakland; Baltimore: Ak Press. Grimes, Ronald L. 1992. “Reinventing ritual.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 75 (1): 21–41. Hallowell, A.  Irving. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Stanley Diamond (ed.), Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, 19–52. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Houseman, Michael. 2011a. “Trying to Make a Difference with Ritual Design.” In Udo Simon, Christiane Brosius, Karin Polit, Karin, Petra Rosch, Corinna Wessels-Mevissen et Gregor Ahn (eds.), Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual IV. Reflexivity, Media, and Visuality, 699–706. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ———. 2011b. “Refracting Ritual: An Upside-down Perspective on Ritual, Media and Conflict”. In Ronald L. Grimes, Ute Hüsken, Udo Simon, Eric Venbrux (eds.), Ritual, Media, and Conflict, 255–284. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. “Comment comprendre l’esthétique affectée des cérémonies New Age et néopaïennes ?” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 174: 213–237. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge. ———. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought.” Ethnos 71 (1): 9–20. Harvey, Graham. 1997. Contemporary Paganism. Listening People, Speaking Earth. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Magliocco, Sabina. 2014. “Introduction: Ritual creativity, emotions and the body.” Journal of Ritual Studies 28 (2): 1–8. Taylor, Bron. 2000. “Deep ecology and its social philosophy: A critique.” In Eric Katz, Andrew Light et David Rothenberg (eds.), Beneath the surface: Critical essays in the philosophy of deep ecology, 269–299. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turner, Edith. 2006. Among the Healers: stories of spiritual and ritual healing around the world. Westport: Praeger Publishers. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-structure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, Arnold. 2013. The Rites of Passage. Routledge. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–88.

PART I

Living with More-than-Humans: The Role of Daily Rites

CHAPTER 2

Inter-species Interaction Rituals in Yak Herding Practices in Nepal Théophile Johnson

Introduction Research on domestication (St Hilaire, 1861) revealed very early that domestication is a process characterized by an unstable equilibrium that requires relationships to be updated on a daily basis. Feralization thus refers to the ecological and social adaptation of domesticated species when they lose their relationship with humans. This chapter focuses on the means used to avoid feralization and on the maintenance of domestic relations between humans and yaks in an extensive farming system that relies heavily on the autonomy of the animals to survive in the Nepalese Himalayas. Indeed, it has been shown that, to be possible, cohabitation between humans and large mammals in extensive systems requires mechanisms to induce cooperation or, as Charles Stepanoff has called it, “joint commitment” (2012). These relationships are closely dependent on the environment and thus form a relational triad.

T. Johnson (*) Paris-Nanterre University, Nanterre, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_2

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By following symbolic interactionism and by taking into account the postulate of hybrid communities (Lestel 2008) in pastoral environments, which considers that the hybridity of inter-species relations is a cultural fact that can lead to cognitive innovations (1998), we will focus our observations on the communication interactions between herders and their yaks. This study is based on a participant ethnography split into two five-­ month fieldwork visits conducted between 2017 and 2018  in Manang, Nepal. I stayed in six camps with thirteen shepherds, both men and women, of all cultural backgrounds, whether Gurung, Dolpali, Sherpa, Ghale, Tamang or Kami. I nevertheless stayed in a privileged way with Purba and his wife Poltu with whom an apprenticeship situation (Downey et al. 2014) was initiated. The master’s thesis that resulted from this ethnography focused on the techniques of the shepherds that they use to relate to their herd and the types of knowledge and skills they require to keep it. During these ten months spent in the company of the shepherds, the recurrence of certain interactions that all the shepherds pointed out to me, the situations of embarrassment brought about by my errors in the help I tried to provide, led me to attempt to define the role of these interactions in the setting up of the process of cooperation between the shepherds and their yaks. Thus, in this chapter, the description of these interactions is derived from a corpus of direct and participatory observations collected during the collective movements of the herd produced by the herders, milking, tying the young every evening on a rope and the distribution of salt. These observations were then confronted during semi-directive interviews which focused on the reactions to the reading of my field observations. This ethnography finally led me to identify certain stereotyped and daily repeated interactions which, as I would like to show in this chapter, can be considered as interspecific interaction rituals that humans and animals use to communicate and maintain a stable relationship over time and which lead to the development of a hybrid community organized by bio-­semiotic interactions. After reviewing how the notion of ritual can be a heuristic for the study of the ways of communication between men and animals inside domestication processes, we will go further into the ethnography of the Manang herders. We will observe the intimate relationships that develop between a shepherd and his yaks. We will then see, from aggression to cooperation, how the passage from one to the other is frequent and depends on the interaction framework according to Ervin Goffman’s concept (1991). Finally, we will see several types of interaction rituals that we have tried to organize into a non-exhaustive typology.

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Interaction Rituals The anthropological theory of ritual has evolved considerably since Emile Dhurkeim. Without going back over the review by Frederik Keck (2004) on the notion of ritual in anthropology, let us summarize that it tends to be extracted from the religious field and extended to everyday interactions (Goffman 1982), to play or to the regulation of emotions (Collins 2005). The ethologist John Smith (1977) identifies “formalised interactions” that organize ritual gestures, both in animals and in human interactions. The contexts in which they can be observed are often the same: greetings, seductive approaches, challenges and contestations (Lecomte 2019). Everyday rituals, or rituals of daily life from Ervin Goffman’s expression (1982), shape social behavior in animals first, as his ethological inspiration to Julian Huxley indicates, and then in humans in the ways of greeting, politeness, meals and postures of dominance. Indeed, at first, ethologists extended in the same way the application range of interaction rituals that Julian Huxley (1966) defines in this way: “Biologically, a ritual is an adaptive formalization or channeling of emotionally motivated behavior and responds to the pressure of natural selection (…) in order to promote a more elaborate signaling function both intra—and inter-specific” (ibid.). As Bernard Conein (1992) explains in his discussion of the contribution of ethology to sociology: When Goffman borrowed the notion of ritualisation from ethology, he sought to link the analysis of communication more closely to that of the actual bodily behaviour of the protagonists. (…) Huxley and Lorenz sought in the analysis of model micro-behaviour and patterns of action in which social intelligence played a minor role. The success of classical ethology, which explains its fascination with Goffman’s microsociology, is to have been able to break down animal behaviour into micro-units in order to establish, with complete accuracy, what an animal does. (…) The inadequacy of the ritualisation model was that it did not take into account the social properties of interaction. (Conein 1992)

If we finally follow Erving Goffman’s minimal acceptance of the situation in which the ritual is implemented, the animal as well performs ritualised actions in a social ‘frame’ (Lecomte 2019). As he defined it “I argue that any definition of situation is constructed according to organising principles that structure events—at least those of a social character—and

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our own subjective engagement. The term ‘frame’ refers to these basic elements” (Goffman 1991: 9). Charles Stepannoff (2015) even comes to compare the modes of communication to spirits in shamanic rituals to a type of communication known as “analogue” which aims to share experiences with non-humans. As he proposes, “religious rituals can be compared to other situations of communication between humans and non-humans. This is the case with human-animal communication, where humans exchange signals and sometimes cooperate with animals (game, livestock, pets)” (ibid.). There are many examples of interspecific communication in nature (attack signals, distress signals, exchange of environmental signals between sympatric species). “The general question to be asked is: what are the implications for humans of communicating, of sharing experiences with non-humans? What are the consequences for communication and interaction of the fact that the participants are not supposed to belong to the same community, but to profoundly, ontologically distinct universes? How does one construct a common world with such beings?” (Stepanoff 2015).

A Yak Older than the Shepherd, When a Yak Shapes the Shepherd We felt the snow coming. The icy wind from the heights blew across the interstices of the tent and whispered to us that the storm was coming. While we were resting and dreaming to the sound of the storm’s roar, five yaks, with their imposing heavy build, approached the tent. We hear their grunts all around our shelter. Their request is clear and Pau Roti, who understands what is happening, hastens to get dressed to satisfy them: they are looking for salt. Without delay, we leave the tent to give them some. Pau Roti approaches slowly, and the yaks perfectly calm in front of him. His step is light and silent but confident, without hesitation. A few meters away from the first one, he put his hand forward after having dipped it in the salt bag. Thulo Rato (the big red one) with his broken right horn slowly stretches his neck to reach the hand without moving his massive body that he is holding back. As he moistens his tongue with salt, he leaps backward, head down and performs a series of small jumps with his body arched. The others move aside startled. Pau Roti enters the circle they form and places several handfuls of salt on a stone polished by the tongues of yaks for nearly a hundred years. The yaks wait for him to finish, and as

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soon as he moves away, they rush at it and fight for the biggest share with great blows of horns in the flank, they fight, head against head and we hear their blows resounding in the whole valley. The big red one dominates them all and takes a large portion of the salt. The younger ones, smaller in size, do not dare to approach him and wait until he is satiated before taking their share. Pau Roti tells me that he has known the big red one for twenty years, when he first arrived in the village. This yak saw him become a shepherd, and he confides to me that he will be very sad when he dies. He has seen the youngest born and is quite familiar with them all. He also tells me that there is no risk around the camp, but you have to be very careful when you come across the horde on the pastures (Jaṅgalı ̄ maa) because they can be aggressive. When the salt is finished, the yaks set off again at a slow pace, together toward their solitude.

From Aggression to Cooperation A few days later, I decide to pay a visit to the horde on the highest plateau; their domain is at the top of the cliff which overhangs Yak Kharka. I pass the last fold of the mountain which hides me from the plateau. I had become used to the cauri’s cooperation and when these males began to charge me I even didn’t try to run away at first. It seems that, as Pau roti warned me, when the free yaks are on the pastures, they protect their territory and scare away foreigners who approach them (Fig. 2.1). This was also the information that I had been given by the yarsagumba gatherers who all were really scared about meeting during the day yaks onto pasture. The day after this traumatic experience, the yak that had attacked me came among the cauri. I didn’t recognize him at once and tried to throw stones at him to make him join the herd. At first he did not react. I then approached him and threw the starting hooting “Ah!” and “Chhe!” but without any result. I tried to scare him by running after him, but he didn’t move. Only then did I recognize who I was dealing with. We looked at each other for a moment, and I froze, remembering the scene from the day before. He then slowly went back in the opposite direction to the herd, alone. Unlike during the rut, male yaks do not respond to stone throwing and hooting by joining the herd, but go in the opposite direction. It is then impossible to bring them back to the camp, reminding us once again that whatever happens the shepherd only produces the signal to return to camp. It is only followed by effects if the yaks want it and hear the ritual

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Fig. 2.1  A cauri is negotiating her dominance with me. (Photo: T. Johnson)

gesture that the shepherd proposes. When a single yak joins the herd, it does not become cooperative. In contrast, when the rutting yaks join the herd, they adopt the same cooperative behavior as the cauri. This change in behavior is extremely marked. They respond to stone throwing and hooting, in reply to the signal of the herders, join the herd and follow it back to camp. This contrast between male and female behavior and the ability of males to change their attitude upon joining the herd make yak pastoralism an extremely rich case for studying domestication and its possibilities in terms of animal agentivity in bio-semiotic mechanisms. I was constantly surprised by the shepherds’ radical change in behavior, which seemed quite normal to them. But what are the mechanisms at play so that these semiotic atmospheres are set up? What are the relevant factors that cause these changes in yak behavior, ranging from cooperation to rejection and even aggression? In order to maintain a domesticated relationship in a pastoral space and practice that relies on the animal’s cooperation, herders must enter into a set of daily interactions. We will see in what way we may call these “ritual”.

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Cycles Winters are long and often harsh in Manang. This difficult climate and in recent years, predators’ attacks have caused the death of a large number of yaks, often reducing the size of the herds by half or more. In Manang and Tanki, four herders (gothalo) and their yak herds share the village pastures, stretching from Ghunsang to Thorong Phedi, along the valley (4000–5000 m high) that runs north from the village and up the hillsides (daada) above them. In this valley, six seasonal camps (Kharka) are inhabited alternately by different herders. Each of these camps is dedicated to a species. However, Purba and Khansar, two yak herders, have joined forces and mixed their herds at the Ledar camp. They mix their herds during the day, but tie their young separately for the night, thus maintaining the identity of each herd. During the Summer, three yak herders from Manang gather at Pripche, on the heights of Ghunsang. Snow covers the land from October to March. In spring, some snowfall still occurs, but this is the mildest season. From June the monsoon rains that accumulate on the peaks plunge the pastures into fog and rain, sometimes for several weeks. This rainy season is the richest period for grass. It is during this season that the cauri are strongest and it is also the only season during which the shepherds can milk the cauri without risking to weaken them or their young. Autumn is the hottest season, but also the driest. The grass is often scarce and the herd’s range becomes wider and wider. The transhumance is also determined by the needs of the cauri which cannot stand the heat. Thus, as autumn approaches, the shepherds go up to higher altitudes with their herds and come back down when the first snows arrive, thus completing the pastoral cycle. Yaks have their own rhythms. Like all other mammal species, yaks are governed by circadian rhythms that alternate between day and night, feeding, digestion and movement phases. But many other physiological aspects shape the rhythms of daily activity. Shepherds adapt themselves to the rhythm of ruminants in order to stay with them. Unlike us, ruminants must feed for more than ten hours a day and alternate between stubble phases during which the ruminants chew after their grazing the stubble grass. The seasons are marked by rhythms that have their own particularities. Autumn is calm like the herd, which stretches out over large areas, without moving. Spring is excitement, vivacity. Summer is heavy, humid and Winter is hard. There is a musical score of actions according to the seasons that is reflected even in the approach of a shepherd to his flock. This sense of rhythm is even imposed in the transformation of the raw

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material. The shepherds churn the butter by counting in rhythm the five hundred strokes of the churn necessary before adding the hot water that will separate the milk from the butter. If the strokes are not regular, the efficiency of the process suffers. Through walking, shepherds and yaks alike survey the same territory, undergo the same unevenness, twist their ankles on the same slope, experience the emptiness on the edge of a ridge and discover the mountain together. The shepherd leads his flock to the corners and areas that he has identified for the quality of its grass and the herds, by the march of the pasture, slow down that of the men. The step of the shepherd gets closer to that of his flock and he begins to observe differently in the silence that inhabits the space left between each step. The story goes that it was a shepherd who discovered the yarsagumba. A village gatherer once told me, “As the shepherd was grazing his yaks and observing them, he realized that the bold ones were eating and enjoying a tiny black blade of grass that the shepherds had never paid attention to before. Digging at its root, he discovered the yarsagumba”. All the virtues attributed to the yarsagumba stem from this. Thus, it is by observing the yaks that the shepherd learnt the existence of a miracle plant that has become the elixir of youth in the Chinese pharmacopoeia. The yarsagumba is the result of the union of the fungus Ophiocordyceps sinensis and the caterpillar Thitarode. The young caterpillars are infected by the fungus through their food. During the season, the pickers scan the pasture all day long for this small spike. The yaks spend their days grazing these stretches of grass where the yarsagumba grows. Vegetative state, banal at first sight but if we look at it from another angle, the action of grazing is a state of intense focus. The yak’s senses are fully immersed in the search. They scrutinize the ground in its smallest details, discovering all its nuances. They penetrate a dimension unknown to our eyes. They leave their space-time and enter the one of the grass and the insect. This is how, according to the shepherds, the yaks discovered a great number of medicinal plants: food that the shepherds are aware of. For this reason, the inhabitants consider the milk products of the yak as real medicines and consume them as such. “It’s like looking for a needle. It’s even more complicated than that because the needles are shiny. The yarsagumba is black. When you look from afar, you can’t see anything. So you have to get closer. It is like the tip of an incense stick. Some of them are so small that even if you look very closely, you can only see a tip. Those who recognize it will be able to pick

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it while others won’t even see that it’s there.” Was saying a picker. The hybrid community that is formed between humans and herds, by the rhythms it imposes, shapes a common attention formed by the juxtaposition of the environments of each species. For several weeks now I have been busy bringing back to Purba all the cauri that have escaped from the herd. I thought that it was an important task, without which the herd would fall apart day after day. But I realized while discussing with an owner that the shepherds also rely on the needs of the cauri as a result of predictable behavior. “The cauri always come down to drink” he told me. This is why the camps are always set up near a water source where watering troughs have been created and fed by a catchment. This way, the herders ensure the attractiveness of the camps and rely on the predictability of the behavior of those groups that have fled the herd. Manang is a semi-arid region where grass is quite scarce. The grass growth is the main reason of transhumance and here again, the behavior of the cauri marks the departure date. A few days before, the herd becomes more and more fragmented, climbs higher and refuses to return to camp in the evening. Without enough grass to satisfy the cauri, the shepherds would be unable to bring the herd back. The snow melts first at the bottom of the valley where the spring camps are located. Once the higher pastures are cleared and the grass has had time to grow after a few weeks of rain, the herds move to the summer camps. As soon as the first snow falls, the herds go back down to the valley bottom where the snow cover is thinner. The herders’ herding modes varies seasonally for this reason. In Autumn and Winter, the cauri are left in total autonomy. Returning to camp is too cumbersome a system to allow them to reach the inaccessible places where they can find the grass they need. This cycle and the rhythm of the grass also have consequences on the breeding and the relationship of the herd toward the shepherds. This need to leave the herds in autonomy during the Winter leads each year to a small loss of tame of the cauri, which lose the group cohesion of the herd that gather in small groups of affinity. Spring is the season of the birth of the calves. This season is particularly hard for the shepherds because the cauri who get birth has a will to isolate herself. Once she did it is almost impossible to bring it back before the calf is one week old. For this reason, it is imperative for the shepherd to gather all the groups every evening, or they risk suffering during the summer season. In the summer, the return to the camp must imperatively be assimilated again by the herd,

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which, if the work of the shepherd has been properly carried out during Spring, is almost done by itself. The shepherd can then milk the cauri every morning. If he lacks cauri daily, his milk production will inevitably be affected. This cycle also corresponds to the learning cycle of newborns during their first year of life. The shepherds must tie the young around the tent. In this way, they teach them to have confidence in themselves and to assimilate the camps as a space of confidence and security. There are, as we saw, many actions that are repeated daily according to a precise rhythm in order to create a habit and transmit certain behavior such as returning to the camp, letting themselves be caught, milking and forming a united herd. We will now see how these daily actions can have ritual value. Before returning to the yaks, I would like to make a small detour to introduce this notion through the means of protection against predation that the shepherds have put in place. The rituality of the relationship is indeed also found in the means of avoiding predation by the snow panther, which, although turned toward avoiding close contact, nonetheless uses the same daily semiotic mechanisms.

Avoidance Rituals: The Snow Leopard Recently, thanks to the work of Tashi Ghale, a wildlife photographer who has been very involved in the conservation of the snow panther while protecting the interests of herders, shepherds are multiplying the installations that signal human presence in order to combat predation and offer more security to their animals (Fig. 2.2). One finds at the four corners of the camps solar lamps hung on long poles which, during the night, illuminate the goth at regular intervals. One can also find scarecrows placed at the ends of the goth. It also happens that the shepherds install fires of gophaal (dried dung) and choupa (small conifer usually burned for the daily puja). Thanks to these installations, shituar hardly ever attack at night on the goth and have now started attacking the herds during the day on the pastures (jangaal). These solutions to the dangers of predation, which of course are not unanimously accepted, and the use of poison, are in contrast to the response of French herders who, in such circumstances, use herding dogs (Patous) capable of competing with wolves. In Nepal, shepherds prefer to indicate human presence by mobile structures, clues and signs reproduced daily, whereas in France shepherds rely on continuous surveillance and direct confrontation with another species as well as electric fences.

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Fig. 2.2  The snow leopard in the yak pasture area. (Photo: T. Johnson)

Upon arrival at Thi’s goth, Kunga explained to me how he placed the scarecrows and lamps. “It’s not enough to put them in the four corners of the camp”, he told me. “You have to put them where the shituar will see them as soon as he arrives in the valley. If, for example, he comes from up there, you have to put him there. Then put one over there if he comes from the other side. When he comes to the camp, he comes by this path. The scarecrows have to lead him around the camp. If you put a scarecrow in and it’s makes it go right over the cauri, it can’t work.” The position of the scarecrows is therefore thought out according to two factors. First, according to the morphology of the land and the views it offers, but also according to the habits of the shituar. The shepherds project themselves into his field of vision in order to anticipate his movements and divert his trajectory with the help of lamps and scarecrows. The gophaal fires must also be placed so that the smoke spreads over the entire camp. To do this, the herders look for a place where the wind is more or less constant and comes from the same direction. The herders also burn every day the gophaal (dried yak dung) which gives off a particular acrid smell. These fires spread the sign of human

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presence in the mountain and are intended to dissuade the panther from approaching this scented area. Finally, as with the rituals to the deities, the shepherds enter into a relationship with the shituar through an odor perceived on a daily basis. Through these multiple indexical processes, the shepherds give the panther the message not to approach. They delimit a life zone that belongs to humans by introducing sensory markers that only they can produce and that are supposed to dissuade the panther from approaching. This ritual relationship corresponds to what Goffman calls avoidance rituals (Winkin 2005). Daily Pudjas, dedicated to the local demons, seem to be using the same process of fumigation, dropping objects in special areas, in order to keep them satisfied and, in this way, not bringing misfortune. The use of similar type of analogic communication has been shown by Stepanoff (2015).

A Short Typology The number of rituals in place in the daily life of shepherds and herds is far too great to be able to give an exhaustive description in this chapter. However, we will attempt to develop a short typology inspired by the work of Goffman (1982). The elaboration of this typology will allow us to understand in more detail what can be the consequences of the transmission of emotions through ritualized and daily repeated interactions in the relationship with the animals and in the practice of pastoralism. Rituals of Identification Identification rituals fit with all interactions that aim to recognize each other as individuals and even more as a person. The few Nepalese zoologists and agronomists who have worked on yak pastoralism could not help but notice that “These animals are very sensitive to smell, they can tell if a crevasse is nearby on the path but also indicate its location” (Joshi 1982) and that “Yaks and cauri also have bad habits such as giving a blow to people with clean and colorful clothes” (ibid.). These two remarks were also made to me by the shepherds who were careful not to have soap with too much fragrance and wear dark or brown clothes. These colors adapt to the visual and olfactory perceptions of the yaks and are worn in order not to disturb the sense of normality in the olfactory field. The uniform and the fringes are two very marked aspects of the ritual practices and they do not fail to be found in the daily life of the shepherds. These two aspects

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could correspond to rituals of identification and aim to make the shepherd enter the field of singularity, of the person with the yaks. In the same way, the shepherds whistle at the approach of the herd to put it out to pasture and bring it back, this melody is unique to each shepherd. Purba taught me that when returning to camp, it was better to stand in a place where all the cauri could hear the whistle and wait patiently while whistling, rather than forcing them to move one by one. Also, the cauri perceive the individual nuances of whistles and other hooting and respond differently depending on the individual making it. I tried to imitate the melody of Purba and indeed, after five minutes, all the herd started to move toward the camp, slowly, group after group. In the same way as for the clothes the whistle is a means of recognition of a particular singularity repeated which by habituation and repetition make it easier to identify an individual. It also happens that the shepherds take care of a calf whose mother has died and feed it with a bottle. The feeding times can be seen as a ritual of identification and confirmation. The youngster remains thus nearly six months in the exclusive company of the shepherds and stays on the camp and follows them when they are nearby. This taming and the familiarity with the human presence make them animals of choice for milking or returning to the camp. From infancy on, the various phases of affective and positive training allow the shepherd to train assistants to initiate ritual interactions. Confirmatory Rituals Confirmatory rituals tend to re-actualize the relationship. Each time the position is challenged, accentuated and broken, a series of stereotyped behaviors that announce an emotional state are put in place. Cattle herds have an extremely strong hierarchical structure that can be disconcertingly complex with countervailing effects (Bouissou and Boissy 2005). Ethologists refer to these interactions between individual animals as dominance and affinity relationships, which are also recognized through stereotyped behaviors. Ethologists have recognized four different types of dominance: defiance, attack, retaliation and avoidance. The cauri regularly display this behavior toward the shepherds and the latter must constantly redouble their efforts to maintain their place within this hierarchical structure. In this negotiation, the smallest gesture counts, because the slightest startle at a gesture of defiance from a cauri makes them lose face. Shepherds must take on the role of “leader” in the herd (Fijn 2011: 44) and enter the social

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Fig. 2.3  Phurba and Dorze are milking a cauri that wouldn’t cooperate. Dorze is petting her flank and calming her by whispering. (Photo: T. Johnson)

hierarchy of the yaks. But all the non-agonistic interactions are also to be taken into account when setting up the herd structure and the shepherds have to play both to be able to lead the herd and to milk the cauri (Fig. 2.3). Non-agonistic interactions include physical contact, petting, sniffing and any affective gestures. It is common for one shepherd to assist the other in calming a stressed one during milking. He will stand next to the cauri and pet her flank. Maintenance Rituals From birth, the bacca are kept as close as possible to the shepherds’ tent. It is at this age that the cauri have the most contact with humans, because the mothers also stay with their young around the tent. The moment when the shepherds tie them to the rope is the first physical contact of the bacca with humans. Every day, they are handled when the rope is put around their leg or removed. The shepherds then begin to talk to them, to get them used

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to their voice and their smell, and they show them that their intentions are not bad by offering them daily affection (Campbell 2005). When I asked Pau Roti why it is so important to tie the calf at the same place every night, he answered two things. First, it facilitates the calf to understand where he has to go if he wants to do it himself, ant two, it tied not only physically but also socially the calf to his neighbor. It is when the calf is tied that much of the learning takes place. At first, mothers cooperate with shepherds in leading the calf to the tether. The shepherd places himself behind the mother and, while spreading his arms, produces softly and with a low voice the hooting dedicated to this situation: “bulubulébulébulé”. Then, accompanied by her calf, the mother goes to the tether and waits for the shepherd to catch the calf. With time, the mother has less and less need to accompany her calf who goes to the tethering rope by himself. When she does, the shepherd rewards her with a pinch of salt, the yak’s only real addiction to human possessions. The training of the young is actually carried out by the mothers who, by reacting to the shepherds’ hooting, show how to act in response. They show their young how to cooperate with the shepherds. A few days after the transhumance on the Thi goth, a pohor1 was impossible to catch. The three of us, Kunga and Dorje, went out to catch it, and once again, it managed to escape us. He ran in all directions, his attention fixed on our arrival, he always maintained a considerable distance between himself and the shepherds. When he was accompanied by his mother, who cooperated, we managed to bring him close to the rope, but still without succeeding in catching him. We finally let him free and returned home exhausted to light the fire and prepare the tea. The next day, there were two of them who did not let themselves be approached. The first one had shown the way to the others. After eating, Kunga went out again in the night. All the cauri and the calves were already asleep. He approached without a sound and managed to catch it. On the way back, Kunga said to me, “We don’t let ourselves be taken advantage of. The cauri must always believe that whatever they do, the shepherd will always get his own way.” The autonomy of the herd is based on the sense of the cauri that they will not be able to escape the will of the herder. It is essential to maintain this feeling at all times. In this sense, there is indeed a basis of domination. But this is not, as Ingold thinks, a shift from trust to domination, from hunting to herding (Ingold 2011). Rather than domination, it is “dominance 1

 A one-year-old calf.

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Fig. 2.4  Phurba is approaching a bacca that is hard to catch. His hand is catching the young’s attention. (Photo: T. Johnson)

relation” that is at stake (Fijn 2011: 44) as discussed above. Although there is dominance of herders over their cauri, domination in Ingold’s sense has no reality for Manang herders. Tying to the rope is done as we have seen by approaching the fiercest calves also using certain stereotypical behavior. One example of this is to reach out with the right hand and gently approach the calf without making eye contact. This method of approaching by holding out the hand is a very human ritual interaction, but it also serves the animals by reducing the escape distance (which also happens to be the unit of measurement for ethologists to measure the degree of taming of animals) (Fig. 2.4).

Are There Funeral Circles? “It is often difficult to judge whether animals have any feeling towards others’ sufferings. Who can say what cows feel, when they surround and stare intently on a dying or dead companion?”—Darwin (1981, p. 73)

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I was bringing the yaks back when all of a sudden, a young cauri stumbles and falls into a juniper bush. It gets stuck on its back and comes to a complete stop. I expect her to struggle, but not a spasm. She froze. The other cauri who were nearby and who saw the scene as I did also stopped and stared at the stricken animal. I know that if a sheep is on its back, it can be taken by paralysis and suffocate. When this happens it is a matter of minutes. Except that I am facing a yak. I approach to see its eyes when I realize that it is still alive. At this precise moment, several cauri encircle me and observe by approaching more and more. Some of them come to sniff the inert body. I pulled one of its paws to make it roll on the side. A spasm takes her, but she is too heavy. I pull again, she falls over and rolls down the steep slope. After a few rolls, she finds herself on her four legs, stunned. She takes a few moments to regain her senses while some yaks hurry to come and smell her before leaving together. I remain speechless; the vision of this circle of cauri around the body looking at her, sniffing her with a worried look, comes back to me brutally. I observed a similar scene with sheep in the scrubland of Narbonne two years ago. In order not to have to pay the slaughterhouses, the shepherd slaughters and butchers the lambs himself. To do this, he kills them in the park before taking them away. We catch them as we do when we care for them, turning them on their sides. He quickly stuck his knife in the jugular and took it out again, letting the lambs bleed to death. I was by then the shepherd of this flock and participated in the slaughter; I worried about my future relationships with the sheep. Like the yaks, the ewes (including the mother of this lamb) were watching us in a circle around us. Something they never do during care. We load the lamb in the truck and the whole flock follows us and forms what looks like a funeral procession. When I took the flock out, I thought that they would be angry with me, that they would not eat, in shock, or at least that they would behave in an unusual way, but to my greatest surprise, it was a day like any other and I returned to the hut with a strange feeling caused by the relativity of mourning that the ewes had confronted me with. Toward whom are the glances turned, why this curiosity, tinged with worry? Why this indifference a few moments later? Is it a gesture of communication toward humans, or an empathy for the animal that is close to death? We can observe the mourning behavior of many species and an expression of suffering faced with loss, as with the elephant or the behavior of the cattle confronted with the death of their congener. But this is not the case in all species. Is this a sign of a perceptive relationship to time that is too immeasurable?

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Conclusion Stepanoff already provided part of the answer to the question we were asking. Indeed two types of communication are possible for humans. “Digital communication is only possible within a community that shares many conventions, linguistic and otherwise (between humans). Analogue communication, on the other hand, lends itself to cross-linguistic exchanges (people who do not speak the same languages use iconic or indexical gestures) and interspecific exchanges (we understand the signals of terrestrial mammals quite easily)” (2015). As he also explains, common features of zoosemiotics and ritual communication include redundancy of identical formulas or vocalizations repeated multiple times and in various forms; multimodality where the same message is communicated through different sensory channels: sound, visual, olfactory; and, finally, stereotypy, so these interactions are non-idiosyncratic, non-spontaneous and non-flexible (Stepanoff 2015). In order to share representations, desires and experiences with yak the shepherds have adapted to them and communicate messages inspired by their own communication system. However, the shepherds do not give up their humanity by maintaining their linguistic modes of communication in some way. Rather, they make adaptations and introduce borrowings, constituting a “hybrid code” (ibid.). “Thus, all ritual language is a conversation between worlds including human and non-human properties” (ibid.). We have just explored a multitude of bio-semiotic behaviors that are shared between humans and yaks in Nepal. We have seen that these behaviors aim to exacerbate an emotion and make it intelligible by daily repetition. These interaction rituals are at the basis of an inter-species semiotics and thus of the geopolitics of relations that allow domestication and herding. These can as well be subdivided according to the same typology that Goffman applied to humans and their social life as that of stereotyped behaviors in ethology. It seems important to me not only to speak today of pastoralism in an encompassing way in the cultural relationship that herders have with their animals but to focus on the exchanges between individuals in order to understand how these are shaped and make possible a bio-social phenomenon as complex as that of domestication. The aim of this chapter was not to formulate a complete theory of the role of ritual interactions in the emergence of domestication but to propose a hypothesis and to question the existence of interaction rituals between several species on the basis of empirical observations made during my stays with Nepalese herders and my work as a shepherd in France.

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References Bouissou, Marie-France, and Alain Boissy. 2005. “Le comportement social des bovins et ses conséquences en élevage.” INRAE Productions Animales 18 (2): 87–99. Collins, Randall. 2005. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Campbell, Ben. 2005. “On ‘Loving Your Water Buffalo More Than Your Own Mother’: Relationships of Animal and Human Care in Nepal.” In John Knight (ed.), Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies, 79–100. Oxford: Berg. Conein, Bernard. 1992. “Éthologie et sociologie. Contribution de l’éthologie à la théorie de l’interaction sociale.” Revue française de sociologie 33 (1). Darwin, Charles. 1981 [1871]. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Downey, Greg, Monica Dalidowicz, and Paul H. Mason. 2015. “Apprenticeship as Method: Embodied Learning in Ethnographic Practice.” Qualitative Research 15 (2): 183–200. Fijn, Natasha. 2011. Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1982. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1991. Les cadres de l’expérience. Paris: Minuit. Huxley, Julian. 1966. “Introduction.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 251 (772): 249–271. Ingold, Tim. 2011. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Joshi, D. D. 1982. Yak and Chauri Husbandry in Nepal. Kathmandu: His Majesty Government Press. Keck, Frédéric. 2004. “Ervin Goffman et les rites de la vie quotidienne.” Working Group “La philosophie au sens large” https://philolarge.hypotheses.org/ files/2017/09/01-12-2004_keck_Goffman.pdf. Lecomte, Vincent. 2019. “Greta Alfaro, le rituel à l’épreuve de l’animal.” Images Re-vues 16. Lestel, Dominique. 2008. “Les communautés hybrids.” Sciences Humaines 194 (6). Smith, William John. 1977. The Behavior of Communicating: An Ethological Approach. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Stépanoff, Charles. 2012. “Human-Animal ‘Joint Commitment’ in a Reindeer Herding System.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 287–312.

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———. 2015. “Communication rituelle et communication interspécifique.” Annuaire de l'École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), Section des sciences religieuses 122: 51–56. Winkin, Yves. 2005. “La notion de rituel chez Goffman: De la cérémonie à la séquence.” Hermès 43 (3): 69-76.

CHAPTER 3

Urban Wixárika and More-than-Human Beings: The Case of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) in Western Mexico Cyndy Margarita Garcia-Weyandt

Native Corn offers a framework to understand human and more-than-­ human interactions by instructing us about how plants are teachers in a human’s life. Settler colonialism and its effects disrupt the ways in which Native communities related to non-humans. According to Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism is defined as the “logic of elimination” and as a structure not a single event (2006: 388). In Mexico, the commodification of Native species of Corn and other plants for human consumption and use in the pharmaceutical industry disrupted the “kincentric” relationship between humans and plants.1 This kincentric relationship maintains Our 1  Enrique Salmón describes “kincenric” as the extension of kinship relations to more-than-­ human beings. Enrique Salmón, Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2012), 8.

C. M. Garcia-Weyandt (*) Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_3

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Mother Corn as central to the life of families for not only ceremonial purposes but in the daily life of families to give us a framework to live life in wellness. However, many Indigenous communities through embodied practices and memory have maintained their close and intimate relationship with more-than-human beings because their relationship offers a framework for cultural survivance. For many Indigenous families in Abya Yala/Turtle Island, maintaining and sustaining ontological relationships with Our Mother Corn grants families the possibility to continue being and existing.2 Many plants in Abya Yala/Turtle Island gifted their knowledge to Indigenous peoples to maintain reciprocal relations. The significance of understanding human and more-than-human interactions is to (1) change our paradigms of personhood (who is a person), (2) envision plants as beings that shape our humanity (agency of plants), (3) help thinkers move away from humancentric and zoocentric relationships (plant centric and kinship), (4) position plants as sentient and intelligent beings (with will, intention, and the possibility to act upon the life of people), and (5) re-envision plant and human interaction among urban Wixárika families. This chapter provides a discussion of human and more-than-human interactions to demonstrate how plants help us shape our humanity. I argue that with the interaction of plant relatives, people learn how to become humans. Through this interaction, people manage to formulate relations beyond humans, thus framing our existence. Here, I draw upon an Indigenous framework in the Americas, specifically within the colonial borders of North America (Mexico, the USA, and Canada), to show how more-than-human beings such as plants help people understand personhood, being, and existing. Furthermore, I examine the case of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) as a plant relative who offers a framework to live life in relationality with “others.”3 This chapter aims to push readers to rethink more-than-human being interactions, especially plants, as crucial actors in helping people build relationships, maintain them, and reinforce them through ritual and daily interactions. 2  For this chapter, I will use the words Abya Yala and Turtle Island to follow Indigenous terminologies and ways of knowing concerning their geographic location. From the Guna language, Abya Yala means “land in its full maturity” and this term refers to the continent of America. From Native American ways of knowing, this is the name for Earth and their geographical location. 3  Throughout this chapter, I capitalized word such as Corn, Beans, and Squash to denote personhood. Words in lower case take away personhood attributes.

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Kinship Relations In Wixárika ways of knowing, Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) is central in the life of families simply because she offers a framework to live life in wellness. For many Wixárika, living a life in wellness means to be in good physical state of being and in balance with more-than-human. Some sickness in Wixárika ways of being can be caused by the lack of or unproper interaction between people and more-than-humans. In the work of Karina Ivvett Verdín Amaro (2012), the author explains how ‘Iku-xiya literally means the “disease placed by Ancestor Corn.” This disease is a mal puesto “a disease placed” (2012: 171). Wixárika people get this type of diseases because their lack of participation in ceremonies or pilgrimages. For this, Our Mother Corn prescribes the health of people by initiating relations with all beings on Earth. In the cultivation of Our Mother Corn, families learn from relative plants how to care for more-than-human beings. For example, Our Mother Corn needs human interaction for growth and development. Following the growth and development of plants allows people to interact in a very intimate way in the field from the very beginning of the cycle of the seeds to the culmination of the season in the harvesting. Through the cycle of Our Mother Corn, families interact in the field and bring offerings to maintain a reciprocal relationship. When families bring offerings and “feed the plants” with these offerings, families exchange energy and devotion for a good season. Even though many scholars focus on the relationship between people and medicinal plants, Native Corn has not been envisioned as a crucial plant in the health of people. My understanding of plant kinship and communication has been in collaboration with communities of Mexico—namely Wixárika families, Nahuatl speakers, and Zapotec communities. In my research, I follow a research agenda that aims to understand how settler colonialism disrupted human and non-human interactions. First, by learning about Wixárika philosophy and their relationship with more-than-human beings, I began understanding the central role of plants among Indigenous communities of Mexico. I collaborate with urban Wixárika and Our Mother Corn to deeply understand how humans and Kaka+yarite/Kaka+ma (“Elder Ancestors”) interact in ceremonial practices and daily life experiences. Human and more-than-human interactions have always been the core of conversations during my years of fieldwork. In my doctoral dissertation, I grapple with how non-human relatives in ritual, specifically Tatéi Niwetsika

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(“Our Mother Corn”) as an Elder Ancestor, prescribe the health of Wixárika families. Additionally, I discuss how families outside ceremonial spaces recreate spaces for the interaction between people and other beings. For instance, in pilgrimage families encounter Kaka+yarite/Kaka+ma (“Elder Ancestors”) and acknowledge other beings in multiple ways such as with offerings, verbal performances, or exchanges of energy (García-­ Weyandt 2020). In these encounters, families make kinship beyond humankind. For example, when families participate in different pilgrimages or walking across land to make kinship with more-than-human beings, people leave offerings such as food. The offerings are prepared at home by family members to feeds the land with meals prepared from the harvest. Along with the offerings families exchange words and especially the mara’akame of the family using their muwieri (“Feather”) they initiate a prayer and an open conversation with more-than-human beings. In some places, such as bodies of water, people use metal coin to “cleanse” their bodies and exchange energy to ask for consent while crossing, for example, rivers or encountering the sea. Thus, kinship with more-than-­ human beings is a constant act of embodying a reciprocal and sustainable relationship among beings.

Methodology/Methods I am currently a guest in the Native land of the Council of the Three Fires—the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi—Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region (also known as the Anishinaabe or original people). In this chapter, I share my experiences getting to know local Native plants and my efforts for establishing connections with Native communities of this land. My intention here is not compare or contrast their worldviews but to exemplify through my experience how I am learning about local communities and their connections with more-than-human beings. I conduct Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) in the colonial state of Nayarit in collaboration with urban Wixárika families in the colonial city of Tepic in Mexico. Since 2012, I participate in communal activities to learn about Wixárika ways of being and existing among families in Tepic, Nayarit. The Wixáritari (pl.) are in the colonial states of Jalisco, Durando, Zacatecas, and Nayarit. In my research, I collaborate with urban Wixárika speakers in El Gran Nayar—Wixárika (Huichol), Náayari (Cora), Mexicanero (Nahua), and O’dam (Southeastern Tepehúan) territory. My investigation focuses on the crucial role of Our

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Mother Corn in urban Wixárika families. Mainly, my CBPR takes places at Y+rata community with the Rivera family (a Wixárika family from Santa Catarina, Jalisco) who have become my own family through co-parenting kinship ties. My research is possible due to my efforts to extend kinship relations with Felipa Rivera, Rosalía Lemus de la Rosa, and Our Mother Corn. In my research, I engaged in decolonial practices in the field by conducting community-based research and participatory research. I often offered workshops in collaboration with youth and children to understand how they conceptualize plant-human interactions in the urban context from their own epistemologies and ontologies. I used multi-species ethnography or the study of “contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (from the “The emergence of multispecies ethnography” by Kirksey and Helmreich). The relationship between humans and plants within Native communities exemplifies how nature and culture are in constant interaction and inseparable from one another. Plants are relatives and their existence supports many families. Additionally, some plant’s livelihood depends on the interaction with humans. Thus, writing from the perspective of plants including more-than-human relatives allows for a deeper understanding of how nature and culture are intertwined and the importance of nurturing this relationship. The main inquiry of my community-based research in Tepic, Mexico is about the personhood of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) and kinship. Through the conversations about personhood within Wixárika paradigms, I ventured into the understanding personhood among Indigenous communities and the epistemic value of plants as relatives. Moving away from the Western notions of personhood and the antiquated theories of personhood in the field of Anthropology, I wrote an article “Mothers of Corn: Wixárika Women, Verbal Performances, and Ontology” (2018) with the following intentions: (1) to insert the Wixárika perspective on personhood and move away from the Aztecentric view of the “Mexican ontology” described by Philippe Descola (2013) in the book Beyond Nature and Culture; (2) to demystify Western views of Indigenous communities as animistic societies with “primitive” thinking and “childish” views on the natural world of Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1871) ideas; and (3) to reposition the role of Indigenous women as actors in the knowledge production, as educators of community-based knowledge, transmitters of

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Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and experts in Indigenous Science and Technology (García-Weyandt 2018). For the purpose of this chapter, I examine the literature (oral and written) of Native scholars and thinkers to highlight the relevance of plants kinship.

Literature Review Numerous researchers have documented Wixáritari families in La Sierra for more than one hundred years. For instance, Carl Lumholtz (1900) and Robert M. Zing (2004) documented material culture of the community, oral tradition, and the ceremonial art. Specially the early work of Lumholtz and Zingg provided early accounts of the community and an extensive compilation of oral tradition. For my understanding of Wixárika kinship, the early accounts of Lumholtz and Zingg demonstrate how oral tradition since the 1900 maintained as central component human and more-than-human interactions. Barbara G.  Myerhoff (1974), Peter T. Furst (1972), and Stacey Schaefer and Furst (1996) documented the ceremonial aspects related to the cult of Peyote. Their foundational work adds to the understanding of ritual in the context of more-than-human beings. In more recent works, the authors provide a glimpse of how medicinal plants and material object are important aspects in the study of Wixárika culture and traditions. However, little or no attention has been paid to the central role of Our Mother Corn as a relative or Wixárika ecology and their relationship with plants in specific. In this chapter, I focus on the role of Our Mother Corn as a relative and how Wixárika families learn from the cultivation and harvest of plants about kinship. From the perspective of Wixárika epistemology, understanding plant and human interactions beyond the ceremonial and spiritual practices of the living world is imperative in the understanding of human and more-­ than-­human kinship. Through relationships that emerge in the physical world, we can begin to formulate strategies to approach our current issues concerning climate change, food scarcity, food sovereignty, pollution, and food justice topics. For this, the work of Kim TallBear and Michelle Murphy in Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele E.  Clarke and Donna Haraway, is crucial in rethinking kinship relations. The question about families and kinship brings into the front fort topics of environmental justice, reproductive justice, and more-than-human genocides. In chapter 5 and 3, respectively, TallBear and Murphy explore new practices

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of making kin outside colonial boundaries to envision family with more-­ than-­human being (2018). Following the same line of work, Nurit Bird-David (1999) invites the reader to rethink antiquated theories about personhood and how Native communities extend their kinship relations to more-than-human beings. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) brings to the front plant relationship and kinship to show how plants are teachers. The work of Kimmerer has been foundational to my study of human and plant interaction to conceive how other Native communities make kinship with Our Mother Corn in different frameworks but with similar principles of reciprocity. Vanessa Watts (2013) speaks about the physical embodiment of place and though as a space where “humans and non-human get their agency through the extension of these thoughts.” The work of Sara Hunt (2013) is a clear critic to anthropologist and scholars who discuss ontology without taking into consideration the voices of Native scholars and Native philosophers. Finally, the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) contributes to my understanding of land as pedagogy and the myriad of was plants teach us lessons. Native feminist scholarship provides the space to envision kinship relations outside colonial logics. Consequently, their Native feminist scholarship has urged me to regard plant kinship outside patriarchal and hierarchical constrains. The understanding of how Our Mother Corn makes kinship with people is a matter of rematriation efforts of seeds and women’s bodies and epistemologies. From the Wixárika case study of Our Mother Corn, both the ceremonial and daily life of communities are intrinsic to the interactions of humans and more-than-human beings. To perpetuate a division between the spiritual and the mundane ensnares us in a false binary that disrupts Indigenous ways of thinking (Shorter 2016), as well as creates dichotomies that romanticize interactions, mystify encounters, and stigmatize those communities who have lost their connections with plants. For many community members, it is impossible to attain connections with plants without entering in relation. Thus, to explain plant and human interaction in the ceremonial realm, I must first discuss the daily implications in disrupting plant-human interactions caused during the area of the Anthropocene and settler colonization.4 In their article, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017) 4  Many scholars identify settler colonialism in the epoch of the Anthropocene as crucial event resulting in current ecological crisis such as climate change.

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posit that the process of “ecocide” began during epochs of colonization, causing our current ecological crisis. Entire ecosystems of Native plants and other beings have been destroyed in the promises of civilization, advancement of the sciences, and more processes of settler colonialism (e.g., immigration and diaspora), all of which disrupt relationships between plants as relatives and Indigenous ecologies. Thus, learning how communities interrelate and make kinship specifically with plants allow us to find ways to be in a good relationship with our environment. Being in good relationship with our environment means to think about the effects of our occupation in the land and the impact of our ecological footprint into the local environment.

Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) Stories people tell about Our Mother Corn frame the relationship between people and land. Wixárika families use the genre of Wixárika yeiyarieya (“Wixárika history” or “Wixárika cultural way in the past”) to narrate human and more-than-human interactions (García-Weyandt 2020). In Wixárika epistemology, women narrate Wixárika ethnohistory and keep tracing the genealogy of Corn in their embodied practices. In my research, I depart from the ethnohistory of how Wixárika received the daughters of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) to understand human and plant interactions. Yuawima (“Blue Corn”) along with her sister (Corn in La Sierra Madre Occidental: Tsinawime (“Multi-color”), Tekuleti (“Blue”), Pipitiyu (“White”), Ta+rawime (“Pink”), Taxawime (“Yellow”), Yek+ri tuxa (“Orange”), and Tse’+ri (“Yellow with elongated kernels”) were a gift to Watakame (“First Farmer”). Watakame received instructions of taking care of them by placing them in the altar and providing offerings.5 These offerings included candles, food offerings, flowers, chocolate, and nawá (Corn-based fermented drink). From all colours of Corns, Watakame cultivated their Yuri’Ikú (“True Corn”) for the substance of the family. This interaction between people and Our Mother Corn, this ethnohistory shows how human and non-human interacted and later demonstrates the protocols and principles of coexistence, which still shape the life of families. By continuing to interact in ceremonial spaces and in the domestic

5  Accounts from Wixárika storytellers Felipa Rivera and Rosalía Lemus de La Rosa during fieldwork in 2012–2020.

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sphere with Our Mother Corn, urban Wixárika continue the genealogy of Our Mother Corn and initiate relations despite urban living. In the oral traditional of Wixárika families, Our Mother Corn teaches members of the community how to mediate relationships with more-than-­ human beings. Rosalía Lemus de La Rosa, or Mamachali, the elder of the Rivera family at Y+rata community, in Tepic Nayarit has been transmitting oral traditional to teach members of the family about the relationship between plants and people. In the 2021 “Tatéi Niwetsika: Sembrando Semillas, Saberes y Sabores Tracionales,” a hybrid event to cultivate Our Mother Corn in Kalamazoo College, Mamachali opened the conversation by narrating how her ancestors taught her about Our Mother Corn: “Mɨɨkɨ tsɨ niuki temɨta wewíeni, takaiˀatu ke pukatimieme, méripaitɨ pu mieme, kiekári munuiwaxɨ pai mɨɨkɨ putimieme niuki yamanuyɨ ́ne ‘Tateí niwetsika niukiyari’, paɨ tsɨ manuyɨ ́ne. Neteukarima paɨ meteˀuyexatsikakai, netutsima, mɨɨkɨ waniuki tsɨ nepapine” (Lemus de la Rosa, 2021).6 In this narrative, Mamachali explained how Our Mother Corn gifted Blue Corn to Watakame, the first farmer. Before sending them back Tatéi Niwetsika gave Watakame advice about how to care for Blue Corn. However, Watakame and his mother did not follow the directions and consequently they had to cultivate and make offerings in every stage of plant. Mamachali narrates: Paɨ waníu karikɨ tiniuˀɨkitɨarieni mɨɨkɨ. Kuukurú: , paɨ waníu karikɨ katiniutahɨawaríeni. ˀUtsiema maayaní ˀaikutsíeya xemeixɨɨrieni. Paɨ xeikɨ ́a xeteheitiweiyáni, tukaari meutihane paɨ xeikɨ ́a ri xeteheiweiyáni, ˀeékɨ tsɨ ri paɨ xeikɨ ́a ri pemureiweiyáni, tsɨ ri yaxekateneyuríeni, xekaneixuawá ri7

6  What I have come to talk about are legends that have arisen since the earth began to be inhabited, the legend of “Our Mother Corn.” The words that I have come to express to you are stories and legends that my grandparents used to tell me.” 7  When you have planted it, you are going to pave the milpa and offer it what I have told you: Tejuino, the deer, and tortillas. In its granulation stage, you will also have to offer it. When it becomes a dry harvest, you will also have to make an offering to it, and so on, in each stage and in each season, only then will you learn to recognize your actions—Mrs Paloma had explained to Watakame.

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Fig. 3.1  El Buruato offerings with the Carrillo family. (Photo: C. Garcia-Weyandt, July 2021)

From the early stages of Our Mother Corn cultivation, Wixárika families make offerings as Mamachali narrates. These offerings include food and drinks are a form of interaction with the plant throughout the cycle. In the early stages family offers candles, chocolate, and cookies (Fig. 3.1). For urban Indigenous communities, moreover, this kincentric relationship frames the experiences of children when they learn from parents about their more-than-human relatives. For instance, in the production of art, children learn through oral history and memory of their parents and grandparents how Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) came to the life of people. In the narrative of Tatéi Niwetsika, families learn TEK, protocols of interaction and principles of coexistence. In oral tradition the community receives the instructions of how to take care of Yuawima (Blue Corn). The instructions imply the harvests, dries, stores, and hull/thresh of t Yuri’Ikú (“True Corn”) for their ceremonial and consumption. This is a very important aspect of ceremonial life of Wixárika women. In the “ground herself to make tortillas for Watakame” exemplifies the process of

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making Xakwitsari (“Limed Corn” “nixtamal”) and the TEK passed down from women to women. With safekeeping of the seeds, Wixárika not only continue the genealogy of Our Mother Corn but honour Tatéi Takutsi Nakawé (“Our Grandmother Growth”) and Tatéi Niwestsika (“Our Mother Corn”). In this way, ceremonial and everyday practices are intertwined to conceive reciprocal relation through sustainable agriculture during the cycle of Our Mother Corn in multiple ceremonial and communal spaces. In the Yuimakwaxa (“Drum Ceremony”) and Tatéi Neixa (“Maize Dance”) families gather to celebrate the end of the cycle of Our Mother Corn in the month of October.8 Usually, at Y+rata community the two ceremonies are combined to host a one weekend festivity for the family. In the first stage of the ceremony, mothers began preparing the offerings for exchange at the end of the ceremony. Then at dawn children sit in the patio to listen to the chants of the mara’akame (“medicine man or woman”) of the family. Through the chants, the children are taken in a journey to Wirikuta in East. After long hours of chants children exchange their offerings and culminate their Drum Ceremony consuming for the first time of the day Corn-based meals. For the Tatéi Neixa (“Maize Dance”), men gather around the Tatewarí (“Our Grandfather Fire”) to initiate conversations with the ancestors at night-time. One by one they began recalling how they hunt Deer and then the mara’akame of the family begins chanting to initiate conversation with Elder Ancestors. Meanwhile women prepare the offerings (candles, chocolate, and tamales) to commence the Maize dance. Wixárika cultivate once per year during the rainy season. The ceremonies begin prior the rainy season to petition for rain and culminate in the Fall with the harvest. For instance, in the “Maize Dance” sometimes combined with the “Drum Ceremony,” families bring from the field their best Corn Cob and create a doll. After the mara’akame of the family chants and opens the ceremonial space with his/her verbal performance, families begin the ceremony with offerings that include Corn-based foods and animal offerings. Later at night, families offer a long performance for Our 8  It was until my doctoral dissertation that I reflected on my own intersubjective position as I entered in kinship with Our Mother Corn. I began participating with the permission of elders in multiple ceremonies to fully understand the meaning of entering in a relationship with Our Mother Corn. Between the years of 2015–2019, I participated in Tatéi Niwestsika ‘Ets+xa (“Cultivation Ceremony”), Yuimakwaxa (“Drum Ceremony”), and the Tatéi Neixa (“Maize Dance”) in Y+rata Community.

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Mother Corn and the mara’akame invokes the presence of Our Mother Corn. Throughout the night families dance with the dolls and make offerings for Our Mother Corn with gratitude. While Felipa and other women in the community set the environment for Our Mother Corn, they place flowers to signal the spirit of Our Mother Corn how to descend in the ceremonial space by providing a visual representation of Wixárika’s ceremonial places and spaces of knowledge. The cardinal points signal the position of the major ceremonial places in Wixárika context: Xapawiyeme (“South”), Hautsi K+p+ri (“North”), Haramara (“West”), ‘Ariweme (East), and Werika ‘uimari (“Center”). Felipa points out that Cuando tiramos el agua asi en los puntos y luego pusimos las flores es lo mismo que se hace cuando rezas. Te acuerdas que era el Hautsi K+p+ri, Haramara. Primero Xapawiyeme, Hautsi K+p+ri, Haramara, ‘Ariweme, and Werika ‘uimari. Ah esos son los mismos rumbos que vas a rezar cuando vas a sembrar el maíz. (Felipa Rivera, Personal Interview November 03, 2019)9

In the ceremonial patio, Felipa points out that women signal with the flowers and then spray water from the springs, and they pray in the same way they pray while cultivating Corn in the field. This is a replica of Wixárika ceremonial places and universe. The flowers, the water, and the signalling of the cardinal points set the stage for the Corn ancestors to arrive in the ceremonial patio. Once the patio is clean, decorated, and with all the elements for the ritual, then the Corn dolls are taken outside and placed in the patio. The “Corn Dolls” are the body of Our Mother Corn or the new harvest of the year that will be safeguarded for the following year. Following Wixárika aesthetics, representatives of each family select the most beautiful Corn Cobs and make a doll to physically position Our Mother Corn in the altar. Finally, the verbal performances of the mara’akame (“medicine man/ woman”) bring into the ceremonial space the energy of Our Mother Corn. Then, Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) shows up in the ceremony when the mara’akame of the family chants and opens the 9  When we throw the water like this on the points and then we put the flowers, it is the same thing that is done when you pray. Do you remember? That it was Hautsi K+p+ri, Haramara. First Xapawiyeme, Hautsi K+p+ri, Haramara, ‘Ariweme, and Werika ‘uimari. Ah those are the same cardinal points that you are going to pray when you are going to grow the corn.

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ceremonial space. Through their verbal performance, families gather to welcome Our Mother Corn. They recreate the space using flowers and the essence of the flowers to guide Our Mother Corn. The body of Our Mother Corn is also present in the altar in the Corn dolls. At the end of the two-day ceremony, Felipa explains that “cuando se termina la ceremonia del tambor, al día siguiente cuando ya se termina la danza queman el elote y antes de quemarse mi apa le quita todo con su muwiari lo de arriba y que viene siendo las energías y se lo pone en una jicarita.”10 The energy of Our Mother Corn is transferred to the little gourd and preserved in there for the blessings of the year and the next cycle of Corn.

Kinship Relations Plants structure our human experience with the teachings of relationality practices without falling into false dichotomies of spiritual/mundane. For instance, plants can transmit energy to alter the state of mind of people or produce the proper chemical gas exchange during photosynthesis. These two actions allow humans to enter in relation with plants. However, due to the commercialization, commodification, and extraction of certain plants the dynamics between plant and human interaction change over time. For example, the commercialization and commodification of seeds such as corn have caused the production of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) to assure the fast and more profitable growth of crops. Certain plants have been extracted from local environments to grow in global economies to use their properties in the pharmaceutical industries. This shift of interactions between plants and humans has also changed the way people relate and learn from plant, thus decentralizing the “kincentric” relationship between plants and people. In Wixárika ways of knowing, people learn from oral tradition about extended members of the family. Additionally, families learn in the field and practice the kincentric relationship between Our Mother Corn and members of the family in the cultivation of Native seeds. During the stages of cultivation, harvest, and devotion, Our Mother Corn and other plants allow families to maintain a reciprocal relationship. Being in relation with Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) is a practice that entails body, land, 10  When the Drum Ceremony is over, the next day when the dance is over, they burn the Corn and before Corn burns my Dad takes everything from above it with his feathers and has the energies and he puts it in a little gourd.

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and labour outside colonial boundaries and definitions. In other words, we can maintain a reciprocal relationship between bodies (human-plants) through the labour (embodied practices) in exercises of devotion inside ceremonial and communal spaces. Many families in Tepic and the neighbouring towns acknowledge the difficulties of maintaining these practices to pay tribute to Tatéi Niwetsika despite land struggle, settler colonialism effects, urbanity, and diaspora. Thus, these families centre practices such as cultivation in communal plots to preserve the genealogy of Our Mother Corn or participate in the ritual. In this way, communal spaces and the practice in community permit families to maintain traditional ways of cultivating the land and being in relation with more-than-human beings. Becoming a devoted relative of Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) in the Wixárika context entails that families maintain her genealogy through cultivation practices, produce and consume culinary representations based on Our Mother Corn as main ingredient, pass down oral tradition through storytelling, remember the teaching of Our Mother Corn through memory and embodied practices, and make bodily offerings during the cultivation and harvesting cycles (e.g., eating restriction, fasting, and feeding). While some practices are part of many families, and some are not. I recognized through my research that devotion to Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) does not make a Wixárika member less authentic or less Wixárika. Families have the autonomy to decide the levels of interaction and involvement with more-than-human beings. Additionally, families decide the level of involvement of relatives or extended members of the family based on their own terms. For example, as an extended member of the family some individuals can help in the cultivation and preparation of the offerings. Since 2012, I have been fortunate enough to be in ceremonial spaces among Wixárika families. I have been learning from Wixárika urban women about motherhood and their resilience to teach children traditional Wixárika ways (Fig. 3.2). Our Mother Corn is central in culinary representations of the community to feed the family and extended members of the family human and more-than-human. Before the cultivation, families prepare offerings to the land that include nawá (“Fermented Corn-based drink”) and tamales (“nixtamalized” dough, wrap into Corn leave with beans inside) through the ceremonial centring Our Mother Corn. In many Wixárika families, the ceremonies mainly follow mainly the cultivation and the harvest ceremony. For instance, the Rivera family at Y+arata maintain kinship relations with Our Mother Corn in the Yuimakwaxa (“Drum ceremony”). In each ceremony,

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Fig. 3.2  Yuimakwaxa (“Drum Ceremony”) at Y+rata. (Photo: C. Garcia-Weyandt, October 2019)

women prepare meals to offer; however, in the harvest ceremony, often held in October, families gather to thank Kaka+yarite/Kaka+ma (“Elder Ancestors”), specially Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”). In the Drum Ceremony, children participate and initiate their relationship with Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”). The levels of interaction among families relate to the levels of commitment of each member of the family. When speaking about Our Mother Corn as a relative and a more-­than-­human being, people use specific language to denote an intimate relationship. For example, the translation of “Our Mother Corn” denotes a kinship relation in which the word “Tatéi” is a possessive pronoun and adjective that denotes a relationship between the plant and people.

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Literal translation of relationships using colonizers’ language since early times obscures the ability to understand how Indigenous communities in Mesoamerica relate with other beings. For instance, in early colonial documents such as Florentine Codex by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1950), a sixteenth-century ethnographic account of the traditions in Mesoamerica, translation of words such as Corn relative were transcribed as “deities” or “gods.” Some examples are found in the translation of Pitao Cozobi “Zapotec God of Corn,” Nal “Maya Young God of Corn,” Centéotl “Aztec God of Corn,” and Xilonen “Young Goddess of the Tender Corn” (Vela 2011). These translations follow literal translations and do not convey the meaning of the original words. In current times, though, when bilingual Spanish- and Wixárika-­ speaking families describe their relationship with Our Mother Corn, they referred to Tatéi Niwetsika using the Spanish word la milpita (“The little Corn stalk”) or the Wixárika word for Our Mother Corn. The use of diminutive denotes respect, care, and love. According to José Ignacio Dávila Garibi  (2022), Spanish speakers in current times utilize -ito/ita suffix to denote a relationship between speaker and subject. Mesoamerican languages influenced Mexican Spanish and frequently, speaker carried these relationships from their Native languages to Spanish. For example, diosito translates as “little God” in which “little” connotes an honorific relationship between the speaker and the noun. In Wixárika, when speakers talk about Native Corn, they use the words Yuri’Ikú (“True Corn”) or Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”). Furthermore, the use of milpita in the lexicon of bilingual Spanish-Wixárika speakers connotes a relationship in which the speaker decides to honour and speak about the milpa in diminutive. In such use of the work, speakers denote the kincentric relationship with more-than-human beings. Among other examples, this language names and constructs a cognitive orientation to conceive Our Mother Corn ad a relative. Thus, Wixárika families learn from the interaction with plants on ways to make kinship.

Plants Personhood Every day, I encounter more species of plants than any other species. I originally studied Mexican Traditional herbalism in Wixárika homelands. I learned from my plant teachers about their energy, healing powers, and the kincentric relationship with humans. In local Native communities, plants are also relatives, and many plants have been interacting with people

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since immemorial times. Since my arrival to Michigan, I have been learning from other colleagues about plant interaction in the area. For instance, I am currently learning about Indigenous foods, relationships, and new plants that I have never encountered in my homeland. I am learning how Anishinaabe or original people conceive Corn, Beans, and Squash (three sisters) as relatives. Because, I am occupying Native’s land and my occupation has a great impact on the land, I am in need to acknowledge the activist work of Native communities and learn from them about plant and human relation. Indigenous communities are in the front line of the struggles for environmental justice, climate crisis, and ecocide (Gilio-­ Whitaker, 2019). Thus, for my scholarship and to be in good relationship with this land it is imperative that I learn and listen as much as possible from Native voices. In the daily interactions between Native communities and plants, families learn from plants in a multiplicity of ways. The first interaction of human and plants comes during the consumptions as food. Plant-based diets are becoming more popular as people attempt to follow more healthy ways of eating. However, Indigenous communities around the world have always maintained a traditional diet consisting of plants. In the Decolonizing Diet Project Cookbook, April E.  Lindala, Marty Reinhardt, and Leora Lancaster (2016) describe from an Anishinaabe Ojibway perspective the relationship between people and food. Specifically,  Marty Reinhard defines  “Spirit food” as plants and animals people consume from their local environment to gain energy and ability to sustain and maintain a healthy body (2015). In these ways, the interactions between humans and plants affect the wellbeing of families, the health of their ecosystems, eating habits, survival of species, and ultimately food sovereignty, sustainable agriculture, relations, and kinship. Consuming local and Indigenous foods maximizes the benefits for plant’s survival and humans’ health. This is a reciprocal relationship engendered in the consumption of “spirit food” (Reinhard 2015). In Anishinaabe Ojibway cosmology, more-than-human beings interactions began in the consumption of Indigenous and local foods to make kinship. I understood “spirit food” and kinship relations with more-than-humans in the context of Native communities in the USA because they have a similar approach as Indigenous peoples from Mexico. Wixárika families enter in relationship with Our Mother Corn to maintain the health of their bodies and to assure the survival of the genealogy of True Corn. Our Mother Corn is a relative because families maintain a “kincentric” relationship in which both give and receive in reciprocal ways.

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Wixárika interact with plants more often than with other beings including humans in the domestic sphere, the field, and ceremonial spaces. However, Our Mother Corn as a relative plant is present in the life of everyone in the family in ceremonial and communal spaces. When Our Mother Corn grows, she grows with other plants in a multi-crop plot (e.g., Beans and Squash or the three sisters in the Anishinaabe Ojibway perspective). The structure of Our Mother Corn grows vertically to provide Beans, the support and structure to climb around. Then, beans entangle their roots and bodies around Cornstalks and avoid predators. Furthermore, in exchange the roots of Beans provide oxygen and nitrogen to the soil. Finally, Squash grows low on the ground to keep away predators. In this ecosystem, all plants grow and give their fruits for consumption in ceremonial or in the domestic sphere to people. In exchange, people cultivate all plants repeatedly every season. This is a clear example of human and morethan-humans interaction in ceremonial and communal spaces in the living world. Additionally, this environment recreates principles of coexistence, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (teachings from the land), protocols of interaction, and a framework for relationality. In a recent project at Kalamazoo College, as part of my course “Plant Communication and Kinship,” my students learn about kinship from Native feminist scholarship. In our class, we cultivate Our Mother Corn as an activity to extend the learning environment outside the classroom. My students volunteer in the summer to take care of Our Mother Corn in our “Milpa Project.” At the end of the season, we celebrate the Harvest Festival, and we consume the local fruits collected from our harvest. In the cultivation, we learn about kinship, coexistence, protocols of encounters, and principles of reciprocity. For example, the first teaching of the plant is about growth; this year, with the help of environmental professor Amy Newday, the class explores different cultivation techniques. Our plot did not possess all the necessary requirements for a fertile plot. Additionally, in 2021 Kalamazoo experience an intense rainy season due to climate change. Our students learned how the plants adapted to our local environment and despite the long raining days we were able to harvest Our Mother Corn. These practices allowed students to experience in their own body the fruits of their labour. They make community agreements to relate and coexist with Our Mother Corn. Later students reflect on their own occupation of Native land, their active role in making kinship relations with plants, and their relationship with land as well as with the food they eat. Thus, reframing our understanding of relationality requires us to

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depart from colonial frameworks and normalize more-than-human interaction. In Wixárika homelands or the colonial state of Nayarit, in Mexico Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) and her body are active actors in wellness of Wixárika families. Our Mother Corn provides a myriad of culinary representations, especially Nawá for offerings and for medicinal purposes.11 Through the elaborated process of parching of the Maize, families make the drink to offerings in ceremonial spaces for more-than-human beings. The act of “feeding the ancestors” or making offerings to the land shows reciprocity and the nourishment of other beings. In ceremonial spaces, this act of “feeding” demonstrates the care and devotion towards more-­ than-­human beings. Nawá is one example of the many ways in which plants can transmit their healing properties through the ingestion of their bodies. When families drink nawá they consume the properties of Our Mother Corn and the fermentation of the drink acts as cleaning elixir in the body. Usually, families consume nawá during ceremonial spaces and while fasting. After ingesting nawá the families specially children during the “Drum Ceremony” can consume Corn-based meals like tamales. With the fasting and the properties of nawá the body is cleansed for the consumption of other meals during the day. Other examples are teas and herbal infusions. Mexican Traditional Medicine offers a vast array of teachings from plants and the healthy benefits of consuming herbal infusions. For instance, in Mexico it is very common to drink infusions made from Cornsilk for urinary tract infections. Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) maintained an ontological status in many Mesoamerican communities due to the health benefits of consuming Native seeds. Placing Our Mother Corn at the centre of the health of families in Mexico prioritizes the needs to maintain a reciprocal relationship with the plant. Families cultivate Our Mother Corn and plants grow healthy to be consumed as primary food staple. However, due to the commodification of seeds and the rapid growth of the agribusiness, corn has become a genetically modified organism without the abilities to connect in a deeper level with human beings. In the contrary of Native seeds, GMOs harm the health of people and the health of the environment. Since 2020, laws in Mexico uphold a person’s right to cultivate Native seeds without the fear of cultivating near GMO fields (Esteva and Marielle 2003; Fitting 2010; Lopez-Hernandez 2020). Indeed, corporations such  Corn-based fermented drink.

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as Monsanto have lost their power over the types of seeds to be cultivated in Mexico. Moving towards food sovereignty projects in Mexico grants the possibility to maintain the cultivation of Our Mother Corn without fearing the impact of GMOs on either the seeds or the ecosystem. The main question now is how to make the leap between sustainable agriculture to a kincentric relationship between Our Mother Corn and people? Indigenous groups in Mexico have shown over time—despite colonization—how to foster relationships with many beings. One example is in the cultivation of Our Mother Corn to keep the genealogy of seeds. When families cultivate the seeds to maintain not only the seeds but find ways to extend kinship ties to more-than-human, then plant and human enter in a relationship guided by the community. The labour of people inside the community maintains the relationship between more-than-humans. Changing the paradigms to include more-than-human beings as relatives extends the possibilities to understand how humans maintain relations and find teachings from plants to follow principles and protocols of coexistence. Wixárika come to know about their identity by learning from Our Mother Corn how to interconnect with other beings not only in ceremony but in communal spaces. As human beings, we tend to prioritize species over plants. This anthropocentric and zoocentric perspective disrupts the ways we can relate with more-than-human beings. In Wixárika ways of knowing, plants like other beings are sentient, intelligent, and have the undeniable ability to shape the life of families by offering wellness. In this way, kinship and reciprocity extend to more-than-human beings to maintain knowledge of the land, which is an approach that places plants as major actors in the life experience of people. In our general interaction with other beings, plants as species form part of our network of connections because we exist in relation to plants—even though we do not see it, plants grow around us every day. Our breathing is a gift from the complex chemical exchanges of gasses in the photosynthesis of plants. This simple and complex process allows us to live and thus connects our entire existence to plants. In the doctoral dissertation Dancing Breath: Ceremonial Performance Practice, Environment, and Personhood in a Muskogee Creek Community, Ryan Koons (2016) describes how in Muskogee Creek cosmology, plants communicate through “corporeal movements and enactions” (309).12 Thus, actions such as breathing and the chemical exchanges of gasses in the photosynthesis of plants connect human-plant interaction.  Koons, Dancing Breath, 2016 309.

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The very intricate process of photosynthesis teaches us much about reciprocity. In the book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, botanist and Native thinker Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) echoes Koons’s assertions by demonstrating how plant communication and interaction with humans emerges from basic principles in ecology. This Indigenous ways of thinking and knowledge of the world drives Western communities to rethink more-than-human beings, especially plants, as great teacher into making meaning of the living world.

Conclusion In this chapter, I provided an overview on the literature on human and other-than-human beings interactions. I offered an alternative to the understanding of making kinship relations with the review of feminist scholarship. Additionally, I demonstrated how Indigenous communities in Abya Yala/Turtle Island formulate relations beyond human to frame being and existing. This perspective on plants-human interactions invites the reader to consider other ways of knowing and Indigenous Science and Technology. By learning from daily interactions between plants and humans, we can learn how plants help us become humans. With this idea, the reader can move away from an anthropocentric and zoocentric way of thinking. Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) as a plant relative is a clear example of how to conceptualize relationships outside colonial frameworks, thus to see the urgency to shift our paradigms of kinship and rethink our experiences with plants and other beings on Earth. Human’s interaction with plants is crucial in the developing of strategies that force us to care about our land and landscape. Through my community-based research and participatory research, I aim to learn how many Indigenous communities continue reinforcing ways to stabilize relations, practise sustainable agriculture, and make kinship beyond humans. For Wixárika families, food sovereignty is embedded into an inter-species relation; such relation allows families to maintain kinship and ties to their homelands. Without a doubt, the work of keep families in good relation is in the role of mothers and caregivers. Thus, rematriation of ancestral seeds and plant relatives and centring women as a major actor in this process of bringing back Native Seeds to Indigenous communities is imperative into the survivance of Native communities and their knowledge systems. Our Mother Corn teaches us the importance of making kin with more-than-human

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beings in ceremonial and daily interactions outside colonial, patriarchal, and hierarchical modes of thinking. Notes: I acknowledge that part of this chapter was written in the unceded land of the Council of the Three Fires—the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region are also known as the Anishinaabe or original people, and their language is Anishinaabemowin. Additionally, I wrote this chapter in El Gran Nayar, Náayeri, O’dam, Mexikan, and Wixárika unceded homelands. I thank my plant teacher and relatives for accompanying me through my life. Specially to Our Mother Corn for teaching much about kinship. Also, I am grateful to Felipa Rivera Lemus and Rosalía Lemus de la Rosa for helping me collect oral tradition and teachings from women in Y+rata community. Additionally, I thank Amy Newday for her friendship and her work in rematriation efforts in Kalamazoo. Finally, my advisor and mentor Dr David Delgado Shorter for encouraging me to write about kinship relations. All the comments and opinions are my responsibility.

References Bernardino, De Sahagun. 1950. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things in New Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (S1): S67–S91. Dávila Garibi, José Ignacio. 1959. “Posible Influencia Del Náhuatl En El Uso y Abuso Del Diminutivo En El Español De Mexico.” Estudios de cultura Náhuatl 1: 91–94. Davis, Heather, and Todd Zoe. 2017. “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: an international journal for critical geographies 16 (4): 761–780. Esteva, Gustavo, and Catherine Marielle. 2003. Sin maíz no hay país. Mexico: CONACULTA. Fitting, Elizabeth. 2010. The Struggle for Maize. Durham: Duke University Press. Furst, Peter T. 1972. “To find our life: peyote among the Huichol Indians of Mexico.” In Peter J. Furst (ed.), Flesh of the gods: The ritual use of hallucinogens, 136-184. New York; Washington: Praeger Publishers. García-Weyandt, Cyndy Margarita. 2018. “Mothers of Corn: Wixárika women, verbal performances, and ontology.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 14 (2): 113–120. ———. 2020. “Te ‘uayemat+ ta Kiekari Tat i Niwetsikak+: Urban Wixárika Healing Practices and Ontology.” PhD dissertation. University of California.

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Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As long as grass grows: The Indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press. Hunt, Sarah. 2013. “Ontologies of Indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept.” Cultural Geographies 21 (1): 27–32. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Koons, Ryan Abel. 2016. “Dancing Breath: Ceremonial Performance Practice, Environment, and Personhood in a Muskogee Creek Community.” PhD dissertation. University of California. Lindala, April E., Marty Reinhardt, and Leora Lancaster. 2016. Decolonizing Diet Project Cookbook. Marquette: Northern Michigan University. Lopez-Hernandez, Ernesto. 2020. “GMO Corn, Mexico, and Coloniality.” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law 22 (4): 725. Lumholtz, C. 1900. Symbolism of the Huichol Indians. AMNH Memoirs, Vol. 3. American Museum of Natural History: New York. Murphy, Michelle. 2018. “Chapter 3. Against Population, Towards Alterlife.” In Donna Jeanne Haraway, and Adele E.  Clarke (eds.), Making Kin Not Population, 101–124. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Myerhoff, B.  G. 1974. Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians. New York: Cornell University Press. Reinhardt, Martin. 2015. “Spirit Food: A multi-dimensional overview of the decolonizing diet project.” In Elizabeth Sumida Huaman and Bharath Sriraman (eds.), Indigenous innovation 81–105. New York: Springer. Schaefer, Stacy B., and Peter T. Furst. 1996. (eds.). People of the peyote: Huichol Indian history, religion & survival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shorter, David Delgado. 2016. “Spirituality.” In Frederick E.  Hoxie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, 433-452. Oxford: Oxford University Press. TallBear, Kim. 2018. “Chapter 5. Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family.” In Donna Jeanne Haraway and Adele E. Clarke (eds.), Making Kin Not Population, 145-209. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1871. Primitive Culture: Research into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. London: John Murray Editions. Vela, Enrique. 2011. “El maíz.” Arqueología mexicana 38: 7–8. Verdín Amaro, Karina Ivvett. 2012. “Males ‘normales’ y males ‘puestos’ del pueblo Wixárika: un análisis cognoscitivo.” PhD dissertation. Autonomous University of Querétaro.

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Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1): 20–34. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Zing, Robert. 2004. Huichol Mythology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Peasant and the Soil in Southwestern French Biodynamic Agriculture: A Ritualistic Creative Relationship Entangled in a Holistic Commitment Bertrande Galfré

Biodynamic Agriculture is entangled in many contemporaneous fields which makes it a special subject of interest for anthropological studies. Historically, it was the first kind of organic agriculture, having been invented in the twentieth century, decades before the ecological movement began, one of the major political concerns of our times. By doing ethnographic research of Biodynamic Agriculture there is an opportunity to study how those political, ecological, and agronomic stakes are being tackled in a—growing—part of western peasant societies. Furthermore, a specificity of Biodynamic Agriculture is its spirituality. It was invented in an esoteric movement called Anthroposophy which

B. Galfré (*) Paris-Nanterre University, Nanterre, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_4

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proposes a link between science and spirituality by saying that it is not because we cannot see something that it doesn’t exist or, indeed, that we cannot understand it. Therefore, it is building a whole “science of the unseen”, with exercises that anyone can practice so that each one can personally make their own experience of the unseen. This “science of the unseen” is called “science of the occult” and Biodynamic Agriculture was invented upon it. Moreover, through Biodynamic Agriculture, the ethnographer meets a large diversity of peasants: from the neo-peasant to the traditional, from the small to the big farm, the gardener to the shepherd, and so on. They are engaged in the ecopolitical movement with their highly sustainable ways of life (accommodation, consumerism, nutrition, and so on) and, in this fieldwork, with their shared political commitments, especially concerning their socio-political status as peasants. Despite the diversity of profiles observed in this fieldwork there is a common holistic alternative way of life with the same commitments seen in everyday life. Through this dedication in everyday life, those peasants involved in ecopolitical concerns are proposing a different way to make society. Society starts in the farm and, with Biodynamics, is linked with a spirituality which questions our way to be in the world, to understand it, and to enter into relationship with the living. A point of specific anthropological interest can be seen in the ways that these biodynamic peasants relate their everyday life to their spirituality. This ethnographic fieldwork exemplifies the points at which rituality crosses everyday life until it becomes ordinary and not extraordinary like in “traditional” rituals (a ritual that precisely starts and ends). Even more, this spirituality, through its very concrete practices (the peasantry work), represents a special way to enter in relationship with the world—from the smallest microcosm of the farm (the bacteria, micro-organisms, and such like.) to the largest (the planets, the stars, and so on). Therefore, this ethnographic research uses the relational approach to ritual in anthropology to explore those dynamics. With this  anthropological approach, ritual becomes a way to create relationships: relationships between human participants but, also, relationships entangled in a network of interpersonal links with non-humans entities. This can be seen in the quotation (translated from French) from Michael Houseman as he defines it in Le Rouge est le noir (2012):

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[a ritual is] the work and the act of relationships: relationships between human participants of course, but also relationships entangled in a network of interpersonal links with non-human entities. (2012: 111)

Furthermore, in this study, special attention is given to gestures. Anthropology of gestures is linked to ritual anthropology to see how this spirituality is, in everyday life, linked to the very concrete practices of agricultural work. Indeed, we will see that gestures are showing how the spirituality is lived in the inner self and, at the same time, express how this self enters concretely in relation with the world around. Gestures are the very boundary between the inner self and the relational world. In the first part of this article, we will see how ritualization and spiritualization in Biodynamic Agriculture are processes entailed in a more global commitment which involves the peasant in many aspects of his life. We will illustrate it by an ethnographic account of Silica Preparation (a very special biodynamic technique) in a Pyrenean mountain farm. In the second part we will look closer at how ritual anthropology in its relational approach can enlighten us to the way Biodynamics offers a particular way to enter in relationship with the “Living” (as many Biodynamicists say, as well as “living forces of Nature”, which will mean human and non-human entities all together). We will introduce the “analogical way of thinking” and see how it can be useful to comprehend those relationships. Finally, we will talk about the anthropology of gestures. In this rituality as a process, spirituality crosses each and every moment of everyday life. Biodynamic Agriculture, in its technical application, can always be apprehended through the spectrum of spirituality. Therefore, Biodynamicists see their technical actions not only as techniques in a rational term, but really as “gestures”. They tend to find the right “gestures” that will harmonize their work and, by doing so, a “gesture” itself becomes a technique for Biodynamic Agriculture. We will talk about what a “gesture” means in this context and how it becomes a special way to relate to the world for a Biodynamicists. This chapter is the result of one year (2019–2020) of ethnographic fieldwork in the Comminges countryside (Southwestern France). One year, through all seasons, spent working and sharing everyday life with a large variety of biodynamic profiles: from the small gardener to the large collective farm.

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Ritualization and Spiritualization Within a Global Commitment: The Biodynamic Silica Preparation Biodynamic Agriculture was invented by Rudolf Steiner at the beginning of the twentieth century when peasants began to worry about the future of their profession and about the welfare of the soil. They were starting to see the effects of the industrialization and of the entrance of science in agriculture (with chemical inputs and genetic modification of plants). Historically, Biodynamic Agriculture was the first alternative agriculture. On the one hand, its evolution is linked with the development of organic agriculture in western societies. On the other hand, Biodynamic Agriculture is also linked with the evolution of western esotericism. Rudolf Steiner was a member of the Theosophical Society, a western esoteric religious movement inspired by Christianity and by Hinduism and Buddhism. Rudolf Steiner left this Theosophical Society to create his own syncretism called “Anthroposophy” (etymologically “human wisdom”). Therefore, the biodynamic method isn’t just a pragmatic theory, but it is also rooted in spirituality (Choné 2017). This is what makes Biodynamic Agriculture specific compared to other alternative ways of farming. In Biodynamic Agriculture, the farmer is working with the various “dynamic forces” of nature. He conceives his agricultural domain as a “whole” and works to balance the different forces and rhythms of the earth and cosmos. For example, the special Lunar and Planetary Calendar1 which guides them in harmonizing their work with the cosmic forces like the moon and other planets. Biodynamic Agriculture was invented to cure the soil from the negative activities of humans and to improve the fertility of that soil. The aim of Biodynamic Agriculture is not directly the productivity of the farm but its general welfare. It’s an agriculture of care. The farmer’s role is to improve “the balance between all the forces”: animal forces, plants, humans, cosmical, terrestrial, and so forth. To do so, a Biodynamicist tries to work on his special human intuition. Biodynamic Agriculture intends to revive traditional peasant knowledge and develop it by working on the peasant’s intuition. This task implies some spiritual work inspired by Anthroposophy. In this task, the Soil is a major concern because it is intertwined in many relationships, particularly in the cycle of nutrition (animals feed off plants that fed themselves with the soils; they feed the soils with the manure that will feed the plants; we also feed on animals and on the plants, and so on). Biodynamicists focus their work on complementarities, on entanglements. 1  Biodynamic Agriculture has a special agricultural calendar showing the movements of the moon, the sun, and the other planets. On that basis, peasants follow special indications for their crops.

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Spirituality, for the peasants in this fieldwork, is really part of a more global commitment. Spirituality is not only an ontological question. Very concrete commitments are at stake in the ways of life of all the actors: ecological, political, sociological, and economic. Spirituality acts as a response, along with a set of other forms of commitment, to contemporary issues. All of them have lifestyles that are very imbued with ecological awareness. Then, political commitments are, like spiritual ones, obviously variable according to the individuals. But overall, there is a strong awareness of the societal challenges that individuals must face. The way of life and peasant work, for example—and this discourse is very strong among the neo-peasants but not only—is a strong choice of sociological, political, and economic position. It is a choice that is made in the face of a critical distancing from the dominant societal functioning in which the individual is inserted. Choosing Biodynamics and Anthroposophy in this biographical context is not insignificant: this choice is experienced as a real commitment that is effective, that also responds to contemporary issues—for example by participating in this ontological recomposition (Descola 2013). We can take George’s example. George is a 30-year-old gardener in a Pyrenean farm of 40  hectares up in the mountains (Hautes-Pyrénées, Occitanie, France), the youngest associate of this biodynamic collective farm in Pyrenean’s piedmont. He discovered this farm four years ago, during his agricultural education, the biodynamic BPREA (an agricultural diploma recognized by the state). Throughout his training he was questioning his desire to settle and engage himself as an associate in the farm’s GAEC (an association of multiple farmers on the same farm). Five associates are engaged in this GAEC today: three gardeners and two livestock farmers (a cow breeder and a sheep breeder, producing cheese); there is also one apprentice and two employees. George is a neo-peasant. He grew up in the city, in Lyon. His parents aren’t farmers, only his paternal grandfather was, in a polyculture farm. Also, he was not raised with any adherence to religion. During his childhood he spent his holidays in the countryside, at his grandfather’s. He has some striking memories of beans harvest, battles of rotted tomatoes, eating wild blueberries and his grandfather teaching him. After his studies he worked as a wholesaler, but this life did not appeal to him. He remembers that, one day, he was looking at a splendid sunset, with movements of light through the clouds, and suddenly, he understood a sentence that was preoccupying him: “without the matter, the spirit is nothing”. Without those clouds in front of him, the light would not have been so beautiful. Without the matter, the spirit is

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nothing. He had this kind of revelation that he had to do something and not “stay in his thoughts”. His thinking had to become a reality. He started to travel and do some wwoofing.2 He knew nothing about Biodynamics when he discovered the biodynamic school in Alsace, France. He felt attracted to the way this course presented its approach to the living. It responded to his need to replace the human being in a cycle of life, of relationships with nature, and to see the beauty behind all those processes, terrestrial and cosmical. Now, with his experience, he can tell that Biodynamic Agriculture invites the farmers to have strong rigour in their work to respect those ideals. He settled in this farm because of this high level of responsibilities they require. Indeed, farmers here are very attached to “doing things well”, with rigour and strictness (Fig. 4.1). Those two last years in this Pyrenean mountain farm are marked by renewal, with the arrival of three young associates, all neo-peasants. With George, there is Isa, 34 years old, the ewes breeder, and Michael, 29 years old, replacing the cow breeder (Freyja, the founder of the farm, now going into retirement). Also, working in the farm as employees are a couple of neo-peasants: Margueritte, 27 years old, making bread and working in the gardens (she also did the biodynamic formation in Alsace) and Jean, 32 years old, working as gardener to. They all have in common this change of life, when becoming a biodynamic peasant turns out to be a way to incarnate political, ideological, sociological, ecological, and spiritual commitments (Fig. 4.2). Further developing George’s example, if Biodynamic Agriculture was important to him (as a “mission” for what he “has to do in this life on Earth”), he also needed to be “integrated in his territory” as he says, which means that he needed to feel invested politically. He feels that his militancy is linked with his everyday work, but he needed also to invest himself in a network in the “outside world” of the farm. He engaged himself in the “Confédération Paysanne” (the French political peasant federation, strongly opposed to industrial ways of farming and defending the peasant’s identity and way of work, defending traditional peasantry and small farming) and he is today treasurer of the syndicate of his region (Hautes-Pyrénées). The actors of this movement want to show that small agriculture, the peasantry, has propositions and solutions to face the major concerns of our society: economic, sociological, and ecological. George 2  Wwoofing is a network which gives the opportunity to work as a volunteer in farms all around the world.

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Fig. 4.1  George in his garden, hoeing. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020)

says we can “easily forget the matters of society” in the microcosmos of the farm. Between the associates, George is the one responsible for managing the spreading of biodynamic preparations on the 40 hectares of the farm. In Biodynamic Agriculture, especially for the labelled farms (Biodynamic Agriculture has an international label called “Demeter”), each agricultural plot, pasture, culture, and field have to receive the biodynamic preparations. In the following ethnographic account we see what a biodynamic preparation is with the example of the Silica Preparation that we made one spring morning with George in this Pyrenean farm (Fig. 4.3).

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Fig. 4.2  Jean on the “weeding bed” in the leeks. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020)

It is 6:15 am. We are in “Flower Day” according to the Biodynamic Moon and Planet’s Calendar. The sun is rising in the mountains’ landscape, offering us an atmosphere of dancing warm colours and light through the cloudy sky of fresh early morning. George has already prepared the barrel, made of copper, and filled it with water of the source, coming from the uppers of the farm. We wait until the water warms up to the temperature of the body (around 27 °C) and we start the dynamization. It is the “Horn Silica” preparation (501). George puts the equivalent of the tip of his knife of the Silica Preparation in the water and we dynamize it for one hour. One arm is plunged into the water and start to circle in one direction, slowly, slipping on the borders of the barrel. George makes me notice the softness of the copper. When you can sense that the water is

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Fig. 4.3  Dynamization of the Silica Preparation; George teaches Noé the woofer. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020)

carried in the movement, you can start going stronger and quicker from the borders of the circle to the inside, going deeper and deeper with your arm in the water. When it is well done, when you arrive at the centre, you can remove your arm and the whole water is driven in a vortex. You wait a little time, (the time of two or three breaths, to keep a rhythm) then with your arm again (you can change arm if you prefer) you break this vortex and start again in the opposite direction. This is called dynamization and, for the Silica Preparation, it lasts one hour and must be done at the sunrise. According to Biodynamic Agriculture, Silica is a sunrising preparation because it has affinities with the light. Silica conduces light. This preparation is complementary with another one called the “Horn Manure” preparation (500). The Horn Manure acts on the inside of the soil; for example, it is used right after plantation to stimulate the roots of the plants. While Silica is used on the upper parts of the soil: on the vegetal parts. George

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tells that when you observe well after planting, there is a vegetative period when the plant settles or “anchors” itself in the soil. This is the time for the Horn Manure preparation. Then, suddenly, the vegetal explodes. There is important foliar development (growth of the vegetable). The Silica accompanies the healthy growth process of the vegetal. The Silica is used when the plant is close to maturity. For example, with the hay, it fits with the moment when they start preparing the tractor for the reaping. According to all biodynamic references, Silica will reinforce the communication between the plant and the cosmos. Through the reception of light, Silica helps the plant—therefore the soil—receiving information from the environment, along with cosmic information. Plants are bridges between Earth and Sky and Silica encourages this process. George explains that there is Silica in a lot of objects that aim to receive or conduce information: our eyes, or in computers, for example. After the dynamization, other farm workers meet us at 7:30 am for the spreading. There is Isa, the sheep breeder, and Noé, a helper who came for a one-month internship period. We fill four spray-machines of 15  litres each, charge them on our backs. George splits us in teams and explains to us where, in which areas of land, we will spread the preparation today. There are 200 metres of elevation on the farm, and some agricultural plots are extremely hard to bring the preparations to. But we do it anyway, and it is important to do so. On this farm, we are invited to draw a lemniscate in the air while we spray. We don’t have a real explanation for it; they just like to do it this way. It is as if the communication of the information will be improved using a symbol such as this, rather than doing a random spraying gesture (Fig. 4.4). Before we start, George likes to share a sentence which expresses the feelings inhabiting him during the dynamization. He shares those feelings with the idea that they will inspire us while we spray. Today he says there is “a lot of light”: it is not a shiny day, it is rather cloudy, but he says there is a lot of light between us when we dynamize. So we all go with our 15-litre spray-machine on our backs on the slopes of the mountains. What is happening there? Some will testify that it is hard because of the slope and the weight, that you have to concentrate on your feet and on the physical effort. But mostly, all will insist on the fact that you are “observing the field”. You can see the light passing through the cloud of thin mist of the preparation; sometimes the colours of a rainbow are visible. When I was spraying, I remember seeing George in the field in

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Fig. 4.4  The gesture of the dynamization: the vortex. (Photo: B. Galfré, May 2020)

front of me surrounded by this mist, in the shape of a lemniscate, with the high mountains behind him. Freyja, the founder of the farm, says that “Silica Preparation is like an envelope holding the landscape”. Each person who practises the biodynamic preparations testifies that it is a precious time given to the landscape, and some say, like George or Freyja, that in this moment they feel “united” to the landscape. It is a special time where they can observe every piece of the field they are walking through, each piece of grass and flower, and such like. They enjoy it because they don’t do this work of observation as well as they like in their everyday work. They usually don’t have so much time to dedicate to this careful observation. A commonly asked question (by people who don’t practise it) about biodynamic method is: “So, does it work?” The implication of this question is the enquiry as to whether it is efficient as an agronomic method. For Biodynamic Agriculture this question is kind of obsolete. Biodynamic Agriculture was not conceived, and is not practised, as an agronomic method with magical recipes made to improve the productivity of the farm. Nobody wakes up before sunrise and takes one hour to dynamize the Silica Preparation, then one hour again to spread this preparation with, as a motivation, the idea that it will improve the productivity of the soil.

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In our ethnographic example, we are in the middle of May, so it is the high season in the garden. In regard of the economic and practical logic of productivity, there are other priorities in the garden at this time of the year. So, if it’s not the productivity which determines the efficiency of the soil, then what is it and what is the leitmotif of this practice? Why wake up before sunrise, when you are already tired at the beginning of the high working season, and why choose to “lose” at least two to three hours of work? What is the motivation to take your 15-litre spray-machine on your back, on the harsh slopes of the mountain once a week?

Relational Approach to Ritual in Anthropology and the Analogical Way of Thinking Applied to Agriculture With that ethnographic example we understand that the effectiveness of Biodynamic Agriculture is to be understood in the light of its rituality and spirituality. Biodynamic Agriculture’s effectiveness is to be regarded in the frame of the relational approach to ritual in anthropology (Houseman and Severi 1998). The idea of this research is that the peasant’s actions are related to an “inner gesture” animating all the technicity. Agriculture’s efficiency here is, at first, relational. Agriculture becomes a manner to develop a proper relationship between the “self” and the “living”. A question that is at the heart of the biodynamic practice is: how do I relate to the other earth beings (De la Cadena 2015). This question can be declined in many more specific questions, related to all the different agricultural activities: how do I, by the work of the plants on my farm, relate my soil to the energies of the cosmos? Where is the balance between my animals and my plants? Where is the balance between what is wild and what is humanly manipulated on my land? for example. The biodynamic preparations are used to work on these balances between all the living creatures of the farm. They are used to harmonize the different energies, terrestrial and cosmical. At the heart of those practices are not just technical actions but a number of “gestures” which are the incarnation of inner works of intention. Behind the act of spreading Silica Preparation is the gesture of a human who wants “to restore” (with the ecopolitical idea that it was lost with all the pollutions, etc. and the spiritual basis that the extreme materialistic way of thinking made us loose another type of knowledge that was “more intuitive”) a communication between his soil and the

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universe. It is a person who wants to be sensitive enough to feel, by herself, through the work of observation, this relationship. As they say a lot on this farm, with a touch of humour: “We don’t know if Biodynamic Agriculture works, but what we do know is that it makes good peasantsobservers”—observers of living processes and entanglements between the diversity of living beings and forces. Biodynamicists are ontological troublemakers for anthropologists (Breda, 2016; Foyer, 2018). This research uses the framework of the relational approach of ritual anthropology to show that Biodynamics, through a process of ritualization and spiritualization of agricultural practices, is a medium for questioning western cosmogony and developing new forms of relational mediation (Moisseeff and Houseman, 2020) with the “Living”. In this research work, the notion of “gesture” is put at the heart of this process of relational mediation, as well as the analysis of analogical thought (and not of analogism in the sense of Descola, who uses it as a category to name a founding structure used by a society to define the relationship between the human and its environment—an analogical society is a society which bases this relationship on a network of discontinuities structured by links of similarities). This work does not aim to consider Biodynamicists as “another culture”, nor to abuse Descola’s categorizations (Descola, 2013). These categories are the result of a structural analysis that I find difficult to apply without transitions to this ethnography. If, in the Comminges territory, Biodynamics is invested as an alternative to the dominant ontological model, the actors are not absolute outsiders. They are all nevertheless members of this society, all Westerners. They are constructing themselves against a number of institutions that they have been, or still are, confronted with. A large part of the actors are neo-peasant: they grew up in the city, many of them have a long academic career, some maintained their job and are still in a professional transition (e.g., one teaches mathematics in the university, another is working some days of the week at the local secondary school, and so on). They share simultaneously an agriculture link with the past—in its romantic nostalgia for the traditional peasantry— and with the future—an alternative that is concretely proposed by actors who challenge the dominant way of life of their society. One hypothesis is that if Biodynamics tends to link the entities that populate the world, human and non-human, visible and invisible, in a holistic whole, it is not strict analogism or animism in the very precise sense of Descola’s (2013) structural analysis. It is rather an implementation of

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analogical thinking—in the cognitive sense, as a system of thought—which is used to push the limits of rational-dualistic logical thinking—the proper way to think in a society of dominant naturalism. For this study, I think it is important to distinguish the analogical thinking system from analogism as an ontological category. If analogies are prevalent in biodynamic discourses and behaviours, the assumption of this study is that these analogies result from the shaping and acting out of relationships established during the ritualization of practices, rather than being evidence of an analogical ontology in Descola’s sense. In other words, the spiritualization and ritualization of agricultural practices promote the shaping and enactment of relationships going beyond the limits of western naturalistic relationality through the use of analogical thinking. Western naturalism in Descola’s sense is the way “Nature” and “Culture” are separated in westerns minds which is determining the way they understand their environment and enter in a relationship with it. This is linked to the tendency of the Cartesian mind to rationalize everything, leaving less credit to other forms of understanding of the world (like imagination, sensation, intuition, dreams and such like) and creating a strong dualism in the categorizations through which western culture apprehends the world. If Descola warns the ethnologist of this ontological scrambling, that does not prevent him from affirming that the existence of these variations and their amplitude are “perhaps an indication that the naturalist scheme has come to its limits. A phase of ontological recomposition perhaps began, whose result nobody can predict” (Descola 2005: 347). Without affirming that Biodynamics belongs to another culture or another ontology, on the contrary, our concern is to put it back in its socio-cultural context, a context of questioning and redefining a societal model in crisis, an “ontological recomposition”. What is at stake is tending to exceed the frameworks imposed by modernity, especially in its relationship to “nature”. It is a question of rethinking naturalism from the inside by widening it. To analyse how this widening of naturalism is concretely carried out, this research study was able to highlight a certain framework whose three central points seemed to be: the exercise of analogical thought (Hofstadter and Sander 2013b), the anthropology of gesture (Jousse 1969), and the rituality of daily life (as we will see in the last part of this chapter). To go beyond the categories imposed by a cultural framework, the mechanism of analogical thought seems to be the privileged tool. In support of this assertion the work in cognitive science and psychology of Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander (2013b) can be cited. They denounce

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“the belief in the supremacy of logical thinking over analogical thinking” as well as “the specious conclusion that analogies belong only to the realm of intuition, an irrational realm that cannot and should not be taught” (2013: 473). They show us that we have commonly accepted a reductive view of categorization: each entity in the world would have its “mental box” or “natural category” (2013: 20–21). According to them, this way of thinking about categorization is a “chimera”, as they explain it: “The implicit and naive analogy ‘categories are boxes’ conveys the idea that each entity in the world has its own box of belonging, linked to the very nature of the world, and independent of individuals and their psychology, and that this box would be reflected by a mental presence in the brain of all. In other words, categorical identity would exist and be objective” (2013: 524). Here we find the Cartesian naturalism that is dominant in western society: they call it the “classical approach”. According to these authors, categorization is indeed necessary to be able to think, and “the motor” of this mechanism is the analogy. Analogy is the heart of thinking. According to them, it is determining the most banal acts as well as the “flashes of genius” or the way “each person interacts with his or her environment, interprets a situation, reasons in everyday life, makes decisions and acquires new knowledge” (2013: 28). Also, they assert […] that cognition is made up of an uninterrupted flow of categorizations and that at the roots of our ability to think lies not classification, which places objects in rigid mental boxes, but categorization/analogy, on which the remarkable fluidity of human thought depends. Categorization/analogy gives us the ability to perceive similarities and to rely on these similarities to cope with novelty and strangeness. (Hofstadter and Sander 2013a: 28)

The ethnographic research under discussion here gives us an account of the conceptual richness accessible through analogical thinking. It would seem that Biodynamicists are re-engaging with this analogical engine with a strong creative capacity. From Cartesianism, we have inherited the “classical approach” which is now the dominant view, denounced by Hofstadter and Sander—a logic with fixed categorizations, which considers analogical thinking and intuitions eccentric. Taking the opposite view, Biodynamics values analogical way of thinking and constantly invites us to make it flourish by pushing back the limits of categories through the perception of

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similarities between the different aspects of the living. Therefore, the differences are brought into resonance. To present this in a different light, we can choose an example from Biodynamic Agriculture. One of the biodynamic compost preparations is made from dried Yarrow (or Aquileia, a white wild flower) inserted into a deer’s bladder. The deer is considered to be the most sensitive ruminant, which captures external energies through its outstretched antlers. One way to understand the connection between the properties of the deer and those of the yarrow is the shape of this compound flower which resembles the antlers of the deer. In the stag, as in the Aquileia, we observe in both a “gesture of opening up to the cosmos” through the branching: if we observe the form and the movement of the branching of both the flower and the deer, we can tell that there is this same gesture that stretches from the inside to the outside. If we would try to imitate the form and the movement of this flower or the animal, we would stretch our arms up and wide open. That would be an illustration of a gesture. What are Biodynamicists looking for in analogies, similarities and differences? They are looking for grand gestures, as they call them. They enter in relationship with “the Living” by observing the different forms and movements crossing nature. In this desire to connect with “the Living”, Biodynamics invites us to develop our sense of observation—indeed, our sensoriality as a whole—in order to appropriate the grand gestures that run through our “psycho-­ sensorial” reality, visible and invisible. One can say that they are good examples of the “spontaneous man” evoked by Marcel Jousse, in his Anthropology of the Gesture (Anthropologie du Geste, 1969).

Daily Ritualization: Gesture(s) as Technique(s) […] for the spontaneous man, echo and mirror of the ambient reality, each of the beings is seen and mimicked as an action, as a gesture which is proper to him, which is “essential” to him. This essential gesture, characteristic of a living or inanimate being becomes, so to speak, its Name. (Jousse 1969: 53)

The notion of “gesture” is at the heart of the analogical thought system that inhabits the practice of Biodynamics. Ethnography has revealed the concept of gesture as a tool that realizes the analogical way of thinking in practice. It makes concrete the enlargement of the classical way of thinking through analogy. As the gesture is at the same time an initiation—it begins physically outside—and an extension—it is the intention, the emotion, the

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idea or the personal interiority that is the origin of the external physical expression—(Guérin 2011, Philosophie du Geste) it allows to make the link between the external world and the internal world (within which the analogies are lived). For Biodynamics, analogies allow us to apprehend a universe that is a priori invisible (like an inside space, since it is hidden) but it can be unveiled through the understanding of grand gestures. The Biodynamist seeks to perceive these grand gestures and to integrate them in order to be able to “play them again” (Jousse 1969). These grand gestures reveal multitudes of analogies that serve to create links between things and beings in order to understand the “living”. The more the individual perceives these gestures and the more he can “replay” them, the more he can develop his analogical thinking, because he constantly makes links, in his thinking and in his sensoriality, between beings and things, between the visible and the invisible, and so on. This process at work in Biodynamics seems to exemplify particularly well the work of the anthropologist Marcel Jousse, as he says: “The myriad of interactions of the Cosmos are unconscious. They become conscious only by a seizure of the Anthropos which ‘intellige’ them.” For Jousse, we can only know what we have received in us and “replayed” in the form of gestures and it is the specific character of man to “make intelligible” the interactions of reality. He also tells us that a human cannot “lock himself in the expression of the only immediately visible world. […] His triumph is the invention of the analogy and the symbol. […] Hence his necessarily concrete expressions, but which refer to the invisible world mimicked by visible things” (Jousse 1969: 83). There is an interpenetration of the visible and invisible world which can be understood by the analogy and the symbol (which are strongly present in religion). Therefore, through the quest of the right gestures one tried to catch the essence of the beings. The Biodynamicists observe a multitude of gestures, then try to characterize them and, in doing so, create analogies that will link these characteristics—of different natures, of different dimensions—to finally catch a “grand gesture”, like an overall vision. For example, different characteristics can be observed in the cow—the shape of the horns, the way it moves, the rumination, the cattle life and interactions, and so on—that will lead to the “great gesture of the cow”. For Biodynamicists, this great gesture is linked to a powerful inwardness, which is the counter-image of the deer. Biodynamicists make an opposition between the image of the cow, the largest ruminant with the greatest fertility showing “a strong internalization of its forces” (it digests the

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cosmos and returns it to the earth with its manure); and the image of the deer, a very sensitive and furtive animal “completely focus on the outside forces”, as shown by its antlers spreading out in branches. These characteristics are the result of observation and analogical reasoning. Individual experiences are shared with others and debated and, in the end, each one has the same vision of the cow’s “gesture”, the same overall image. These experiences of observation are part of an inner work: the idea is to be able to “replay” this observed gesture in the inner self, to imagine and feel this gesture inside oneself. It means observing and characterizing it not only outside but from the inside also, connecting oneself to it, through our senses, feelings, and emotions, so that each person really experiences this gesture internally. This is an exercise commonly practised, especially in the “Goethean Approach of the Living”, a special way to practise the observation of the living forces, famous in Biodynamic Agriculture, inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).3 The development of these gestures and this way of thinking are reinforced by a rituality and a spirituality that are omnipresent. Through the analysis of Biodynamic Agriculture’s practices, we notice that despite the different degrees of spiritual commitment, Biodynamics establishes a framework for everyday life. This framework is shaped by the rituality of daily life (Herrou, 2018). What is this daily life rituality? It is a permanent search for finesse in attention, for presence in oneself and one’s actions, for awareness in one’s actions, in its gestures. All this focus to encourage an inner development (the development of one’s “I”, as anthroposophists speak about their “self”, translated from “mein ich” in German). One important aspect of this work on oneself in daily life is that it brings joy. It is not only a question of locking oneself into a monastic rigour. Perhaps some people and some farms are very rigorous and can evoke monastery life. But no one will go to confession or be punished for not following the path. These are individual choices that bring joy and satisfaction to daily life. There is pleasure in seeing and participating in the sacred dimension of life. There is pleasure in working on self-­development. Emotions, along with sensoriality, are particularly important in the practice. The gesture being the extension of oneself; the role of emotions is 3  Goethe is mostly known for his poetry, but he was also a scientist and a botanist. He is famous in Biodynamic Agriculture for his ability to put together his talent for both art and sciences. For more information on his way to approach plants is his book The Plants Metamorphosis: La métamorphose des plantes, 1975, Paris: Triades.

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crucial. We see that in the example above of the Silica Preparation: making the dynamization, George “feels” a lot of light, he puts his attention on the “softness” of the copper, he teaches me the moment when you “feel” that it is the good moment to accelerate, and so on. To go a little further on this question of rituality in daily life, biodynamic practices are not recognized by the actors as rituals. It is difficult to distinguish rituals that have a beginning and an end when one is immersed in the practice. Certain events, such as the meetings for the preparation days, or certain very specific biodynamic practices such as the dynamization and spraying of preparations, may come very close to the “classical definition of a ritual”. But this is a very external observation. Biodynamics is experienced individually in a way that makes these events or practices blend into the everyday, rather than the extraordinary. Within the framework of ritual anthropology, it would seem that we are closer to a form of everyday rituality: rituality and spirituality are backdrops, acting more or less strongly on everyday life. Just as prayer is part of monastic life, dynamization is part of the Biodynamicist’s daily life. This does not mean that it loses its sacred character, it just means that more room is given to the sacred in daily life, to grace in gestures. Afterwards, the degree of sacredness that inspires the practices varies according to the individuals and their spiritual commitment. But it remains a permanent background. Which brings us back to the gesture. The rituality and spirituality of daily life are part of the beginning of the gestures that animate Biodynamics. “The gesture translates less than it initiates, interprets less than it prolongs” (Guérin 2011: 20). The biodynamic gesture initiates outwardly what is an extension of an inner work, fruit of this daily rituality. Biodynamic agricultural practices show us that gestures can be part of a technical itinerary. A gesture is an act of will which takes the totality to express it in a singularity. Biodynamic Agriculture shows us that anthropology of techniques can be enriched by anthropology of gesture and ritual anthropology. George, in his collective Pyrenean farm, shows us how Biodynamics becomes a rituality of the everyday life, entangled in ecopolitical and socio-political concerns. This rituality is expressed through gestures that are concretely made by the peasant or that the peasant observes in the world around him. Those gestures, along with an analogical way of thinking, make him build his cosmogony of relationships with “the Living”. One could also seek the biodynamic gesture. The Biodynamicist seeks to unravel the interweaving of interactional gestures of the universe in order to understand it, accompany it, and replay it in his practice of

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peasantry. The biodynamic gesture would be like this ideal of a Biodynamics that manages to capture what is essential in the “living” to “replay” it. We can quote Jousse again (knowing he is hard to translate because he creates his own vocabulary, but we can use our imagination to understand his creations): The universe presents itself to the rhythmic-mimeur Anthropos as a formidable interweaving of interactional, unconscious and rhythmically triphasic gestures, which he will replay and succeed with consciousness and logic in this rhythmic triphasism. The anthropos, as a kind of successivant microcosm, receives and returns, in all its being, the innumerable and simultaneous Actions of the macrocosm. (Jousse 1969: 137)

A big question behind the practice of this agriculture is what is “the Living”? This is where the quest for the “great gestures” of Nature begins. A footnote in The Anthropology of the Gesture of Marcel Jousse (quoting a course that he gave to the Sorbonne the 28th of January of the year 1955) is telling us that the peasants are “those who are truly in-formed (modelled) by their country”, that “in its strong acceptance, the peasant is the country replayed by the whole being, mimicking, interacting, bilateralizing” (1969: 161). Let’s think back to that energizing gesture, that vortex, and that moment when we “create chaos” in the dynamization practice. Let’s also think about this habit of making the lemniscate gesture while spraying the preparation. There are a very large number of examples of gestures of all kinds that illustrate the farmer’s desire to “express his landscape”. I would like to conclude these ideas of analogical thought, rituality of daily life and gestuality with an extract from Philosophie du Geste by Michel Guérin. This passage speaks of Art but it seems to me to fit perfectly with what we have just said about Biodynamics: Art is only the gesture of gesture: the management of sensations (“aesthetics”). […] Thus, the theme of imitation (of nature) could be reinvigorated, not a bland replica of appearance, but the discovery of the source-gesture by the invention of the gesture that suits it. What we call the creative imagination, in whatever domain it manifests itself, is nothing else than the faculty to articulate the mimetic physics and the schematizing fiction of the gesture, that is to say to take in charge (gerere) a mode or a manner (gestus) or to convert a gesture into a gesture. Art is the “exploit” of the sensation.

The work of gesture and analogical thought in Biodynamics, within the framework of rituality, are all new forms of relational mediation.

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References Breda, Nadia. 2016. “The Plant in Between: Analogism and Entanglement in an Italian Community of Anthroposophists.” Anuac 5 (2): 131–57. Cadena, Marisol de la. 2015. Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Callicott, John Baird. 1991. Genesis and John Muir. State University New York Press. Choné, Aurélie. 2017. “Changer le monde par l’agriculture? L’influence des théories et pratiques de l’anthroposophie sur les modèles de pensée écologiques alternatifs.” In Philippe Hamman (ed.), Ruralité, nature et environnement: Entre savoirs et imaginaires, 275–302. Toulouse: Érès. Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2013, Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foyer, Jean. 2018. “Syncrétisme des savoirs dans la viticulture biodynamique. Incorporation dans l’expérience et le sensible et trajectoire initiatique.” Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances 12 (2): 289–321. Guérin, Michel. 2011. Philosophie du geste. Paris: Actes Sud. Herrou, Adeline (ed.). 2018. “Une journée dans une vie, une vie dans une journée. Des ascètes et des moines aujourd’hui.” Paris: Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis. Hofstadter, Douglas R, and Emmanuel Sander. 2013a. L’analogie: Cœur de la pensée. Paris: Odile Jacob. ———. 2013b. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York: Basic Books. Houseman, Michael. 2012. Le rouge est le noir: Essais sur le rituel. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail. Houseman, Michael, and Carlo Severi. 1998. Naven or the Other Self. A Relational Approach to Ritual Action. Leiden: Brill. Jousse, Marcel. 1969. L’Anthropologie du geste. Paris: Resma. Moisseeff, Marika, and Michael Houseman. 2020. “L’orchestration rituelle du partage des émotions et ses ressorts interactionnels.” In Laurence Kaufmann and Louis Quéré (eds.), Emotions collectives. En quête d’un “objet” impossible, 133–168. Editions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

PART II

More-than-Human Politics: Belonging, Identity, Indigeneity and the Rights of Nature

CHAPTER 5

Human-Resource Connections as Articulations of Belonging in Buriatia Anna Varfolomeeva

Introduction In the Oka district of Buriatia in Siberia, the affluence of mineral resources is often mentioned as a symbol of the region’s natural wealth and uniqueness. ‘We have all the Periodic table of elements under our feet’, my interviewees would state with pride. Indeed, Oka is rich in mineral deposits, including gold, jade (nephrite), graphite, bauxite, phosphate and asbestos. In the nineteenth century, Oka was known for its production of high-­ quality ‘Siberian graphite’. Today, it is a place of gold and jade extraction carried out by private businesses. Many locals are concerned about the expansion of large-scale mining and its potential negative impact on Oka’s environment, as they have little information about the activities of mining companies. Despite limited opportunities for official employment, many Oka residents have nonetheless engaged in informal jade extraction and trade. The informal extraction is carried out through a set of negotiations

A. Varfolomeeva (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_5

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with the governing landscape spirits and therefore is not perceived as stealing but rather as an exchange with non-human actors, similarly to hunting or gathering. The three different types of resource extraction, including graphite, gold and jade mining, have a strong impact on the identity of Oka residents and their connections to the territory. They create worries over possible outside influences on the Oka district, but at the same time reinforce the ties between different actors in more-than-human landscape. This chapter explores how the development of mining in Oka influences its residents’ sense of belonging. It argues that local connections to mineral resources are a crucial element in the articulations of indigenous and local belonging. Local conceptualisations of belonging extend beyond the established dichotomies of dominance or mutualism and create specific notions of ownership based on shared intentions between humans and non-humans (Oehler 2019). Graphite, gold and jade are viewed as integral elements of the sacred Oka landscape; they are animated and related to the spirit masters of a particular territory. Humans and mining materials are not straightforwardly linked to one another, as mineral resources do not have a deep symbolic meaning in the community when they are separated from the animated landscape. However, as a part of the landscape, they are attributed value as substances governed by the spirit masters of the territory. Mining activities carried out by private businesses are perceived as a threat endangering the bonds between human and non-­ human actors. At the same time, Oka residents are reinforcing their ties with the territory through graphite mining narratives, growing concerns over gold mining development and informal jade extraction. The Okinskii district, referred to as Oka in Russian or Akha in Buriat (with the stress on the last syllable), is situated in the western part of the Republic of Buriatia in south-central Siberia. This is a remote and scarcely populated region of Buriatia. Its population comprises Oka Buriats and Soiots, whose cultures have developed interdependently during the course of several centuries. This chapter focuses on both ethnic groups as indigenous and local inhabitants of the territory, not drawing a clear border between them. The commonly used local word for Oka residents is ‘Okans’ (R: okintsy), and I will refer to it throughout the text. The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Oka district (Orlik and Sorok settlements) and in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buriatia, in several instalments in 2016, 2017 and 2021. In the summers of 2016 and 2017, I conducted 36 semi-structured and unstructured biographical interviews with the residents of Orlik and Sorok as well as with

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several administration representatives and activists located in Ulan-Ude. In the summer of 2021, I conducted 21 interviews primarily in the settlement of Orlik (17 interviews with new respondents and 5 interviews with the informants I had already interacted with in 2016).1 The interviews conducted in Oka centred on the residents’ upbringing and education, their current life in Oka, their family life and various ways of engaging with the landscape, including hunting, fishing, leaving sacrifices, performing rituals, collecting herbs or informal jade mining. To complement the interview data, I collected a set of related publications from the district’s newspaper, Akha (until 1991, called Saianskaia nov’). The newspaper has been published since 1944 in Orlik, the main settlement in the district. To access the materials on local history published prior to the 1940s, I worked in the local archive of the Oka district in Orlik. In this chapter, I also make use of materials on the jade trade published by regional Buriat media channels, such as Inform Polis and Novosti Buriatii. The following section of the chapter focuses on the notion of indigenous and local belonging. It discusses how belonging is asserted, articulated or contested. After that, I concentrate on mineral resources as a measure informing indigenous and local articulations of belonging. As specific examples of articulations of belonging through connections with natural resources, the chapter discusses legends about past graphite mining, the perceived dangers of gold mining expansion and local involvement in informal jade extraction in Oka.

Articulations of Indigenous Belonging Belonging is conceptualised as the connection between matter and place that is constructed through a variety of practices (Mee and Wright 2009). This is a multidimensional notion that is simultaneously analysed as an intimate connection between a person and a place and as a resource of power governing inclusion and exclusion (Antonsich 2010). Therefore, belonging may be viewed as an act of self-identification or the process by which one is accepted or excluded by others (Yuval-Davis 2006). The concept of belonging is often connected with strong emotional responses when seen as ‘the desire for some sort of attachment’ or ‘wanting to 1  The interview lasted between 50 minutes and 3 hours and was conducted in Russian. To cite the interviews, I use a code consisting of the letter ‘B’ (for Buriatia) and the sequential number of the interview. The translations of the interviews from Russian are my own.

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belong’ (Probyn 1996, 19). In this way, belonging represents an unfinished act or unfulfilled expectation: not being, but longing to be a part of the territory or community, longing to be accepted or included (Wood and Waite 2011). In this chapter, when discussing the expressions of belonging, I rely on the concept of articulations developed by Stuart Hall. As Hall notes, ‘An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?’ (Hall 1986, 53, original emphasis). Articulation represents a link between entities that may not be inherently similar; at the same time, it is a structured connection that is not formed by chance, but follows a specific pattern (Hall 2018). The concept of articulation has been widely applied to the positioning of indigenous identities under a variety of circumstances (Li 2000; Watson 2010; Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019; Varfolomeeva 2019). In this chapter, I argue that indigenous and local connections with mineral resources, including graphite, gold and jade, may serve as means for articulating people’s sense of belonging and their identity as long-term dwellers of a particular territory. In Oka, graphite, gold and jade do not have a distinct value as beautiful or expensive substances. However, they are treated as a part of the sacred landscape, and therefore, contested resource ownership is seen as a danger to stable human-landscape relations in the district. Mining sites are often understood predominantly through economic and political relationships. However, they are also places with significant cultural value, influencing the formation of identities and memories (Ey and Sherval 2016) and evoking complex emotional responses of hope, fear, worry or excitement (Komu 2019). Articulations of belonging in industrialised regions take different forms depending on specific connections formed with resource extraction. The development of mining in a region may produce a sense of belonging through perceived security and continuity of the industry benefitting the area (Emery 2018). Simultaneously, it may strengthen the divide between ‘locals’ and ‘incomers’, and therefore, contribute to a contested feeling of belonging (Mnwana 2015). Officially documented and licenced land property rights often conflict with local conceptualisations of ownership viewed in terms of a deep knowledge of the territory (Anderson 1998).

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The articulations of Soiot and Oka Buriat belonging are contingent on the history of their indigenous status recognition as well as the rapid post-­ Soviet development of extractive industries in the area. However, they are also informed by intimate connections between humans and the sacred landscape of Oka. The problem of indigenous belonging may, therefore, be approached from different angles: as an intimate connection with a place and as a discursive tactic connecting indigeneity to a particular territory. In Russian legal discourse, indigenous groups are strongly linked to the space they occupy. The Russian word for ‘indigenous’—korennoi— derives from the word koren’ (root), and thus etymology itself comes into play in describing indigenous communities as ‘rooted’ in a specific territory. The etymological linkage to space is reflected in the Russian federal laws regulating the definition of indigenous minorities. According to the federal law, ‘On guarantees of the rights of indigenous small-numbered peoples of the Russian Federation’ (1999), for a minority to be considered indigenous it should reside in territories of their ancestors’ traditional residence, engage in traditional forms of subsistence, not exceed 50,000 people in size and self-identify as a separate ethnic community.2 The legal definition of indigeneity in Russia does not allow for indigenous self-­ determination and instead keeps such minority peoples in the position of ‘perpetual dependency’ (Donahoe 2011, 412), as they are expected to live up to the definitions imposed on them. Due to the territorial criteria, indigenous citizens who choose to migrate from their ancestral land then lose the state benefits associated with indigenous status. At the same time, cases exist of territorial attachment prevailing over self-identification when indigenous residents register their new status (Donahoe et  al. 2008). Paradoxically, even though indigeneity often implies ‘confinement’ in a certain place (Appadurai 1988, 37), indigenous rights to land and natural resources are simultaneously questioned and contested. Indigenous communities do not have ownership rights over the lands defined as their traditional territories of natural resource use (Yakovleva 2014). Moreover, their use of resources is controlled and restricted: as an example, in 2012 the Evenki brigade ‘Dylacha’ was prohibited from mining jade in the Baunt region of Buriatia. The state-approved definitions have a strong impact on local perceptions of indigeneity in Oka. The ethnic groups of Soiots and Oka Buriats 2

 Federal Law of the Russian Federation №82-Ф3, 30 April 1999.

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have developed in mutual interdependence, and in contemporary Oka the two groups are largely mixed. However, while Soiots have an indigenous status, Oka Buriats do not: the total number of Buriats in Russia in 2010 was 461,389, clearly exceeding the 50,000 ‘numerical ceiling’ for indigenous status recognition. The ancestors of the Soiots, the Samoyedic people,3 moved to Oka from Western Siberia in the late Neolithic period (Pavlinskaia 1999), while Buriat settlers migrated to the territory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Pavlinskaia 2002). Due to the remote position of the district, the various ethnic groups residing there cooperated intensively while being separated from the rest of the country by high mountains. The issue of Soiots’ indigenous status was raised in the Okinskii district in the early 1990s. In March 2000, after several rounds of appeals to the Government of the Russian Federation by Buriat authorities, the Soiots were registered as an indigenous small-numbered people of the Russian Federation. Although Soiots and Oka Buriats are formally divided as indigenous and non-indigenous residents of Oka, it is difficult to draw a clear border between the two ethnic groups. In Oka, indigeneity is imagined as an intimate connection or negotiation between humans and non-human actors in the landscape. As Oka is an area rich in natural resources, gold and jade often become a means to affirm or contest indigenous belonging. The following sections of the chapter focus on the position of natural resources in human-landscape connections and indigeneity articulations in Oka.

The Sacred Landscape of Oka Oka is the fourth largest district in Buriatia based on its size; at the same time, it is scarcely populated and has only approximately 5400 permanent residents. The district’s main settlement and administrative centre, Orlik, is located 713 km from Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buriatia. A daily minibus connects Orlik with Ulan-Ude. The trip takes approximately 11–13 hours depending on the number of stops, length of the border control inspection in Mondy or weather conditions (see Fig. 5.1). Oka is surrounded by several high mountain chains, making travel to the district especially difficult; as a result, the district has long remained 3  The Samoyedic people are a group of closely related ethnic peoples who speak the Samoyedic languages, which are part of the Uralic linguistic family in Russia.

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Fig. 5.1  Minibus passengers stopping near a sacred site on the way to Orlik from Ulan-Ude. (Photo: A. Varfolomeeva, 2021)

separated from the rest of Buriatia. Oka residents rely on cattle breeding and hunting as traditional occupations. The locals take pride in the abundance of Oka’s natural resources, as well as the close ties between its community members. As my interviewee Balta, a resident of Orlik, noted, ‘[W]e have everything [we need] right here: one can find gold, and nephrite, and places rich in wildlife. … You can walk into anybody’s house, and the hosts will be sure to seat you at the table; they will treat you to whatever they have. That is just the way we are here’ (Interview B5). The belief system of Oka residents is often described as a syncretism of Buddhism and shamanism. The Buddhist religion is heavily integrated with shamanist beliefs, as both religions rely on Oka residents’ connections with the region’s sacred landscape. The Buddhist and shamanist beliefs of Okans are often viewed interchangeably. As an example, it is common to see either a Buddhist lama or a shaman before starting a trip or when needing advice. As I began my field research, I was soon taken to a local shaman by my host family to ‘open the road’ for my studies. At the same time, they advised me to visit the local datsan (a Buddhist monastery) as well ‘to show respect’. One of my interviewees explained that when she has a health issue, she goes to see a lama (a Buddhist monk) and then a shaman, just to make sure they both address the problem and ask the spirits for quick healing (Interview B19). However, this

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interchangeability is not universal; several other interviewees claimed they did not trust ‘modern shamans’ and preferred to go to Buddhist lamas, ‘as lamas are educated people’ (Interview B37). Local connections to the sentient landscape are manifested through the concept of toonto niutag (Buriat for ‘homeland’). Toonto is the concrete place where a person was born and where his/her afterbirth was traditionally buried. This is a more precise concept referring specifically to the place where one was born, while niutag is a concept that refers more generally to the motherland. Toonto symbolises the strong connection between a person and a place. In Buriat culture, it is recommended to visit one’s toonto from time to time to gain strength and support from ancestor spirits. My interviewee Lubsama, a resident of Orlik, noted that she never visited the graveyard where her ancestors were buried; instead, she went to her birthplace once a year ‘to pray to the mountains’ and to establish a connection with her ancestors through a direct interaction with the landscape (Interview B51). Oka Buriat and Soiot beliefs focus on a pantheon of celestial beings (in Buriat, tengri), where each god or spirit is associated with a specific natural force or part of the landscape (such as a river or a mountain). The sky is seen as a masculine force that gives life, whereas the earth is associated with a feminine force that shapes elements. The heavenly world and the underground world are governed by strong spirits: Erlen khan is presented as the master of the underground world, including natural resources. Therefore, when extracting resources from the earth, one is at the same time negotiating with spirit masters who may allow or prohibit their extraction. Different parts of the landscape, including rivers, mountains or taiga, are seen as animated by the spirit of a particular territory, or ezhin (Batomunkueva 2019). The locals’ sacred views on stones are represented by the cult of oboo—stone pyramids created by humans that are used for leaving sacrifices for spirit masters; the ritual of leaving sacrifices is referred to as oboo tahilga (Batomunkueva 2019). A stone pyramid is viewed as providing a connection between the Sky, the Earth and human beings (as the intermediator between worlds). In such situations, objects, such as stones, temporarily attain personhood, as they are viewed as mediators between humans and spirit masters (Oehler 2020). In Oka, belonging is viewed as being a part of the shared multispecies household, following the rhythms of nature and living in harmony with non-human actors. Natural resource extraction is viewed within the same framework: in order to bring prosperity and not misfortune, it needs to be

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attuned with different landscape actors. However, when the extraction is not properly negotiated, it is viewed as a threat to the established way of living. The following sections of the chapter will engage in more detail with three examples of natural resources extraction in Oka: the memories of the nineteenth-century graphite extraction, as well as contemporary gold and jade mining conducted in the district.

Graphite as a Symbol of Natural Richness Oka residents began engaging with mineral resources as early as the nineteenth century. There is evidence showing that amateur gold extraction took place near the Kitoi River. In the mid-nineteenth century, Soiot hunters discovered graphite of high quality near Mount Botogol in Oka (Dorzhieva 2014). During that time, graphite was widely used in Europe for the production of pencils, and the demand for it was high. Jean-Pierre Alibert, a French entrepreneur residing in Russia, became interested in the discovery and tried to establish a mining operation to extract graphite near Mount Botogol in 1848. Alibert brought a team of French workers to help him, but he also employed local residents at the graphite mine. The mine and the settlement around it developed quickly; Alibert even built an orchard house and a hippodrome designed for his wife, who enjoyed watching horse racing (Dorzhieva 2014). The extracted graphite was transferred to Germany, to the Faber Company in Nuremberg. Transporting the extracted stone was expensive, and thus the graphite mine was closed in 1857 when a cheaper way of producing graphite was discovered in France. Soon after that, Alibert left Oka, and the Botogol mine was abandoned. Later, in the Soviet period, there were attempts to re-start graphite extraction at Botogol (as graphite was used for military needs), and some of my interviewees recalled working there in their youth. At the beginning of the 1990s, the extraction of graphite stopped once again and will probably not be continued in the near future. Stories about Alibert’s graphite mine were frequently mentioned in the interviews. Many locals spoke of it as a wondrous operation and shared that Soiots and Buriats had provided Alibert with cattle (horses and yaks), wild game and fur and received good remuneration from him (Interview B15). This story is often mentioned as a symbol of Oka’s unique nature and rich resources, demonstration of the fact that Siberian graphite was so rare and precious that it was demanded in faraway Europe. There are even legends that some residents of the district descend from French

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entrepreneurs who were working with Alibert. One of my interviewees told me that her relative did not look Buriat or Soiot at all, having fair hair and blue eyes, a sign that he was the descendant of a French entrepreneur who had worked for Alibert (Interview B16). At the same time, graphite narratives also sometimes serve as a signifier of the marginalised position of Soiots and Buriats in their relations with the state and with private investors. My interviewees Damba and Nomina (Interview B15), both residents of Sorok and members of the same family, noted that although Soiot hunters were the first to discover graphite on their land, this discovery was soon taken from them by the state and Alibert’s business. They drew a parallel with contemporary resources being ‘taken’ from the locals in a similar way: Damba: We locals knew where the gold was, but we could not extract it; we are not allowed to. (…) There are decrees written about that. We should stick to cattle breeding; we cannot extract anything. Nomina: It always happens like that. Our guys know where to search, they find the stone and then this all happens: legalisation of the land, new owners, new investors, all over again.

As this dialogue demonstrates, the issue of resource extraction is strongly linked with the perceived unfairness of land ownership. My interviewees claim that although Okans know how and where to find the mineral resources, they cannot extract them and make a living from them because outsiders immediately assume legal control of the site. Although graphite was first discovered by locals, it was managed by an outside entrepreneur, and Soiots and Buriats were not directly involved in its extraction. The history of graphite extraction, therefore, is simultaneously viewed as a symbol of Oka’s unique position and natural richness and as an indicator that local ownership of resources is impossible.

Gold as the Outside Threat During the Soviet period, Oka became the site of active geological explorations. The first geological expeditions by the state gold mining enterprise Soyuzzoloto in Oka took place in 1934 and 1938 (Akha, 16 February 2000). In 1955, one of the largest gold deposits in the district was discovered at Zun-Kholba (Volkov 2012). Geologists mostly lived separately from the locals, though the residents of Oka often worked for them as

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guides (Saianskaia nov’, 31 October 1987). For many younger Okans who had never left the district, their meetings with the geological brigades were the first times they had any contact with ‘outsiders’. My interviewee Nadia, a Soiot who grew up on a farm near Sorok, recalled how geologists started conducting explorations close to their settlement: In Oka, Russians were called “orodmangad”—in one word. They were called like this at the time of my childhood and even later, up until the 1970s. People would tell children to scare them: “Mangad will come and take you”. But I had very different understanding of Russians, because we had the expedition working in Debi where almost all were Russians. They were geologists. I was trying to communicate with them as I could, and so it was so strange for me when I came to Orlik to study in the fifth grade and saw other children running away from Russians and screaming “oh, mangad!” But it was so interesting with the geologists, I have learned so much from them. (Interview B14)

The Buriat word used in Oka in relation to Russians, orodmangad, literally means ‘Russian others’. The word Mangad is also related to an evil character from Buriat folklore, where Mangad-khais is the eternal rival invading the territory of the main protagonist. The geological brigades were similarly viewed as potentially dangerous ‘others’ who had the power to appropriate Oka’s resources. The Oka geological explorations often encountered transportation problems due to the absence of roads and the harsh climatic conditions (Saianskaia Nov’, 31 October 1987). In 1985–1986, construction began on a gravel road from Mondy, in the Tunkinskii district, to Orlik, the central settlement of Oka. The road construction work was supported by the gold mining enterprise Zabaikalzoloto. Construction of the road was completed in 1993 and became an important milestone in the district’s history. In Oka media narratives, the construction of the Mondy–Orlik road was viewed as a sign of progress. At the same time, the construction of the road also generated worries, as locals associated it with the possibility for the rapid development of resource extraction enterprises (Saianskaia Nov’, 24 September 1993). The locals were concerned that the new road would result in a boom in industrial development, and therefore, change the established lifestyle (Akha, 15 July 1994). At the time of my fieldwork, more than 20 deposits of gold, bauxite and phosphate were being developed in Oka. The largest gold deposits

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included the Zun-Kholba, Konevinskoe and Vladimirskoe deposits. The gold companies working in the region are one of the main sources of Oka’s income, as their taxes constitute more than 70% of the district’s budget (Inform Polis, 22 July 2015). Buriatzoloto is also involved in a number of social initiatives in Oka (e.g. they support youth projects in Orlik). This support is considered insufficient, though, and is sometimes referred to as podachki (R: pittances) in  local publications (Baldanov 2009). As most of the companies employ fly-in-fly-out workers, the residents of Oka are rarely employed for the gold extraction work. As a result, many local residents feel that their land is being exploited by outsiders while they are not able to take advantage of the natural resources (Baldanov 2009). The development of gold extraction efforts in Oka also causes people to worry about the environmental impact. When I was in the district in 2016, a new mining site owned by Huzhir Enterprise company was being constructed, and when I returned in 2021 it was already operating. During our trip to the village of Huzhir back in 2016, the driver Aleksandr pointed to the building newly constructed by Huzhir Enterprise and said to me, ‘Look! You see this? This is the cancerous tumor of our district!’ (Interview B28). Aleksandr was worried about the danger of environmental pollution caused by gold mining development, especially since the new factory was close to Sailak waterfall, a popular recreation place loved by many Okans (see Fig.  5.2). Indeed, in April 2019 the Rifei company, the owner of Huzhir Enterprise, was accused of polluting the Kholba River near the Huzhir settlement. Although gold mining is a prominent industry in Oka, the locals rarely engage with it directly. It is present in their everyday realities mostly in the form of stories, gossip or fear. Gold companies are often blamed for not paying enough taxes to the district or not investing in its well-being. With subsoil resources being viewed as an important element of the sacred Oka landscape, the development of gold extraction enterprises is viewed as a possible danger to the land as well as an offence towards the governing spirits of the mountains. The companies extracting gold, just like the Soviet-era geological brigades that had searched for it, are seen as outsiders and treated warily. The development of gold mining coincided with the construction of the new road connecting Oka with the rest of Buriatia. Therefore, gold extraction has meant a greater openness of Oka to outside influences. As a result, resource development has strengthened the

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Fig. 5.2  A view from the Sailak recreation area; Huzhir Enterprise is visible next to the mountains. (Photo: A. Varfolomeeva, 2021)

collective identity of Okans, who feel they need to protect their land against the dangers of extraction.

Jade as a Part of Sacred Landscape Jade was discovered in the Eastern Saian Mountain Region in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it did not receive much attention from the state: the stone was used to decorate buildings or for interior details. The search for jade began in the Soviet period, and several deposits were discovered in Buriatia before the Second World War (Inform Polis, 30 May 2018). In the 1980s, jade was discovered in Oka. Since the 1990s, several jade deposits in the district have been controlled by a company called Baikalkvartssamotsvety, based in Irkutsk. However, the jade is extracted unevenly, and there are periods when blocks of jade are just stored in the company warehouses and no mining is taking place. This situation offers opportunities for young male residents of Oka to engage in informal jade mining. In the early 2000s, the demand for jade increased in China, as it was used for Olympic medals. During that period, informal jade extraction became widespread in Oka. Nowadays, China is the main market for Buriat jade, as the Chinese consider it a sacred stone, and in certain historical periods it was even valued more highly than gold or silver (Safonova

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et  al. 2018). Sometimes, Okans engage in the actual extraction of the stone using simple instruments (Interview B4). However, in many cases they collect the pieces of jade left by private companies after extraction (Interview B8). The collected stone is transferred to Irkutsk and Ulan-­ Ude and sold to Chinese buyers. The clients’ contacts are shared between informal miners, and they call the buyers in advance after securing the stone (Interview B8). Local attitudes to the jade being extracted in Buriatia are complex. The locals often claim that they see no value in jade per se and do not understand why it is so highly valued in China (Interview B4). Some use it in saunas, as jade steam is considered pure (Interview B10), but otherwise I could not find any examples of practical uses for jade in the community. At the same time, many Okans keep small pieces of jade at home and are ready and proud to show them to guests (Interview B11, B30). These pieces are the ones they found or extracted when organising a jade trip but that were not valuable enough to be sold. The pieces are kept in homes in a similar fashion as hunting trophies or souvenirs, to demonstrate the owner’s courage and luck. Since the jade trips are often linked to risk-­ taking, keeping pieces of jade in the home signifies to others that the owner of the jade managed to overcome all the risks and challenges associated with obtaining it and did not return empty-handed. At the same time, jade trips are typically kept in secret, at times even from one’s relatives. As my interviewee Andrey reminisced about an unsuccessful attempt to find jade: It was minus 40 degrees outside. We decided to go search for jade with my friends for the first time. I did not tell at home that we went for the jade, I said we just went to the forest, so that mum and dad would not be worried. So we packed and left. The main road went about 200–300  kilometres towards Samarta. Then we left the road and went straight to the forest. There the road was a total disaster, and it was dangerous, you needed to drive professionally. We tried, but could not reach the spot, as there was too much snow. So the car was simply not moving uphill. (Interview B8)

The extraction of jade involves a complex set of negotiations with the sacred landscape. Although jade is viewed as a resource available for all residents of Oka, one needs to demonstrate respect towards landscape spirits to obtain the stone. When searching for jade, it is important to respect the stone and not to display an insatiable desire for it. ‘Jade does

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not like those who are greedy’, my interviewee Nimazhab, also a jade miner in the past, noted, indicating that the stone may bring bad luck to those who do not respect it and who take too much of it at once (Interview B7). It is considered appropriate to only obtain enough jade to secure one’s well-being, but people should not press their luck and search for more of it. The interviewees referred negatively to Okans who are overly greedy to find more jade. They stated that jade has strong energy and thus would exact revenge on those who do not recognise limits in regard to how much they extract (Interview B7, B25). Similar behaviour is expected when one is hunting; as Gasaran, who has hunted for years, noted: ‘You should not take too much game, as there are other hunters in the forest’, meaning carnivorous animals (Interview B47). Jade is treated by Okans like a subsistence resource, and the logic is similar to that applied to hunting and fishing: one should behave respectfully and avoid taking more than is needed. Even though the interviewees refer to their activities as ‘sort of stealing’ (Interview B8) or note that ‘they are illegal’ (Interview B27), they do not reportedly see it as a problematic issue, as they do not believe jade is ‘owned’ by the extractive business just because the company has a licence. They perceive it more as a part of nature, similar to animals, fish or plants, so it is logical to take some for your needs. As Erdeni expressed it, ‘You cannot steal something that belongs to you anyway’ (Interview B4). However, at the same time the miners reportedly realise that the authorities and mining company owners view their activities as a criminal act. In recent years, Baikalkvartssamotsvety’s jade warehouse, in the Okinskii district, has become the centre of several criminal incidents. In 2012, several local residents tried to steal pieces of jade from the warehouse and were wounded by the guards (Novaia Buriatia, 25 January 2012). In August 2015, a similar situation occurred; this time, though, a young resident of Orlik was killed during the attempt to steal jade from the warehouse (Inform Polis, 1 June 2017). After that, as my informants noted, the jade trips became rarer, but they never stopped, as many of the residents still view them as an additional source of income in unstable economic conditions. The illegal extraction of jade is quite popular particularly because many young residents of Oka are unemployed. Since the options for finding a job are very limited, especially in small settlements, most people rely on hunting, fishing, cattle breeding and the jade trade. Besides, the jade trade is ‘fast money’, and if one is lucky, in several days it is possible to earn

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enough to buy a car or make some other financial investment (Interview B8). One interviewee implied that he had purchased his car as the result of a successful trip to obtain jade. However, not all the trips result in new cars or houses: there is always the danger of being caught by the police, or one may simply be unlucky and return empty-handed (Interview B5). At the time of my field visit in 2016, possible changes in legislation regarding jade extraction were widely being discussed in Oka. In 2016, jade was still classified as an ornamental stone, so its illegal extraction only led to a small fine. As my interviewee Balta noted: We were constantly afraid of the police while being in the forest and looking for the stone. Well, we’re all illegal. Jade is an ornamental stone, so it is not so highly valued. It’s not a precious stone. And not semi-precious either, yes. Because otherwise everyone here would already have, I don’t know, a criminal case. (Interview B5)

However, in 2017 it was re-classified as a semi-precious stone, making the fines for its illegal extraction much higher. When I visited Oka in the summer of 2021, the topic of illegal extraction was even more silenced than before. Although there were hints that the locals still engaged in jade mining, the topic was generally avoided. A new widespread business had appeared in Oka in the meantime, as many residents had begun collecting sagaan dali (Rhododendron adamsii), a medical herb used to treat circulatory ailments (Metzo 2011). The hardening of state policies governing informal mining was already predicted by Okans back in 2016–2017: ‘Putin is just not interested in our jade yet’, they would say. The legislative changes further limited Okans’ ownership of local resources. However, the principal motivation for jade trips represented a temporary shift in power relations and was an attempt to question the dominant ownership narratives and to promote Okans’ sense of belonging and their symbolic right to govern the local subsoil resources.

Conclusion While officially the Soiots and Oka Buriats have been separated into indigenous and non-indigenous residents of the same territory, the divisions do not matter so strongly at the local level. The commonly used word ‘Okans’ unites Buriats and Soiots as dwellers in the Oka landscape. In local narratives, Okans are presented as a distinctive group with common features:

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strong and brave people who are not afraid of hardships, who are ready to help each other when needed, who place high value on extended families and who respect nature. The Okinskii district itself is viewed as a place ‘not for everybody’, as a beautiful land that is extremely difficult to live in, but one to which people have nevertheless become attached. This alternative indigenous identity is based on knowledge of the Oka landscape and everyday interactions with it. Through practicing rituals, negotiating with the spirits of place and attuning themselves to the changes in nature, Okans reinforce their belonging to the territory. The legacy of graphite extraction, as well as the gold and jade mining currently occurring in contemporary Oka, are viewed beyond their economic nature and produce multiple meanings as a part of human-­landscape ties. When discussing resource extraction or engaging with the stone directly, Okans simultaneously articulate their connections with place and a sense of belonging. Graphite narratives are used to stress the rich history of Oka as well as the early involvement of Soiots and Oka Buriats with mineral resources and their deep knowledge of the territory. At the same time, when compared to modern resource extraction, such narratives symbolise the Okans’ continuing lack of rights to local resources. While Soiot hunters found graphite and used to work for Alibert, the mine was nevertheless managed externally, and locals did not influence any decision-­ making regarding the resource. This pattern, as many locals believe, continues in the contemporary Oka, as its residents are alienated from gold and jade mining. The perceptions and representations of gold mining further illustrate Okans’ lack of resource rights. The development of gold mining is explicitly connected with outside influences, as it intensified after the Mondy-­ Orlik road was constructed and Oka became much easier to access. Gold mining is simultaneously present and absent in the community: the locals do not know much about the activities of mining companies but live in a permanent state of concern over its negative environmental influences. While strengthening the divide between Okans and outsiders, the shared concern over mining development further brings the community together. When engaging in informal jade mining, Soiots and Oka Buriats attempt to reclaim their symbolic property rights over the resource. They negotiate the extraction with the animated landscape, and therefore, jade trips are not perceived as stealing, even though they are viewed as illegal acts by the authorities. Whereas initially jade trips have not been regulated by the state, they became uprooted in the community as a part of

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human-landscape relations. Similarly to other natural resources, jade needs to be treated with respect, and overharvesting is reproved. The case study of Okans illustrates multiple visions of belonging that mining sites may produce within a single community. Additionally, this case brings attention to indigenous and local conceptions of identity and belonging that are often overshadowed by dominant narratives. In Oka, mining is not necessarily perceived as something alien to other human-­ landscape interactions; instead, it follows the established models of cooperation with non-human forces. However, the lack of local involvement in resource development becomes a shared concern and disappointment. As extractive efforts continue to develop and as local attempts to engage in mining become increasingly limited, many Okans feel that their belonging to the land is being repudiated by the dispersed power of state authorities. State agencies rather than spirit masters become the primary actors in resource negotiations. However, these sets of negotiations are based much less on mutual attunement compared to the reciprocal relations of morethan-human landscapes.

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Dorzhieva, Galina. 2014. “Pik Alibera (Frantsiia) i Doroga Alibera (Rossiia, Buriatiia) – Vremen Sviazuiushchaia Nit’.” Vestnik Irkutskogo Gosudarstvennogo Tekhnicheskogo Universiteta 7 (90): 190–194. Emery, Jay. 2018. “Belonging, Memory and History in the North Nottinghamshire Coalfield.” Journal of Historical Geography 59: 77–89. Ey, Melina, and Meg Sherval. 2016. “Exploring the Minescape: Engaging with the Complexity of the Extractive Sector.” Area 48 (2). Hall, Stuart. 1986. “On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart Hall (edited by Lawrence Grossberg).” Journal of communication inquiry 10 (2): 45–60. ———. 2018. Essential essays, Volume 1: Foundations of cultural studies. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Komu, Teresa. 2019. “Dreams of Treasures and Dreams of Wilderness–Engaging with the beyond-the-Rational in Extractive Industries in Northern Fennoscandia.” Polar Journal 9 (1). Li, Tania Murray. 2000. “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (1):149–179. Mee, Kathleen, and Sarah Wright. 2009. “Geographies of Belonging.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 41 (4). Metzo, Katherine. 2011. “Medical Pluralism and Expert Knowledge in Buriatiia.” In David Anderson (ed.), The Healing Landscapes of Central and Southeastern Siberia, 29–44. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Mnwana, Sonwabile. 2015. “Between ‘Locals’ and ‘Foreigners’: Mining and Rural Politics of Belonging in North West Province, South Africa.” Labour, Capital and Society / Travail, Capital et Société 48 (1 & 2): 156–181. Oehler, Alex. 2019. “Introduction: On Making Home Together.” In Alex Oehler and Anna Varfolomeeva (eds.), Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at the Russia-Mongolia Border, xi–xxiv. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Oehler, Alex C. 2020. Beyond Wild and Tame: Soiot Encounters in a Sentient Landscape. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pavlinskaia, Larisa. 1999. “Vostochnye Saiany i Etnicheskie Sud’by Korennykh Narodov.” In Larisa Pavlinskaia (ed.), Etnos, Landshaft, Kul’tura, 60–75. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dom. ———. 2002. Kochevniki Golubykh Gor. Sud’ba Traditsionnoi Kul’tury Narodov Vostochnykh Saian v Kontekste Vzaimodeistviia s Sovremennost’iu. St. Petersburg: Evropeisii Dom. Probyn, Elspeth. 1996. Outside Belongings. Oxon; New York: Routledge. Safonova, Tatiana, István Sántha, and Pavel Sulyandziga. 2018. “Searching for Trust: Indigenous People in the Jade Business.” In Caroline Humphrey (ed.), Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands, 205–28. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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CHAPTER 6

“Behind-the-curtain Work”: Animal Ingredients, Divine Collaboration, and Ritual Substitution in West African Healthcare Degenhart Brown

Introduction In Togo and the Republic of Benin, animal-derived medicines help local populations make sense of contemporary global shifts, neoliberal homogeneity, and novel health issues by facilitating relationships between humans, gods, spirits, and ancestors. Animal ingredients and the interbeing connections they enable are especially effective in treating new “spiritual illnesses” engendered by globalization. One of the most well-known animal-medicine providers in southern Togo and Benin is the Awinon society. The Awinon use animal ingredients to treat spiritual illnesses and materialize divine presence in a multiplicity of medicines, from powders, soaps, and ointments to more elaborate technologies such as amulets, talismans, bundles, and altars. Moreover, by focusing on their clients’ relationships with both human and non-human agents, and by providing

D. Brown (*) University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_6

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services and products that can help mediate these relationships, Awinon practitioners address illness in ways that more secular, allopathic institutions cannot.1 Despite the widespread use of animal ingredients in west African medicine, the healthcare structures that they support and the illnesses they treat are seldom addressed in the Africanist literature. The dearth of scholarship on west African animal-medicine acquires added significance when one considers that animal-medicine is both a product of fraught international pressures and a means for local communities to make sense of such pressures. From this vantage, west African animal-medicines and the ritual processes that accompany their uses emerge as entanglement manifest, resulting from local interpretations of the “disjunctive flows” (Appadurai 2001) of globalization. In addressing the paucity of scholarship on animal-­ medicine and medicine markets in Africanist research, this chapter explores what constitutes animal-derived medicines in southern Togo and Benin, who uses these medicines, what illnesses these medicines are used to treat, and, most important, how these medicines emerge from human and other-­ than-­human relations. The first section of this chapter introduces the Awinon, one of the most successful animal-parts merchants in west Africa, and highlights the importance of their markets to local healthcare contexts. The second section explores the uses of animal ingredients in Awinon curative practice and frames Awinon epistemologies and animal-based healing services as adaptive responses to modern spiritual illnesses. The third section engages the symbiotic relationship between “spiritual illness” and globalization in Togo and Benin and provides examples of animal-parts substitutes and ritual adaptation as manifestations of human/other-than human relationality. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to interrogate healthcare as a means of contesting dispossession and to illustrate how globally marginalized communities navigate the lived experience of instability through resourceful and recombinant healing strategies.

1  Allopathic medicine (also referred to as modern medicine, Western medicine, or biomedicine) is a branch of medical science that applies clinical biological and physiological principles to healing practice.

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The Awinon Community, Their Markets, and Their Clients The Awinon are Fon merchant-healers who operate a vast network of animal-­parts markets across west Africa.2 The Awinon society comprises thousands of members operating in countries spanning Benin, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Togo (Sourou pers. comm. 2018). Only Fon people from the Zou Department of Benin can become Awinon members, and every member must be an adept of the religion of Vodun. The largest and most illustrious Awinon market, known colloquially as the Lomé “Fetish Market,” is a spacious open-air apothecary located in Lomé, Togo, which sells plants, animals, and minerals used in “traditional” medicine and ritual practice (N’kere 2016: 121). Each year, this market is frequented by thousands of customers from across west Africa as well as tourists from Europe and the United States. In Fongbe, the primary language of the Awinon, the term housodji refers to animal-­medicine markets (“animal-bone place”) and housato (“animal-bone merchant”), designates the men and women who work in these locales.3 Since their central market is located in southern Togo, however, Awinon merchants refer to it as Lantassapé, which from Ewe translates to “place where animal heads are procured.”4 The Awinon association is made up primarily of men, since only men are thought to be naturally endowed with the propensities for trading in animal parts and preparing animal-medicines (Sourou pers. comm. 2018). Pre-menopausal women are not permitted to become Awinon initiates because menstruation is said to diminish the power of the animal products sold by the Awinon association. However, many women choose to join the association after menopause and a considerable number have become successful and respected matriarchs in the Awinon community. Awinon healers are “born into the practice” and gravitate to full membership through rigorous apprenticeships and ritual initiations. Nepotism remains central to the structure and regulation of the Awinon community 2  The Fon are the largest ethnic group of the Republic of Benin, and they reside primarily in the country’s southern departments. 3  Fongbe is the language of the Fon people; it belongs to the Gbe group and comprises just over two-million speakers internationally. 4  Ewe is part of the Gbe language group and is spoken primarily in Togo and south-eastern Ghana by approximately eight million people.

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and preserves the authoritative secrecy that shrouds Awinon mystical expertise. Awinon neophytes are chosen at an early age through Fâ divination, which members use to determine whether potential apprentices possess the don (or mystical proclivity) necessary to become a successful Awinon merchant-healer. Apprenticeships last ten years, after which time the neophyte becomes a recognized Awinon member and either inherits a family member’s market stall or moves to a neighbouring country to start his own animal-trade business. Today, although kinship and marital ties remain important in guaranteeing trust and loyalty from Awinon members, with the exponential growth of housodji markets across much of west Africa, elaborate initiations, and the issuing of accrediting diplomas, have largely replaced the need for direct kin relations. Since Fâ divination is central to diagnosis and healing in Vodun, most Awinon adepts are initiated as Bokonôn (Fâ priests or diviners) as part of their introduction into the Awinon society. Awinon adepts learn to recognize and interact with gods (voduns), spirits (yê), and ancestors (togbo) during Fâ initiation. In Fongbe, the term yê is used to denote spiritual entities generally, including benevolent spirits (yê-dagbe), malevolent spirits (yê-gnagnan), and ancestors (togbo). Yê are autonomous spirits that operate between the physical realm of humans and the ethereal realm of the voduns. Yê can help or harm humans, either by their own volition or through “contractual” agreements with human agents. Togbo are the spirits of once powerful Vodunon (Vodun priests) who, after death, passed into the realm of the voduns, but continue to interact with the living through ritual practice. Vodunsi (Vodun adepts) require the intermediary capacities of the Togbo to interact with voduns (deities) and, as a result, consider the Togbo to be semi-divine. Dana Rush has compellingly demonstrated that west African Vodun is “fundamentally opposed to a complete definition,” and that it is in this “incompleteness” that Vodun’s power lies (Rush 1997: 5). Indeed, Vodun is sheer infinite regress and any attempt to define it concisely is akin to defining lived experience itself. Given the ever-expanding nature of Vodun, the following thoroughly truncated working definition will have to suffice. Vodun is a decentralized, multifaceted, and uniquely absorptive religious system indigenous to Benin; populated by a vast pantheon of gods, spirits, and ancestors; and practised primarily  across the diverse “spiritscapes” (Roberts and Roberts 2016) of the Bight of Benin and the Afro-Atlantic world. Although the term Vodun is a seemingly insatiable homonym— often used to refer to shrines, ceremonies, objects, the sea, death, and flat

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tyres (Rush 1997: 6)—translated from Fongbe it means “world apart” (Vo = separate, and dun = world) or “spirit world” (Christophe pers. comm. 2021). In accordance with local usage, I will be using the term Vodun throughout this chapter to reference the “open-ended” vortex (Rush 2010) that is the Vodun religion in Togo and Benin, and voduns to reference the deities that operate in this vortex. Housodji Markets Lantassapé is located on the outskirts of Akodésséwa, a sprawling, cacophonous marketplace encircling Lomé’s central port. The Awinon designed Lantassapé as a walled, open-air compound measuring approximately 1600 square metres and comprising 45 stalls. The fact that Lantassapé is a stand-alone market is a sign of prestige since all other housodji are incorporated into larger markets. Lantassapé’s stalls are composed of three inter-connected segments and are operated by a single vendor and two apprentices. The first section of the stall, known as the étalage (or frontal display, Fig.  6.1), consists of a cornucopian assemblage of animal parts designed to advertise the vendor’s best ingredients and attract potential customers. The second section, referred to as the pharmacopée (or apothecary), consists of a large wooden table cluttered with recycled bottles, jars, and cans containing ointments and other pre-made substances (Fig.  6.2). The third section, named the couvant (or altar-room), is a bifurcated alcove constructed from corrugated iron panels and sapling trunks that houses the vendor’s shrine and surplus products. The couvants are divided into a “public” section and “private” section, separated by a curtain or a corrugated iron door. The public section opens onto the market and is commonly used as a waiting area to receive clients placing large or complex orders, while the private section is used for confidential consultations and for the creation, activation, and storage of powerful products.5 The couvants are the locus and reservoir of the Awinon vendor’s power and, as such, are the most important spaces in housodji markets. Moreover, as centres of on-site healing and consultation, the couvants embody the Awinon motto “la théorie et la pratique” (“theory and practice”). La 5  Remarking on the “suspicious” privacy of Lantassapé’s couvants, a University of Lomé professor with whom I spoke in 2018, referred to the activities that take place at housodji markets generally as “behind-the-curtain work” (N’kere pers. comm. 2018).

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Fig. 6.1  Awinon étalage display. Lantassapé market. Lomé, Togo. (Photo: D. Brown, October 2021)

théorie refers to the Awinon’s vast knowledge of plant and animal healing properties; while la pratique refers to the association’s mastery of divination (Fâ), plant medicines (amassin), and power objects (Bǒ). The couvant is a unique feature of Awinon markets, since west African “traditional” medicine merchants do not tend to offer their clients on-site healing services (Nevadomsky 1988; Edwards 2012). Most Lantassapé customers are healers who come to the market from Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso, in search of products for their own practice. However, many west African Lantassapé visitors whom I interviewed were neither healers, Vodunsi, nor regular customers. While conducting fieldwork at Lantassapé in 2018, most

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Fig. 6.2  Awinon pharmacopée display. Lantassapé market. Lomé, Togo. (Photo: D. Brown, October 2021)

clients with whom I spoke had come to the market in pursuit of some product or service that would help them redress a serious and complicated issue, be it a spiritual illness, a spate of unanswered prayers, a series of sporting or political loses, the heartbreak of an ended relationship, or the inability to conceive children. Importantly, these clients had come to the market, often in secret, because they felt they had exhausted all other religious or medical options. On my first day at Lantassapé in July 2018, Ourafa, an elderly Togolais man who was a both a Muslim and a Mamisi (Mami Wata adept) explained to me that “this market is a last resort for most people; we come here when all other measures have failed” (Ourafa pers. comm. 2018). In another encounter, Jean, a successful evangelist preacher who I met at Lantassapé in 2018, explained to me that the unrealistically non-negotiable aetiologies of “modern medicine” had pushed him towards Awinon markets, plant healing, and incantation, despite publicly condemning these approaches in his sermons. If nothing else, the irreconcilable tensions evident in Ourafa and Jean’s accounts attest to the complexities and risks underpinning healthcare navigation in west Africa.

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Many clients, Ourafa and Jean included, frequent Lantassapé in secret due to the ambivalent reputation that housodji markets have in the Beninois and Togolais public imagination. The “aesthetics of secrecy” (Nooter 1993: 56) so visibly on display at Lantassapé, combined with the sights and smells of its merchandize, stoke a public perception of the Awinon as being morally ambiguous and inherently different from more “conventional” Vodun phytotherapie (plant-healing) organizations (Constant pers. comm. 2018). Simultaneously, the great diversity of housodji-market clientele and their wide-ranging needs contribute substantially to the ambiguous and contentious status of housodji markets in Togolais and Beninois public discourse (N’kere 2016; Sokemawu 2012). It should be noted, however, that the social ambivalence towards housiza work (or the sale of animal parts) is most heavily informed by the increased Westernization and evangelization of west Africa (Meyer and Sounaye 2017), which systematically paint animal-parts medicine as the last vestiges of a superstitious and pre-rational era, soon to be eradicated by twenty-first-century “modernity” and “development” (N’kere pers. comm. 2018). Despite the pressures of evangelism and foreign investment, the Awinon are incredibly skilled at adapting to their ambivalent reputation as evinced by the continued spread of Awinon-operated housodji markets across west Africa (Constant pers. comm. 2021). The name Awinon itself presents a useful example of the association’s pragmatism in the face of shifting societal norms. In Fongbe, Awinon translates literally to “the mother cat,” a moniker which evokes feline resourcefulness, flexibility, and a tendency towards improvisation. According to Christophe, an affable young man who inherited his father’s stand at Lantassapé in 2021, the name Awinon “references the fact that when a member [of the community] leaves their house, they always find something to eat and something for their children to eat” (pers. comm. 2021). In other words, like a cunning feline fending for herself and her offspring, Awinon merchants always find a way to adapt to the ebb and flow of environmental change. Appropriately, the patron vodun of the Awinon is Gou, lord of iron, war, justice, and metal-based technologies. The association between the Awinon and Gou hinges on the community’s use of metal tools (knives, saws, pestles, hammers, etc.) and their association with hunters who, by using guns, machetes, cages, and metal traps, also solicit guidance from Gou. Taking these connections one step further, one could argue that Awinon ingenuity finds legibility in the fact that Gou is the master of inventiveness and creativity. As per Robert Farris Thompson, Gou (Ogún

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in Yoruba) is the lord of not only the metal blade but also resourcefulness and innovation, hence the brilliance of Thompson’s Gou epithet, “Lord of the cutting edge” (Thompson 1984: 53). Manifesting the inventiveness, resourcefulness, and technological wizardry of their patron god, the Awinon have successfully spread their “endogenous pharmacies” across large swathes of west Africa while devising new medicines to treat ever-­ more complex spiritual illnesses engendered by globalization.

Animal Ingredients and Their Uses in Awinon Medicine Much has been written on the sacred arts and material cultures of west African Vodun (see, e.g., De Surgy 1993; Blier 1995; Rush 2010; Bay 2008; Kerchache 2011; Noret 2011; Adandé 2014; Matory 2018; and Ogunnaike 2020). Often neglected, however, are the vitalities of the individual ingredients used in the creation and activation of Vodun’s celebrated sacred arts. In Awinon trade contexts, animal parts, plant concoctions, and pulverized stones are other-than-human beings with their own power and mystical attributes. Indeed, these spirited commodities are often described as “batteries” by Awinon healers and are invaluable to the creation and “activation” of agentive medicinal technologies (Sourou pers. comm. 2018). Following Tim Ingold’s call for an increased focus on the generative capacities of materials rather than the finality of materiality (Ingold 2007a: 11), this section examines the imperative function of animal ingredients in Awinon medicine and the “Doctrine of Signatures” that gives these ingredients legibility within Vodun epistemologies. Although the Doctrine of Signatures (DOS) phenomenon appears in a wide variety of historical and pharmacological contexts across the academic literature, the aegis that unites practically all manifestations of the DOS is similia similibus curantur (“like cures like”) (Bennett 2008: 39). In accordance with this concept, the DOS can best be described as a system of mimetic associations that takes the resemblance of certain plants to human body parts or ailments as an indication of their efficacy in treating those body parts or ailments. The resemblance of a plant to a human body part or ailment is what is referred to as its “signature.” Following this logic, the eye-like flowers of the Euphrasia plant were used in early European pharmacology to treat ocular infections, while the red-tipped leaves of Columnea tessmannii Mansf found use in the treatment of

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menstrual issues and snakebite (Bennett 2008: 38). Unlike the DOS of early modern Europe, however, the signatures of plants and animals in Awinon practice do not reference a human body part or ailment as a means of guiding treatment. Instead, the Awinon DOS acts as a reference to the quality, potency, and amount of mystical power (or aché in Fongbe), in a given mineral, animal, or plant (Blier 1995: 208). Aché is imbued in all things by Mahou-Segbolissa, the omnipresent creator of the universe and chief deity of the Vodun pantheon. Aché, however, does not manifest equally in all natural phenomena. Regarding animal aché, the Awinon understand lions, panthers, hyenas, hippos, and crocodiles to possess more potent aché than other animals due to their size and predatory behaviour. Similarly, animals that are known to strike unexpectedly (eagles, vipers, eels); protect themselves from attack (turtles, water buffalo, pufferfish); blend in with their surroundings (chameleons, boas, parrots); or evade taxonomic identification altogether (owls, hyenas, pangolins) are praised for their own types of aché and for the powerful medicine that can be made from their bodies. In Vodun, the “signature” of an animal, plant, or mineral is produced by the complex interplay of its appearance, behaviour, and “aura,” which Awinon healers learn to recognize through apprenticeship and initiation. Once the Awinon neophyte has gained a working understanding of different aché and their applications, his mentor will teach him how to combine the aché of different ingredients to treat spiritual illnesses and obtain the favour of divinities. Awinon healers learn to distinguish the diverse types of plant and animal aché through quotidian and dialogic interactions with divinities, spirits, and ancestors and by observing the behaviour of plants, animals, and minerals in the “sacred forests” of Togo and Benin. The pursuit of proficiency in aché detection and manipulation is a life-long endeavour, making even the most senior Awinon healer a perpetual apprentice of the gods and spirits. Awinon merchants accentuate the signatures of animal products through a proprietary taxidermic practice, saturating housodji markets with the “agitated” power of Vodun in the process (Christophe pers. comm. 2021). Housodji-market étalages are infamous across west Africa, making ingredient preservation and display important skills imparted to Awinon apprentices. Consequently, taxidermy is also a lucrative form of publicity, which, by allowing the Awinon to populate their markets with dramatic displays of animals frozen in action, has made these locales internationally famous. The Awinon use taxidermy to transform the face of an

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animal into a “mask” that metonymically accentuates its aché. Dog heads, for example, are commonly used to charge the shrines of the vodun Legba, because like the dog, Legba can be a messenger, a trickster, and a fierce protector. Apprentices will mould dog heads to project the wild and aggressive aché of Legba by opening the dog’s mouth, distending its tongue, and furling its nose and lips before setting it to dry. Taxidermic modifications are applied to most animals at housodji markets, turning these locales into “zoological museums” (N’kere 2016: 127). Indeed, one will often see apprentices at work behind their mentor’s stall distending the mouths of vipers into grotesque displays of teeth, or making monkeys snarl and hiss in perpetuity, fangs exposed and eyes bulging. The “condensed stories” (Ingold 2007a: 14) that inhere in animal parts as aché contribute to both the value of animal ingredients, and so to, the purposes to which animal ingredients are put. In line with this understanding, Ingold affirms that bringing things to life “is a matter not of adding to them a sprinkling of agency but of restoring them to the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist” (Ibid.: 12). Appropriately, the animal-derived medicines and power objects the Awinon make are natural extensions of human and other-thanhuman relationality, and as such, they are critical to maintaining the generative “fluxes” connecting humans to spiritual worlds. Awinon displays, then, are not populated with dead animals, but with examples of “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010: 13), sought after by marketgoers to charge medicines, protect homes, enliven shrines, or entice voduns into contractual relationships. With these underpinnings in mind, it becomes clear that animal ingredients are just as important to maintaining relations between Awinon healers and other-than-human beings as these same relations are to maintaining animal-medicine practice in a rapidly changing west Africa. Indeed, animal products are so vital to human/numinous interaction in west African indigenous life that they are found in almost all instances of interbeing communication and related communication technologies, from ritual sacrifice and divination to the adornment of power objects, altars, and ceremonial paraphernalia (Roberts 1995: 37). Housodji markets predominantly trade in animals said to have aggressive or combative aché, since most clients visiting these locales seek products for medicines that will undo, deflect, or neutralize a malignant force or spiritual ill. Elaborating on this theme, an Awinon merchant working at Lantassapé who I spoke to in 2019, claimed that Vodun adepts consider many of their deities to possess “predatory” characteristics that can be

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elicited through ritually activated animal ingredients in moments of dire need (Marie pers. comm. 2021). Evidently, the signatures of the crocodiles, eels, hippos, eagles, scorpions, puffer fish, boars, vipers, mandrills, and honey badgers on display at housodji markets all embody these necessary, if pugnacious stereotypes. The complex relationship between animal stereotypes and animal signatures is further illustrated in the popularity of owl (Koelé) and chameleon (Lissa) products sold at housodji markets. Since owls are the most common vehicles used by sorcerers (àze ̌to) to consume the souls (sɛ́) of their victims, these birds are usually used by adepts of Kenessi Vodun, Àze ̌ Vodun, and Gambada Vodun (three popular “sorcery destroying” societies) to make witchcraft repelling or witchcraft neutralizing power objects. Owls are also depicted frequently in murals on Awinon compounds dying violent deaths at the hands of Gou or Xebiosso in their azebligbǒ (“witch-­ killing/hunting”) iterations. Chameleons, on the other hand, are said to embody all the most noble and celestial attributes of Mahou-Segbolissa, the divine creator of Vodun after whom the reptile is named. These attributes include wisdom, patience, tranquillity, adaptability, and resourcefulness, and are usually sought-after primarily by merchants and business owners facing financial difficulties. During a conversation at Lantassapé in 2021, Christophe explained to me that sorcerers usually prey on their victims through the bodies of owls because they are nocturnal creatures and “sorcerers prefer to work in darkness” (la sorcellerie est d’un esprit qui aime le noir). Elaborating on this inter-species relationship, Christophe explained that both owls and sorcerers are proficient in the dark because “when it is night-time in the human world, it is day-time in the world of sorcerers and of owls” (pers. comm. 2021). Indeed, like owls, sorcerers work at night because they can manoeuvre with ease under the cover of darkness and because their sleeping victims are more vulnerable during this time. Beyond the ontological and metaphysical linkages that blend the world of owls with that of sorcerers, there exists a parallel, semantic connection that is worth exploring. Namely, how  the unusual signatures of owls make them ideal vehicles through which to understand the unnerving mysteries of sorcery. In Vodun, the owl is an inauspicious omen of sorcery because it is inherently ambivalent. Not only are owls difficult to observe directly, but by not sharing the behavioural characteristics of other birds, they evade natural classification and excoriate the logics of nature. For the most part, owls are

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only seen and heard at night; they are birds of prey that hunt in the dark; they have large, forward-facing, yellow eyes that can blink independently; they are able to turn their heads up to 270 degrees in each direction; and their large, pellet-like faeces (often containing complete mouse skeletons) resemble bundles associated with witchcraft (Sourou pers. comm. 2018). In her famous treatise on Biblical animal taboos decreed in the Book of Leviticus, Mary Douglas argues that “those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world” (2001: 69). Douglas’ focus on conformity is especially helpful in understanding the ambivalence of owls in Vodun, for the owl “confounds the general scheme of the world” due to its “imperfection” vis-à-vis other birds. This negation of established doxa, in turn, lends itself well to ambiguity and speculation. Like the hyena, and other “imperfect members” of animal classes (Roberts 1995: 75), the owl is inherently “apart.” A liminal thorn in the side of animal taxonomy, the owl is both “good to think” (Levi-Strauss 1964) and good to revile. Owl ingredients are most widely used in the creation and activation of medicines designed to prevent or neutralize sorcery. In an interesting parallel with  occidental toxicology, and the customary practice of using venom in the manufacture of anti-venom, the Awinon Doctrine of Signatures recognizes that the aché of the owl itself can be used successfully to combat àze ̌ (sorcery). The specifics of why owl aché is a useful counter to sorcery, or which body parts precisely should be used to treat witchcraft attack, cannot be divulged here. Notwithstanding, since the practice of using owl aché in the treatment of àze ̌ attack is continuously taught to healers by the gods through Fâ divination, dreams, and possession, this practice is both a product of human/other-than-human relationality and a means of maintaining such relationality. Although one is unlikely to find “docile” animals such as cows, sheep, doves, pigs, chickens, turkeys, or rabbits, for sale at housodji markets, Awinon merchants do sell animals that do not necessarily fall under the penumbra of “ferocity.” Among these are chameleons, grey parrots, starfish, and turtles, which due to their perceived abilities to prevent, resist, or evade attack, are bought to make mystical prophylaxes and fortuitous power objects. Chameleons are especially popular products because they are emblematic of divine presence and of Danxomèan royal authority (Adandé 2016). Chameleons move slowly and with great precision, denoting patience and beatific serenity; they can literally “grasp” (through their unusually bifurcated paws) almost any surface, evincing a “supernatural”

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ability to “understand” the world around them; and their eyes can move independently of each other, evincing an ability to look forward and backward in space and time (Akossou pers. comm. 2018). Most importantly, chameleons can adapt to any environment and avoid danger by changing the pigmentation of their skin, a characteristic that makes them particularly powerful beings. A popular Fon saying (“Segbolissa nonô avô dokpo mea,” “the chameleon does not stay in the same cloth”) illustrates both the chameleon’s camouflaging abilities and the animal’s refusal to “stand still” in the face of adversity (Sourou pers. comm. 2018). The chameleon’s ability to physically change its vestmental “cloth” as a means of adapting to its surroundings is widely admired in southern Togo and Benin as evinced by the perennial popularity of the various chameleon-based products sold at housodji markets. The desire to change oneself in responses to a spate of financial difficulties is especially evident in the buying patterns of west African petit-­ commerce merchants who come to Lantassapé from Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria in search of chameleon-based products. Through the consumption of chameleon atin wiwi (a black-powder medicine, which can be eaten, bathed with, worn, kept in the house, or inserted subcutaneously depending on the desired effect), merchants operating in west Africa’s globalized informal sector seek to emulate the chameleon’s prowess in adapting to an increasingly unpredictable financial environment. Importantly, the chameleon’s indexicality to divine power illustrates the metaphysical qualities inherent to chameleon-based products, while the sale and use of chameleon-medicine evinces ritual connections between Awinon merchants, their countless clients across west Africa, and other-­ than-­human agents.

Globalization, Spiritual Illness, and Mimetic Hybrids While globalization facilitates infrastructural works, job growth, education, biomedical ubiquity, and opportunities for financial security in west Africa, it also spurs wealth disparity, introduces novel diseases, masks governmental corruption, exacerbates environmental degradation, and abrades social norms and traditions (Adjotin pers. comm. 2019). Moreover, as Arjun Appadurai and others have thoroughly illustrated, globalization is inextricably linked to earlier logics of empire, trade, and political dominion in many parts of the world (Appadurai 2001; Mignolo 2011). In Benin, despite its visibility in foreign investment and public sector

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“development,” globalization is a constantly negotiated phenomenon, which remains closely linked to àze ̌ (witchcraft), tchakatou (“sent” sickness), and maladies spirituels (spiritual illnesses). The link between globalization and spiritual illness in Benin is cemented in the fact that the socio-economic boons of globalization are as conspicuous as they are unevenly distributed (Adjotin 2017: 7). In Benin, globalization, neoliberal individualism, and capital accumulation exacerbate spiritual illnesses by degrading indigenous interbeing relations and by amplifying community-destroying jealousies (Landry 2015: 178).6 Illustrating the issue at hand, Appadurai views globalization as a “cover term” for a world of “disjunctive flows,” which produce social problems that “manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are anything but local” (Appadurai 2001: 5–6). Appadurai terms the uneven layering of globalization as it embeds itself in local contexts “relations of disjunctures” (Ibid.: 5). For Appadurai, such disjunctures are found in contemporary phenomena such as the “media flows across national boundaries that produce images of well-being that cannot be satisfied by national standards of living and consumer capabilities” (Ibid.: 5). Both Appadurai (2001) and Tsing (2005) have speculated that the “frictions” caused by the disjunctures characterizing our contemporary world-­ in-­motion precipitate “acute problems of social well-being” in different local situations (Appadurai 2001: 5). In Benin, the capital-driven “frictions” of globalization produce jealousies and communal strife, which frequently culminate in spiritual illness (Adjotin 2017: 15). Often undetectable through scientific analysis, spiritual illnesses cause fatigue, loss of appetite, sexual impotence, sterility, and even death. In addition, the sufferer may feel a “strange sensation inside the body,” which was once described to me as a sharp pain caused by a “foreign object” (Vincent pers. comm. 2021). A.G., a colleague and mentor who in 2009 suffered a serious tchakatou (“sent sickness”) attack from a jealous in-law, described his condition to me in vivid detail at his home in Abomey in 2019. During our conversation, A.G. claimed that for the past decade he had been chronically fatigued and plagued by the 6  Hugh Mackay describes cultural imperialism as the power-laden flow of cultural goods from the Global North to the rest of the world, and the inculcation of Western values in those recipient nations. Importantly, this process prepares the ground for the import of other Western goods creating a further dependence on Western commodities and absorbance of Western values (2004: 45).

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“maddening” sensation of a “hammer circulating in [his] body, incessantly hitting [his] nerves, muscles, and bones.” A.G. also described feeling a “thick smoke surrounding [his] heart,” which paralysed him at night and filled him with dread. A.G. only began to recover once the Daa ̌ (patriarch) of an Adja Vodun sect in Abomey removed the tchakatou from his body by ritually replacing his “contaminated” heart, stomach, groin, and liver with those of a ram. The link between witchcraft and jealousy is well documented in the Africanist literature (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Geschiere 1997; Falen 2018). Less prevalent, however, are the ways in which the “muscular objectivism” (Appadurai 2001: 5) of Western science produces spiritual illnesses and contributes to the popularity of animal-parts medicine. Despite its success in treating disease, reducing infant mortality, and prolonging life-expectancy across the African continent, Western medical science is based on a secular, positivist, and materialist understanding of the natural world, which a priori denies the existence of non-Euclidian realities and negates the importance of interbeing relationality. During one of our discussions on the tendency of biomedicine to systemically invalidate non-Cartesian modes of existence, scholar Pierre Adjotin proclaimed that “The West has taken its reality for the reality of the world and created a scientific dictatorship in Africa” (pers. comm. 2019). The denial of indigenous lifeworlds sustained by biomedical determinism not only prevents clinicians from acknowledging the transcendental attributes of their patient’s sensoriums and the very real dangers of “immaterial” spiritual illnesses (Geurts 2002: 7); it creates ontological and existential disruptions, which themselves manifest as malaise. The increased secularization of healthcare in Benin, and its systematical relegation of interbeing relationality to the realm of the folkloric and metaphorical, degrades human/ancestral relations and increases the prevalence of spiritual illness. According to almost every healer with whom I have spoken in Togo and Benin, “severed” or “degraded” relationships between humans and ancestors are a leading cause of spiritual illness. Accordingly—as explained to me in 2019 by an elder Bokonôn in a village outside of Ouidah, Benin—one of the main pillars of Vodun practice is maintaining good relations with ancestors through standardized acts of devotional sacrifice (sa vo) and prayer (dé). Yet, biomedicine’s materialist worldview and medical efficacy have in many instances replaced more elaborate, ritualized interactions between humans and ancestors. These ritualized interactions are not only a necessary part of healing, but of

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preventing spiritual illness from occurring in the first place. Ultimately, biomedicine may have impressive quantitative results in west Africa regarding the treatment of physical health issues, but it also causes bifurcations between patients and ancestors, which heighten the occurrence of underreported spiritual illnesses. In addition to its empirically narrow interpretation of reality, the allopathic institution remains the target of public suspicion across the African continent due to its colonial history and post-colonial applications (Vaughan 1991; White 2000; Adjotin 2011). As an example, Beninois citizens have received both the COVID-19 pandemic and the biomedical approaches adopted to curtail it with equal mistrust and trepidation, opening the door for “traditional” medicine markets and local medicine unions to provide ontologically viable “alternative” care (Avade pers. comm. 2021). During fieldwork conducted in 2021, Beninois interlocutors often associated the pandemic and state-sponsored vaccination drives with the overreach of globalization and its tendency to create and spread new diseases (Akossou pers. comm. 2021). Even with the appearance of the Omicron COVID-19 variant in November 2021, and its subsequent spread across the globe, the topic of vaccination was more often a point of concern in Benin than the virus itself. Most people with whom I spoke in bakeries, bars, restaurants, and taxi stands reported knowing someone who had died or become “permanently paralyzed” shortly after receiving the vaccine, while very few had heard of anyone dying, or even becoming ill, from COVID-19. Based on these conversations, and countless others like them, I began to understand that “traditional” medicine had gained newfound popularity across the African continent in the era of COVID-19 because both the pandemic and the biomedical approaches adopted to curtail it represented a new link in the chain of fraught relationships between Africa and the rest of the world. Conversely, “traditional” medicine, in the chaotic environment of the COVID-19 pandemic, had evidently become a beacon of recognizable treatment, local identity, and cultural revitalization. In contrast to biomedical approaches, which tend to isolate illnesses to specific regions of the body and follow strict causal logics when determining disease aetiology, Awinon healers work within the unbounded mutability of their patient’s sensorium by prioritizing the effects that their patient’s intra-spiritual relationships have on their health. In treating l’homme entier (the “person in their entirety”), the Awinon evoke and navigate their patients’ “distributed personhood” (Gell 1998) as it

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manifests in their relationships, desires, fears, and malaises. This holistic approach eschews the Cartesian dogmatism of mind/body dualism espoused by biomedical practitioners, positing instead that people are perpetually caught in rhizomatic relationships with ancestors, divinities, spirits, objects, and other humans that orient their experiences of reality and affect their well-being. Lantassapé clients interviewed in 2018 and 2019 repeatedly emphasized the importance of this approach, elaborating that a person cannot maintain good health without medicines that influence their “extra-corporeal” relations to the environment and the other-than-­ human persons who populate it (Ourafa pers. comm. 2018). When asked to elaborate, these same interlocutors reported that “traditional” care paradigms usually healed the patient by bringing them “back into balance” with the spirit world, or conversely, by destroying the malevolent forces afflicting them (pers. comm. 2018). Central to the open-ended care environment in which the Awinon operate is the understanding that the human body is far more fluid and porous than it is in the Western sciences. Consequently, disease aetiologies are also more ephemeral, elastic, and subjective in Awinon healing than in biomedicine. In cases where suspicious or abnormal conditions present themselves in illness scenarios, and clinical approaches can do little to alleviate the patient, Awinon healers will consult the Fâ oracle to determine the cause of the ailment and best treatment approach. Once the affliction and appropriate avenue of treatment have been revealed through Fâ, a process that may require multiple divination sessions, the Awinon healer will return to the Fâ oracle alone to create and activate the medicinal technologies necessary “to bring the patient back to health” (Sourou pers. comm. 2018). As a medium of interbeing communication, Fâ divination takes the responsibility of aetiological certainty and treatment efficacy out of the hands of either the patient or the healer and places it instead in the omniscient, yet adumbral, realm of the divine. Fâ divination, therefore, acts as a form of preliminary healing in its own right and holds important philosophical implications concerning meaning, comfort, and familiarity in “traditional” consultation contexts. Specifically, the opportunity to “return to the source” through Fâ divination has powerful implications for dispelling uncertainty and fatalism on the part of the patient (Christophe pers. comm. 2021). Awinon aetiology does not take biomedical prognosis or treatment for granted, however. Instead, diseases can have any number of causes and remedies, allowing patients to devise complementary healing approaches

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from a vast spectrum of disparate treatments (Sargent and Kennell 2017). In most scenarios, the patient and her family will collaborate with divine interlocutors through a healer to discover not simply what the patient is suffering from, but why she has become ill in the first place. This pursuit of aetiological meaning may seem protracted and overly complex, yet it remains a fundamental part of the healing process in much of west Africa (Sargent and Kennell 2017). Vitally, such a “quest for therapy” affirms patient/ancestor relationality in often traumatic contexts when control, agency, and certainty are fleeting (Janzen 1978). Working within the “skein of relationships” linking humans and other-­ than-­human beings, Awinon healers are able to treat spiritual illnesses in ways that lie beyond the scope of allopathic medicine. Indeed, by combining divination practice and animal aché in their healing approach, the Awinon operate within ontological “meshworks” (Ingold 2007b: 3) that remain more familiar and effective to their clients than the constrained one-dimensionality of Western science. Tim Ingold uses the term meshwork, and the fine entanglements that the term evokes, to argue that human/environmental relations are not connections between pre-located entities so much as paths “traced through the terrain of lived experience” (Ibid.: 89). Like Ingold’s “inhabitant,” the Awinon healer is one “who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being and who, in laying a trail of life, contributes to its weave and texture” (Ibid.: 81). As intermediaries operating in the meshworks of human/numinous relationality, Awinon healers lay a trail of life through their animal-derived medicines. Awinon medicines, in turn, are remarkably effective in treating the spiritual ills wrought by globalization because they too are a product of this milieu, of the world’s continual coming into being. In other words, animal-derived healing technologies remain relevant to west African healthcare because they unfold in real time with health crises, reacting to and transforming in step with these crises. Mimetic Hybrids In rare instances when a housodji market has run out of a specific animal product, the vendor and client will discuss what the product is needed for to determine what animals can be used instead. Through such a “logic of substitutes” (Roberts 1980), replacements are usually chosen from the same taxonomical rank as the unavailable animal. Accordingly, a Puff adder (Bitis arietans) might be used as a substitute for a Gaboon viper

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(Bitis gabonica), depending on what the client requires the snake for. If the client needs the fangs of a Gaboon viper for a common, protective tila (or talisman), for example, the fangs of a Puff adder will likely suffice. During a discussion about animal attributes at Lantassapé in 2018, a senior Awinon merchant explained the logic of substitutes to me in frank, clinical terms, “it’s like Western medicine,” she claimed, “when you can’t find a specific product, you can use the generic version” (Marie per. comm. 2018). Nevertheless, the ability to easily substitute one animal for another only applies to animals with similar signatures and animals that do not possess high quantities of aché. In instances where uniquely powerful animals are required, the Awinon will create elaborate and inventive substitutes by ritually combining two or more animals. Awinon access to powerful ingredients has become increasingly complex given recent governmental regulations curtailing the commercial trade in animals such as lions, white vultures, parrots, hyenas, elephants, leopards, and pangolins. Although Awinon merchants recognize the incentives behind these ecological regulations, during interviews, many also expressed concerns that these policies represented a bureaucratic effort to homogenize Vodun and other “traditional” lifeways in Togo and Benin.7 In a telling exchange at Lantassapé in 2018, one vendor remarked that African nations were merely “copying the occident” or pandering to Western ideologies, in their efforts to ban certain animals from medicine markets. Since 2018, the theme of “copying the occident” has appeared frequently in my  fieldwork discussions  concerning how African indigenous religions are perceived by, and marketed to, the West. Apart from the systemic state-sanctioned commercialization of indigenous religions such as Vodun, an important, if insidious, part of “copying the occident” entails “smoothing-out” the more “distasteful” aspects of indigenous culture, including the use of certain animals for medicinal purposes (Akossou pers. comm. 2021). Ironically, exogenous pressure to restrict the west African animal-parts trade simultaneously ignores the reasons why animal-derived medicines remain so popular and, through the cultural imperialism underlying these pressures, intensifies the popularity of animal-derived medicines.

7  Relatedly, the international visibility that Benin gained with the UNESCO-funded Ouidah ’92 festival has brought with it an influx of tourists, investors, and state-sanctioned “cultural heritage” stipulations over the past 30 years (Landry 2011).

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Accordingly, animal-trade restrictions have spurred the Awinon to modify their pre-existing Doctrine of Signatures and logic of substitutes through creative animal-medicine adaptations. When faced with requests for restricted animal ingredients, Awinon merchants will create what I have termed a “mimetic hybrid.” The Awinon create mimetic hybrids predominantly from animal heads, which they modify in private compounds through a two-step process of taxidermy and ritual incantation.8 To be successful, the mimetic hybrid must “function” as the unavailable animal by embodying both its physical signature and its aché. The process begins with two apprentices who will paint and sculpt the head of a recently deceased animal until it resembles the head of the desired animal. The most fundamental part of this preliminary, “aesthetic” work is the placing of a piece of the desired animal inside the cranial cavity of the substitute. In the language of Sir James Frazer, this process represents an act of “contagion” that creates a sympathetic “correspondence” between the desired animal and its avatar (1990: 11). Thus established, this correspondence will permit the Awinon mentor to transform the avatar into the desired animal at the point of consecration. Once the apprentices have achieved the appearance of the desired animal, they will take the modified head to their mentor’s couvant to be activated. During the rites of activation, “key words” are spoken onto the head to “awaken” the aché of the desired animal and “seal” it inside the substitute. After consecration, the head is left on the Awinon mentor’s altar for an undetermined period so that it may “age” and “absorb” divine power. Expanding notions of what defines medicine, both in Vodun and in the Western imagination, mimetic hybrids are commissioned to charge home-protection bundles, shrine-­rooms, personal and communal altars, ceremonial power objects, funerary markers, and ritual vestments. I conceived of the term “mimetic hybrid” not only to encapsulate the fact that Awinon animal substitutes are the products of creative mimicry and ritual combination, but to demonstrate that the medicinal power of these objects lies beyond mere anthropocentric ingenuity. Mimetic hybrids are physical manifestations of human/other-than-human relations 8  Although I have witnessed the creation of mimetic hybrids on multiple occasions, the animals used in such operations and the incantations required for successful transubstantiation are highly coveted “professional secrets.” Out of respect for the Awinon community, I will not be divulging any ingredient, technique, or incantation specifics relating to the construction of mimetic hybrids in this section.

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unfolding in response to the precarity of west Africans increasingly swept up in globalization’s pernicious “relations of disjunctures.” With characteristic brilliance, Appadurai has demonstrated that despite the tendency for global flows to create critical ruptures in the fabrics of society, such flows also engender incredible feats of adaptation and transformation through, what he terms, “social imagination” (Appadurai 2001: 5). For Appadurai the imagination is no longer a matter of individual genius, escapism from ordinary life, or just a dimension of aesthetics, but is instead a “communal aptitude” that works across national lines, producing “locality as a spatial fact and as a sensibility” (Ibid.: 5). In so doing, the social imagination informs the daily lives of ordinary people in myriad ways, not least of which by allowing people “to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries” (Ibid.: 6). More importantly, as evinced by Awinon mimetic hybrids, the imagination “is the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge” (Ibid.: 6). Twenty years ago, Appadurai claimed that the “social forms” of the imagination “have barely been named by current social science, and even when named their dynamic qualities are frequently lost” (2001: 6). Today, although the material products of the social imagination have garnered more attention through such intellectual re-orientations as the “turn to matter” (see Bennett 2010), there remains a paucity in academic investment towards such phenomena. In countering this absence, I argue that Awinon mimetic hybrids, as direct by-products of a “metaphysics of ontological disjuncture” (Willis 1990: 9), are unquestionable physical manifestations of the social imagination in west Africa. As adaptations to state restrictions and important actors in interbeing relations, Awinon mimetic hybrids are prime examples of the imagination as lived practice. As such, these objects are powerful not because they mimic a potent animal or combine two animals together, but because in doing both they transcend their own materiality. The power of mimetic hybrids lies in the fact that they are neither one ingredient nor another, and as such, they exist in the interstices of what is “naturally” possible. Indeed, the turbulence of their “inbetweenness” (Basu 2017: 2) imbues Awinon mimetic hybrids with the open-ended potential that Vodun is famous for (Rush 2010: 60).

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Conclusion The obdurate defence of an “objective” universe, historically sustained by Euro-American academic orientations, is often at odds with how Africans are in the world, contributing to a fundamental negation of lived reality, and therefore, a continual pressure on indigenous lifeways (Mbembe 2001: 188). The power-laden negations of indigenous realities unfolding through globalization in west Africa are typical of broader “epistemicides” (Santos 2015) taking place across the Global South and may in fact be fuelling “alternative” healthcare practices such as divination and animal-­ derived medicine. Moreover, since epistemologies of health, sickness, and healing hold paramount positions in west African cosmological systems (Apovo 2004: 13), the fact that animal-medicines and west African medicine markets remain absent from academic and public discourse denotes an added effacing of local lifeworlds (Adjotin 2017: 7). The dearth of scholarly attention towards the “fluidity” (Sargent and Kennell 2017) of west African medical pluralism is symptomatic of a research corpus that regards “traditional” healing practices and the mystical frameworks that accompany them as mere cultural curios produced by the growing pains of a continent in transition (Piot 1999). Indeed, the fact that so few studies have engaged the social aspects of African medicine markets or the implications underlying the widespread use of animal-­ derived medicine in west Africa is telling of how misunderstood these phenomena remain in academia. A refrain I frequently hear while explaining my research to colleagues in west African universities is that animal-parts markets are “archaic” locales run by charlatan “féticheurs,” which prevent the full implementation of modernity by “keeping people superstitious” (pers. comm. 2017/2018). In countering this line of thought, this chapter has sought to elucidate how animal-derived medicine provides salient ways for west African populations to affirm their identities and needs during a historical moment that so starkly highlights the “darker side of Western modernity” (Mignolo 2011). The use of animal-based medicine in Togo and Benin evinces a large-scale search for meaning and ontological grounding in an era that excels at making the everyday unrecognizable. Indeed, most housodji-­ market customers are in search of ingredients or products that will help them crest the wave of neoliberal development rapidly moving across west Africa. Since the use of animal-derived medicine originates from the needs of vulnerable people attempting to put global uncertainty into

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perspective, the very act of going to housodji markets becomes a form of reactionary  resilience. From this perspective, housodji markets are constantly enfolding palimpsests of alternatives fuelled by contemporary healthcare necessities and challenges. By engaging the social functions of housodji markets and the services of the merchants who run them, this chapter has attempted to show how in a uniquely uncertain moment of human history, communities across west Africa materialize and effect their precarity through pragmatic, meaningful, and adaptive healthcare frameworks. Since the continued popularity of housodji markets represents in visceral ways the shortcomings of development, more attention must be paid to animal-parts markets and animal-­ derived medicine in west Africa. Given that housodji markets attend to, and are sustained by, the needs of those who have fallen between the “safety nets” of Western (and, increasingly, Eastern) trans-colonial hegemony, animal-parts markets, and the imaginative products they sell present vital implications for destabilizing the still dominant dichotomy of progress and development versus stagnation and tradition that continues to haunt the African continent. Africanist scholars working primarily in the fields of public policy, sustainability, healthcare, and neoliberal development must begin to take seriously the impact of indigenous medicine markets and animal-derived medicine to prevent the continued effacing of local needs and perspectives in policy-making discourse. Notwithstanding, the “academic translation” of indigenous lifeworlds more often than not results in the abstention of local realities from manuscripts and, relatedly, from broader systems of legitimation (Isichei 2002; Willerslev 2007). The fact that “traditional” medicines possess ontological capacities derived from divine presence, animal aché, and mystical agency requires not just that more attention be paid to these capacities but that this be done through a new processual and “perspectival” approach (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 469) informed by local hermeneutics of healing, corporality, and interbeing connection. Acknowledgements  I would like to thank Komi N’kere, Christophe Guedenon, Sourou Dako, Marie Sonon, and Constant Legonou for their interminable patience in helping me understand the complexities of Vodun, the Awinon community, and animal-derived medicine in Togo and Benin. In addition, I am indebted to Allen F. Roberts for his continued mentorship and guidance; David Shorter for orchestrating my participation in this book project and for his extensive comments on this chapter and previous Awinon-related essays; Joseph Adandé for his hospitality

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and willingness to share with me his vast expertise on Beninois history and contemporary social issues; and Cyndy Garcia-Weyandt for reviewing an early draft of this chapter and for providing such gracious and insightful comments. The fieldwork necessary for the completion of this chapter was made possible by the Polly Roberts Graduate Research Fellowship from the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA.  This work is dedicated to the memory of Dr Pierre Adjotin. Kútomɛ nan yɔn ni.

References Adandé, Joseph C.  E. 2014. “Bocio. From Nothingness to Liminality and Minimality.” In Gabriele Genge and Angela Stercken (eds.), Art History and Fetishism Abroad: Global Shiftings in Media and Methods, 177–188. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. La toile appliquée: ou l’art de faire voir des sons de couleurs chez les Fon de la République du Bénin d’hier a aujourd’hui. Niamey: Presse du CELTHO. Adjotin, Pierre. 2011. L’univers sous les thérapies de FÂ: Sciences. lettres, et arts au chevet du malade. Lyon: Éditions Baudelaire. ———. 2017. “Médecine moderne et FÂ face à la ‘maladie’: Paste’s de collaboration pour une synergie de l’action médicale à partir du Bénin.” PhD dissertation. University of Abomey-Calavi. Apovo, Cossi Jean-Marie. 2004. Anthropologie du BO: Théorie et pratique du grigri. Porto-Novo: CNPMS Publishing. Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). 2001. Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press. Basu, Paul (ed.). 2017. The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bay, Edna. 2008. Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun: Tracing Change in African Art. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Bennett, Bradley C. 2008. “Doctrine of Signatures through Two Millennia.” HerbalGram 78: 34–45. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Blier, Suzanne Preston. 1995. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff (eds.). 1993. Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Surgy, Albert. 1993. “Les ingrédients des fétiches.” Systèmes de Pensée en Afrique Noire 12: 103–143. Douglas, Mary. 2001 [1966]. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

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Edwards, Ian. 2012. “The Social Life of Wild-Things: Negotiated Wildlife in Mali, West Africa.” PhD dissertation. University of Oregon. Falen, Douglas J. 2018. African Science: Witchcraft, Vodun, and Healing in Southern Bénin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Frazer, Sir James George. 1990 [1890]. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: The Macmillan Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Geschiere, Peter (ed.). 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Geurts, Kathryn Linn. 2002. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ingold, Tim. 2007a. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1–16. ———. 2007b. Lines: A Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge. Isichei, Elizabeth. 2002. Voices of the Poor in Africa: Moral Economy and the Popular Imagination. Rochester: University Rochester Press. Janzen, John M. 1978. The Quest for Therapy: Medical Pluralism in Lower Zaire. Berkley: University of California Press. Kerchache, Jacques. 2011. “The Bocio Figure and Its Symbolic Environment.” In Anna Douaoui (ed.), Vodun: African Voodoo, 28–35. Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain. Landry, Timothy R. 2011. “Touring the Slave Route: Inaccurate Authenticities in Bénin, West Africa.” In Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure, and Exclusion in a Global World, 205–231. New York: Springer. ———. 2015. “Vodun, Globalization, and the Creative Layering of Belief in Southern Bénin.” Journal of Religion in Africa 45: 170–199. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1964 [1962]. Totemism. London: Merlin Press. Mackay, Hugh. 2004. “The Globalization of Culture?” In David Held (ed.), A Globalizing World? Culture, Economics, Politics, 44–81. London: Routledge. Matory, Lorand J. 2018. The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make. Durham: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Post Colony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meyer, Birgit and Abdoulaye Sounaye. 2017. “Introduction: Sermon in the City: Christian and Islamic Preaching in West Africa.” Journal of Religion in Africa 47 (1): 1–8. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. Nevadomsky, Joseph. 1988. “Kemwin-Kemwin: The Apothecary Shop in Bénin City.” African Arts 22 (1): 72-100.

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N’kere, Komi. 2016. “Le Marché Aux Fétiches (Lantassimé) d’Akodésséwa à Lomé (Togo), Un Espace Géographique Aux Fonctions Multiples.” Journal de la Recherche Scientifique De l’Université De Lomé 18 (3): 117–129. Nooter, Mary H. 1993. “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals.” African Arts 26 (1): 54–102. Noret, Joel. 2011. “Notes on Vodun Imagery in Southern Bénin: Observing an African Religious Modernity.” In Anne-Marie Bouttiaux & Anna Seiderer (eds.), Fetish Modernity, 99–105. Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa. Ogunnaike, Oludamini. 2020. Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press. Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago press. Roberts, Allen F. 1980. “Heroic Beasts and Beastly Heroes: Principles of Cosmology and Chiefship Among the Lakeside BaTabwa of Zaire.” PhD dissertation. University of Chicago. ———. 1995. Animals in African Art: From the Familiar to the Marvelous. Munich: Prestel Publishing. Roberts, Mary Nooter and Allen F.  Roberts. 2016. “Spiritscapes of the Indian Ocean World: Reorienting Africa/Asia through Transcultural Devotional Practices.” In Nicole Khouri and Dominique Malaquais (eds.), Afrique-Asie: Arts, espaces, pratiques, 55–88. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Rouen at du Havre. Rush, Dana. 1997. “Vodun Vortex: Accumulative Arts, Histories, and Religious Consciousnesses along Coastal Benin.” PhD dissertation. University of Iowa. ———. 2010. “Ephemerality and the ‘Unfinished’ in Vodun Aesthetics.” African Arts 43 (1): 60–75. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2015. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. London: Routledge. Sargent, Carolyn and James Leslie Kennell. 2017. “Elusive Paths, Fluid Care: Seeking Healing and Protection in the Republic of Bénin.” In William C. Olsen and Carolyn Sargent (eds.), African Medical Pluralism, 227–243. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sokemawu, Koudzo. 2012. “Le marché aux fétiches d’Akodésséwa: un lieu touristique au cœur de la ville de Lomé au Togo.” Journal de la Recherche Scientifique De l’Université De Lomé 14 (2): 233–247. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1984. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. London and New York: Vintage. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Minneapolis: Univocal. White, Louise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willis, Roy ed. 1990. Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 7

Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks Jean Chamel

Introduction Since the inclusion in 2008 of specific rights to “nature or Pacha Mama” in the Ecuadorian constitution and the adoption a few years later of the rights of Mother Earth in Bolivian laws, initiatives to grant rights to non-­ humans have multiplied around the world: Whanganui River in New Zealand, Ganges River in India, Atrato River and Amazon Basin in Columbia, and Lake Erie in the United States. These widely publicized cases are part of a global movement, driven by growing transnational environmentalist networks. By implying the attribution of a legal personality to non-human entities, the rights of nature question the relations to them from an

J. Chamel (*) Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_7

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ontological and epistemological point of view. To address this aspect, the French jurist Marie-Angèle Hermitte carved the notion of “legal animism” (Hermitte 2013), which she attempts to clarify by drawing on Philippe Descola’s modes of identification (Descola 2013) and on some of the most emblematic cases. According to her, this legal animism structures itself from “three paths”: one with an indigenous consonance, one religious and mystical, and one with a scientific basis. The concept opens promising lines of research, without, however, formulating a fully articulated theoretical framework (Hermitte 2018). It is taken up by Diego Landivar and Émilie Ramillien in a stimulating way to compare the Ecuadorian and Bolivian cases of the implementation of rights of nature (2019). However, the broad focus of their approaches does not allow them to discuss in a narrow way the concrete actions of human persons seeking to mobilize this legal animism. Referring primarily to Descola’s proposals on animism, they do not delve into what the term may mean in terms of personification and relationality. How, indeed, are these “earth beings”, if we may use this expression (Cadena 2015) in a larger context, constituted as persons, beyond a mere cognitive operation conferring them a legal personality? This question is crucial, however, if we want to characterize possible ontological reconfigurations at work that would go beyond declarations of intent, which would not fundamentally disrupt the “composition of the world” of the moderns. This chapter aims to provide a first answer to this uneasy question by looking not only within the networks promoting the rights of nature but also in the events draining their inspiration from a supposed indigenous wisdom, at practices aiming precisely at “connecting” with these non-­ human entities, at “making a place” for them within their assemblies. It is based on a multi-sited and online fieldwork conducted between December 2017 and September 2021 and more specifically on the observation of some key events in the life of the movement over this period: participation for three consecutive years in the days dedicated to the rights of nature of the Objective Science International (OSI) Forum held each year at the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva; online observation of the annual dialogues at the UN headquarters in New York on Harmony with nature in April 2018 and 2019; participation to the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) symposium in Quito in September 2018 and to the Earth Rights Conference held in Sigtuna (Sweden) in May 2019. Observations were also conducted at Kiva UK 2019, a shamanic-inspired ceremony in Cambridgeshire, and at the Flourishing Diversity Summit

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(FDS), a gathering of indigenous peoples’ representatives held at University College London in September 2019. The latter two events are not directly part of the rights of nature movement (although they often refer to such rights), but the circulations of people as well as ideas and ceremonial practices justify not compartmentalizing between these intertwined circles. We will first see—with the help of brief excerpts from their recordings—that these practices mainly take ritual forms, sometimes inspired by the performances of indigenous representatives. But they are also part of a process of ritual innovation, and all these elements contribute to the debate on the proposal of legal animism. Then will follow the analysis of these ceremonies that is based on their observation, on informal conversations during the events and on a dozen relatively free but more formalized interviews with key actors of the networks. Conducted in an iterative way according to the methodology inspired by the grounded theory (Charmaz and Belgrave 2007; Strauss and Corbin 1997), it will lead us to propose the concept of ritual animism, in the light of contemporary reflections on the notion of animism. Finally, we will discuss the limits of an approach that seeks to go beyond naturalistic perception without real achievement.

Indigenous Performances and Imitations at the GARN Conference in Quito Following the decision of the United Nations General Assembly in 2009 to make April 22 the annual International Day of Mother Earth, a “People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth” was held in Cochabamba (Bolivia) in 2010 to draft a “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth”. The same year, in Patate, Ecuador, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) was born, bringing together more than 150 NGOs from around the world. This alliance, although not the umbrella organization of the very diverse movement for the rights of nature, which remains very little studied, constitutes a nodal point through which the main actors and the most active networks pass. Cristina Espinosa analysed the discourses of the GARN at the 2012 Rio+20 summit (2014) and looked at the practices of GARN’s founding NGOs, such as the Pachamama Alliance, through the workshops and seminars they organize. However, her work focused mainly on the “spatial and cultural dynamics of collective action” in an environmental governance approach (2017), which thus leaves aside the ontological or epistemological questions raised by the rights of nature.

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A major symposium organized by the GARN in Quito in September 2018, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Ecuadorian constitution, was the perfect place to start researching these issues. More than a hundred participants from all over the world—but mainly from the Americas and Europe—occupied the large conference room of the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar for two days. With its long podium, its country flags and a huge screen, this very formal setting was reminiscent of a UN conference room. Many speakers represent indigenous peoples. Several of them led the opening ceremony (and then, symmetrically, the closing ceremony) with short statements in indigenous languages, followed by longer speeches in English or Spanish and sometimes also songs in indigenous languages. Among them, Tom Goldtooth, director of the international indigenous NGO Indigenous Environmental Network, accompanied by Casey Camp-Horinek, an environmental justice activist from the Ponca Nation, invited the assembly to stand and honour the six directions (the four cardinal points, as well as the sky and the earth), apparently following his own Lakota tradition. Almost the entire room responded to Goldtooth’s invitation to stand up and turns as he does four times in a row to observe a station in front of each cardinal point, in a relatively neutral attitude, eyes open or sometimes closed. Then Goldtooth and Camp faced the room again and raised their hands in the air. Some imitated them with very different postures: hands very high in the sky, or closed eyes and head upwards, or hands at face level, palms facing forward. The two ceremonialists then lowered themselves to the ground, and the audience reacted in even more variable ways: most remained standing, a few bended down to touch the ground, some crouched or even sat down to touch the ground with their hands, others just bowed their heads. The ceremony ended with a few words and applause. This first description illustrates some recurrent and fundamental features of ritual practice within the rights of nature movement as well as in the networks mobilizing indigenous spiritualities. First, we note the pre-­ eminence of the indigenous word, always put forward and rarely, if ever, discussed. Indigenous people do not hesitate to assert their status and affirm it first through their physical appearance, by a simple accessory or a whole set of clothes, as well as by beginning any intervention with a few sentences pronounced in their language, spoken or sung, sometimes accompanied by a musical instrument. This legitimacy seems to have been built up gradually, in particular thanks to the long work carried out by the movement for the rights of indigenous peoples, whose important

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achievement has been the adoption in 2007 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The institutionalization of indigenous rituals within this movement was not self-evident. Ceremonies were strongly contested at the beginning, since religious demonstrations are not normally permitted within the United Nations, before finally becoming accepted (Muehlebach 2001). In this example, we note that the assembly’s adherence to the performance is strong, with everyone or almost everyone following the gesture of the ceremonialists. But it also varies beyond a minimal collective involvement, with many who imitate what the other participants around them are doing, personalizing it to variable degrees, while others, more experienced or more involved, follow the ceremonial leaders as closely as possible or follow the inspiration of the moment without caring much about what the majority does. This greater involvement may give rise to attempts at imitation on the part of other participants who do not have well-established indigenous legitimacy. For example, during the Quito symposium, a young Colombian with no claimed indigenousness placed the Wiphala, the rainbow-coloured checkerboard flag that symbolizes the unity of the Andean indigenous peoples, in front of the lectern. Waving a maraca, he then sang a few phrases in Spanish in which the words celebración and sagrado (sacred) stood out, before returning to a more academic presentation and without his performance provoking any particular reaction from the audience. He was later followed by a North American activist who also prefaced her remarks with a short song in English, again in a manner reminiscent of the way indigenous people speak publicly in such events: People’re gonna rise, like the water, We’re gonna curb these crises down, I hear the voice of my great granddaughter, Saying “Rights of Nature now”.

Perhaps because she is a recognized figure in the GARN, her singing was greeted with applause this time. These initial observations already make it possible to situate the context in which the ceremonies are engaged: that of indigenous performances considered legitimate and which inspire ritual practices that both innovate and seek to build on their legitimacy.

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Ritual Innovation at the European Headquarters of the UN in Geneva Ritual innovation takes a more institutional turn when it becomes an integral part of the organization of the event, such as the days dedicated to the rights of nature at the OSI Forum 2017 in Geneva. Although mainly composed of oral presentations with slide shows in a very conventional format, they were opened by an Opening Ceremony: Gratitude to Water led by a professional ceremonialist, Danielea Castell.1 The programme stated that “water connects us all. Water can bring harmony amongst ourselves, others, and Nature. Water is alive, intelligent and available for conscious connection.” She explained that the purpose of this ceremony was to “formally invite water into the room as a stakeholder”, to connect participants to it and to inspire a creative flow. Participants were invited to bring a sample of water from a source near their home. The ceremony was filmed and is available online.2 The very formal setting of the meeting room in the Palais des Nations, the European headquarters of the United Nations,3 stood out in contrast to the white dress of the ceremonialist, her Tibetan bowl, her chanting, and the five water carriers who accompanied her in a meditative attitude. The contrast even increased as she invited the audience to approach the water carriers, to close the eyes, to put one hand on the heart and to touch the water they hold in a bowl with the other, then to spread it on the skin, the face, in order to “connect to your own love for water” and “let the water know your heart”. The water carriers then spread out across the room in small and gentle steps while the ceremonialist slowly beat a shamanic drum, addressing the water and its ancestors. The people in the room reacted in quite different ways. Some refused to take part in the exercise while others smiled, filmed, had their picture taken while touching the water. The engagement in the ritual varied greatly from one person to another, ranging from just brushing the water with one’s fingers to 1  Presented in the programme as “Mrs Danielea Castell, Water Ceremonialist & Sound Weaver”. She offers this type of service on her website https://watergratitude.me, last accessed 7 October 2021. 2  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPg5XCHMQc4 last accessed 2 December 2021. 3  OSI is accredited by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations, which allows it to organize events in the UN rooms without any official character, but this distinction is unclear in the minds of most participants who think they are speaking “at the UN”.

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coming forward with the hands crossed over the heart, immersing one’s fingers for several seconds, eyes closed, and then running the wet hand over the face. Here, the ceremony is not explicitly presented as part of a particular tradition, but is a bricolage of instruments of various origins, invented gestures that give each person a certain freedom of performance, and an unfolding that reminds the Christian rite of communion. The absence of indigenous legitimacy, combined with discourses and practices that are at least implicitly associated with the spiritual or religious domain, in a UN forum that is a priori associated with the seriousness of international governance, leads to a different reception than that of the Quito ritual: adherence is not self-evident, and one can afford to remain in the background or even to display a certain distance by not participating, by adopting a detached attitude, by smiling or even simply by filming the scene. A regular participant in these encounters explained that she had not felt anything particular on this occasion, the non-indigenous origin of the ceremonialist explaining for her “that it didn’t get through to my heart”.

Recurrences and Circularities at the Earth Rights Conference in Sigtuna The ceremony in Geneva could lead one to believe that it was an isolated and inconclusive experiment of imitation and innovation, especially since it was not reproduced in the following two years. The observation of the Earth Rights Conference in Sweden in May 2019 shows that it is, on the contrary, part of a process of institutionalization of the practice. In Sigtuna, there was about a hundred participants, mostly Swedish but also several key actors of the movement from all continents, most of them already present in Quito in 2018. Again, the bulk of the conference was composed of oral interventions, but more space was given to ceremonies and workshops presented as inspired by deep ecology and ecopsychology. The morning of the second day opened with an Earth ceremony, “a celebration of our interconnectedness with Mother Earth, with the world as a whole, with each other and with ourselves”. A Lakota representative, Leo Yankton,4 began with a sage smoke cleansing of all participants who stood in a large circle. One by one, their hands drew the smoke towards their head and body, in a meditative attitude, sometimes with closed eyes, 4

 Leo left this world prematurely in August 2021.

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in a relatively homogeneous way, “to repel negative energies”. After a song sung by a young Sami Sara Ajnnak, Erena Rhose, a Maori woman who has lived in Sweden for a long time and considers herself a daughter of the Whanganui River, her great-great-grandmother being one of the co-signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi,5 then led the ceremony. She invoked the Earth, her womb from which we came, and the way humans are destroying it. She shouted, cried, a woman in the circle fell into tears. Rhose then cleared the gravel on the ground to make a circle of bare earth, sang, shouted, alternating between English (“We become the warriors of Mother Earth … we are really in the womb of Mother Earth”) and an unidentified language, probably Maori. Then the shamanic drums began to sound rhythmically, Rhose sang and the circle of participants spiralled towards the bare earth, towards which Leo blew sage smoke from time to time. Each person entered the circle turn by turn. The firsts to come forward simply stood upright for a moment in the centre of the circle and then left. Then a man took the initiative to raise his arms to the sky, then to touch the ground and finally to join his hands in prayer at forehead level. Then others touched the ground in the same way, some began to take off their shoes before entering, then this practice became widespread. One woman sketched a dance step. Then, when everyone had passed, Rhose covered the ground with gravel again, still alternating songs and shouts, the drummers nodding their heads, slowing down the rhythm, and the ceremony ended with thanks and applause. This time, it is indeed indigenous people who led the ceremony, but they each brought disparate elements to contribute to its elaboration, seemingly in a relatively improvised manner, like a ritual jam session. The support of the participants, who knew what to expect, was stronger and more persistent than in Geneva. The morning continued with the verdict of a mock trial (that took place the day before) before a tribunal for the rights of nature that the GARN frequently sets up, especially during major climate conferences. The Swedish state was found guilty of denying Lake Vättern its fundamental rights by conducting military exercises there. The lake was defended by humans but also physically present through a bowl containing its water, placed in front of the court. An artist had installed a 360° camera above it, 5  This treaty, signed in 1840 at Waitangi by British settlers and Maori chiefs, is considered to be the founding act of New Zealand as a nation. Having retained legal force, it remains relevant until now.

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to film the vibrations of the water in relation to what was happening in the room. The bowl of water did not initially appear to have any other purpose, but at the end of the trial a new procession was proposed. Tom Goldtooth, the Lakota representative who led the opening ceremony in Quito, explained that his nation has a special relationship with water (“we are made of water, that’s what we believe”), that the water ceremony is very important to them and that they intend to bring it back to life. He then suggested that the participants come forward “to put [their] own petition to the water”. The first people approached, simply touching the water with their hands, and Goldtooth added, “If you want to touch the water and put some on your forehead, on your head (mimicking the gesture), go ahead, do that … it is here to share herself with you” and his suggestion was immediately followed by action. In the background, some were videorecording the scene, people exchanged benevolent smile and a guitar-­ accompanied song began, repeated in a loop until the end of the ceremony (Fig. 7.1).6

Fig. 7.1  Water ceremony, Earth Rights Conference, Sigtuna. (Photo: J. Chamel, May 2019)  “The river is flowing, Flowing and growing, The river is flowing, Back to the sea. Mother Earth, carry me, A child, I will always be, Mother Earth, carry me, Back to the sea.” 6

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One participant after another touched the water with the hand and then brought it to the face. A man arrived who joined his hands in prayer at the level of his mouth, made a small curtsy of the bust, then dipped the fingers of both hands, joined them again and made another curtsy. A young man arrived in front of him, touched the water and joined his hands in prayer (is he inspired by his predecessor?), eyes closed, for a moment and then walked away. Variations followed, with imitations and innovations, three people in a row put both hands very slowly on the water and then passed them over their face. A young man taped his shamanic drum while looking at the water, then passed a long bird feather over it, several times while blowing, then dipped the feather and sprinkled water on the drum before bowing slightly. A woman slipped a finger into the water and brought it to her mouth. Erena Rhose touched the water and then her headdress three times in a row, then touched the water again and placed it on a small planet Earth made of papier-mâché that stood next to the basin, again three times. After a few more people showing up, the song ended smoothly, and a peaceful and collected ambience emerged from the room. A few women, mainly indigenous, finally brought the water out to put it in a fountain and then on the gravel, where the earth had been laid bare in the previous ceremony. They thus established a continuity between the two ceremonial instants and the two elements called upon, earth and water.

Beyond Rights of Nature Water was in the spotlight again at another event, the Flourishing Diversity Summit (FDS), held in London in September 2019. This summit was not primarily about the rights of nature, although they featured in some speeches, but aimed to bring “indigenous wisdoms” into dialogue to feed Westerners’ inspiration to respond to the ecological crisis. Indigenous representatives, some of them already crossed in this chapter such as Erena Rhose in Sigtuna and Casey Camp-Horinek in Quito, came to share their thoughts with an audience that was more openly alternative—as demonstrated by the way many of the participants were dressed—than in the venues depicted before.7

7  Others had spoken at the Kiva UK in June 2019, a gathering in the tradition of the red path (camino rojo), during which there are four elements, Kiva ceremonies, temazcales (sweat lodges) and so on, with indigenous speakers from around the world.

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The second day of the FDS was dedicated to Mother Earth, with almost exclusively female interventions. It opened in Gordon Square adjoining UCL with an Honouring the Waters Ceremony initiated by a meditation guided by an Aboriginal descendant, Jarmbi, who was also at Kiva UK 2019 and then with a song by a young Sami woman, Elin Teikus. On a mound, made of soil brought in by the participants, was placed a large basin containing water, also brought in from various sources. On the surface of this “altar” were floating flowers and a candle. The ceremony is led by a young American woman of Mayan descent, Kya-Xe’ Zelaya Dudney, whose legitimacy derives from her grandmother Grandmother Flordemayo®, a spiritual healer involved in several communities of indigenous elders.8 Her words came as no surprise: “without water there is no life, there is no crops, there is no us”. In an affected manner, she raised her hands “which is why these waters must be protected, so I bless myself with these waters”, dipped a corn cob into the basin in a circular motion and then sprinkled the assembly. The Elders received the water by opening their hands, the rest of the audience reacted little or not at all. A bit later in a UCL auditorium, water was again the focus of two successive rituals. The first was led by Jyoti, founder of a California-based international spiritual community, Kayumari, which is home to the Center for Sacred Studies (CSS), a “church dedicated to the protection and continuation of the spiritual practices of First Nations peoples worldwide”.9 The white-clad woman, who was also present at Kiva UK 2019, sprinkled water, presumably from the morning basin, on the participants in the room. Using a feather duster, she deposited the water on the tops of the head and other body parts of those within her reach, drenching others with a broad gesture.10 Some people put their hands together, bowed their heads and adopted a meditative attitude after receiving the water. Then Jyoti approached the altar, which was the table of the auditorium covered with a white cloth on which were arranged various objects, among which flowers, a lighted candle, but also the portrait of an old woman (probably considered as an Elder) which she came to touch with her feather duster before putting it down on the altar. The young woman who was following 8  http://www.grandmotherscouncil.org/who-we-are/grandmother-flordemayo/ and http://www.grandmotherflordemayo.com/bio/ last accessed 13.10.2021. 9  https://www.centerforsacredstudies.org/jyoti-talkkpfa/ last accessed 13.10.2021. 10  The day before, Erena Rhose had already done a similar sprinkling with fern leaves in a smaller workshop entitled “The Rights of Rivers from a Maori Perspective”.

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her with a vase containing the water for the ceremony also put it down on the table and Jyoti then made the whole room stand up and dance to the sound of a song by Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of the famous actor, who accompanied the whole ritual with her guitar. It was then the turn of Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook, a Lakota Elder, to invite the audience to address, out loud and as spontaneously as possible, the same water, this time distributed in paper cups. We could then hear some of whispers: “I love you water, always be pure (…) be here for the next seven generations”, “Show me your heart, show me how to flood, show me how to be the … purity and … flood”. Finally, the day ended where it began, back in Gordon Square around the basin. Participants were invited to take some water and soil home with them. Each person took a turn and proceeded in his or her own way, drawing inspiration from the previous ones and innovating at the same time: kneeling down, closing their eyes, running a little water over their face (Fig. 7.2). Finally, the water, the flowers and the earth were dispersed by some volunteers in the park, without following a precise ritual, but they were asked to do it with a particular intention, full of respect.

Fig. 7.2  Waters closing ceremony in Gordon Square during the Flourishing Diversity Summit, London. (Photo: J. Chamel, September 2019)

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Hybridization, Institutionalization and Embodiment of the Ritual All these ceremonies show the importance of ritual innovation. It is expressed through the freedom the participants enjoy and the creativity they mobilize to personalize their interactions with the natural entities involved in each ritual. However, freedom and creativity are not absolute; they come together in a compromise that is continuously renegotiated. In one side, following all together a few instructions help the participants feeling to be part of a collective happening. On the other side, bringing a personal touch, often inspired by the observation of the gestures practised by others, allows everyone to distinguish oneself. Along the process, the gestures evolve and become step by step more complex during the few minutes of the ritual, without ever stabilizing completely. The mainly sequential character (moving one after the other towards the water and/ or the earth) of most of the examples just described imperfectly illustrates the reciprocal influences, which occur when the participants—especially when they are in a circle—permanently adapt their attitude and their actions to those of the others without being guided by a facilitator, or in addition to that. Attitudes that express a played affectivity, as observed by Michael Houseman in contemporary rituals (Houseman 2010, 2012, 2016), are also evolving following the same patterns of specular interaction. Ritual innovation also occurs, with as much if not more force, at the level of the organization of ceremonies. If we focus on water ceremonies, they are all different, but there are similarities and recurrences in their diversity. It could mean that a process of progressive stabilization, of institutionalization, is at work between the ceremonies. The first evidence of this institutionalization is undoubtedly the multiplication of these ceremonies around water, within the rights of nature movement and beyond with the FDS. In terms of content, a similar proposal to touch foreheads and heads with water was repeated between the ceremony at the Palais des Nations in Geneva and the one in Sigtuna, even though their respective instigators were not present at the other event and do not know each other. Water ceremony seems to have become so necessary in a few years that it has even found its place in the series of five European Tribunals in Defence of Aquatic Ecosystems that took place monthly between January and May 2021. Organized by GARN Europe, they were tailored to fit the online constraints due to the pandemic context. The members of the Tribunal on Zoom and the (hidden) public on Facebook Live were thus

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invited by Tom Goldtooth to hold a container of water from their homes, facing the webcam, while he sang a few words in his mother tongue and then delivered a short speech on water and the place it holds in our lives: “water is life, water is sacred (…)”, “we are all related to water (…)”, “water has its own lifeforce, its own consciousness, water has a spirit, with its voice”.11 The attitude of the members of the Tribunal evolved over the months: the water was carried closer to the face and the eyes were more systematically closed during the last session in May 2021 than during the first hearings.12 A water ceremony was also led by Jyoti at the Glastonbury festival during the summer of 2019. Water, again from various sources around the world, was placed in three basins representing past, present and future, and applied to the foreheads of participants by three “Wisedom Keepers”,13 illustrating the same compromise between reiteration of certain traits and innovation. The choice of water as the favourite ritual channel is relatively obvious when it is associated with the defence of aquatic entities, which represent most candidates for legal personalization. It can also be explained by the omnipresence of the element, which could facilitate identifying with it; this is at least the hypothesis formulated by a key player of the rights of nature networks (interview, 2021) and it is corroborated by the many statements similar to the idea that “I am the water and the water is me”. It is uneasy to comment processes that are not yet stabilized, but the ceremonies can be understood in the continuation of indigenous performances conducted for political affirmation. Much has already been written about these performances in various contexts such as at the UN for the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples (Cadena and Starn 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Graham and Penny 2014; Kuper 2003; 11  Tribunal for the Rights of Nature for the Mer de Glace, 30 January 2021. (00,08:30). https://www.facebook.com/102874091171981/videos/225718685857159 last accessed 02.08.2021. 12  See, for instance, the water ceremony led by Tom Goldtooth at the opening of the Rights of Nature Tribunal on the releases of red mud in the Mediterranean, on 29 May 2021: https://www.facebook.com/102874091171981/videos/777455206464410 (13’15”) last accessed 15.07.2021. Tom Goldtooth also led a water ceremony at a GARN Europe event in Marseille on 4 September 2021 along the IUCN World Congress. https:// www.facebook.com/GARNEUROPE/videos/286773252779267 (from 00:56:00) last accessed 06.09.2021. 13  https://www.wisdomkeepers.earth/ and https://www.breatheourword.com/post/ the-wisdom-keepers-water-ceremony-at-the-common last accessed 10.11.2021.

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Pulitano 2012; Schulte-Tenckhoff 1998; Tilley 1997; Bellier 2012; Hodgson 2014; Muehlebach 2001; Hanna et al. 2016) or during ethical tribunals (Macleod 2017). Playing with the Western clichés of the “hyper-­ real Indian” (Ramos 1992), they may contribute to a political strategy of radical otherness “aimed at increasing their independence or autonomy” (Leach and Fairhead 2002: 349, cited in Demeulenaere 2019, my translation). This political struggle is recalled at times during rights of nature meetings, for instance in the mouth of Kirsti Luke, representative of the Maori organization Te Uru Taumatua at the GARN symposium in Quito in 2018, but also in 2014 at the Interactive Dialogue on Harmony with Nature, the forum that promotes the rights of nature at the United Nations headquarters in New York. On that occasion, she concluded her speech, without hiding her emotions, in such way: My name is Kirsti, I am an indigenous person, that’s great for an opening. What that means in reality, is that I am a colonized person living a colonized reality. I am broken and full of despair, and I can’t wait to fix myself home, and I am making progress at it. (2h46’)14

Indigenous speeches and rituals are performed in front of a convinced audience made up of people who find themselves in the counter-currents of modernity, in search of alternative relationships with the world, a milieu that sets up indigenous cosmologies as a model15 and that intersects with the one of alternative spiritualities. Meetings such as the Flourishing Diversity Summit in London, or “Au cœur des temps” (“The Heart of Times”) in French-speaking Switzerland,16 facilitate these exchanges, which are also supported by the events organized to promote the rights of nature. Strategies of imitation of non-indigenous actors are then developed, as observed in Quito (see above), and it can go as far as appropriation, as it was the case of the despachos, Q’ero-inspired offerings to the

14  http://webtv.un.org/watch/part-2-interactive-dialogue-on-harmony-with-natureduring-the-commemoration-of-international-mother-earth-day-general-assembly-72nd-sess ion/5775795430001/?term=&lan=original last accessed 15.10.2021. 15  This quasi-automatic legitimacy allows young representatives, such as Kya-Xe’ Zelaya Dudney, the granddaughter of Flordemayo®, to express themselves with words that do not have the force of the ones of their elders. 16  See the documentary (in French) on this event: http://www.nicefuture.com/evenements/au-coeur-des-temps/ last accessed 13.11.2021.

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Frome River17 and the Thames organized in 2018, without any representative of the Andean community. This chapter is not the place to enter the complex debate of cultural appropriation, but it is clear from field observations that processes of ritual hybridization are at work within the milieu, processes in which central actors claiming undisputed indigenous legitimacy, such as Tom Goldtooth or Erena Rhose, take part, without seeking to protect an untraceable purity of original rites. Rhose is far from confining herself to her Maori ancestry since she also participates in Sami-inspired shamanic ceremonies and has practised the Lakota sun dance, while Goldtooth expresses a monistic conception of water shared by Western esoteric currents. In this regard, it seems that the intense circulation of these new ceremonialists between the events to which they are invited facilitates their disposition to hybridization in addition to reinforcing their legitimacy and their ease in assuming their status of “elders” and spokespersons for “indigenous wisdom”. Beyond the question of indigenousness, let us finally point out that the programming of a non-naturalistic ceremony seems to become a must for any event promoting the rights of nature, as suggested by the Geneva water ceremony, or the organization of a very different ritual concluding the December 2018 launch of the “Hague Principles” by the Earth Trusteeship Initiative, a process that is somewhat competing with the initiatives overseen by the GARN.18 However, it is not inter-human cosmopolitical issues that preside over the conception of these ceremonies. Their stated objective is to engage with earth beings, animated because they are hosting life (the living Earth-­ Gaia, the rivers, forests, etc.) or in movement (the mountains and glaciers). To this end, the mobilization of indigenous cosmologies and practices takes on its full meaning. Graham Harvey explains that a Sami singer’s greeting, “From our mountains to your mountains, from our rivers to your rivers”—an expression comparable to many introductory phrases (such as the much-repeated “I am the river and the river is me” of the Maori) uttered by representatives of indigenous peoples at events related to the rights of nature—is more than a rhetorical formulation linking human communities through their non-human environment: it 17  A river that was concerned by an attempt of legal personalization through a bye-law in the town of the same name in Somerset (UK). 18  http://www.earthtrusteeship.world/the-launch-of-the-the-hague-principles/ at 02:23:00, last accessed 10.11.2021.

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recognizes the full participation of mountains and rivers within extended communities (Harvey 2021: 78), within collectives would say Bruno Latour (1999). Ritual can then be a privileged form for integrating and incorporating a being-in-the-world, inspired by indigenous people, that goes beyond the nature-culture dualism of the moderns (Descola 2013). Definitions of ritual such as the classical ones proposed by Catherine Bell19 or Jonathan Z. Smith,20 focusing on the distinction between ritual action and everyday activities, are of little help in understanding what is at stake here. Harvey’s proposal to give Smith’s a more processual formulation that takes into account its permanent reinvention21 is more useful: “Ritual is a means of performing the ways things might become in conversation with customary practice in such a way that this ritualized innovation might inform the ordinary and always emerging, course of things.” (Harvey 2021: 74)

For Harvey again, “rituals are among the ways in which ideas or norms become enacted” (Harvey 2021: 76). The ritual mode is indeed a powerful tool of embodiment if we follow Adrian Harris, who calls upon Bell (who defines it as “a bodily strategy that produces an incarnate means of knowing”), Ronald Grimes (for whom it is “a bodily way of knowing designed to move consciousness from the head to the body”) or Talal Asad, for whom the role of ritual is not to express a symbolic meaning but to influence the habitus (Harris 2008: 39). Thus, indigenous performances, inspired by established rituals, can be seen as invitations to learn through the body how to interact with the more-than-human world (Harvey 2021: 84) without apprehending it a priori as separate. This is what a regular participant in the rights of nature conferences explains: “it is about short-circuiting the mind to harmonize—in vibrational

19  “Ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities” (Bell 1992: 74). 20  “Ritual is a means of performing the ways things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things” (Smith quoted in Harvey 2021: 74). 21  See, for example, Ronald Grimes, for whom “An adequate theory must account for ritual creativity, ritual criticism, ritual revolutions and the deaths of rituals” (Grimes 2021: 21).

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terms—with the earth and the universe” (interview, 2021). To this end, it seems useful to return to the notion of animism.

Relationality, Personification and the Limits of Ritual Animism More than a century after being coined by Edward B. Tylor in Primitive Culture (Tylor 2010a, 2010b), after animism had been abandoned by anthropologists to the common sense to designate primitive and erroneous beliefs according to which natural entities are animate, that is endowed with a soul (anima in Latin) and capable of intention, the concept has come back in academic debates, echoing the growing attention paid to the differentiated perceptions of what moderns call “nature”. Philippe Descola in particular, with his ontological grid delineating four schemes of perception, proposed a new definition. Characterized by the resemblance of “interiorities” and the dissimilarity of “physicalities”, Descola’s animism is defined as the structural opposite of the naturalism of the moderns, and these two modes of perception constitute the most solid part of his grid, completed by less convincing totemism and analogism (Descola 2013). His perspective is, however, sometimes considered coming from a lofty point of view that would not break out of the dualism he intends to overcome (Demeulenaere 2017; Descola and Ingold 2014). The Israeli anthropologist Nurit Bird-David also “revisits” animism by borrowing from A. Irving Hallowell’s ethnography of the Canadian Ojibwa the idea that personality is not a characteristic reserved for humans alone. For them, on the contrary, the attribute of personhood emerges from the relationship with any type of being, without any categorization a priori (Hallowell 1960).22 Bird-David comes to consider animism as a relational epistemology quite distinct from modernist epistemology. Whereas modernist epistemology is, in her view, “a totalizing scheme of separated essences, approached ideally from a separated viewpoint, the object of this animistic knowledge is understanding relatedness from a related point of view within the shifting horizons of the related viewer” (Bird-David 1999: S77). For Bird-David, this relational epistemology is universal in scope. 22  Hallowell relates that he once asked an old man if all stones were alive, to which he was told, “No, but some are”. He concluded that the Ojibwa were not animists in the sense of systematically attributing a living soul to inanimate objects such as stones, that they did not have a consciously formulated theory about the nature of stones, but that they recognized a potential for animation in certain classes of objects under certain circumstances. This was decided by experience (Hallowell 1960: 24).

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While it enjoys authoritative status in so-called hunter-gatherer societies, it works equally well in Western contexts, for instance when relating to domestic plants or cars. We personify entities because we socialize with them, not the other way around, and perhaps the strangest thing is that modernity has opposed this tendency to animate things (Bird-David 1999: S79). Bird-David further strengthens her relational perspective by proposing that we no longer speak of persons but of relatives, as a person can exist in itself when it takes at least two to define a relative (Bird-David 2018). Harvey acknowledges the value of this semantic shift, even though in his view the notion of person retains the merit of being more disruptive to the dominant atomizing understandings (Harvey 2021). This last remark is particularly relevant to the movement for the rights of nature and the legal animism that it aims to establish, since attributing legal personality to earth beings is tantamount to recognizing them as persons, in contradiction of the summa divisio that still prevails in Western law between persons and property. However, as we have seen, Hermitte, as well as Landivar and Ramillien, by referring largely to Descola to define legal animism, apprehend animism with the very terms of naturalism, which separates and divides, and therefore do not integrate the fully relational scope of animist thought if we follow Tim Ingold (Ingold 2000: 108). According to Ingold, animist thought constitutes an “ontology of dwelling” in which all humans, without distinction, are immersed in “an active, practical and perceptual engagement with constituents of the dwelt-in world” (Ingold 2000: 42), in which “the relations that human beings have with one another form just one part of the total field of relations embracing all living things” (Ingold 2000: 59). In Ingold’s processual perspective—which does not seem very different from the ecosophy of Arne Næss, thinker of the deep ecology (Naess 1989) and an central reference for the environmentalists that promote the rights of nature—all beings live, inhabit and interact in the world, without separation, and thus without a priori personification, in the manner of the Ojibwa that Hallowell described. The approach of embodiment and incorporation through ritual mentioned above thus seems consistent with this understanding of animism. In order to deploy the legal animism of the rights of nature, it appears necessary to give first to these earth beings the status of persons or “relatives” by mobilizing interbeing ritual forms that reduce the distance between mind and body, cognition and habitus, cerebral and incarnated knowledge. Ritual practice thus aims to escape from embodied patterns oriented

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by dispositions that can be described as ontological, and thus to move towards an “ontology” or “poetics of dwelling” made, according to Ingold, of continuous engagement with other beings in a single unified field of relations, in a single “web of life” (Capra 1997), would say the environmentalists who are the most enthusiastic about a holistic and monistic relationship to the world (Chamel 2018). I call this will in action, which translates into the interbeing ceremonies just described, a ritual animism that is inspired by the dwelt animism of hunter-gatherers without identifying with it, because it is not truly inhabited.23 This strategy shows very quickly its limits, which tends to confirm Descola’s intuition that one does not escape so easily from the dominant “mode of identification” of the society he or she leaves in. Thus, no matter how strong the intention to involve this lake or that river, the discourses surrounding the ritual planned for this purpose show that it fails to establish a direct connection with the entity that remains separate, for lack of a total engagement with the “lifeworld” (Ingold 1993). Indeed, the interlocutor of the ritual is not so much this particular river or that localized glacier, with which it would indeed be possible to cohabit, but a more global or abstract entity such as water, the latter being very frequently mobilized. This water is indeed honoured in the diversity of its forms, its sources and the specific interactions experienced by each person, as shown by the recurrent invitation to bring water from one’s own environment, but at the same time it is the idea of water that is omnipresent when it is constantly recalled that it is “the source of all life”, “the blood of the earth” and so on. This celebration of water as a universal substance involves the instrumentalization of specific aquatic environments whose rights are defended, by a top-down approach from the general idea to the specific case. For instance, the project of legal personalization of the River Frome did not emerge locally from a desire to protect the river, but from nature’s rights activists based elsewhere in the UK who saw in the “independent” local executive of Frome an interlocutor receptive to this iconoclastic approach.24 Similarly, the development of the tribunals on Lake Vättern in Sigtuna and on Mer de glace online suggested that the encounter between 23  The term “ritual animism” is used instead of “animistic rituality” to emphasize the constructed and voluntary character of an animism invented for specific purposes and which differs from a total animism of an “ontological” order. 24  Conversations with several key players in the case in Frome and online between September 2018 and July 2019.

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rights of nature activists and a few people with tangible knowledge of the defended entities contributed far more to the promotion of the concept of granting legal personality to non-humans than to the real protection of these specific cases. In fine, ritual animism is thus very far from the dwelt animism of hunter-gatherer societies with which the authors discussed above are familiar: the naturalistic separation between humans and non-­ humans is indeed questioned, but the ritual framework, in spite of its power of embodiment, does not seem to succeed in making the rapprochement effective, since it does not establish an “ontology of dwelling” in which (human) organisms and their environment form an indivisible totality (Ingold 2000: 9). The promotion of the rights of nature and the rituals deployed thus defend above all an alternative relationship to the world, holistic, monistic and ecocentric, one that emphasizes the links of interdependence between all beings, with the search of more harmonious relationships (it is thus rather close to a form of analogism without falling into the category theorized by Descola, see Chamel 2019). As I have shown elsewhere about people interested at the same time by collapsologie and a form of ecospirituality and who share a common alternative relationship to the world, promoters of the rights of nature seem to align themselves with this mindset, in a similar vein that does the milieu of alternative spiritualities, once identified with New Age (Chamel 2021). The importance of “interiority”, of “reconnecting” to oneself by closing eyes and adopting a meditative intention, the idea of a reconnection to water, starting with the water that makes us up, are recurrent features of the discourses accompanying the ceremonies, also emphasized in interviews. These rituals made of bricolage therefore have more to do with the spiritual practices of this environment than with those of the indigenous peoples described as animists. This neo-­ animism expressed by the ritual resonates with the religious dimension attributed to the term by Tylor; but his animism understood as a primitive religion in an evolutionary perspective has become a globalized contemporary spiritual practice, almost primitivist in its valorization of the knowledge and practices of sometimes idealized and essentialized indigenous peoples. A more classical effect of these rituals seems to be to reinforce the sense of belonging to the collective, this time inter-human. Without being rites of passage, the two Sigtuna rituals had brought the participants closer together, no doubt by the mere fact of having shared intense moments, of having experience a kind of communion together if one may say so, so much so that the second ritual resembled the Christian Eucharist.

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Conclusion The enquiry carried out at the heart of the networks for the rights of nature helps to understand better the processes at work beyond the purely legal discussions. It shows that the notion of legal animism proposed by Marie-Angèle Hermitte is embodied in numerous interbeing ceremonies that aim, by re-establishing links with the earth beings whose legal personality is being defended, to awaken the animistic part that lies dormant in everyone. If this ritual animism seems to fail to transform the being-in-­ the-world of the moderns and in any case to think like hunter-gatherers, it is not without effects. Attempting to capture for themselves some of the legitimacy of indigenous leaders, these practices tend to crystallize and become institutionalized at the end of a process of ritual innovation that allows each person to express his or her creativity by influencing each other in a process of specular interaction, which can strengthen group cohesion. It also promotes another relationship to the world, holistic and monistic, where the parts are in interdependent and harmonious relationship within a unified Whole, a perspective comparable to Descola’s analogism. The rights of nature then seem to be not a pretext but a banner to promote this ecocentrism that is no longer truly naturalistic, without being truly animistic. What is at stake goes beyond rights of nature, as shown by the multiplication of events calling on representatives of indigenous peoples and proposing similar ceremonies, such as those of the Flourishing Diversity Summit. Even established churches do not seem to be outdone, as shown by a ceremony in the presence of Pope Francis in the Vatican gardens with Amazonian indigenous representatives.25 Acknowledgements  I gratefully acknowledge insightful comments from colleagues and students following presentations of my work at Université de Lausanne, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris), University College London and conferences (ISSRNC 2019 Cork, IUAES 2019 Poznan and EASA 2020 Lisbon). Several grants of the Swiss National Science Foundation made the research, analysis, writing and improvement process possible.  https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-10/pope-synod-amazon-saintfrancis-vatican-gardens.html last accessed 2 December 2021. These developments do not happen without friction. Thus, statuettes representing the Pachamama, present at this ceremony and then exhibited in a church in Rome, were thrown into the Tiber to denounce their allegedly “idolatrous” nature. https://catholicherald.co.uk/pope-francis-apologisesthat-amazon-synod-pachamama-was-thrown-into-tiber-river/ last accessed 2 December 2021. 25

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References Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford University Press. Bellier, Irène. 2012. “Les peuples autochtones aux Nations unies: un nouvel acteur dans la fabrique des normes internationales.” Critique internationale 54 (1): 61–80. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (S1): S67–S91. ———. 2018. “Persons or Relatives? Animistic Scales of Practice and Imagination.” In Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (eds.), Rethinking Relations and Animism. Personhood and Materiality, 25–34. New York: Routledge. Cadena, Marisol de la. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cadena, Marisol de la, and Orin Starn. 2007. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg. Capra, Fritjof. 1997. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York; London: Anchor Books. Chamel, Jean. 2018. “‘Tout Est Lié’. Ethnographie d’un réseau d’intellectuels engagés de l’écologie (France-Suisse): De l’effondrement systémique à l’écospiritualité holiste et moniste.” PhD dissertation. Université de Lausanne. ———. 2019. “Relational Ecologists Facing ‘the End of a World’: Inner Transition, Ecospirituality, and the Ontological Debate.” In Rosalyn Bold (ed.), Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Change, 161–181. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2021. “Waiting for Ecological Apocalypse: From New Age Millenarianism to Collapsologie in French-Speaking Europe.” Journal of the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture (JSRNC) 15 (4): 441-461. Charmaz, Kathy, and Linda Liska Belgrave. 2007. Grounded Theory. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Online Library. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Demeulenaere, Élise. 2017. “L’anthropologie au-delà de l’anthropos.” In Wolf Feuerhahn, Élise Demeulenaere, and Guillaume Blanc (eds.), Humanités environnementales: Enquêtes et contre-enquêtes, 43–73. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. ———. 2019. “Savoirs paysans et conservation des ressources génétiques: réductionnisme stratégique et réflexivité.” Anthropologie et Sociétés 43 (3): 167–192. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Descola, Philippe, and Tim Ingold. 2014. Être au monde: Quelle expérience commune? Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon.

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Espinosa, Cristina. 2014. “The Advocacy of the Previously Inconceivable: A Discourse Analysis of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth at Rio+20.” The Journal of Environment & Development 23 (4): 391–416. ———. 2017. “Bringing about the Global Movement for the Rights of Nature: Sites and Practices for Intelligibility.” Global Networks 17 (4): 463–482. Graham, Laura R., and H.  Glenn Penny. 2014. Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Grimes, Ronald L. 2021. “Improvising Ritual.” In Graham Harvey, Michael Houseman, Sarah M. Pike, and Jone Salomonsen (eds.), Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource, 17–36. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hallowell, Alfred Irving. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View.” In Stanley Diamond (ed.), Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, 19–52. New York: Columbia University Press. Hanna, Philippe, Esther Jean Langdon, and Frank Vanclay. 2016. “Indigenous Rights, Performativity and Protest.” Land Use Policy 50 (January): 490–506. Harris, Adrian. 2008. “The Wisdom of the Body: Embodied Knowing in EcoPaganism.” PhD dissertation. University of Winchester. Harvey, Graham. 2021. “Indigenous Rituals Remake the Larger-than-Human Community.” In Graham Harvey, Michael Houseman, Sarah M.  Pike, and Jone Salomonsen (eds.), Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource, 69–85. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hermitte, Marie-Angèle. 2013. Le droit saisi au vif: Sciences, technologies, formes de vie. Entretiens avec Francis Chateauraynaud. Paris: Petra. ———. 2018. “Artificialisation de la nature et droit(s) du vivant.” In Philippe Descola (ed.), Les natures en question, 257–284. Paris: Odile Jacob / Collège de France. Hodgson, Dorothy. 2014. “Culture Claims: Being Maasai at the United Nations.” In Laura R.  Graham, and H.  Glenn Penny (eds.), Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences, 55–82. Houseman, Michael. 2010. “Des rituels contemporains de première menstruation.” Ethnologie française 40 (1): 57–66. ———. 2012. Le rouge est le noir: Essai sur le rituel. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail. ———. 2016. “Comment comprendre l’esthétique affectée des cérémonies New Age et néopaïennes ?” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 174 (April): 213–237. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism.” In Kay Milton (ed.), Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, 31–42. London; New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London; New York: Routledge.

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Kuper, Adam. 2003. “The Return of the Native.” Current Anthropology 44 (3): 389–402. Landivar, Diego, and Émilie Ramillien. 2019. “Du sujet de droit à l’hyper-sujet du droit: Une analyse anthropologique comparée du droit des entités de la nature en Bolivie et en Équateur.” Revue juridique de l’environnement HS18: 69–88. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Politiques de la nature: Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie. Paris: La Découverte. Leach, Melissa, and James Fairhead. 2002. “Modes de contestation: le ‘savoir indigène’ et la ‘science des citoyens’ en Afrique de l’Ouest et dans les Caraïbes.” Revue internationale des sciences sociales 173 (3): 337–351. Macleod, Morna. 2017. “Ethical Tribunals: Maya Incursions into Symbolic Social Justice.” In Helen Gilbert and Michelle H.  Raheja (eds.), In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization, 255–72. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2001. “‘Making Place’ at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.  N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (3): 415–48. Næss, Arne. 1989. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pulitano, Elvira. 2012. Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramos, Alcida Rita. 1992. The hyperreal Indian. Brasilia: Universidade de Brasília. Schulte-Tenckhoff, Isabelle. 1998. La question des peuples autochtones. Bruxelles: Bruylant. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet M.  Corbin. 1997. Grounded Theory in Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tilley, Christopher. 1997. “Performing Culture in the Global Village.” Critique of Anthropology 17 (1): 67–89. Tylor, Edward Burnett. 2010a. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010b. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART III

More-than-Human Spiritualities: Liminality, Embodiment and Intimate Experiences of Personal Transformation

CHAPTER 8

Escaping the Modern Predicament: Nature as Refuge and Community in Contemporary Health Practices in Wales, Sweden, and Finland Ed Lord and Henrik Ohlsson

Introduction In contemporary Western culture, nature is often perceived of as pure, authentic, and life-affirming, in contrast to the messiness, artificiality, and life-lessness of modern society (Kidner 2012). We see this in advertising, in popular culture, and, not least, in the growing interest in nature connection as a health practice. Ironically, as our distance to nature has

Ed Lord (*) Swansea University, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. Ohlsson Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_8

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increased in modernity, our relationships with nature and beings associated with it1 may have become more unequivocally positive, as compared to older folkloristic accounts in which such beings could also be dangerous and malevolent. This, however, is of course an over-­simplification. To gain a deeper understanding, it is important to pay close attention to the complexities of people’s attitudes and experiences in encounters with nature. We have studied the burgeoning international phenomenon of therapeutic nature practices, such as ecotherapy, forest bathing, and forest therapy, in geographical and cultural contexts with much in common but also notable differences: Wales, Sweden, and Finland. In both our fields, we have found that one important factor in participant’s experiences of healing is the notion of escape. It may be an escape from social demands and restrictions or from techno-modernity. In this escape lies an implicit dichotomy between nature and culture, although many of our interlocutors consciously strive beyond this dichotomy. However, there is a tension here between a negative and a positive understanding of what nature is. What our interlocutors speak of is not just an escape from but also to something. Nature is a refuge, but it is far from empty. It is a space shared with other beings that are full of life and whose presence is not a burden but an injection of energy. Nature is experienced as a community of beings, which we will here refer to as earth beings. As a being, we define any entity which is related to as being alive and communicative in some sense. An earth being, then, is a non-human entity related to in the above manner. It may be an animal, a tree, a rock, or even a place. We are not concerned with beliefs regarding intrinsic qualities (such as life or sentience) but rather in the ways in which people relate (bodily, emotionally, and morally) to the entities in question. In this way, our understanding of our interlocutors’ relationships with earth beings is close to the relational views of animism that have gained popularity in anthropology in recent decades (Hallowell 1960; Bird-David 1999; Harvey 2006). For many of our interlocutors, nature offers relief because it is perceived as a community where everyone exists on equal terms. We will use Victor Turner’s term communitas, that is, a community without stratification resulting from the dissolvement of social structures in a liminal condition. In this chapter, we will discuss ethnographic material from two geographical fields in relation to their specific social and cultural contexts as 1

 Henceforth referred to as earth beings, defined below.

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well as to contemporary Western culture in general. We will explore participants’ relations with earth beings in  the context  of nature-related health and wellbeing practices, hoping thereby also to contribute to a re-­ evaluation of the classical and widely used terms liminality and communitas.

Nature Connection as a Health Practice: The Western Zeitgeist The intersection of human health and nature has a distinctly Zeitgeist feel about it currently. From empirical and theoretical work in numerous disciplines including medicine and health sciences, geography and psychology, exposure to nature has been claimed to improve health in a huge variety of ways, including through the reduction of stress (Gidlow et al. 2016; Olafsdottir et al. 2017), attention restoration (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Berto 2005), improved mood (Joye and Bolderdijk 2015), slowing of cognitive ageing (Cherrie et  al. 2019), improved immune function (Kuo 2015), frequency of exercise (Gladwell et al. 2013), increased life satisfaction (Korpela et al. 2008), social connection (Chen et al. 2013), and better sleep hygiene (Morita et  al. 2011; Stothard et  al. 2017). Bloomfield (2017) noted that the evidence for mental health benefits of nature is “substantial”, and although “findings are of variable reliability”, “there is a consistent positive trend” (p. 82). Alongside empirical claims like these to be found in scholarly work there has been a widespread uptake of therapeutic nature themes in mass popular culture. Indicative of this is a number of mass-market books with high global sales, such as Florence Williams’ (2018) The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, and Richard Louv’s (2008) Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. The notion that human health and exposure/connection to nature are interrelated is not, however, a new or novel thing. For example, in relation to mental health  specifically,  narratives around an intertwining relationship between nature and ‘madness’ are a recurring theme historically (Bentall 2004; Fisher 2013; Foucault 2001 [1965]; Shepard 1998 [1982]). What interests us as researchers and ethnographers is why this notion has come to the fore as such a strong cultural Zeitgeist in Western countries  at this specific point in time.  Specifically,  our research focuses on how it is being operationalised by individuals and groups in our contexts in Wales and Sweden.

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Two Contemporary Ethnographic Studies of the Nature/Health Intersection In the following, we will present our ethnographic material from two field studies, one in Wales and one in Sweden and Finland. The practices included are similar but not identical. And, similarly, the social contexts have much in common but also some possibly important differences which will be discussed in the concluding sections of the chapter. Wales Using ethnographic methods, including 350 hours of participant observation, interviews, group discussions, and analysis of documents, between 2017 and 2019, the fieldwork in Wales examined the experiences of people who were engaging  in  ‘ecotherapy’  through participation in  specific  projects.  To aid in the  sampling  process  a definition of  ecotherapy used by the UK mental health charity ‘Mind’ was applied: Ecotherapy (sometimes called green care) comprises nature-based interventions in a variety of natural settings. Ecotherapy initiatives usually consist of a facilitated, specific intervention, for a particular participant, rather than simply a ‘natural’ experience for the general public. Ecotherapy approaches are ‘therapeutic’ in nature although some ecotherapy initiatives also include formal therapy (e.g.  counselling sessions, CBT, psychotherapy etc.) as an integral part of the programme. (Bragg et al. 2013, 13)

In this chapter, fieldnotes and interview excerpts from two woodland-­ based interventions groups WellWoods and EcoConnect (all pseudonyms to protect participant anonymity) in Wales are presented. These projects had their genesis within or around the decade prior to this research, with Well Woods founded in 2010 as the wellbeing outreach project of a UK national social forestry organisation; EcoConnect founded slightly earlier by an individual with lived experience of serious psychiatric diagnosis,  this project had elements closely associated with the global forest bathing/therapy movement (a similarity with the Nordic fieldwork described below). Wales is widely seen as culturally and geographically distinct to its larger UK neighbour, England, largely through having its own language, a generally lower population density, and a more ‘rugged’ landscape in the popular imagination (Gruffudd et al. 2021). Wales was the location of some of the earliest chapters in the industrial revolution (with tin, copper, and iron works  dating back up to 350  years and large-scale coal mining

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200 years in the South Wales valleys) and associated environmental degradation and demographic effects like urbanisation.  This industrial  heritage occupies an interesting dialectical interplay with widespread notions of the ‘wild’ and rugged coastline, moorland, and mountains of the country (enshrined in Wales’ three National Parks and five designated Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, covering approximately 25% of the entire land area). The health and wellbeing of an increasingly urbanised population, working through a legacy of deindustrialisation, frames notions of a need for ‘nature reconnection’ seen in the ecotherapy field under review, and there are multiple echoes of the Swedish fieldwork context outlined below. Wales is a part of the UK, but since 1999 some powers have been transferred to a devolved  parliament  and government, with further areas of jurisdiction added to these initial powers in 2007 and 2011. Included in these devolved powers are both health and social care, and departments associated with ‘natural’ spaces including environment, agriculture, forestry, rural development, culture, and town and country planning. Due to this political arrangement Wales, along with the other  UK  devolved nations of Scotland and Northern Ireland,  displays  distinct aspects  of autonomy in  cultural and policy terms  (Hannigan 2021; Wallace 2019). One notable aspect of this autonomy has been the development of “all of government”  wellbeing strategies  (Wallace 2019), enshrined in Wales in the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. This has arguably  created a political environment that is conducive to the wider Zeitgeist of nature and human health, as summed up in this quote from a report commissioned by the Welsh Government into the designated landscapes (such as National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) in its jurisdiction: The designated landscapes are now far more than passive ‘green lungs’ for the urban populations; they are as we state in our vision, the new, dynamic and productive ‘factories of well-being’. (Marsden et al. 2015, 5)

Despite this conducive political and policy climate, however, there is no centrally recognised standard for ecotherapy or green care. Therefore, projects are often small, rely on blocks of grant funding, and must negotiate health and social care arrangements such as social prescribing mechanisms (Wallace et al. 2021).

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Sweden and Finland The field research in Sweden and Finland consists of 280 hours of on-site participatory observations, 26 recorded interviews, numerous informal conversations, emails, and contacts on social media, oriented towards activities labelled as forest bathing and forest therapy, which have gained popularity in the Nordic countries in recent years, as well as analysis of websites and literature, all conducted between 2018 and 2021. Forest bathing is a translation of the Japanese term shinrin-yoku, which was coined in the early 1980s (Miyazaki 2018, 9). In the last decade, this concept spread rapidly in the U.S. and Western Europe, under the aegis of a plethora of national and international associations as well as independent practitioners. Many of the existing organisations in the West are in some way related to the U.S.-based Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (ANFT). The terms forest bathing and forest therapy are sometimes used interchangeably. But there has been some debate regarding their distinction. There are no state regulations in this area. The standardisations and certifications are made by the practitioners themselves and their organisations, sometimes with the ambition to integrate the practice with the conventional health-care system. For instance, Petra Ellora Cau Wetterholm, a pioneer in this practice in Sweden, has made efforts in this direction, defining forest bathing as a preventive health-care intervention, and reserving the term forest therapy for more targeted interventions for patients diagnosed with exhaustion syndrome, anxiety, or depression (Cau Wetterholm 2020). Thus far, there is no national health-care strategy that includes forest bathing/therapy or other forms of nature-based interventions. But there are several regional and municipal initiatives. The fieldwork followed the development of this practice in Sweden and Finland since 2018, through participatory observations, interviews, written material, and continuous communication with key persons. Most interviews have been with people who have a serious commitment to the practice. In Sweden, the term shinrin-yoku/forest bathing was first introduced in 2016.2 Since then, about 70 forest bathing guides from all over the country have been trained and certified by  Shinrin-Yoku  Sweden (a sole proprietor), Forest Therapy Institute (FTI), and Scandinavian Nature and Forest Therapy Institute (SNFTI). It is clearly a burgeoning practice in Sweden—as in many other countries—and it has received a lot of media attention. In Finland, the association International Forest Therapy Days  https://shinrin-­yokusweden.se/verksamhet/, accessed 7 June 2021

2

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(IFTD) has stirred up a lot of attention around the concept with yearly gatherings of researchers and practitioners since 2018 (of which the ones in 2020 and 2021 were held online due to the pandemic). Swedes and Finns cultivate an image of being nature-loving people. This idea has a complex historical background (Cf. Uddenberg 1995; Thurfjell 2020). But in its modern form, it is closely connected to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation—which began somewhat late compared to the leading industrial nations in Western Europe, but which picked up the pace in the twentieth century and, combined with social democratic redistribution policy, built a strong welfare state with high material standards. In these processes, the vast majority lost their everyday interactions with nature. Many have kept a link back to self-­ subsistence farming, which in many cases lies only a few generations back, through their summer cottages and through gathering berries and mushrooms, fishing and hunting—activities which have now become much appreciated parts of leisure time. Early on in the industrial period, outdoor culture flourished as a counter-reaction to the increased distance to nature. In this way, through increased distance to nature, and an outdoor culture which tries to compensate for that distance, nature has become something out of the everyday, a place for healing and recuperation from the stresses of a modern life. In the last decade, outdoor culture has been growing. For instance, visits to National Parks in Sweden increased by 21% between 2013 and 2019 (Naturvårdverket 2020). The Covid situation is likely to have further reinforced this trend (Länsstyrelsen Stockholm 2021; Skriver Hansen et al. 2021). The growing forest bathing trend is riding this wave of increased interest in outdoor culture, as well as  that of  a wider health and wellbeing culture. The growing awareness of the ecological crisis is arguably another important factor. Most practitioners consider the practice on a social level as a way towards more harmonious human-nature relations.

Notions of Escape In both our fields, we have identified a frequently expressed identification amongst participants of natural spaces as something ‘set apart’ or seen as ‘other’. This arguably echoes the nature-culture dualism that has been suggested as a mindset characteristic of Western modernity (Kidner 2012).  This  notion of otherness and difference was  operationalised  as therapeutic in the fieldwork contexts under review through the idea that

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these  ‘natural’  spaces were somewhere one could ‘get away’ to as an  ‘escape’. ‘Other’ and ‘escape’  are, however,  both broad  themes and are thus in need of furnishing with finer grained concepts. In this section, we provide  a  more granular  delineation by  guiding  the reader through some of the multiple ways that escape was both conceptualised and  operationalised  by  participants in the fieldwork settings  in Wales, Sweden, and Finland.  ‘Escape’,  in  both settings,  was framed  as getting away from society, often in terms of a particular notion of technologically and bureaucratically mediated modernity, but also as an escape from structurally imposed limitations on occupational fulfilment through providing a space for learning skills and accomplishing satisfying tasks. The approach to ecotherapy,  observed in the two  Welsh  woodland groups—EcoConnect  and  WellWoods—placed a strong emphasis on ‘hiding  away’, being embedded in the environment, and cut off from the outside world. On arrival at one of their sessions it would be very hard to locate the group within the site without being guided by a leader.  Through  deliberate  strategies  of finding secluded ‘close-but-­ remote-feeling’ niches in the woodland, these groups achieved a situation that had a remote ‘feel’ while being very close to the wider public but without either party being aware of the other.3 This use of ‘close-but-­ remote-feeling’ niches was coupled with a ‘slowed-down’ temporality: the woodland ecotherapy sessions were typically four hours long and involved bodily movements like sitting, kneeling, and lying down; wood craft tasks; wildlife observation; and,  with  EcoConnect,  a  practice called  a  ‘hunter-­ gatherer ancestors walk’ (Fig. 8.1). The challenges involved in accomplishing basic tasks  in these ‘close-­ but-­remote-feeling’ niches  required a focus that fed into the feeling of slowing  down, and  marked a contrast with everyday life—making this clearly ‘time away’. An example of this was the making of hot drinks, at the EcoConnect ‘remote’ basecamp. This required engaging directly with earth beings and elements—such as firewood collected nearby, sparks flying from steel striking on flint, and the dance of flames from the resultant fire. This was a visceral experience, involving the risk of cutting or burning 3  Most of the woodland sites the projects in Wales used were not remote—even by Western European standards—many were popular with the public judging by the amount of footfall noted during fieldwork in some settings, some had facilities such as car parks and signage, and some were close to towns. In response to these spatial characteristics it took specific strategies deployed by leaders to make the sessions feel like time away separate from the outside world.

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Fig. 8.1  Finding a ‘close-but-remote’ niche in the woods with an EcoConnect group. Pembrokeshire, Wales. (Photo: E. Lord, September 2018)

one’s hands, and discomfort from eyes filled with smoke, just to accomplish the seemingly simple task of boiling water. This activity made a sharp contrast with more ‘everyday’ experiences of making hot drinks, such as boiling an electric kettle on a kitchen worktop. Earth beings are still in-­ play with the electric kettle (wind turns turbines or fossil fuels are burned), but they are at a distance, mediated by power stations and the electrical grid; techniques displacing the imminent interaction of human and more-­ than-­human earth being that is fundamental to making a drink in woodland (Fig. 8.2).

Escaping from But Also to In these practices of ‘getting away’ there was both an escape from something perceived as pathological about the spaces of everyday life (disconnecting), but there was also the pull of the salutogenic (Lindström and Eriksson 2005) within nature (reconnecting). This was very explicitly pinned down to particular processes by some participants, as Paul4 (Male 4  All names of interlocutors in the Welsh as well as the Swedish fieldnotes and interviews have been altered to assure anonymity.

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Fig. 8.2  The interaction of elements, beings, and hardware/tools involved in making a hot drink in woodland. Gower, Wales. (Photo: E. Lord, April 2018)

20s, EcoConnect) describes below, but for others it was more of a vague and nebulous idea of disconnecting and/or reconnecting: [P]eople doing  different things and it all becomes quite mysterious—you conjure up stories of why people are doing certain things, and why objects are in certain places. [Paul; EcoConnect]

This participant, Paul, had been negotiating feelings of paranoia (which had partly informed a recent psychiatric diagnosis) in the busy spaces of the local town where he lived. But his notion of escape from this aspect of society did not rest on a silent absence of empty nature, but on a difference in the activity around him. In the woodland space the earth beings did not invoke paranoid thoughts for Paul, as the people in the urban space did: the more-than-human earth beings were a presence, but one that lacked malevolent intent. Another participant in the same EcoConnec t group, Colin (Male 40s), developed this point in a later group discussion described in fieldnotes:

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“look at the sun streaming through the trees …,” Colin points up to the canopy and continues speaking “it’s magical out here today. In town we are all judged and separated, half a mile out of town here we are, no one is judging anyone, no one needs to spend any  money,  this is all free!” (Fieldnotes; EcoConnect; Hidden Woods; 14 June 2018)

This notion of  escape through  different social relations facilitated by the physical and cultural affordances of nature is a point of suture between the two fieldwork contexts in Wales and Sweden. One important theme in the interviews with Swedish  forest bathers is that people have specific places in nature where they go more or less regularly to find peace and comfort and to reflect (Fig. 8.3). This is certainly not unique for Sweden. In fact, it is a practice actively cultivated in the international forest bathing milieu, often termed “sit-spot” (Cf. Clifford 2018, 77–9, and 2021). But it is also something that seems to come naturally for many of the practitioners long before they engage actively in forest bathing. Tina, a forest bathing guide,  describes how she started this practice in childhood and has continued in adult life: (W)hen I was around 7–8 years old I had my rock in the woods on a hill where I always went when mom and dad were being difficult or something. So, I went there to kind of refuel and cry or be angry or sad or just sit there and think. And this has continued. I have moved around quite a lot, but I have always had my places or my rocks in the forest, or some cliff by the sea or the lake, or a place where I walk, which I kind of return to all year round to, well, get strength or just sit and be. But often because if I have been sad or to find comfort or energy. (Interview with Tina, 10 Nov. 2019)

What Tina describes here is a place of refuge to which she can escape a conflict with her parents or other social pressures in adult life, a place where she can be safe. It may, however, also be a place of communication, but communication of a different kind than that of everyday human life. Occurrences in such places in nature can be perceived as meaningful and have an instant effect on a person’s mood. Tina recalls an occasion when she found a ‘sit-spot’ in a new area: I wandered around to find a place where I wanted to sit for a while. And then I sat down. (…) Not far from me, I don’t know exactly what species it was, but a bird of prey, lifted. It was a big heavy bird of prey that just “poof!”, lifted and flew away maybe 50 meters ahead of me or so. It was

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Fig. 8.3  Forest bathers entering the portal to the forest in reverent silence. Evo, Finland. (Photo: H. Ohlsson, July 2019) powerful! And then I sat for a while and  made notes  and then only after maybe 15 minutes it came back. I was wondering if it was the same bird, but it flew between the tree trunks just 15 meters in front of me. So, you felt the heavy sound and, yes, a big big bird, yeah, it was overwhelming, awesome! And then I got this strong feeling that, well, I trusted my intuition in choosing that place, and it felt like it chose me rather than that I chose it, or perhaps that we chose each other mutually. (Interview with Tina, 10 Nov. 2019)

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The appearance of birds and other animals is often experienced as a kind of communication with the place, and it can change people’s mood for the better in an instant. Thus, while the animals are encountered as beings in their own right, the place as a whole also comes across as a being in which animals, trees, rocks, and so on are part. In the fieldwork in Wales the ‘sit-spot’ concept was introduced by one of the session leaders with EcoConnect, Pete. He had found benefit from this practice over a long period of time, much like Tina in the Swedish cohort, and was keen to share it with others. To engage the diverse participants of the group Pete suggested following the more-than-human earth beings that were all around in the woodland setting; as recorded in fieldnotes, “ignore the surfaced paths that brought us here, look for the smaller lines in the woodland. Follow the winding hidden track that is probably used by foxes at night, look for the elevated ground with a view that a bird would choose as a landing place. Then sit in that place, at the end of the fox run, or on the bird perch, pause, look around, smell, see, feel. What is going on?” (Fieldnotes; EcoConnect; Cwm Woods; 3 May 2018)

The group then dispersed into the woods and no one could be seen for 30 minutes. When we re-convened at an agreed time people shared stories of their ‘sit-spot’: what different trees sounded like as their branches swayed in the breeze, debating the difference between badger and fox trails, reaching a high point where soil and leaf litter were replaced by bare rock, and a near miss as a Red Kite swooped low. Pete encouraged the participants to find a similar place they could return to regularly and watch the seasons change (Fig. 8.4). Thus,  nature is an escape or a refuge not only in the negative sense, providing distance and shelter from something (e.g., social demands and the stress of technology). It is also an arrival to something. This theme is developed in the next section, in which  we  introduce  the concepts of communitas and liminality.

A Community Full of Life To get to be in nature on the same terms as the trees or the moose or the ant, simply being there, it takes me to a space that I rarely get to in my everyday life, a space inside which, as I’m thinking now, has to do with a lack

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Fig. 8.4  The tea ceremony ending a forest bathing session, where experiences are shared and gratitude expressed to the forest. Karjalohja, Finland. (Photo: H. Ohlsson, August 2018) of demands, a pause from achievement and from trying to meet any kind of expectations. (Interview with Annika, 13 Feb. 2018) [The forest] is where you can be regardless of who you are and what you do or if you’re unemployed or whatever. (Interview with Eva, 9 May 2018)

The above descriptions, of nature as a world full of life and other beings, are examples of experiences that  can be had during alone time in nature as well as during collective practice. During a forest bathing session, the guide often emphasises that nature is full of living beings, and the exercises carried out involve connecting with those beings through close sensory attention. Some participants in the Welsh EcoConnect group even found they could see themselves ‘as’ the animals during the ‘sit-spot’ time described in the previous section; for example, a participant, Hamish, reported that on reflection he often felt like the fox: Seen by many humans as a feral pest, but finding safety hidden amongst the trees, stretching my legs as I wind back and forth along a narrow path, ­pausing, listening, smelling, keeping moving; the fox doesn’t care what

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society thinks, it is just breathing the air and living its life. I thought of that while following the fox’s trail, his presence was there in the footprints, the branches brushed aside, and the entrance to the burrow. (Hamish, participant in EcoConnect, Fieldnotes; Cwm Woods; 3 May 2018)

Thus, it is not emptiness that generates the experience of escape and refuge. Nor does it seem to be the lack of human presence, considering the fact that participants in collective nature exercises have such experiences.5 What does seem to be important is a lack of social roles and demands. Nature is a community, but one without social roles and stratification, a communitas, as described by Victor Turner (1969). In Turner’s understanding, communitas arises in a liminal state, an in-between state where the social system is dissolved within a ritual framework, enabling participants to transform, reconstitute themselves, and re-enter society in a new role (e.g., in rites of passage between childhood and adulthood). In forest bathing, nature therapy, and similar practices, a single session is usually more about recuperation followed by return to the same social role. The experience of  liminality and  communitas  in this context is a temporary relief from the stresses of everyday life. Practitioners do testify to having gone through life-altering transformations. However, this is for the most part something that takes place over time through regular practice. Later ritual theory has been somewhat less preoccupied with social meaning and instead put more emphasis on inner experience. Catherine Bell has observed a paradigm shift in the ritual culture of the West through which rituals and ritual-like activities have become primarily inward-­ focused, that is, they aim to bring about an inner change in the participating individuals, rather than addressing external social structures and functions (Bell 1997, 240–2). In this perspective, it is conceivable that profound inner change may take place without manifesting in any tangible way in a person’s social and societal life. As in many other forms of contemporary wellbeing and self-development practice, it is an inner process that often leads to a different attitude towards one’s given roles and duties  without necessarily  altering them. Over time, the practice may result in outward changes as well, for instance in a work situation that has become unbearable. However, it is often hard to tell whether the practice  Lack of human presence is probably a factor, at least for some people. Many of our interlocutors deeply appreciate spending time alone in nature. But the fact that the feelings of escape and refuge can be experienced during collective exercises as well speaks against this being the only or the main factor. 5

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is causing the change or if it just works as a catalyst and provides a conceptual framework for a change that would occur anyway. A methodological challenge when dealing with life-stories related in interviews is of course that past events and processes are filtered through a person’s present understanding. A lack of social roles and demands is still an absence, of course. However, in many practitioners’ accounts it is also clear that positive characteristics are attributed to earth beings. The presence of life and living beings is experienced as revitalising—a positive contrast to everyday life, which appears as lifeless and grey. As attention shifts, earth beings such as trees or animals can appear more alive and communicable—that is, they become beings in the full sense of the definition we are using here. The forest bathing practitioner, Annika, describes this experience: When I’ve been in Nature long enough, the trees somehow become more alive to me, than when I’m in this everyday busy mind, more preoccupied with my thoughts than with my sensory impressions. Then I can hardly see. But when I really get to the point where I see, I often perceive incredible beauty, which leads to gratitude. Wonder is a good word, the feeling that everything is so magical, crisp, and magically alive! (Interview with Annika, 13 Feb. 2018)

As mentioned in the introduction, many practitioners recall meaningful encounters with earth beings from their childhoods, a type of encounters which are maintained and encouraged in the practices described in this chapter. Eleonora, an experienced practitioner of forest bathing and forest therapy, provides a vivid account of her childhood experiences, an important part of the background to how she came to her current practice: As I remember it, the way I thought about it when I was young, very young, was that I was a bit elevated, thrilled and delighted about being in a kind of contact, to be able to look around and feel that I could communicate with the animals – “what if I could really do that?” well, something like that, the thrill and the delight of not being left in this dualistic thinking that here I am as a human being and over there are the animals, but instead in some spontaneous way be part of something, of a whole, which one now might call a spiritual or religious kind of feeling … and also this idea, which was then completely spontaneous, it wasn’t something that I had picked up from somewhere, that the animals might be looking at me and that there may be more to the animals than what was usually attributed to them. (Interview with Eleonora, 18 April 2018)

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In summary, in both the Nordic and the Welsh cases, participants tend to experience nature as a community, a community which is contrasted with everyday life and human society both negatively, as a lack of social roles and demands, and positively, as a presence of invigorating life. Like Turner’s  communitas, it is a temporary dissolution of the social system which enables transformation. With Bell, however, we observe that this transformation takes place primarily on the ‘inside’, that is, in people’s attitudes, thinking, and feeling towards  the world, other beings, and towards their own roles and obligations in society. This altered mode of relating, which may be temporary or permanent, is at least part of the recuperating and invigorating experience of nature as described by forest bathing and ecotherapy practitioners.

Liminality and Communitas This being a subculture which takes a lot of inspiration from research (mostly from psychology and biomedicine, but also from the humanities and not least anthropology), liminality (but not communitas, to our knowledge) is a concept which is sometimes used by leading practitioners themselves to describe the condition achieved in forest bathing (cf. Clifford 2018, 67–8). The departure from the everyday, the dissolvement of social roles and attitudes, and the feeling of renewal, recuperation, and re-evaluation are all factors that have been associated with liminal states. As we have seen, however, there are also differences from how liminality has traditionally been understood, in that it works as a catalyst primarily of inner change (temporary or permanent) rather than of social transition. And there is at least one more noteworthy difference. There are very few traces of the danger that has often been associated with liminality and liminal beings in earlier anthropological and historical studies (van Gennep 1960 [1908]; Douglas 2001 [1966]; Turner 1969;  Häll 2013). Mary Douglas, for instance, has observed the ambivalent function in many cultures of liminality as a source of both danger and power which is actualised  during transitional phases but also in people who are permanently placed on the margins of society (Douglas 2001 [1966], 95–114). In contemporary Western European forest bathing and ecotherapy, however, the danger-part appears to be lacking.

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Wellbeing Through Contact with Earth Beings When asked about unpleasant experiences in nature, most of our interlocutors in both Wales and Sweden  struggle to remember  anything at all. Some remember being afraid of the forest at night-time during childhood. But this fear is now gone and replaced by a feeling of love and comfort. As discussed in the introduction, this unequivocally positive view may to some extent be due to the practical separation between nature and everyday life, through which nature has become associated with freedom from work, relaxation, and recuperation. In accordance with this generally positive view of nature, earth beings are seen as essentially benevolent and thus nothing to be afraid of. Earth beings, in our definition, may be animals or plants but also whole places in which animals that appear are perceived as elements of communication. As we saw in some of the quotes above, the presence of birds or other animals often elevates the mood. Animals may be seen as concentrations of many of the positive values ascribed to nature. They display nature’s freedom from the burdens of social structures (what we understand here as communitas) as well as spontaneity and vitality—an untamed life-force.  Trees display many of the same qualities but also tolerance, communication, and cooperation. Many practitioners are inspired by a genre of popular science of which Peter Wohhleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2016) is a prime example often referred to in our interviews and on websites promoting therapeutic connection with nature. It may be problematic to speak of earth beings as liminal, seeing as they are so unequivocally perceived as benevolent and salutary, an ideal to aspire to rather than a transitional or marginal state. However, some of their most treasured qualities in this context are precisely those that dissolve the order of modern society. Modernity entails unprecedented levels of control of behaviour and emotions (Anderson 2012; Firth 2016). At the same time, it has also brought with it a counter-reaction in the form of a strong appraisal of spontaneity, expressivity, and inward listening (Heelas and Woodhead 2004; Riis and Woodhead 2010, 34–8; Hochshild 2012, 22–3, 190–8). The therapeutic nature practices studied here may be understood as part of this counter-reaction—a counter-reaction which can be seen in many contemporary forms of spirituality—sometimes expressed and shared on an ideological level as a critique of modernity and sometimes merely as a personal need for escape.

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Conclusions In our attempts to shed light on relations with earth beings in contemporary nature-related health practices, we have found that the concepts of liminality and communitas can still contribute to our understanding if their meanings are somewhat modified in relation to contemporary Western culture. The inward and experience-focussed orientation of contemporary ritual culture—as well as of spiritual culture in general—makes the social dimensions less tangible (although relations are still at the centre). Moreover, the positive re-evaluation of nature appears to be connected with a similar re-evaluation of the notions of disorder, transitivity, and ambiguity, and in this way to neutralise the dangers traditionally associated with liminal conditions and beings. This may, in turn, reflect the postmodern condition as understood by Jean-Francois Lyotard, that is, a constantly nascent state in which the metanarratives of modernity have been delegitimatised (Lyotard 1984 37–41, 79). If there is no constancy, save the constancy of becoming, then all conditions are transitional and ambiguous. Although the social implications of these practices are difficult to grasp, we will, in the following, make some general reflections about the nature connection Zeitgeist in Wales, Sweden, and Western cultures more broadly. Observed in our research in both Sweden and Wales, it has been seen that contained within a seemingly simple and innocuous concept— ‘escape’—there is much complexity  in need of unpacking. Many of the interlocutors we encountered expressed this notion that nature presented opportunities to get away  from the social striations of society, as in the application of Turner’s (1969) communitas to describe a temporary dissolution of the social system. But, judging by the observed  blind spot to potentially negative/dangerous experiences of transformation in liminality, it seems there are some critical issues in need of consideration. Central to this is the observation that communitas and liminality effect change at the inner/individual level while bypassing any notion of social transformation. These observations suggest, we argue, that the individualised project of neoliberal modernity (Kidner 2012) is being reproduced in many of these practices. This reproduction is ironically  occurring  at the very moment that participants feel they are escaping  from the pathological effects of modernity.  It can be argued, however, that any subculture or social movement simultaneously both reflects and resists the social order of its time.

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In arguing,  earlier in this chapter,  for a contemporary Zeitgeist of nature and human health  we pointed out that this intersection is influenced by a range of factors associated with the experience of modernity in Western contexts.  These deliberate steps  ‘into’  nature seemingly make sense in a time and place where large sections of society can be argued to be separated from nature—disconnected—by urbanisation and their occupational sequestration. But in the urgency to heal and repair our Western “extinction of experience” (Soga and Gaston 2016)  we risk relying  too heavily on individualised notions of ‘inner transformation’ and avoiding the implicit  imperatives  of societal change.  In the rest of this  section we reflect on some of the broader challenges raised by this observation. First, if so many of our interlocutors attributed an unambiguously positive experience of liminality within nature, what happened to the people who are permanently placed on the margins of society (Douglas 2001 [1966], 95–114)? It must be acknowledged that there are structural barriers to accessing spaces seen as ‘natural’ in Western societies. For example, in the ethnographic fieldwork in Wales there were participants from significantly marginalised social groups, these included people with serious psychiatric diagnosis, and refugees and asylum seekers. While these cohorts expressed notions of escape in nature, their journey into nature was fraught with barriers. These barriers included pragmatic things like transport, but also a heavy burden of  bureaucratic practices, including monitoring  of grant expenditure (most ecotherapy projects in Wales were reliant on blocks of grant funding), that induced the very stresses and strains that others were unambiguously ‘escaping’ from. This echoes Graeber’s (2015) ethnographic work on bureaucratic practices, as well as other  organisational  ethnographies.  In  forest  bathing groups from the Swedish fieldwork, very few can be said to be significantly  marginalised. A  large proportion of them have experienced burnout fatigue and long sick-leaves due to over-burdening work situations. However, at least among people deeply engaged in the practice, the level of education is significantly higher than the population average and very few have immigrant backgrounds. Attempts are being made to use greenspace exposure to improve immigrant’s social and cultural integration (e.g., Moshtat 2007) and it is interesting to reflect on why these groups were under-­ represented in this fieldwork. Further research is needed, we argue, into the more ambiguous ways that notions of escape, communitas, and liminality in nature play out in groups on the margins.

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Next,  in enjoying the  salutogenic  effects of immersion in landscapes and spaces alive with non-human vitality, it cannot be ignored that there is a long shadow cast by the pressures on these things induced by human civilisation on a global scale (Kidner 2012). Thus, while escape from social pressure, from technology, and from the stresses of everyday life is to be welcomed  as a vital restorative effect of nature, this is an escape that  is becoming harder to find. As ethnographers in specific micro contexts we would be overstepping our analytic leverage  to provide overly  generalised or prescriptive solutions to this situation. We do note, however, that the effects of climate change, deforestation, and species extinction (among others) are well documented, and we urge a critical reflexivity in the forest therapy and ecotherapy field as to our collective imbrication in these problems, and the societal transformations needed in response. We also note that the question needs to be posed of why Western societies are so inhospitable to human flourishing that people seek health and wellbeing practices in an ‘escape’ away from these societies. We will end this section with the observation that there is a double scarcity in play here: a growing scarcity of alive and thriving nature, coupled with a scarcity of wellbeing within the spaces and practices of everyday life.

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CHAPTER 9

Crossing Thresholds with Nature Spirits: Ritual Design, Liminality, and Transformation in Northwestern France Yael Dansac

Introduction In Carnac archaeological site, contemporary spiritual practices are held on a regular basis, and from an emic point of view, their aim is to access the local megaliths “restorative powers” through the intervention of non-­ human entities called “nature spirits” associated with the stones. The reasons that draw participants to practices are mainly spiritual because they search to communicate with divine forces, seek their “true self,” and experience personal transformation. Embracing notions of nature as a source of beneficial powers, they can navigate through various spiritual domains and emphasize personal transformation as a conscious goal. The contemporary enchantment of archaeological sites as ideal places for achieving this objective is a phenomenon that can be traced back to the end of the 1960s, when the idea of a network connecting the “energy Y. Dansac (*) Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_9

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places” arose in the United States. It was conveyed through esoteric publications like that of John Michell entitled The View over Atlantis (1969), which embraced the idea that “ancient mysteries” and “powers” were contained inside ancient structures such as pyramids and megaliths. There is evidence showing that since the 1970s, travellers were visiting places considered as “sacred” or “powerful” to draw on their “energy” (Fedele 2014, 152–155; Ivakhiv 2003, 95–96). The idea of energy places was taken up by Californian youth of the sixties and seventies, who found themselves faced with a new urgency to think about globality and social complexity (Anderson 1995; Felder 1985, 7). Clearly, it was this youth who began to regard certain places on Earth as “animated,” considering them as inhabited by sacred energies and of non-human beings (English 2002, 8). Throughout the following decades, a process named “re-­ enchantment of nature” produced diverse contemporary devotions where nature was considered as a source of beneficial and restorative powers (Chanvallon 2011; Harvey 2013).1 The re-signification of archaeological sites as energy places was accompanied by the emergence of a culture of personal transformation. It focused on the renovation of the self by combining spirituality and psychotherapy (Partridge 2005). The personal transformation culture broke with the disenchanted and materialistic mentality of modernity and recovered the experience of transcendence, in the context of a spirituality emancipated from institutionalized religion that encouraged the inner search and work on the self (López 2012, 78). Personal transformation has been understood as an individual trajectory towards self-development and personal growth which has an indeterminate duration and is developed when engaging in a wide range of activities. These include Western forms of meditation, reiki, and yoga, or spiritual forms of psychotherapy and reflexology, among others. It is oriented towards potentializing the person’s capacities through the transformation of their cognitive, emotional, and energy structures (Heelas 2009, 759). In the last sixty years, numerous archaeological sites have been adopted as spaces where to engage in personal transformation (De la Torre et  al. 2021). Nowadays, they are 1  With the rise of rational systems of knowledge, and the secular democratic state, scholars considered that the institutional authority of religion would become more decentralized, causing the decline of magical thinking (Weber 1991 [1952], 350–353). Nevertheless, many aspects of alternative spiritualities have reinstalled it in Western societies (Gibson 2006, 68–69).

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identified as places where spirits and energies dwell (Lucas 2007) and humankind can have access to non-human entities (MacDonald 1995; Ivakhiv 2003). The organizational, creative, and ideological features identified in alternative spiritual practices held in Carnac allow us to explore the relationship between the quest for personal transformation and the contemporary perception of this archaeological site as a place where human and more-than-­ human beings interact. Therefore, in this chapter I focus my attention upon three main elements that construct the participants’ interactions with non-human entities: the ritual design, the liminal phase, and the discourse of personal transformation. I will show how nature spirits are conceptualized, summoned, and assimilated during and after practices by participants seeking to transform their relationships with themselves and others. The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Carnac archaeological site between 2015 and 2018. Fieldwork was part of my doctoral research (Dansac 2022). I conducted participant observation in twenty workshops lead by male specialists, averaging approximately two days each and consisting of physical activities such as breathing exercises and body movements practised while touching the megaliths. The applied methodology allowed me to gather information about the discourse associated with non-human entities during ritual practices. I also conducted ten semi-structured and five in-depth interviews. The former consisted of exchanges that took place during or at the end of practices and were guided towards three main themes: the participants’ knowledge regarding the ritual’s development and goal, their expectations, and the results they obtained, and their conceptualizations on non-human entities. The responsiveness of the interviewee determined the order of topics covered. In-depth interviews took place outside the workshops and allowed me to deepen my knowledge of those themes. In this chapter, I will use data mainly from my fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 and quotes derived from several semi-structured and in-depth interviews. The following section presents the geographic context and actors’ characterization. Next, I address the participants’ notions of a “living world” considered as being inhabited by human and non-human beings. I then turn to the ritual design that allows the participants to interact with the non-human beings considered to inhabit Carnac archaeological site. This protocol will be illustrated with an ethnographic narrative. Finally, I analyse how transformation is experienced by participants.

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The Megaliths of Carnac as an “alternative healing mecca” The megaliths of Carnac constitute an archaeological site located in the region of Brittany in northwest France. It is one of the prime megalithic sites in the world due to the quantity and scale of Neolithic monuments.2 Local megaliths are approximately 7000  years old and are scattered throughout the territory, sometimes concentrated in large quantities as is the case of the Carnac alignments. Since the end of the nineteenth century, these monuments have been used for a myriad of purposes that go from therapeutic healing (Boismoreau 1917) to self-knowledge experiences that are nowadays proposed in the local alternative spiritual market (Dansac 2020a).3 Since the 2000s, ritual specialists proposing holistic practices regularly come to Carnac accompanied with their groups.4 Using the local megaliths as material supports, they guide the participants through a set of instructions to visualize, communicate, and interact with the non-human entities considered to inhabit the stones. Access to practices is made through websites where future participants can choose among a variety of experiences that may differ in duration or spiritual orientation. Nowadays, the archaeological site of Carnac has become an “alternative healing mecca,” a characterization it shares with places such as Sedona in the United States (Ivakhiv 2003), or Glastonbury in the United Kingdom (Bowman 2005). Droves of people arrive here searching for new experiences, insights, and “tool for personal transformation.” Groups are led by specialists who are primarily male, aged between forty and seventy years old, and come from Paris. They have often trained abroad, and they rarely establish social relations with other colleagues. Nevertheless, all specialists share similar techniques and notions because their knowledge on the subject usually derives from the same esoteric

 In Atlantic Europe, this period started in 9000 b.c.e. (Demoule 2007, 173).  The commodification of techniques and practices held at the megaliths, the behaviour patterns of specialists and the consumptive actions of participants, points to the formation of a local spiritual market with products and a unique economy (Dansac 2020b). 4  The term “holistic” alludes to the exalted state of mind which is presumably the goal of an individual’s spiritual development. It is organized around ideas such as the respect and feeling of union with nature, the belief in the hidden powers present in nature, and the idea that all religions draw from the same source (Chryssides 2007, 22). 2 3

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books about energies of megalithic sites.5 Therefore, they follow a similar ritual design or pattern of execution while conducting the practices. When in front of the group, they present themselves as specialists and underline their degree of expertise by briefly recounting personal life-changing experiences, neo-shamanic travels among non-Western societies, or their sensorial skills. Participants are mainly females between twenty-four and seventy years old who hold university degrees and live in the Carnac region. Practitioners’ attraction to Carnac arises from their interests in a wide range of subjects such as archaeology, esoteric beliefs, astrology, occultism, or personal development. Any person can become a participant if they pay the fee established by the specialist (Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1  A group practicing at Carnac megaliths. (Photo: Y. Dansac, December 2015)

5  Among the numerous books mentioned by interviewees are mainly those discussing the “energies of ancient places” (Gauthier 2019) and the megalith’s “sacred power and geometry” (Bonvin 2008).

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Actor’s Notions on a “living” World The practices held at Carnac megaliths are mainly inspired by alternative spiritualities’ conceptualizations on a “living world.”6 Specialists and participants consider the world as inhabited by non-human beings and megalithic sites as a source of restorative and beneficial powers. These ancient stones and the forests surrounding them are regarded as objects imbued with sacred, spiritual, and transformative qualities. Furthermore, they conceptualize the human body, the megaliths, and the natural landscape in energy terms. Regarding nature and all these elements as animated beings, actors consider that life-energy flows through them and into the human body. Similar notions have been collected in Sedona, a city located in northern Arizona which is renowned for its red-rock buttes and monoliths. For people who engage in alternative spiritual practices there “a healthy body is one in which the flow of life-energy is unimpeded” (Ivakhiv 2003, 111). Drawing upon ethnographic analysis of energy discourses regarding nature and archaeological sites located in numerous contexts, I have shown how the re-significations of ancient places are being used as strategies to experience, develop, and enact personal transformation (Dansac 2021). Considering nature as a source of knowledge, millenary places are being regarded as the work of ancient builders who had “other” comprehension of their environment and considered nature energies when building their temples. Using their body and their somatic experiences, actors verify the presence of energies and non-human entities during activities (Dansac 2020b). In Carnac, actors value human relationships with natural landscapes and embrace polytheistic and animistic cosmologies mentioned by several scholars conducting research on contemporary rituals held in megalithic sites (Butler 2004, 109; Greenwood 2005, VII, 10; Harvey 2006, 47; Rountree 2015, 1). They share their world with non-human beings, both animate and inanimate, to whom they grant knowledge, emotion, and reflexivity. They regard nature as alive and as having a spiritual dimension. Within their practices and beliefs, they integrate eclectic elements from local folklore, foreign religious traditions, ecology, and esotericism. For them to internalize this worldview, they must embrace a specific enchanted 6  Alternative spiritual practices convey a framework of beliefs and techniques based on an ideology characterized by the intersections of the spiritual, the therapeutic, and the political. They are mainly associated to socio-religious phenomenon such as the New Age and Contemporary Paganism (Pike 2001; Sutcliffe 2008, 466).

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view of the world in which it is inhabited by human and non-human beings capable of interacting and communicating with each other (Taylor 2000, 277).7 The performance of rituals is at the heart of these practices, and ritual design has a considerable influence in shaping the meaning given to individual and collective experiences. Participants use the same techniques to get in touch with supernatural entities summoned, or to access a space that they consider sacred by ancient rites millennia ago. They perform bodily techniques such as palpating megaliths with their hands or engage in mind-body techniques such as visualization to communicate with non-­ human beings.8 As in the case of other alternative rituals, practices are constructed not only through transformation and adaptation but also through invention (Magliocco 2018, 329). They are diverse, unstable, and exposed to secular influences. Their creative potential has been understood as the conscious elaboration of new rituals, or the reinterpretation of existing ones, with the expressly subversive aim of bringing about cultural change. To analyse how participants interact with energies and non-­ human entities during rituals practices, I conducted ethnographic research in Carnac between 2015 and 2018.

A Ritual Design for Interacting with More-than-Humans These practices are strongly prescribed and framed by organizing principles that allow the participants to communicate and interact with humans and non-human beings. In general, participants engage in five main actions following a pre-established order that is shared by all the specialists I met: the opening of the practice, the bodily experimentation of various techniques, the practice of visualization to ask permission from the spirits of nature, the body-to-body encounter with the megalith and the closing of the practice. The activity starts with a slow walk through the forest surrounding the megaliths during which the participant performs breathing 7  Contemporary spiritualities’ views of the world draw on indigenous conceptualizations where animate and inanimate beings can be considered as persons (Bird-David 1999, 73; Hallowell 1960, 24). 8  Visualization, commonly referred to as “guided imagery,” is a psychotherapeutic technique during which a specialist leads a patient in generating mental images. In contemporary Pagan, sensory rich images are visualized to promote concentration and body awareness (Magliocco 2018, 329).

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and meditation exercises. Then, upon arriving at the megalith, the participants practise different body techniques such as body movements to be done alone, in pairs, or in groups. Before touching the megalith, the specialist invites the participants to silently ask the permission of the spirit of the place to open the “vortex” of energy and release the energies contained in the stone. This sort of individual prayer is preceded by collective visualization exercises guided by the specialist. Once the “vortex” has been opened, the group approaches the megalith, and each participant touches it alone for a few minutes. As they pass, the participant places their palms, head, or back on the rough surface of the megalith. Once all participants have touched the stone, they gather to exchange their experiences with others. Before departing, the specialist asks the participants to silently thank the spirits and the megaliths for the energies they received. The actions mentioned above are not dissociated from each other, and sometimes they are juxtaposed during the activity. Participants engage in these ritual practices to achieve an affective state named “transformation.” This state involves encountering the energies of the megaliths which only the nature spirits can release. To ensure this goal, the practice must regulate itself to some extent, so that it monitors its own progress towards the achievement of its goal. This capacity is reflected in the continuous and repeated performance of various preparatory exercises that serve to predispose the participant to a certain somatic and emotional state that will later enable them to interact with the entities being summoned. The ritual’s guideline is aimed at conforming a system of relationships between actors and nature spirits. The distinctive design of these activities is ritualistic because it includes a set of specific processes or morphological features, such as the repetition of certain actions and the respect of a corpus of pre-established procedures. I use the notion of ritual design developed by Don Handelman (2004, 208, 2005) to distinguish the patterns of action that organize these practices and make them consistent and continuous patterns. Without these patterns, the ritual processes of these activities and the interactions between humans and non-human beings could not exist, as those are activated, first and foremost, through the enactment of their organizational principles. The ritual design executed among the megaliths of Carnac is inspired by local and foreign techniques which draw upon conceptualizations of a “living world.” My analysis of the practices’ principles has provided insights into many aspects related to their innovation processes, constant transformations, deliberate revitalizations of old techniques, and

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intentional inventions (Dansac 2022). Initial studies on alternative healing practices involving these megaliths date from the 1980s, when a local couple collected a megalith located in Carnac archaeological site and put it in their garden to perform alternative rituals where the stone’s spirit was summoned (Badone 1991). As it happens nowadays during workshops, this couple used to verbally request the spirit to release the stone energy before slowly walking to the megalith and touching it. The couple’s ritual featured numerous techniques, notably in the form of invocations to non-­ human beings linked to megalithic sites, which were performed by British Pagans in the 1970s (Gray 1975). As I will illustrate hereafter through an ethnographic narrative, these concrete ritual sessions have several phases during which participants perform exercises to communicate with the nature spirits considered to inhabit the megaliths.

Crossing Thresholds with Nature Spirits One month before Saturday, 5 March 2016, a former electrician called Jean9 proposed a workshop in the megaliths of Carnac on a wellness website. I signed up, paid the subscription fee online, and received an email indicating the meeting place and time. On the scheduled date I arrived at a parking lot close to Carnac alignments. Here I joined Jean and the twelve participants—two men and ten women—who were also attending. Jean started by verbally explaining to us the objective of the meeting and mentioned the names and roles of the two non-human entities that would be accompanying us throughout the day: the energies of megaliths and the spirits of nature. As he explained, This landscape is a powerful energy place, used by our ancestors since ancient times. First, we are going to walk in silence through these megalithic alignments, until we reach the end. The telluric currents here are so strong that your bodies will begin to recharge now. The spirits of nature will be present, they have the capacity to cleanse your bodies and they will be collaborating with you.10

The above statement of the Carnac archaeological site as being an energy place inhabited by entities exemplifies the type of discourse that specialists can share to highlight specificities granted to local megaliths and tasks assigned to non-human beings. At the beginning of workshops, 9

 Pseudonyms are used for interviewees to protect their anonymity. Translations by author.  Jean (5 March 2016).

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no descriptions regarding the spirit’s shape, appearance, or gender are mentioned. As soon as participants arrive, they are encouraged to fraternize and cooperate with an “invisible” being whose form and behaviour they generally ignore. As I will illustrate, the practice’s ritual design is constructed for participants to gradually outline the spirit’s personhood. Each exercise allows them to discover, comprehend, and visualize its rationality, self-consciousness, and capacities for reciprocity and mental communication. After providing a brief ideological and technical frame regarding megaliths and nature spirits, Jean asked us to walk silently behind him across a field dotted with tall upright stones called menhirs.11 Following his lead, we started to slowly walk while Jean explained to us that this landscape was inhabited by non-human entities guarding the energies of the megaliths since ancient times. During the walk, we stopped at several standing stones to engage in breathing and meditation exercises. Forming a circle around a megalith, Jean indicated to us to stay still, close our eyes, inhale deeply, and exhale slowly. We repeated this exercise about twenty times. Next, he indicated to us to stay silent, keep our eyes closed, stay alert to our sensorial experiences, pay attention to nature’s sounds and smells, and “get in tune with the spirits that inhabit this place.”12 In the opinion of other specialists I met, mastering “gut feelings” as intuition and instinct, which are not rational or logical reactions, is essential to being able to communicate with nature spirits. Throughout workshops, specialists explicitly defined different body-mind techniques as tools for developing intuition and instinct. Some consist of breathing exercises as those presented by Jean. Others are based in physical movements and bodily postures carried out alone or in pairs. After we did the breathing exercises, we continued to walk for about one kilometre until Jean told us to stop next to a menhir standing eight metres high. Once we arrived there, he pointed to a nearby stone standing a metre high and indicated that the spirit guarding the energy of the big menhir was seated there. According to specialists, nature spirits have an anthropomorphic shape, have no gender identity, lack male/female attributes, are made of light, and communicate mentally with human and

11  A menhir is large human-made upright stone typically dating from the European Neolithic Period (Demoule 2007, 173). 12  Jean (5 March 2016).

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non-human beings. They like to live close to “powerful” menhirs,13 and their attention is always fixated to an upright stone. Following Jean’s directions, we gathered around the small stone where the spirit was located, closed our eyes, stayed silent, and elaborated a mental representation of this being. Meanwhile, Jean started to describe the spirit using the following words: The spirit has a human shape, is made of green light and is sitting cross-­ legged on top of the stone, each foot placed on the opposite thigh. Like in a lotus position. It is seeing the big menhir. Each one of you must talk to it, mentally, and ask it for permission to approach the energy of the megalith.14

Once we took a moment to visualize the spirit and mentally ask it for permission to touch the megalith standing eight metres high, Jean said that the spirit had told him that it had agreed to our demand. The megalith’s energy had been released. One by one, the participants approached the tall stone and started to touch it with the palms of their hands, their back, or their forehead. As I have observed during other meetings, participants enact similar bodily positions. They touch the standing stones with their back or lengthen their body on the surface of the stones which have fallen to the ground (Fig. 9.2). This moment lasted about twenty minutes. Each participant had the opportunity to be alone with the stone for only five minutes. Finally, once everyone had taken their turn with the menhir, we gathered in circle around it. Then Jean told us: Our first part of the journey is now complete. We will be visiting several megaliths today to receive different kinds of energy. Every megalith has a different energy. But before we continue to the next, let us thank in silence the spirit that accompanied us here and gave us its permission to access the energy.15

As illustrated, the practices carried out in Carnac are revealed in the field as actions where the practitioner forges a network of relationships with human and non-human participants. First, this system of relations is based on the idea that there is a “sensory” communion between human beings and nature. Second, it holds the idea of a mediating entity between 13  The value of the upright stones depends on their size. If a menhir has a considerable proportion it is likely to be more appreciated. 14  Jean (5 March 2016). 15  Jean (5 March 2016).

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Fig. 9.2  Participants touching the local megaliths. (Photo: Y. Dansac, April 2018)

humans and megaliths. This mediator can take different names during practices, such as “nature spirit” or “guardian.” For interviewees, the guardians or spirits are generally perceived as discreet beings who lived in the forest, close to large megaliths, under rocks, or near water. Their relationship with humans is dependent on their will, and they can make themselves visible to humans when they desire to offer them the megaliths’ beneficial energy. During practices, interacting with nature spirits becomes a crucial and essential process. It is only through their mediation, collaboration, and participation that practitioners can access the energy of the megalith. Sometimes this relationship takes the form of a barter transaction. As Stephan, another specialist organizing practices, explained to me,

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All these sacred and energy places have guardians. Sometimes they are made of green or blue light. You must talk to them before touching the megalith, ask for their authorization, and if possible, leave them a small offering before you leave the place. They prefer fruits and flowers, but you can also leave them a pretty rock.16

Relationships between participants and the non-human entities summoned during the practices can only be established if the participants demonstrate their intention to engage in this relationship in a blatant way. Willingness is often referred to as “openness,” and it is displayed in bodily movements, acts of meditation, and demands of permission performed in silence. Walking with small steps, making spontaneous stops along the way, opening the arms, closing the eyes, and whispering words were actions that were supposed to highlight the participant’s eagerness to encounter nature spirits. The need to engage in physical demonstrations of willingness is repeatedly mentioned by specialists during the opening of workshops. Participants are expected to embody an “open attitude” for themselves, for other people, and for the summoned entities. As I heard from Eric, another specialist I met in 2015, Try to live this experience with your body, your senses, and your mind. Nature spirits need to see and hear that we are interested in encountering them, that we have an open attitude. If you are not open, you will not feel anything when touching the megalith.17

Moreover, each one of the five actions they execute among the megaliths, as when they perform visualization techniques to communicate with non-human beings or touch the megalith, comprises a liminal phase. Liminality is a concept used by Arnold Van Gennep (1909) in his work on rites of passage, and later by Victor Turner (1969). In the ritual studies, it refers, like the noun “liminality,” to the state of a person whose social status and identity is uncertain, who is in-between two different states. During these specific moments, the participants would access the energy of the megalith to get their body and mind back into shape, among other objectives. According to several participants, these activities are valued as spaces “to transform ourselves and to get to know each other better”18 and to engage in “intense exchanges, questioning and self-examination.”19  Stephan (20 May 2017).  Eric (12 December 2015). 18  Joséphine (21 June 2017). 19  Nathalie (27 March 2016) 16 17

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Specialists prefer to justify practices, stating they help us to “think about ourselves and our lives.”20 Theoretically, while touching the megalith, the participants experience a temporary status in which they are in the separation phase. They are stripped of the attributes of their former status, called “non-transformed,” before being reintegrated into a new status, the one they identified as “transformed.” From start to finish, each one of the five actions stipulated in the ritual design act as thresholds or liminal spaces where participants interact with non-human beings through bodily movements, discourses, and somatic sensations. During these interactions, participants form a communitas. As described by Turner (1969), communitas is formed during the liminal state, an in-between space where participants can transform themselves and re-enter society with a new identity or role. During liminal states, participants and non-human beings (nature spirits and megalith’s energies) exist in equal terms. Outside these spaces, a stratification between human and non-human beings exists because summoned entities are granted authority to release the megaliths energy. The participant must ask for permission from this entity while also considering it as having knowledge, emotion, and reflexivity.

Experiencing Transformation Engaging in these practices where non-human entities and energy discourses are omnipresent, participants experience a state of well-being and personal transformation. They learn how to emotionally relate to both nature spirits and energy landscape, and to “transform” their physical, mental, and spiritual state. This interpretation was shared by Sara, a psychotherapy student who discovered these practices for the first time in 2015. She explained that this experience made it possible for her to fulfil her personal goals, incorporate a new reality, and recognize the presence of a community of non-human beings she characterizes as “magical.” As Sara explained, Since this wonderful experience and in just three months, things have already changed dramatically for me. My intentions of abundance, of Zen behaviour with certain people and of living my dreams are already coming true. These are things that I had been holding back on for years. Now I feel centred and grounded. I really want to thank everyone from the bottom of  Éric (13 December 2015).

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my heart. And especially a big thank you to Eric [the specialist] for introducing me to this magical world.21

For other interviewees, personal transformation is mainly related to acquiring more knowledge about themselves and the world they inhabit. The workshops become spaces where practitioners access, reinterpret, and assimilate heterogeneous conceptualizations that draw mainly on contemporary animism. According to Nathalie, a yoga teacher who visited Carnac for the first time in 2017, these practices altered her perception of reality, allowing her to discover the existence and qualities of unknown beings. Through bodily techniques and visualization exercises, she learned how to communicate and interact with them, and returned home carrying a new set of tools that influenced her everyday actions. For Nathalie and Sara, the encounter with nature spirits and megalith’s energies became a crucial moment that drove them to take a major turn in their lives. As Nathalie shared, I came out of it all transformed. I no longer look at nature in the same way. I discovered all these living beings that surround us and that we do not suspect their presence and the help they give us. My life has taken a different direction and my eyes, heart and mind have been opened. I am now taking a big turn in my life, and I will continue to learn about this world of wonderful knowledge.22

In her speech, Sara conceptualized nature as a community where human and non-human beings can communicate, while also using expressions such as “centred” and “grounded” as synonyms for “transformed.” For her, the interaction with more-than-humans generated a kind of emotional rebalancing. Nathalie used the term “transformed,” referring to the fact that these practices have prompted her to take a major turn in her life. This phrase seems to refer to a radical change of perception about herself and others. Although both participants considered the emotional state they had acquired in different ways, both insisted on the emotions provoked by their engagement in the practices carried out at the megaliths, stressing that, outside of these meetings, the bodily techniques they executed continued to act. Within the discourses of both interviewees, I find similar emotions to those collected from participants who engage in contemporary-­Pagan ceremonies (Sonnex et  al. 2020, 6) and New Age practices (Chen 2014, 237–238), for example, the experience of  Sara (12 December 2015).  Nathalie (20 May 2017).

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self-fulfilment, self-acceptance, the establishment of positive relationships with others, the mastery of communication with nature and non-human beings, as well as the identification of the meaning of human life. As illustrated by Sara and Nathalie, the enchantment of archaeological sites as places where spirits and energies dwell is a phenomenon that accompanies the development and enactment of personal transformation. In my case study, personal transformation can only be experienced if the participants give a central role to non-human beings. The participation and collaboration of nature spirits is crucial for constructing a spiritual experience. Similar observations have been analysed in contemporary spiritual practices in which beings such as spirits or angels are regarded as having the potential to produce sensory experiences and bring about physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. In mediumship sessions, practitioners have reported becoming aware of the moment that they are being “possessed” or “guided” by a spirit because their body experienced “strange” sensations. Specifically, they sense cold or hot sensations through their skin that are not caused by a change in the temperature of the environment. They may also experience their shoulders, arms, and hands being touched by someone or something while they are alone (Voss 2011, 173–174). In neo-shamanic ceremonies, practitioners have mentioned experiencing similar bodily sensations while meditating. During this exercise, they visualize different entities such as nature spirits with which they want to interact. For many of them, bodily sensations make their interactions with non-human beings “convincing” or “real” because they prove them and confirm them (Ostenfeld-Rosenthal 2011, 158–160). As observed among the groups practicing contemporary rituals among the megaliths of Carnac, interactions with non-human entities become more “authentic,” “effective,” and “truthful” for participants when they experience certain bodily sensations previously associated, by themselves or by other actors, with this type of activity. Interactions with non-human beings as the ones reported by my interviewees are possible because the ritual design demands them to immerse themselves bodily, emotionally, and affectively in the realities that these ritual practices mobilize. For Michael Houseman (2016, 232), those requirements are characteristic of alternative spiritual practices, and they serve the purpose of generating an experience he defines as “identity-­ refracting.” This is particularly evident when analysing the practice’s liminal phases. Striving to reproduce actions, emotions, and ways of thinking from others (nature spirits) that they seek to find in themselves,

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participants engage in the exercises as refracted subjects split between two different identities: on the one hand, the non-human entities who have the power to release the megalith’s energies, and on the other hand, the participants who experience the effects of these activities and non-human beings’ actions (Houseman 2010, 65). This can only be done by setting up a particular regime of attention in which the participant must seek to interact with summoned entities physically and mentally. As illustrated in this chapter, participants arrive to Carnac seeking to experience transformation by engaging in a relation with non-human beings which they progressively outline, comprehend, and accept.

Conclusions While nature spirits are viewed as having specific competences and attributes which humans lack, specialists often detailed them as having anthropomorphic form, bodily postures and behaviours to which participants can relate. It would seem there is a need for them to be able to reflect on nature spirits, to understand them as animated beings who are similar to humans in terms of physical form and gestures, while simultaneously distinguishing them as beings who have non-human powers and capacities. Gathered data shows that this dual relation must take place for participants to successfully engage in a meaningful experience with the megaliths and the non-human beings guarding them. Furthermore, each actor seems to assimilate nature spirits in a different manner. For specialists like Jean, nature spirits are akin to us but different, they are not human but have human abilities (authority, knowledge, emotion, and reflexivity). However, participants generally describe nature spirits as animated beings who have extraordinary powers. For Sara and Nathalie, two participants who pondered on the effects of practices in their everyday lives, nature spirits are members of a large community of “magical” beings who exist and have existed for a long period of time, regardless of humans acknowledging their presence. As illustrated through an ethnographic narrative, the ritual design followed by specialists includes different exercises in which the purpose is to produce liminal spaces where participants and nature spirits can communicate. This interaction begins when the practitioner displays bodily postures and behaviours related to a state of “openness.” According to ritual design, actions such as closing your eyes, staying silent, walking slowly among the megaliths, and abruptly stopping all your bodily movements

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during a few seconds or even a few minutes serve the purpose of evidencing this state and attracting the attention of nature spirits. At the same time, individual actions can stimulate, incentive, and influence the behaviour and bodily postures of other participants who may imitate them. So, to experience “transformation,” participants must not only visualize and communicate mentally with non-human beings. They also must physically display, to themselves and to human and non-human participants, their willingness to engage in such a relation. The case study of contemporary rituals among the Carnac megaliths illustrates multiple dimensions of relations to more-than-humans existing in alternative spiritual practices. Every workshop is understood as space-­ time during which human and non-human participants must collaborate. The megalith’s energy can only be acquired if the nature spirit accepts the mental petition of the participants and grants them access to an energy considered to be source of beneficial powers and personal transformation. When the practice ends and the communitas is dissolved, participants return to their everyday lives experiencing an emotional state identified as “transformed.” This new identity entails a transformation of themselves and their reality, one in which human and non-humans co-exist and interact.

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Handelman, Don. 2004. “Designs of Ritual: The City Dionysia of Fifth-Century Athens.” In Michael Wedde (ed.), Celebrations: Sanctuaries and the Vestiges of Cult Activity, 207–235. Bergen: Norwegian Institute at Athens. ———. 2005. “Introduction: Why Ritual in its own right? How so?” In Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist (eds.), Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation, 1–32. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Harvey, Graham. 2006. “Discworld and Otherworld: The imaginative Use of Fantasy Literature among Pagans.” In Hume Lynne et Kathleen McPhillips (eds.), Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment, 41–51. London: Routledge. ——— (ed.). 2013. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Durham: Acumen Publishing. Heelas, Paul. 2009. “Spiritualities of Life.” In Peter Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, 758–782. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2003. “Nature and Self.” Culture and Religion 4 (1): 93–118. Houseman, Michael. 2010. “Des rituels contemporains de première menstruation.” Ethnologie française 40 (1): 57–66. ———. 2016. “Comment comprendre l’esthétique affectée des cérémonies New Age et néopaïennes?” Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 174: 213–237. López, Joaquín P. 2012. “Espiritual pero no religiosa: la cultura de la transformación personal.” Revista de Ciencias de las Religiones, 17: 77–99. Lucas, Phillip Charles. 2007. “Constructing Identity in the Dreamstones: Megalithic Sites and Contemporary Nature Spirituality.” Nova Religio. The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11 (1): 31–60. Macdonald, Jeffrey. 1995. “Inventing Traditions for the New Age: A case of Study of the Earth Energy Tradition.” Anthropology of Consciousness 6 (4): 31–45. Magliocco, Sabina. 2018. “Reconnecting to Everything: Fairies in Contemporary Paganism.” In Michael Ostling (ed.), Fairies, Demons and Nature Spirits. ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom, 325–347. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Michell, John. 1969. The View over Atlantis. London, Sago Press. Ostenfeld-Rosenthal, Ann. 2011. “Reenchanted Bodies. The significance of the Spiritual Dimension in Danish Healing Rituals.” In Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes (eds.), Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections, 151–167. Oxford: Berghahn. Partridge, Christopher. 2005. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture. London: T & T Clark. Pike, Sarah. 2001. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves. Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rountree, Kathryn. 2015. “Introduction. Context is everything: Plurality and Paradox in Contemporary European Paganisms.” In Kathryn Rountree (ed.),

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CHAPTER 10

Crystals as Other-than-Human Persons for New Spirituality in Estonia: Phenomenological Relationality in Animist Materialism Tenno Teidearu

Introduction The crystals1 spread and used in New Age and New Spirituality2 are semi-­ precious stones that are mined, traded and commercialised globally. In Estonia, according to my empirical data, the use and commerce of crystals 1  Based on my empirical data, synonyms for crystal (kristall) in the emic uses of terms are ‘stone’ (kivi), ‘gemstone’ (poolvääriskivi) or ‘gem’ (poolvääriskivi). In this chapter, I use these three designations as synonyms for crystal. 2  The terms ‘New Age’ and ‘New Spirituality’ are sometimes treated as synonyms. In this chapter I use the term ‘New Spirituality’ to mean contemporary Western syncretic spiritual movement or religiosity. The concept ‘New Age’ applies to the New Age movement and the ‘cultic milieu’ (see Campbell 1972) in the 1960s and 1970s. More recent research proposes that this is no longer an emic term and that the main focus in spirituality has shifted from the cosmological idea of entering a new era known as the Age of Aquarius to the spiritual development of the self, which Paul Heelas (1996) has defined as ‘self-spirituality’. Therefore, several scholars (e.g. Sutcliffe 2002; MacKian 2012) propose that the concept ‘New Spirituality’ is more appropriate for the contemporary setting.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_10

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has been an apparent and popular trend in New Spirituality since the mid-­2010s. This phenomenon is not unique to Estonia, of course: crystals have been and still are popular commodities internationally (see, e.g., Hammer 2016, 344; Crowley 2011, 40–41; Chryssides 2007, 5–15; Heelas 1996, 114). According to John Gordon Melton (2013, 203–207), crystals are considered a natural part of New Age and New Spirituality, and Western Esotericism in general (see Hanegraaff 2012), because associated ideas can be traced back to mesmerism in the eighteenth century and theosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The major interest of the few previous studies of minerals in New Spirituality has mainly been ideas and beliefs (e.g. Melton 2013; see discussion in Teidearu 2019, 133). This chapter aims to analyse the practice of wearing crystals in Estonia and their significance strictly as material objects, and to apply a phenomenological perspective to understanding the relationality between human and non-human. My anthropological study departs from a methodological view of crystals as first and foremost just things, pieces of material culture. Instead of treating religious objects as evidence or representation of belief (see discussion in Keane 2008), I aim to take materiality as seriously as those who participated in my research. Often they tend to emphasise the presence and significance of materiality over belief. My empirical data is based on interviews with 35 people and ethnographic observations in several esoteric shops conducted between 2016 and 2020. Most of these people, who wear crystals and are clients of esoteric shops, I met through fieldwork by using the snowball method, although I was previously acquainted with some of my informants. The majority of my interlocutors are women in their twenties or thirties, but some, especially esoteric shop owners or crystal therapists, are middle-­ aged women. According to shop owners, crystals are widespread among women, especially younger and middle-aged women, but more and more men and children are also developing an interest in crystals. I managed to conduct interviews with only two men, in their forties. Some of my

T. Teidearu (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Estonian National Museum, Tartu, Estonia e-mail: [email protected]

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informants know each other, but in general, they do not assemble as a group in sociological terms and do not attend gatherings. However, they are all interested in crystals and wear them often or permanently; some of them have visited the same esoteric shops. Shopkeepers more often know each other; some of them have attended events or courses together, for example crystal therapy course taught by the best-known crystal therapist in Estonia, Kaia-Liisa Reinut. During my visits and ethnographic observations in esoteric shops, I met shop owners and clerks. I have stayed for hours or in some cases days, which has allowed me to have conversations with both of these actors. In my observations I paid attention to the shop as a physical place, the commodities on sale and also to the behaviour of both customers and shop keepers and the communication between them as part of observing how clients choose crystals, among other things. This empirical data corresponds with interviews with people who wear crystals, for example in their narratives about choosing stones at a shop. In this chapter, I use pseudonyms for my interlocutors to protect their privacy and anonymity. In conducting the interviews on the topic of wearing crystals, I have used a method called ‘object interviews’ (Woodward 2019, 34–53) in which stones were thematically and physically the focus of semi-structured in-depth interviews. These interviews helped me and my informants to think with things (ibid., 12–20) and to ‘think through things’ (see Henare et al. 2007, 4). The presence of crystals allowed their material form and material properties to be part of the interview. In addition, this allowed me as a researcher to notice my interlocutors’ phenomenological interaction with their stones. For example, during the course of our conversations, my informants occasionally touched their crystals or held them, which helped them to recall memories and feelings (cf. King 2010, xvi) and to contemplate their relationship with their stones. My interlocutors told me experience narratives about the effect of their crystals in their everyday lives, wearing them close to their bodies, and their material significance. Stones, evidently, are entangled in my interlocutors’ everyday lives by being physically present as powerful matter. This chapter is concerned with material religion (see, e.g., Morgan 2010), which focuses on material expressions and practices of religion or spirituality. From my own perspective on the study of materiality in religion, I am inspired by the approach of material culture studies, which

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focuses upon human mutual relations with things and materiality, and the meaning-making potential of material world and properties of objects (see, e.g., Tilley et  al. 2006, 4; Teidearu 2019, 134–135). Regarding human bodily interaction with crystals as material objects, I find a phenomenological approach useful as a perspective to comprehend the significance of human corporeal interaction with material objects and materials in practice. Phenomenology, after all, as Julian Thomas (2006, 43) briefly concludes, is ‘concerned with the human encounter, experience and understanding of worldly things, and how these happenings come to be possible’. However, my interlocutors perceive crystals often as more than just inert material objects. The presence of stones affects and supports them, and they can sometimes establish mutual communication and relationality with stones. By attempting to focus on relationality, I apply ideas spread in the study of animism. Animism as an ontology, according to Philippe Descola (2013, 129), can be characterised, among many other features, by communicative relationality between humans and non-humans. In this perspective, this chapter is concerned with what could be called ‘animist materialism’, the term proposed by Graham Harvey (2013, 135–151) in his discussion on the various ways ideas are materialised and matter is perceived as spiritual in animism, and in general, that religion can be perceived as ‘a matter of things and relations, substances and meetings, bodies and movements’. The common understanding of modern Western ontology, or naturalism (see Descola 2013, 172–174), reflects an attitude towards mundane things as cultural representations of universal material world and symbols of meanings in general. However, Amy R. Whitehead (2018, 76–77) argues that special relationships with objects in Western culture acknowledge (contemporary) religious materiality and that European religious objects ‘are just as relational, significant and powerful as any ritual or ceremonial object found in the Amazon’. Some recent attempts to study material religion in Western culture by applying ideas spread in the study of animism have discussed relationality, personhood and the power of materiality and materials (e.g. Harris and Crellin 2018; Whitehead 2013, 2018). Based on my ethnographic material about my interlocutors’ relationship with the crystals they possess and wear, it evidently cannot be understood in terms of naturalism and dualism; the significance of stones is based more on relationality and material interaction.

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In the case of the relationality of human interaction with persons, human or other-than-human, including material objects, questions of possibilities and modes of relationship are in focus. On the subject of animist materialism, Harvey (2013, 135–151), as I read him, tends to prioritise the role of deities and possession over the power of materiality itself. However, in the case of the practice of wearing crystals, relationality and communication, as I aim to demonstrate in this chapter, are expressed through the effect that stones have upon people, which has a strictly material and corporeal background. In addition, relationality is not a given quality; rather, it evolves over time and with continual use and, therefore, it has temporal and material dimensions. Based on my case study on the practice of wearing crystals, they are involved in human everyday life. From the phenomenological perspective, relationality and involvement in human life comes only through physical closeness and intimacy. In this chapter, I will firstly discuss how crystals are regarded as powerful matter and how stones are involved in my interlocutors’ everyday lives. Further, I will analyse how my informants perceive communication with crystals as other-than-human persons, and, moreover, how their relationships with stones are processual, evolving over time and with use. Finally, based on my empirical data, I will develop an understanding of a phenomenological relationality that is based on bodily intimacy with stones.

Crystals as Powerful Matter Crystals are natural semi-precious minerals that are formed by geological and chemical processes in the ground. By geological definition, they are ‘naturally occurring, macroscopically homogeneous chemical compounds with a regular crystal structure’ (Wenk and Bulakh 2004, 3–11). They are highly valued in New Spirituality because of their origin. Most of my informants find that crystals are unique because of the way they are formed in the ground, which attributes the power to affect humans to them. This is often linked to the perception of Gaia, Mother Earth, a concept inspired by Ancient Greek mythology. In New Spirituality, the Earth is seen as a living organism, the spirit or energy of which pervades natural objects or

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substances. Therefore, through formation in the ground, crystals accumulate energy that is perceived both as the power of Gaia and as a universal immanent substance or energy. Crystals are valued and perceived to be powerful because they are part of the Earth and of nature. However, crystals are significant because of their materiality too. Moreover, they are significant not only as things but as a material from which things are made and which has distinct properties that are sensed by humans (cf. Ingold 2007, 1–7). Stones are valued based on their material qualities—their colour, patterns, the way they shine, which, in fact, are outcomes of their material and chemical composition. In an esoteric framework, their material and chemical properties are interpreted as being a source of energy, that is they emit, absorb and transform energy. Crystal therapist Kaia-Liisa Reinut (2005, 104) indicates in her crystal therapy handbook that ‘every person who has studied crystal therapy knows that crystals emit positive energy according to their chemical constitution, colour and physical form’. My interlocutors take minerals seriously as unique and powerful material, but in a rather vernacular manner, for example, as being aesthetically beautiful and attractive, or having agency to act towards people. My interlocutors’ perception of crystals has not much in common with Edward Tylor’s (2010 [1871]) theory of animism, which is based on belief in spirits or souls that inhabit objects and is seen as a form of ‘primitive’ religion. Neither has it common ground with the concept of ‘fetish’, which is traditionally a Western concept for non-Western religious objects. Even if one acknowledges that in contemporary academic discussion fetish is seen rather as a process or action (Harvey 2013, 140–143; Whitehead 2018, 88–90), it is not accurate in understanding the significance of crystals. According to Peter Pels (1998, 91), animism is generally understood to mean spirit in matter, while fetish is seen as the spirit of matter. Whitehead (2013, 2018) aims to understand religious objects as ‘new fetish’ by referring to the materials Catholic statues are made of, although she bases this only on a hypothetical biography of material, for example cedar wood, and considers statues to be powerful mainly because they are relational and powerful persons. The general esoteric ideas that my interlocutors have about crystals show that the material and immaterial worlds are more closely linked than that. Characteristic to New Spirituality is a holistic ontology according to which material and spiritual worlds are inherently related and in mutual interaction (Hammer 2016, 350).

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Gordon Lynch (2007, 32–47) defines this as a ‘progressive spirituality’, by which the unity of material and immaterial world is based on the perception of immanent and divine substance or power, often described as divine or cosmic spiritual energy. In this non-dualist and holistic ontology of New Spirituality, matter actually is, or at least has the potential to be, powerful and relational. Based on the understanding of crystals as powerful materials, the energy that enlivens them is not in, but of, matter (cf. Ingold 2007, 12; see also Pels 1998, 91–95) because of their unique material and chemical properties. I am not aiming to extend the concepts of fetish or ‘new fetish’, but to understand crystals as strictly powerful material and to understand human interaction with this material.

Involvement in Everyday Life My interlocutors wear crystals in the form of bracelets, pendants, earrings, or other jewellery, or they just carry them in a pocket. Some of them wear one particular type, while some wear several crystals at once. In addition, they wear crystals daily. Most of my informants have used a particular stone for several years and rarely take them off. The practice of wearing crystals has a temporal dimension that grounds them in the context of everyday life. This is a practice of everyday religion, which is concerned with ‘how religion and spirituality are practiced, experienced, and expressed by ordinary people (rather than official spokespersons) in the context of their everyday lives’ (McGuire 2008, 12). Similarly, it is a practice of vernacular religion that concentrates on the various ways in which (ordinary) people encounter, understand, interpret and practise religion or spirituality in their everyday lives through the verbal, behavioural and material expressions (Primiano 1995, 42–44). In this context, the question is, how are stones as tangible objects and powerful matter connected with people’s mundane lives? As I have discussed in my previous research (Teidearu 2019), by wearing crystals, people generally support their human capacities and qualities in order to solve personal problems and bring change to their lives. According to one of my interlocutors Anne (29), who usually carries six different stones with her in a small bag, and used to wear a chip necklace, uses crystals because of the qualities and abilities that she thinks she lacks herself. For example, during a long and uncertain period when she was looking for a job without success, she started to wear a chip necklace with quartz and amethyst chips that supported her and helped replace the

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confidence and emotional stability that she had lost. As Anne told me, thanks to a greater confidence and serenity, which was the effect of the necklace, she became more active and fortunate coincidences and encounters came into her life, and she managed to find several short-term job opportunities. In New Spirituality, crystals are attributed with the ability to support human qualities, with every ‘species’ of mineral having specific effects. This knowledge is available in esoteric books about crystals, on the internet, at the crystal shops3 that are the main centres of commerce and from esoteric commerce in general. In shops, the minerals often have short descriptions, and sometimes clients ask for recommendations from the shopkeeper. Apart from official knowledge about their specific supportive abilities, available in textual sources, my interlocutors often understand the effect of crystals based on vernacular interpretations in the context of their everyday lives (see Teidearu 2019, 143). The meaningfulness of wearing crystals is linked primarily to the self and to everyday life. Harvey (2013, 208–209) argues that religion is not distinct from mundane activities because it is not an addition to activities, but inherent to them, and therefore religion can be perceived as everyday life. Similarly, Meredith McGuire (2008, 15) emphasises that lived religion (as opposed to ‘official religion’) is based on practices, not on ideas or beliefs, and needs to make sense in the context of everyday life; furthermore, it needs to ‘work’, in the sense of achieving desired ends. For example, Laura (41) is a crystal therapist whom I met through an acquaintance. She has been practising crystal therapy for nearly ten years, doing so professionally and earning a living for several years now. I visited her crystal therapy room, where she has one or two clients every day. Because she is professionally focused on the spiritual world, she uses a specific crystal to support herself and better cope with mundane duties in everyday life: Usually, I wear some kind of grounding stone. As my work is spiritual, I [wear] it to manage mundane things better, to be more present in everyday life as well. Then, I usually wear tourmaline, for example, black stones are 3  Crystals have become the main article of commerce at esoteric shops, and therefore a characteristic feature of Estonian esoteric shops during the 2010s, when esoteric shops have become known as ‘crystal shops’. Both terms, ‘esoteric shop’ (esoteerikapood or esoteerikakauplus) and ‘crystal shop’ (kristallipood) or ‘stone shop’ (kivipood) are emic terms among customers and shopkeepers. In this chapter I use the most common emic term ‘crystal shop’, which illustrates the recent and common trend in the esoteric commerce in Estonia.

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grounding and protecting ones. […] When I have very many daily duties—I need to do the shopping or go to the dentist with my child, stuff like that— then I take some kind of grounding stone in order to get everything done quickly and easily.

Laura is referring to grounding as an effect, which she, like several other of my interlocutors, defines as being fully present in mundane everyday life situations and not being stuck in one’s thoughts, or overthinking simple things. She not only uses a crystal that is attributed with an effect, but it is involved in her everyday routines, duties and challenges. Therefore, by supporting human capacities in mundane situations, crystals are involved and participate in people’s everyday lives.

Modes of Communication with Other-­than-Human Persons The involvement of crystals in people’s everyday lives brings about unique relations with stones, as illustrated by my interlocutors. Apart from gaining support from crystals, they perceive crystals as having the potential for communication and relationality. Stones, for them, are more than inert objects. The possibility of establishing relationships and the ability to communicate in some form or another is the key question in animism (Harvey 2012, 200–201; Whitehead 2018, 78). Harvey cites a vivid example from Irving Hallowell’s (1960, 24; cit. in Harvey 2012, 200; 2013, 124) influential ethnographic observation among the Ojibwa of Beren’s River in south central Canada, where Hallowell asks an old Ojibwa man, ‘Are all the stones we see about us here alive?’, and the man answers, ‘No! But some are’. It is not primarily a question of being alive or not, but a question of the possibility of communication. Harvey (2012, 200, 2013, 124) proposes that movement, gift-giving and conversation are the main indicators of the relational nature of persons, whether human or not, organic or inorganic (e.g. stones), and communication and relationality in general. In a previous paper (Teidearu 2021) I have analysed how my interlocutors impose agency on crystals in choosing stones at the crystal shop, claiming that rather the stone chooses them. Furthermore, when they are giving crystals as gifts, they perceive stones to dictate their movement from person to person themselves with humans seen as middlemen. Similarly, my interlocutors interpret losing stones as the stones having agency to act towards

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humans (Teidearu 2021, 118–121). Based on my fieldwork, people perceive these instances of the movement of crystals as agency in a particular sense that is an expression of mutual relationality between humans and stones. Crystals are sometimes seen as active parties in relation to humans, which is interpreted as an act of communication. Movement and agency are only some occasions of establishing a relationship. The possibilities of communication are not limited to particular acts or movements, as my empirical accounts suggest. For example, Cristin (35), who is attracted to jewellery and has several rings, bracelets and pendants with minerals, thinks that the way stones affect her is actually an indication of communication: I believe that an act of communication takes place between me and this stone. This particular stone alters my mood, this is the effect. If my mood is altered, my health condition also is altered. […] Well, yes, I think that the power and effect of the stone is this communication between me and the stone, and nothing else.

As Cristin explains, she often gets emotional support from the stones she wears, and this affects her feelings and contributes to her wellbeing, especially in the case of anxiety. The power of stones and their effect means that they are involved in human life and that there is a relationship between human and stone. However, not all crystals can affect and support someone; those that can are more than just inert objects. Mary (26) uses chrysocolla to maintain serenity and calmness in case of worries and troubles that cause emotional imbalance, and to think through difficult situations and questions. In these situations, she often holds the crystal in her hand to meditate over the problem or unease she is facing. Mary explains that the stone feels powerful through sensory perception: When I, for example, take this stone into my hand, I feel it is full of power. It becomes part of my system; if it starts to work for me or I communicate with it, then it must be alive.

For Mary, the effect of the crystal that she can sense through physical contact is explicitly an evidence of communication. Therefore, as she claims, the stone is alive in some sense. For many of my interlocutors, crystals are things that relate to and communicate with; sometimes crystals are subjects or other-than-human persons. The relational nature of stones

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as material objects, and materials, is based on the possibility of establishing a meaningful relationship with people, in a particular sense communicating with them. Tiia (51), who is the owner of a crystal shop and a former clerk at another crystal shop, explains that crystals are beings: They carry their own frequency, their own [energetic] field, they carry information. They are also conscious like us, because they carry vibration. And they should be treated dearly, and with love.

Tiia says she is a very spiritual person and claims that she can sense the energy of stones and understand them in a particular way. In her view, crystals are alive and they have consciousness. Stones are also powerful material, the power and ‘aliveness’ of which is the outcome of its origin and chemical composition. In explaining this, Tiia applies concepts used in science—frequency, vibration and information—that express her understanding and perception of the subtle energy intrinsic to minerals. Stones are not alive, or other-than-human persons, because they are possessed by deities, but they are alive because they consist of, or are, powerful material. The human relationship with crystals is commonly explained in an esoteric framework as stones emitting, absorbing and transforming spiritual energy that affects the human energetic subtle body and chakras (see Teidearu 2019, 144). The subtle body concept, which is widespread in New Spirituality, is based on a holistic understanding of the human body as having, apart from a material dimension, also a subtle dimension composed of an energy field, energy channels and chakras, which are centres of energy (Samuel and Johnston 2013, 1–6). In this esoteric understanding, a particular stone supports energy or the specific human quality associated with a particular chakra (cf. Johnston 2014, 27–29). The term energy is a widespread concept in New Spirituality that reflects its holistic ontology, in which the material and spiritual realms are related (see Hammer 2016, 350; Lynch 2007, 11–47). According to my empirical data, for example in Tiia’s case above, this term is also sometimes used to refer to information or knowledge. The subtle body and chakras are also associated with human emotional states, the mind and thoughts (Samuel and Johnston 2013, 6–7). Communication between humans and crystals, in the esoteric understanding, takes place on the energetic level through spiritual energy, which is perceived both as an effect and as information. According to vernacular interpretation, communication and its effects are expressed through feelings and emotions. The esoteric explanation is by no means

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superior to the vernacular interpretation, which is of a respectful and intimate relationship with stones and their effect. Tiia, in the example above, claims that we should treat crystals with the same respect that we treat every other (human) person. Here, the animist approach to stones also serves as the ‘etiquette of relating’ (see Harvey 2013, 214) with other (non-human) persons. Many of my informants have great respect for stones, which they value because of their effect and involvement in their lives. Ontologies and relations arise from human and non-human interaction, but meaningful relationships are determined through interpretation (Paleček and Risjord 2012, 16). Only some crystals have the potential to establish a relationship and communicate with a particular person, only these stones are perceived and interpreted as being other-than-human persons.

Processual Relationality Intimate relationship with crystals or things in general is not given, it must be established. Harry Walker (2009, 83), talking about the Urarina people of Peruvian Amazonia, discusses human companionship with material objects: Artifacts can be and often are considered the companions of humans, though the relation must be established slowly through continual use and ever-increasing familiarity, until the identity of each entwines with that of the other. […] The ontological status of a thing is by no means self-evident, nor is it immune to change, and it is perhaps the temporal dimension that is of greatest importance in understanding the ambiguous position of things in Urarina social life.

Walker emphasises the processual nature of the development of the human relationship with things that is based on the continual use and development of intimate and biographical connection with objects. One example he examines is the baby hammock, where a new-born baby spends most of his or her waking time, and which protects and fortifies his or her body and the development of personhood. Through this permanent and continual use, babies are emotionally and physically dependent on them; moreover, the hammock forms an integral connection to the baby through which each becomes an extension of the other (Walker 2009, 84–89).

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Here, the temporal dimension of human interaction with materiality is part of the process of meaning-making. Many of my interlocutors use crystals in specific situations such as necessity in the short term. In this case, use of the crystals is linked to daily duties and activities, and people change the crystals they wear according to abilities they wish to support. For instance, crystal therapist Laura wears black tourmaline to manage mundane duties more efficiently. The practice of wearing crystals is rather dynamic in the sense that it varies according to mundane necessities (see Teidearu 2019, 135–137). People sometimes choose from among their collections of stones according to their necessities and difficulties in daily life. Cristin, for example, often chooses the jewellery she wears for a particular day in the morning before she leaves home according to her daily schedule and duties. Sometimes she even takes some extra jewellery with her in case of unexpected changes to her day. Human relationships with these stones are rather dynamic and adhoc. From the perspective of the study of material culture and consumption, the relationship between subjects and objects is inherently dynamic (Miller 1987, 33). However, some crystals, which people use to solve deeply personal problems, are used in the long term, even for several years without interruption. Temporality is significant to the human relations with the crystals they use, and as my empirical accounts demonstrate, time is one basis for developing an engagement with crystals. Wearing one particular crystal brings about a stronger personal relationship with it, as my empirical accounts demonstrate. The process of meaning-making is bound to temporality. Regarding the human relationship with material culture, Janet Hoskins (2006, 78) proposes a term ‘biographical objects’, which are things that stay in people’s use and life for long periods and interweave with human personalities and biographies, developing and reflecting them. Some particular crystals, with which my interlocutors have established profound long-term personal connections and which are involved in their everyday lives, are significant biographical objects for them. My informants sometimes use the term ‘my stone’ when they are talking about these objects. Here they do not refer to all the stones they possess, but to the most significant ones. ‘My stone’, an emic term I apply in my etic analysis, is a singular, unique and personal crystal that is significant only for the person who wears it. When ‘thinking through things’ from ontological perspective on material culture, emic concepts generate new things that are different from the ones we, as researchers, used to know

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based on our own ontology (Henare et  al. 2007, 3–18; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 212–213). For instance, in Martin Holbraad’s (2007) famous example on aché powder among Cuban diviners, the powder as a material substance is power, ‘it is a different world [or ontology], in which what we take to be powder is actually power’ (Henare et al. 2007, 12). Therefore, by applying this emic term, I aim to understand and express how these stones, which my interlocutors wear, are present(ed) in my ethnography and what they could be for my informants. Some of my interlocutors have indicated that what are the most significant gemstones for them, cannot be for others. This becomes evident when they choose and buy crystals, because, as they indicate, only some stones among the vast variety available at crystal shop can become the most unique stone for a particular person. It requires a recognition and development of a specific relationship. Daisy (26), for example, emphasises how choosing the right crystal at a crystal shop is a very personal process (Fig. 10.1):

Fig. 10.1  Daisy’s magnetite on the left and tourmaline on the right, which is not finely polished and has a small bulge. (Photo: T. Teidearu)

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There are so many different stones, I chose this black one [tourmaline] just because it has a defect. All the others were beautiful, polished and regular, but this one has a defect. I felt that this is ‘my stone’, this is characteristic to me. […] [You choose] exactly this way, you recognise your gemstone. I recognised that this was ‘my stone’ among all the others, because, you know, this is like me. […] However, if somebody else goes [to the shop], she/he wants the most polished and beautiful gem because this is the right one for her/him, she/he recognises it. It just is like that, you recognise it. For example, you know that you want a specific stone, you want black tourmaline, and you go to a shop and none of those on sale there suits you, and you just go away.

Usually, at crystal shop, there are several or even dozens of crystals of the same species in small boxes on the counter table or store shelves. Daisy encountered a black tourmaline with a unique shape, a small bulge that she refers to as a defect. She explained to me that this defect reflects her own life because she feels that everything in her life is and has been incomplete and there is nothing she can do about it. We met again about a year after our interview and she showed me a new crystal she had just bought without explaining what it means, assuming that I would understand the meaning of it. It was tourmaline with a small bulge of quartz, which was unique because the quartz had grown directly on the surface of tourmaline. However, at that moment I could not understand that this meant that she was pregnant, I found this out about a half a year later. The meaning of this unique stone was evident for her, but not for me. Daisy’s crystals, which she has been wearing for several years, are interwoven with her personality and personhood, and the challenges and goals in her life. Similarly, Joana Miller (2009, 62–68) discusses body ornaments, especially bands of black beads, worn by Mamainde (Nambikwara) people in the Mato Grosso state of Brazil, which are closely linked to a subject’s personhood and spirit. Significant material objects are in fact sometimes inherently linked with human personhood and human life through biographical or phenomenological attachments (see Hoskins 2006, 78; see also Fowler 2010; Thomas 2006). However, this is not given. Daisy’s relationship with her first crystal, magnetite, which she has been using for several years, reveals the processual nature of this relationality: Well, when I bought this magnetite, it was something external to me at first. Since the beginning I have held it in my hand very often. And I prayed for it, to make it work because I really needed it. Then, it gradually became [a

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part of me], I just did not take it off anymore. At first, it was like a magical object for me in some sense, because it was my first one. It was as if I could turn to it externally if I need help. Through that I could reach something that helps me. […] Now it is like part of me. It is like, I do not know, my guardian animal or my element. And it is crucial to have it just in front of my heart.

Here, Daisy indicates that the magnetite became ‘my stone’ over the course of time. Eventually, it became interwoven with her personhood, and as she feels that it is part of her she wears it all the time. She has established very intimate relationship with the stone through continual use and elapsed time. In case of human relationality with crystals in New Spirituality, stones, especially in case of ‘my stones’, can become part of human personhood through involvement in everyday life, prolonged use and constant bodily contact.

Bodily Intimacy as Phenomenological Relationality While the practice of wearing crystals has a temporal dimension, through which stones are involved in people’s everyday lives, it also has a material dimension. Stones that people wear occasionally or more permanently are strictly material and tangible objects, or material, and are valued as such. The practice, besides being a form of everyday religion (see, e.g., McGuire 2008), is an inherently material practice and a form of material religion. Material religion as a field of study focuses on the question of how religion takes place through or as material culture, and how material expressions of religion are part of people’s religious and mundane lives (Arweck and Keenan 2006; Meyer et al. 2010; Morgan 2010). Things not only represent religious thinking or practices but are also involved in the creation of religion and religious acts. Therefore, things also matter as sources of meaning. Following the main principle of the study of material culture in anthropology, meanings ultimately arise from human relations with materiality. As I have demonstrated, people develop intimate relationships with the crystals they wear over a period of time so that they become biographical objects (see Hoskins 2006), with some becoming personally unique ‘my stones’. However, this has a material and corporeal background. In describing how she sensed the effect of stone, above, Mary said that she feels that it is full of power specifically when she takes it into her hand. In

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addition, in describing the development of the relationship with her first crystal, also above, Daisy said that initially she held it in her hand often to make it work, and since it eventually became part of her it became crucial to have it permanently close to her body, in front of her heart. Similarly, many of my interlocutors have emphasised the significance of bodily closeness and contact, which is the medium or source of the support they get from their crystals. Christina (26), for example, told me that she often feels the effect of crystals in the morning when she puts on a bracelet made of silver with tiger’s eye stones, or when she puts on a jade pendant (Fig. 10.2): You know, it has the strongest effect when I hang it around my neck or put it [the tiger’s eye bracelet] around my wrist in the morning. I think it gives its charge at that moment. For example, it protects me or it supports me at the moment when I need it.

Fig. 10.2  Christina’s bracelet with tiger’s eye stones. (Photo: T. Teidearu)

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As Christina claims, she can often sense the charge or effect of the crystal when she puts it on and can feel it against her skin. It affects her particularly through bodily contact. Similarly, drawing a less esoteric parallel with the study of consumption, people make sense of and communicate with things through bodily senses like touch, and the meaningfulness of objects often unfolds through material interaction (Dant 2008, 13–15). Therefore my interlocutors tend to wear their most significant crystals close to their body permanently in order to have the necessary effect and support, which in turn gives rise to a strong emotional connection. Sometimes, especially in difficult situations, people tend to hold the stone in their hand to establish closer intimate physical contact. For example, Merle (27), because of her struggle with depression, wears a sunstone pendant, which supports positivity and positive attitude, around her neck: And I just had a difficult time back then, then I thought maybe this supports me. […] I felt I would have sunstone just like this one and I would actually carry it with me. I have it around my neck usually, but when I have a difficult moment, I sometimes grab it and hold it. Then I think and wish that I could support myself.

By holding it tightly in her palm, Merle hopes that the sunstone can help her even more. The more close bodily contact people establish with their stones, the more they are perceived to support them. Evidently, my interlocutors establish and sustain intimate connection with their most significant stones through material proximity and bodily contact. Similarly, Walker (2009, 96–99) indicates that in the case of the Urarina baby hammock, physical proximity and dependency creates an intense emotional bond. In addition, a lack of the physical presence of crystals interrupts their effect and relationality. For example, Daisy, for whom it is crucial to have her stone in front of her heart close to her body, says she feels more vulnerable and emotionally unstable when she does not wear the magnetite. Crystals become and are significant through bodily intimacy, as my empirical accounts demonstrate. The processual nature of development of human relationships with things includes, apart from temporality and continual use, material and bodily contact. The human body is an integral part of the self and personhood. Subject is produced and shaped through bodily interaction, which is the basis for understanding the bodily and material culture of religion (see Mohan and Warnier 2017, 376–378). This highlights the processual nature of

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relationships and personhood. Bjørnar Olsen (2010, 147) stresses that human interaction with things is by no means a static involvement; things transform human life and abilities and turn humans into something else through non-human actors (see also Latour 2005). People not only use and wear crystals, but their wellbeing and ability to cope with difficulties in everyday life is also sustained by crystals through their supportive effects, which come through physical intimacy. This, as my empirical cases demonstrate, highlights the phenomenological significance of things. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1962], 215–216, 239) phenomenology of perception, the body is the centre for perceiving and understanding the material world, only through the body do people experience things (see also Thomas 2006, 47–48); moreover, people become involved in things with the body so that the person co-exists with things. Olsen (2010, 67, 130–132), in discussion of phenomenological approach, emphasises that things are recognised by using them and by being bodily engaged with them; and through bodily contact things become part of the person in the sense that these things touch and affect the person. Based on these theoretical assumptions, bodily contact with crystals highlights the meaningfulness of relationships with them and actualises their affect. Relationality between humans and crystals can be strictly grounded in materiality and corporeality, which allows people to be physically engaged with and depend on them. Material engagement and bodily contact are also mediations of possible communication. In the case of crystals, their supportive effect is a mode of communication through which they are involved in people’s everyday lives, although this takes place only through material involvement. With the practice of wearing crystals, material interaction in the sense of bodily intimacy is a mode of relationality. The material and phenomenological relationality with stones can inherently affect human subjects, because the subject can be produced and shaped through corporeal perception and interaction. Similarly to Walker’s (2009, 96–99) empirical case of Urarina baby hammocks, crystals in New Spirituality are engaged in shaping human subjects and become other-­than-­human persons through bodily proximity and dependency.

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Conclusion In discussion of animist materialism, Harvey (2013, 151) proposes that religion matters in terms of the significance of materiality, and moreover, it is often a ‘materialist pursuit’. Materialism as a concept has heavy theoretical and ideological luggage, but in this chapter it is understood in the context of human relationships with the material world. Things have unique qualities because of their tangible properties, which affords sensuous and corporeal perception and experience. In the web of relations with the material world, human interaction with other corporeal entities and persons often happens through material and bodily contact. Moreover, human persons touch and hold things and are also touched and held by things. Apart from animist understandings of communicative relationality, which often rely on movement, gift-giving and conversations, material engagement and bodily contact can also be significant in establishing relationships between humans and things. In this chapter, I aimed to demonstrate that relationality with crystals, which are sometimes understood as other-than-human persons, can be strictly grounded on materiality and corporeality. From the phenomenological point of view, things matter because of their physical and tangible nature, and the possibility of being physically engaged with and depend on them. Relationality and communication with powerful matter is often established through bodily intimacy. Human relationality with crystals as material objects through bodily contact and intimacy, I propose, is a mode of phenomenological relationality. In the case of wearing crystals, their supportive effect is a mode of communication through which they are involved in people’s everyday lives; however, this takes place only through material involvement and bodily intimacy. This takes the bodily and material culture of religion (see Mohan and Warnier 2017, 376–378), a step further from material practices. Phenomenological relationality with objects can affect human subjects because the subject can be produced and shaped through corporeal perception, interaction and intimacy, as well as through bodily proximity and dependency. Crystals as natural minerals are not powerful because they are possessed by deities. Crystals are deities, or other-than-human persons, because they are powerful materials. However, their ontological status is not self-­ evident, nor is it immune to change (cf. Walker 2009, 83). Apart from material dimensions the temporal dimension is significant in bodily

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engagement with stones. Relationality is processual as it is produced through involvement in everyday life and bodily intimacy over the course of time. Only some stones are perceived as being powerful and become personally significant. The crystals that my informants wear in the long term can become ‘my stones’, which are singular, unique and personally significant stones that are perceived as other-than-human persons. Persons, as this argumentation suggests, may be the outcome of specific material and phenomenological relationality with this unique material. Acknowledgements  This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant (grant PRG670) ‘Vernacular Interpretations of the Incomprehensible: Folkloristic Perspectives Towards Uncertainty’ at the University of Tartu, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Institute of Cultural Research.

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CHAPTER 11

Afterword: In Among the More-than-Humans Michael Houseman

In thinking about this Afterword, I began by playfully exploring possible, somewhat irreverent but potentially telling connections between chapters belonging to different sections of the book. This helped me get an intuitive feel for the volume’s overall coherence, as well as an inkling of what an unexpectedly interpenetrating place a “living world” can be! I was struck, for example, by how much day-to-day interactions with Himalayan yaks, modulated by a respect for the animals’ individual character and undertaken so as to maintain their shepherd’s “pastoral sustainability” (Chap. 2), resemble the caring for and wearing of crystals whose recognized peculiarities are marshalled to bolster their bearer’s “self-­ support” (Chap. 10). Might we view a New Spirituality-inspired Estonian as their crystals’ herdsperson, or a herd of yaks as a Nepalese shepherd’s gem-stones? Another intriguing criss-crossing comparison is suggested by the ritually postulated continuities between parts and wholes in both animal-­ derived medicine in Benin (Chap. 6) and biodynamic farming M. Houseman (*) École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université Paris Sciences & Lettres (PSL), Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_11

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(using biodynamic preparations) in France (Chap. 4). Animal organs in the former, and plant, mineral and/or animal components in the latter, are held to retain certain essential, serviceable qualities—aché and “the Living” respectively—of the encompassing totalities from which they are extracted (the animal, the “agricultural organism”). The biodynamic farm as a creature with healing powers? Animal agency as an expression of symbiotic welfare? Finally, I was intrigued by a possible analogy between rights of nature movement water ceremonies that ostentatiously mobilize indigenous peoples as a source of authentic, life-affirming wisdom (Chap. 7), and exposure-to-nature health and well-being practices in which individuals temporarily escape their daily lives to discover a revitalizing, benevolent communitas in the wild (Chap. 8). Collective indigeneity-bathing versus moments of (holy) communion with “earth-being” assemblies? OK, enough of that! Let’s move on to the more serious business of briefly highlighting some of the broad issues raised by the case studies brought together in this book. The preceding chapters document and analyse a wide variety of ritualized practices in which privileged connections with more-than-human entities pertaining to the natural environment—plants, animals, minerals, the essential solvent for life on Earth (water), the Earth itself and nature as a whole—are put into effect. In doing so, they emphasize the (growing?) importance of such entities in contemporary ceremonial. In complementary fashion, and to my mind more significantly, they also bear witness to the key role ritual plays in bringing these beings to body and mind. But what exactly is this role and how decisive is it for the more-than-­ human entities considered here? I would not go so far as to say that relating to such beings requires ritual. Ever since reading Len Howard’s magnificent Birds as Individuals (1953), I occasionally enjoy fairly complex, emotionally engaging relationships with the sparrows, tits and jays that visit our terrace. And I have also experienced unplanned moments of peaceful wonder and communion with nature. Finally, in the wake of a series of eye-opening conversations with Marika Moisseeff, whose peasant roots have made her mindful of such things (I was raised on a beach in Southern California), I can appreciate that for persons who actively interact with their natural environment for their livelihood, and who are therefore constantly on the lookout for signs of new, potentially troublesome developments, at once among their fellow humans and in their other-­ than-­ human surrounds, there exists a degree of everyday continuity between inter-human relations and those they entertain with other worldly

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beings: animals, plants, features of the land, meteorological phenomena and so on. Still, ritual seems particularly well-suited for initiating, working out and sustaining inter-being connections. It is no accident that almost all the cases explored here, as indeed the vast majority of documented relations with more-than-human entities, whether of the witches, ghosts, ancestors, divinities and so forth variety, or features of the natural environment, typically take place within the context of ritual performances. It is in the course of such highly memorable, affecting acts that relations with more-than-­ humans are most emphatically experienced and most stably defined. Note, however, that these ritual experiences and representations are somewhat special, at once conventionally streamlined and recognized as irreducible to patterns of ordinary interaction. As such, they do not so much provide participants with viable, ready-to-use models for daily living in the natural world as they afford them with salient, normative vantage points from which their everyday behaviour, notably with regard to the more-than-­ human entities in question, can be customarily assessed. Of course, because these ritually enacted realities are fashioned by drawing on both other ritual practices and the facts of daily life, they give rise to circular, self-­ reinforcing dynamics that constitute the building blocks of any ongoing cultural tradition. This circularity, as well as the essential role ritual plays in it, is nicely illustrated by Cyndi Margarita Garcia-Weyandt’s account of Our Mother Corn in Western Mexico (Chap. 3): ongoing relationship with this more-than-human relative, and the respectful attitudes it is said to nurture towards land, food and inter-species relations in general, is largely upheld by a multitude of ceremonial practices—offerings, pilgrimages, petitioning, dancing, prayer, other verbal performances and so on— in which these attitudes are made manifest in the course of interacting with Our Mother Corn herself. By focussing on more-than-humans entities pertaining to material aspects of people’s natural environment, the chapters in this book forcefully argue for treating ritually mediated relations with more-than-humans as strictly comparable to those between human beings. In this respect, they call into question the latter’s preeminent (ontological) status. I tend to treat inter-human relations as more self-evident and therefore less dependent upon ritual performances than inter-being relations. However, a number of the case studies, especially those dealing with subsistence activities, have given me pause. Moreover, if, on the human-to-human side of the equation, one takes into account life-cycle rituals (associated

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with birth, initiation, marriage and death), ceremonial recognitions of personal pre-eminence and group membership, as well as ritually mediated gift exchange, customary vendettas, peace-making initiatives and the like, the difference is perhaps not as significant as one might first imagine. Another important question this volume raises concerns the link between the nature (pun intended) of the more-than-human entities in question and the design features of the ceremonial practices in which they make their presence felt. The book’s chapters reveal a twofold quality of more-than-humanity that suggests that these two issues are closely related. In some of the cases, humans are shown to entertain relationships with specific more-than-human beings, whereas in others, it is more a matter of connecting to a more inclusive, generic whole such as Nature, the environment, or the Earth and its attendant forces. Thus, while Bertrande Galfré’s account of biodynamic farming (Chap. 4) deals with ritualizations that pointedly strive to encompass both of these poles, the other contributions describe practices that tend to lean in one direction or the other. Cyndy Mararita Garcia-Weyandt’s treatment of Our Mother Corn (Chap. 3), Anna Varfolomeeva’s account of Siberian Okans’ connection with the mineral deposits of their homelands (Chap. 5), and implicitly, Degenhart Brown’s text on animal-derived medicine (Chap. 6), all allude to rituals that enact relationships with particular other-than-human beings: certain mythological figures, local spirit masters or ancestor spirits, specific substances, animals or territories. This also applies to Théophile Johnson’s account of inter-species interactions in Himalayan yak-herding (Chap. 2), but whose ritual character is perhaps less obvious (analogies with supposed shamanic “communication” notwithstanding). Other chapters focus instead on ritual practices that mediate more abstract relations with presumably universal more-than-human entities that act as wellsprings of spiritual energy. As Jean Chamel says of water (and/or Earth) ceremonies in rights of nature movement assemblies (Chap. 7), they are undertaken less to relate to particular rivers, glaciers and so forth, than to collectively “connect” with water as a pervasive “sacred” entity inseparable from the idea of water as the source of all life. Similarly, in the therapeutic practices described by Ed Lord and Henrik Ohlsson (Chap. 8), while this or that entity—a tree, a rock, a bird, a piece of wood or a fire—may become token intermediaries in participants’ salutary “encounters with nature”, it is the latter’s encompassing, impersonal benevolence—as a “community of earth beings”—that is clearly at stake. In Yael Dansac’s account of ritualized encounters with megaliths in

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Brittany (Chap. 9), participants are encouraged to visualize, ask permission and express thanks to the stones and the “nature spirits” that guard them. However, these associated more-than-human beings, unlike the mineral deposits whose ritually hedged mining by Siberian Okans upholds their assertions of local identity, intervene above all as the largely contingent, anonymous purveyors of restorative Earth energies. Finally, the Estonian crystal wearers studied by Tenno Teidearu (Chap. 10), who attribute specific qualities to different types of gem-stones, can develop long-­ term, intimate connections with certain crystals that they “sometimes see as active parties in relation to humans”. Generally speaking, however, these stones are treated less as personalized beings in their own right than as parts or aspects of the person who wears them, becoming the indifferent bearers of positive Earth energies that contribute to their wearers’ self-enhancement. This first, admittedly roughly hewn division of the book’s chapters goes in hand with a further divergence pertaining to the sort of “ritual” the chapters bring into play. The authors clearly do not share a single understanding of ritual. Or to put it differently—in a way that does not presume that some understandings are better than others—their contributions bear witness to the fact that different kinds of ritualization are involved. Théophile Johnson, for example, draws on Goffman’s (1967) notion of interaction ritual to account for the daily negotiated exchanges between Nepalese shepherds and their flocks, whereas in Bertrande Galfré’s account of French biodynamic farming, Tal Asad’s (1993) idea of ritual as a disciplined way of life entailing a set of everyday routines defining membership in a devotional community clearly applies (“Just as prayer is a part of monastic life, she remarks, dynamization is a part of the biodynamist’s daily life”). The remaining chapters, that mostly deal with either long-­ standing or newly fashioned ceremonial practices set apart from mundane interaction (crystal wearing as described by Tenno Teidearu being the possible exception), can be seen as calling upon two rather different modes of ritualization. In the one, found in the chapters on Our Mother Corn, mineral mining in Buriatia and animal-derived medicines, ritual takes a fairly familiar, canonical form (for anthropologists at least) in which the performance of certain extra-ordinary, difficult to grasp yet conventionally stipulated items of behaviour—organized for the most part, as it happens, around petitioning and ceremonial offerings—is presumed to have efficacy and meaning in and of itself. In the other, present in the chapters on rights of nature

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inter-being ceremonies, ecotherapy practices, encounters with megaliths and the caring and wearing of crystals, the participants’ personal dispositions are held to play an essential role: their behaviour, surprisingly variable from one person to the next, is above all construed as the means whereby certain extra-ordinary, hard to pin down yet conventionally stipulated ways of thinking and feeling can be induced and/or expressed: “let[ting] water know your heart”, “experiencing the presence of life and living beings”, spiritual “openness”, feeling “supported” by one’s gem-stones. I have argued elsewhere (Houseman 2007, 2016, 2020, 2021) that these two orientations can be understood as “action-centred” and “actor-­ centred” modes of ritualization respectively. The first entails a complexification of participants’ overt behaviour founded on a process of condensation in which nominally contrary forms of relationship are simultaneously acted out. The second entails a complexification of their private thoughts and feelings based on a process of refraction in which participants self-consciously take on several contrary identities at once: they seek to personify certain exceptional, exemplary emotional and intentional qualities, all the while experiencing themselves as affected by the acts they undertake to do so. One of the troublesome questions this book raises concerns the pervasive use of the notion of “connection”, notably with respect to actor-­ centred ritualizations in which less personalized more-than-human entities are involved. Although this term is regularly used by both practitioners and researchers as synonymous with “relationship”, such that “relating” and “connecting” are assumed to be identical, I suspect that “connection” actually connotes something quite different. I understand “relationship” as referring to an intentionally invested, emotionally animated tie between persons, that is subjects endowed with a degree of self-determining agency; because another person is involved, a relationship is inherently open-­ ended, entailing mutual readjustment, accountability and ongoing negotiation. Such interpersonal relationships, while commonplace between humans, can of course also occur with more-than-human beings, as illustrated by Théophile Johnson’s account of yak-herding in the Himalayas (Chap. 2). Additionally, as previously mentioned, canonical action-centred rituals, including ceremonial petitions or offerings whose acceptance may be anticipated but is never automatic, consist largely in the enactment of special relationships, both between human participants and with morethan-­human entities (Houseman and Severi 1998). It is the interplay

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between the condensed, exaggeratedly systemic relationships realized in the course of ritual performances and the more negotiable relationships of everyday interaction that underlies these performances’ social efficacy. However, when one turns to actor-centred ritualizations like those described in Chaps. 7, 8, 9 and 10, “relationship”, as I understand it, is not what comes to mind. Typically, one of the participating parties is shown to be markedly wanting, either abstracted away or largely subsumed by the other. Jean Chamel, for example, speaks of rights of nature movement ceremonies as a “ritual animism” that “is not truly inhabited”: their stated aims of recognizing and endorsing co-habitation with particular more-than-humans gives way to enacting a “connection” to more global or abstract entities such as “water” or “Mother Earth”. In facilitating an incorporated experience of “our interconnectedness […] with the world as a whole, with each other and with ourselves”, in which it becomes possible to say “I am the water and the water is me”, these rituals seem mainly about inciting the celebrants to experience their own holistic, monistic potential. Similarly, Tenno Teidearu speaks of the bond between New Spirituality Estonians and the energy-bearing crystals they wear as a “phenomenological relationality” based not on back-and-forth exchanges (gift-giving, dialogue etc.) but on material presence and an intimate, bodily “connection” that allows gems-stones to become part of their wearer’s personal, augmented identity. For Yael Dansac, while visualizations and displays of mental and physical “openness” allow participants to enter into what appear to be transient relationships with megaliths and/or their guardian spirits, these remarkably passive other-than-humans act essentially as conduits whereby individuals can self-consciously experience the transformative effects of the telluric energies they are said to convey. Finally, for Ed Lord and Henrik Ohlsson, ecotherapy practitioners “reconnect” with nature by seeking refuge amid an all-embarrassing, unequivocally positive yet liminal more-than-human “community of earth beings”. Taking a cue from these case studies, a “connection” with a more-than-­ human being, then, can be thought of as a relationship in which the personhood of one of the terms is either missing or conspicuously attenuated, often reduced to a felt presence. In keeping with Mircea Eliade’s (1969) admittedly simplistic distinction (Sarbacker 2002) between ecstasy (“standing without”, which he associated with shamanic practice) and enstasy (“standing within” which he associated with yoga), I am tempted to suggest that such inter-being connections tend to take two main forms according to which of the participating parties, the human or the

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more-than-human, becomes enveloped by the other.1 One, the ecstatic path, leads to an experience of mystical union in which the (human) self is subsumed within the more-than-human. My favourite example is the Medieval Christian, Franciscan image of a drop of wine absorbed by the sea.2 To my mind, forest-bathing and other ecotherapy practices correspond to something along these lines. In the other, enstasic path, participants are induced not only to feel something of the other-than-human but also to purposefully experience this feeling, thereby reflexively encompassing a more-than-human presence within themselves.3 To varying degrees, rights of nature ceremonies, ritualized encounters with megaliths and New Spirituality crystal wearing all seem to follow this pattern. I would thus argue that for those partaking in what I have called actor-­ centred ritualizations, of which the present volume provides a number of examples, and which are widespread in what are often described as “alternative” and/or “spiritual” practices, connecting with more-than-humans consists less in entering into relationship with these entities than in momentarily becoming, estatically and especially enstasically, more-than-­ human themselves. As several contributors suggest, such experiences may result in incremental and sometimes long-lasting shifts in participants’ thoughts and feelings, but whose social effects, although surely present, remain, for the moment, notoriously difficult to demonstrate. Let me end by expressing my pleasure at having been so enthusiastically encouraged by this book to speculate about relationships/connections with more-than-human entities, and the modes of ritualization that mediate their recognition. Indeed, from an anthropological point of view, the same principle applies both to the human and more-than-human beings concerned and to the conceptual tools used to grasp their mysterious goings-on: the more the merrier!

 I’m grateful to Sophie Albert for having brought the concept of enstasy to my attention.  See, for example, Jacopone da Todi’s (1236–1306) The Lauds (1982, 153): “What happens to the drop of wine/That you pour into the sea?/Does it remain itself, unchanged?/It is as if it never existed./So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in, It is united with Truth […].” 3  For the online Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, for example, “the state of enstasy [in systems of yoga] is characterized by becoming, in consciousness, that which is contemplated” (http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/development/12331690, retrieved 24/02/2022). 1 2

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References Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1969. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Princeton: Pantheon/Bolingen. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books. Houseman, Michael. 2007. “Menstrual Slaps and First Blood Celebrations. Inference, Simulation and the Learning of Ritual.” In David Berliner and Ramon Sarró (eds.), Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches, 31–48. Oxford; New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2016. “Comment comprendre l’esthétique affectée des cérémonies New Age et néopaïennes?” Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 174: 213–37. ———. 2020. “Becoming Autonomous Together: Distanced Intimacy in Dances of Self-Development.” In Graham Harvey, Michael Houseman, Sarah M. Pike and Jone Salomonsen (eds.), Reassembling Democracy. Ritual as Cultural Resource, 87–104: London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ———. 2021. “Immersive Hugging as a Ritual Act.” In Christina Welch and Amy R.  Whitehead (eds.), Religion and Touch, 236–252. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Houseman, Michael and Carlo Severi. 1998. Naven or the Other Self. A Relational Approach to Ritual Action. Leiden: Brill. Howard, Len. 1953. Birds as Individuals. New York: Collins. Jacopone, da Todi. 1982. The Lauds. New York: Paulist Press. Sarbacker, Stuart R. 2002. “‘Enstasis and Ecstasis’: A Critical Appraisal of Eliade on Yoga and Shamanism.” Journal for the Study of Religion 15 (1): 21–37.

Index1

A Abram, David, 2 Aesthetics, 8, 52, 84, 129, 130 Affects, 10, 57, 126, 216, 217, 222, 223, 230–232 Agency/agentivity, 3, 12, 26, 42, 47, 106, 119, 127, 132, 218, 221, 222, 238, 242 Agriculture/agricultural, 5, 12, 51, 57, 60, 61, 65–84, 169, 238 Altar, 48, 52, 53, 109, 119, 129, 147 Analogism/analogies/analogical/ analogy, 67, 76–84, 154, 157, 158, 238, 240 Ancestor(s), 49, 51, 59, 93, 94, 96, 109, 112, 118, 124–127, 142, 172, 199, 239, 240 Animal(s), 4, 12, 13, 21–24, 26, 30, 32, 33, 36–38, 51, 57, 68, 76,

80, 82, 103, 109–132, 166, 177, 178, 180, 182, 228, 238–240 Animate/animated/inanimate, 9, 13, 15, 80, 83, 90, 96, 105, 152, 154, 154n22, 155, 192, 196, 197n7, 207, 242 Animism/animist/animistic, 8, 14, 15, 45, 77, 137–158, 154n22, 156n23, 196, 213–233, 243 Anthropocentric, 2, 60, 61, 129 Anthropomorphic, 200, 207 Anthroposophy, 12, 65, 68, 69 Appadurai, Arjun, 93, 110, 122–124, 130 Archaeology/archaeological, 191–196, 199, 206 Art/artistic/artists, 3, 4, 6, 46, 50, 82n3, 84, 117, 144

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Chamel, Y. Dansac (eds.), Relating with More-than-Humans, Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3

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INDEX

B Behavio(u)r(s), 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 23, 26, 29, 30, 33, 36–38, 78, 103, 118, 182, 194n3, 200, 204, 207, 208, 215, 239, 241, 242 Belief(s), 6, 10, 13, 79, 95, 96, 154, 166, 194n4, 195, 196, 196n6, 214, 218, 220 Bell, Catherine, 6, 7, 153, 153n19, 179, 181 Biodynamic/biodynamicist/ biodynamicists/biodynamics, 5, 12, 65–84, 237, 238, 240, 241 Biomedicine/biomedical, 110n1, 122, 124–126, 181 Bio-semiotic, 11, 12, 26, 38 Bird-David, Nurit, 9, 47, 154, 155, 166, 197n7 Bodies/bodily/body, 4, 7, 12, 14, 15, 23, 24, 37, 44, 47, 52–54, 57–59, 72, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123–126, 143, 147, 153, 155, 166, 172, 193, 196–201, 197n8, 203–208, 215–217, 223, 224, 227–233, 238, 243 Bricolage, 143, 157 Buddhism/buddhist, 68, 95, 96 Business, 89, 90, 98, 103, 104, 112, 120, 238 C Cadena, Marisol de la, 76, 138, 150 Catholic, 4, 7, 218 Ceremony/ceremonies/ceremonial ceremonialist, 5–7, 9–11, 14, 42–44, 46–48, 50–55, 51n8, 58–60, 62, 112, 119, 129, 137–158, 178, 205, 206, 216, 238–244 Chemical, 53, 60, 68, 217–219, 223

Childhood/children, 45, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 69, 99, 115, 116, 175, 179, 180, 182, 214 Christian, 143 Climate, 27, 46, 47n4, 57, 58, 144, 169, 185 Cognitive, 22, 56, 78, 138, 167, 192 Colonial/colonialism/colonization/ colonized, 41–44, 47, 47n4, 48, 54, 56, 59–62, 125, 151 Comaroff, Jean, 124, 150 Comaroff, John L., 124, 150 Commodification, 41, 53, 59, 194n3 Communion, 9, 143, 201, 238 Communitas, 11, 14, 15, 166, 167, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 204, 208, 238 Community, 11, 13, 14, 22, 24, 29, 38, 41–52, 51n8, 54, 56–62, 90, 92, 93, 95, 102, 105, 106, 110–117, 123, 129n8, 132, 147, 152, 153, 166, 177–181, 204, 205, 207, 240, 241, 243 Compost/composting, 3, 4, 7, 80 Consciousness, 84, 150, 153, 223, 244n3 Consumption, 13, 41, 50, 57–59, 122, 225, 230 Corporeality/corporeal, 5, 15, 60, 216, 217, 228, 231, 232 Cosmogony, 10, 14, 77, 83 Cosmologies, 151, 152, 196 Cosmos/cosmical, 68, 70, 74, 76, 80–82 COVID-19, 4, 125 Creativity/creative, 5–10, 13, 14, 79, 84, 116, 129, 142, 149, 153n21, 158, 193, 197 Crystal(s), 15, 213–233, 237, 241–244 Cultivation, 12, 43, 46, 50, 53, 54, 58, 60 Culture, 92

 INDEX 

D Dance/dancing, 52, 53n10, 72, 144, 148, 152, 172, 239 Death, 4, 27, 37, 112, 120, 153n21, 240 Decolonization/decolonizing/ decolonized, 47 Deities, 56, 112, 113, 118, 119, 217, 223, 232 Descola, Philippe, 2, 9, 45, 69, 77, 78, 138, 153–158, 216 Disease(s), 122, 124–126 Divine/divination, 109–132, 191, 219 Domestication, 11, 12, 21, 26, 38 Domination, 35, 36 Douglas, Mary, 121, 181, 184 Dualism/dualist/dualistic, 78, 126, 153, 154, 171, 180, 216 E Earth, 9, 14, 42n2, 43, 49n6, 61, 68, 70, 74, 82, 96, 140, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 154, 156, 192, 217, 218, 238, 240, 241 Earth beings, 2, 3, 76, 138, 152, 155, 158, 166, 166n1, 167, 172–174, 177, 180, 182, 183, 238, 240, 243 Ecocentrism, 14, 158 Ecology/ecologies/ecological, 21, 45, 46, 47n4, 48, 61, 65, 69, 70, 128, 143, 146, 155, 196 Economic(s), 9, 13, 69, 70, 76, 92, 103, 105 Ecopolitics/ecopolitic/ecopolitical, 66, 76, 83 Ecopsychology, 7, 143 Ecosystem, 4, 48, 57, 58, 60 Ecotherapy, 14, 166, 168, 169, 172, 181, 184, 185, 242–244

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Embodiment/embodied/embodying, 10, 12, 42, 44, 47, 48, 54, 113, 120, 129, 149, 155, 157, 158 Emotion(s)/emotional/emotionally, 23, 32, 33, 38, 80, 82, 91, 92, 151, 166, 182, 192, 196, 198, 204–208, 220, 222–224, 230, 238, 242 Energy/energies, 43, 44, 52, 53, 53n10, 56, 57, 76, 80, 103, 144, 166, 175, 192, 193, 195–208, 195n5, 217–219, 223, 240, 241, 243 Entanglements, 68, 77, 110, 127 Environmentalists, 2, 137, 155, 156 Epistemology/epistemologies/ epistemological, 45–48, 110, 117, 131, 138, 139, 154 Esotericism/esoteric, 8, 12, 15, 65, 68, 152, 192, 194–196, 214, 215, 218, 220, 220n3, 223, 230 Ethology/ethologist(s), 23, 33, 36, 38 Eyes, 28, 36, 37, 74, 98, 119, 121, 122, 140, 142, 143, 146, 148, 150, 157, 173, 200, 201, 203, 205, 207, 229 F Farm(s)/farmers/farming, 4, 12, 21, 49, 66–72, 70n1, 74–77, 82–84, 99, 171, 237, 238, 240, 241 Fedele, Anna, 7, 8, 192 Feeling(s), 10, 35–37, 74, 82, 92, 124, 149, 172, 174, 176, 179n5, 180–182, 194n4, 200, 215, 222, 223, 242, 244 Feminism/feminist(s), 47, 58, 61 Fetish(es), 218, 219 Folklore/folkloristic, 99, 166, 196 Food, 28, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51, 57–61, 239

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Forest, 14, 102–104, 152, 166, 168, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178–182, 184, 185, 196, 197, 202, 244 Funeral(s), 7, 11, 36–37 G Garden(s), 70, 71, 76, 158, 199 Gender, 200 Genealogy, 12, 48, 49, 51, 54, 57, 60 Gesture(s), 5, 7, 12, 23, 26, 33, 34, 37, 38, 67, 74–78, 80–84, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 207 Gift, 48, 60, 221, 240 Global/globalisation/globalised, 11, 53, 67, 69, 109, 110, 117, 122–131, 137–158, 167, 168, 185, 243 God(s), 56, 96, 109, 112, 117, 118, 121 Goffman, Erving, 22–24, 32, 38, 241 Grimes, Ronald, 6, 153, 153n21 H Hallowell, Alfred Irving, 154, 154n22, 155, 166, 197n7, 221 Harvey, Graham, 8, 9, 152, 153, 153n20, 155, 166, 192, 196, 216–218, 220, 221, 224, 232 Healer(s)/healing, 13, 56, 59, 95, 110, 112–115, 117–119, 121, 124–127, 131, 132, 147, 166, 171, 194–195, 199, 238 Health/healthcare/healthy/illness(es), 9, 13, 43, 44, 57, 59, 74, 95, 109–132, 165–185, 196, 222, 238 Holism/holistic, 7, 14, 65–84, 126, 156–158, 194, 194n4, 218, 219, 223, 243

Houseman, Michael, 8, 10, 66, 76, 77, 149, 206, 207, 242 Hunting/hunter(s), 9, 35, 90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 102, 103, 105, 116, 120, 155–158, 171, 172 Hybridization/hybrids, 9, 22, 29, 49, 122–130, 149–154 I Identification/identities/identity, 7, 10–15, 22, 27, 32–33, 47n4, 60, 70, 79, 90, 92, 101, 105, 106, 125, 131, 138, 156, 171, 200, 203, 204, 207, 242, 243 Ideology/ideological, 7, 8, 70, 128, 182, 193, 196n6, 200, 232 Legal/Illegal, 3, 8, 13, 14, 93, 98, 103–105, 137–139, 144n5, 150, 152n17, 155–158 Imagination, 78, 84, 116, 129, 130, 168 Indigeneity/indigenous, 12, 93, 94, 238 Ingold, Tim, 2, 35, 36, 117, 119, 127, 154–157, 218, 219 Interbeing(s), 1–16, 109, 119, 123, 124, 126, 130, 132, 137–158 Interdependence, 94, 157 International, 71, 110, 128n7, 140, 143, 147, 166, 170, 175 Inter-species, 21–38, 61, 120, 239, 240 Intimacy, 15, 217, 228–233 Intuition, 68, 78, 79, 156, 176, 200 Invisible, 77, 80, 81, 200 Ivakhiv, Adrian, 192–194, 196 J Jousse, Marcel, 78, 80, 81, 84 Justice, 46, 57, 116, 140

 INDEX 

K Kin/kincentric/kinship, 11, 12, 41–48, 41n1, 50, 51n8, 53–58, 60–62, 112 L Land, 27, 31, 42n2, 44, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57–62, 74, 76, 92, 93, 98, 100, 101, 105, 106, 169, 239 Landscape(s), 13, 15, 61, 72, 75, 84, 90–97, 100–106, 168, 169, 185, 196, 199, 200, 204 Latour, Bruno, 2, 153, 231 Legitimacy/legitimation, 8, 14, 132, 140, 141, 143, 147, 151n15, 152, 158 Liminality/liminal, 14, 15, 121, 166, 167, 177, 179, 181–184, 191–208, 243 Litany, 3–5, 7 Loss(es), 7, 29, 37, 123 M Magic/magical, 75, 175, 180, 192n1, 204, 205, 207, 228 Magliocco, Sabina, 8, 197, 197n8 Market(s), 13, 101, 110–122, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 194, 194n3 Materialism/materialistic, 15, 213–233 Materiality/materials, 3, 16, 28, 46, 90, 91, 117, 119, 130, 166, 168, 170, 171, 194, 214–219, 223–228, 230–233, 239, 243 Medicine(s)/medical, 13, 28, 51, 52, 104, 109–111, 110n1, 114–119, 121, 122, 124–129, 131, 132, 167, 237, 240, 241 Meditation, 147, 192, 198, 200, 203

251

Megalith(s)/megalithic, 15, 191–208, 240, 242–244 Memories, 12, 42, 50, 54, 69, 92, 97, 215 Mental, 79, 167, 168, 197n8, 200, 204, 206, 208, 243 Mimetic, 84, 117, 122–130 Mind, 53, 78, 119, 126, 142n3, 153, 155, 168, 180, 194n4, 203, 205, 223, 238, 243, 244 Mine/mining, 13, 89–93, 97–101, 103–106, 168, 241 Mineral(s), 13, 89–92, 97, 98, 105, 111, 118, 214, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 232, 238, 240, 241 Modernity/modern, 1, 2, 14, 78, 96, 105, 110n1, 115, 116, 118, 131, 138, 151, 153–155, 158, 165–185, 192, 216 Monism/monistic, 152, 156–158, 243 Mood, 167, 175, 177, 182, 222 Mountain(s), 25, 28, 32, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74–76, 94, 96, 100, 101, 152, 153, 169 Mourning, 5, 7, 37 Mundane, 47, 53, 216, 219–221, 225, 228, 241 Mystical, 13, 112, 117, 118, 121, 131, 132, 138 N Native, 2, 41, 44–48, 53, 56–59, 61 Naturalism/naturalistic, 14, 78, 79, 139, 154, 155, 157, 158, 216 Nature, 1, 2, 5, 24, 45, 67, 68, 70, 78, 79, 96, 97, 103, 105, 112, 120, 137–158, 165–185, 191, 218, 221, 222, 224, 227, 230, 232, 238, 240 Neoliberal, 109, 131, 132, 183 Neo-shamanic, 195, 206

252 

INDEX

O Offering(s), 12, 35, 43, 44, 48–52, 49n7, 54, 59, 60, 72, 151, 203, 239, 241, 242 Ojibwa/ojibwe, 44, 62, 154, 154n22, 155, 221 Ontology/ontologies/ontological, 2, 42, 45, 47, 59, 69, 77, 78, 120, 124, 127, 130–132, 138, 139, 154–157, 156n23, 216, 218, 219, 223–226, 232, 239 Organic, 65, 68, 221 Organism, 12, 59, 157, 217, 238 Ownership, 90, 92, 93, 98, 104 P Paganism/pagan(s)/paganic, 8, 197n8, 205 Pandemic, 4, 125, 149, 171 Pastoralism/pastoral, 11, 12, 22, 26, 27, 32, 38 Peasantry/peasant, 12, 65–84, 238 Perception(s), 8, 15, 32, 79, 93, 105, 116, 139, 154, 193, 205, 217–219, 222, 223, 231, 232 Performance(s), 5, 10, 44, 51–53, 137–158, 197, 198, 239, 241, 243 Personality, 8, 13, 14, 137, 138, 154, 155, 157, 158, 225, 227 Personhood, 12, 42, 42n3, 45, 47, 56–61, 96, 125, 154, 200, 216, 224, 227, 228, 230, 231, 243 Phenomenology/phenomenological, 14, 15, 213–233 Plant, 12, 28, 41–50, 53, 55–62, 68, 73, 74, 76, 82n3, 103, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 155, 182, 238, 239 Politics/political, 4, 6–8, 11–13, 65, 66, 69, 70, 92, 115, 122, 150, 151, 169, 196n6

Power(s), 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15, 56, 60, 91, 99, 104, 106, 111–114, 117–122, 123n6, 129, 130, 157, 169, 173, 181, 191, 192, 194n4, 195n5, 196, 207, 208, 216–219, 222, 223, 226, 228, 238 Prayer(s)/praying, 44, 83, 115, 124, 144, 146, 198, 239, 241 Processual, 2, 6, 132, 153, 155, 217, 224, 227, 230, 233 Psychiatric, 168, 174, 184 Psychology, 78, 79, 167, 181 Purity, 148, 152 Q Qualities, 10, 15, 97, 118, 122, 130, 166, 182, 196, 205, 217–220, 223, 232, 238, 240–242 R Reciprocity, 47, 58–61, 200 Relationality/relational, 2, 3, 12, 14, 15, 21, 42, 53, 58, 66, 67, 76–78, 84, 110, 119, 121, 124, 127, 138, 154–157, 166, 213–233, 243 Religion(s)/religious, 3, 4, 6–8, 23, 24, 68, 69, 81, 95, 111–113, 115, 128, 138, 141, 143, 157, 180, 192, 192n1, 194n4, 196, 214–216, 218–220, 228, 230, 232 Respect, 56, 70, 95, 102, 103, 105, 106, 129n8, 148, 194n4, 198, 224, 237, 239, 242 Rights, 13, 14, 31, 36, 59, 67, 73, 81, 92, 93, 95, 104, 105, 126, 137, 177, 226, 227, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244 Rites, 3, 11, 129, 143, 152, 157, 179, 197, 203

 INDEX 

Rituals/rituality/ritualistic/ ritualisation/ritualised, 3–16, 21–38, 42, 43, 46, 52, 54, 65–84, 91, 96, 105, 109–132, 137–158, 179, 183, 193–200, 203, 204, 206–208, 216, 238–243 River(s), 44, 45, 49, 52, 54, 96, 152, 152n17, 153, 156, 240 S Sacred, 6, 82, 83, 90, 92–97, 100–104, 117, 141, 150, 192, 195n5, 196, 197, 203, 240 Sacrifice, 91, 96, 119, 124 Science(s)/scientific, 1, 48, 66, 68, 78, 82n3, 110n1, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 138, 167, 182, 223 Seed(s), 43, 47, 51, 53, 59–61 Semantic, 2, 120, 155 Sensation(s), 78, 84, 123, 124, 204, 206 Sense(s)/sensitive, 6, 9, 10, 13, 27, 28, 32, 35–37, 72, 77, 78, 80, 82, 90, 92, 104, 105, 109, 110, 154, 154n22, 157, 166, 177, 180, 184, 203, 206, 220, 222, 223, 225, 228, 230, 231 Sensoriality/sensorial/sensory, 9, 32, 38, 80–82, 178, 180, 197n8, 201, 206, 222 Sentient, 9, 42, 60, 96 Shamanism/shamanic/shamanist, 24, 95, 138, 142, 144, 146, 152, 240, 243 Smell(s), 31, 32, 35, 37, 116, 177, 200 Sociology/sociological, 69, 70, 215 Soil, 12, 58, 65–84, 147, 148, 177

253

Sorcery/sorcerer(s), 120, 121 Soul(s), 120, 154, 154n22, 218 Spirit(s), 24, 52, 69, 90, 95, 96, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 112, 118, 126, 150, 191, 197, 199–208, 217, 218, 227, 240, 243 Spirituality/spiritualities/spiritual, 1–16, 46, 47, 53, 65–67, 109, 110, 112, 115, 117–119, 122–130, 137–158, 180, 182, 183, 191, 192, 213–233, 240, 242, 244 Steiner, Rudolf, 68 Stone(s), 15, 24, 25, 96–98, 101–105, 117, 154n22, 191, 194, 196, 198–201, 200n11, 201n13, 213, 213n1, 215–231, 233, 241 Sustainability/sustainable, 44, 51, 57, 60, 61, 66, 237 Symbiotic, 12, 110, 238 Symbolic/symbol, 22, 74, 81, 89, 90, 97–98, 104, 105, 153, 216 Syncretism, 68, 95 T Technologies, 109, 116, 117, 119, 126, 127, 177, 185 Terrestrial, 12, 38, 68, 70, 76 Therapy/therapist(s)/therapeutic, 14, 127, 166–168, 170, 171, 179, 180, 182, 185, 194, 196n6, 214, 215, 218, 220, 225, 240 Tradition, 6–9, 12, 13, 46, 50, 53, 54, 56, 62, 122, 132, 140, 143, 146n7, 196, 239 Tree(s), 166, 175–178, 180, 182, 240 Turner, Victor, 6, 7, 9, 166, 179, 181, 183, 203, 204 Tylor, Edward, 154, 157, 218

254 

INDEX

U Urban, 41–62, 169, 174 V Value(s), 8, 14, 30, 45, 79, 90, 92, 102, 105, 119, 123n6, 155, 182, 196, 201n13, 224 Van Gennep, Arnold, 7, 181, 203 Vernacular, 218–220, 223, 224 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 2, 132 Vodun(s), 13, 111–113, 116–119, 121, 124, 126, 128–130

W Water(s), 14, 28, 29, 44, 52, 52n9, 72, 73, 118, 141, 142, 144–150, 150n12, 152, 156, 157, 173, 202, 238, 240, 242, 243 Wellbeing, 57, 100, 123, 167–169, 171, 179, 182, 185, 222, 231 Wild/wildlife, 30, 69, 76, 80, 95, 97, 119, 169, 172, 238 Witchcraft, 120, 121, 123, 124 Women/woman, 15, 22, 45, 47, 48, 50–52, 54, 55, 61, 62, 111, 144, 146, 147, 199, 214 Woodland, 168, 172–174, 172n3, 177