The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities 9781350197305, 9781350197336, 9781350197312

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Toward a Medical-Environmental Humanities.Why Now?
PART one Conceptualizing Convergence: Econarratology and Narrative Medicine, Graphic Medicine and Environmental Texts, Virology, Grey Ecology, and Ecopsychology
CHAPTER TWO Narrative Knowing and Narrative Practice: Opportunities for Reciprocal Learning across Science-Facing Humanities (
CHAPTER THREE Black Lives Matter in Flint, Michigan: Narrative Medicine and Ecocriticism in Goliath and Michael Moore’s Fahr
CHAPTER FOUR Graphic Medicine and Ecological Consciousness: Paula Knight’s The Facts of Life (Sathyaraj Venkatesan and
CHAPTER FIVE Fungi Umwelt (Maria Whiteman)
CHAPTER SIX Contagious History: The Imagination of the Viruses (Z. Gizem Yilmaz Karahan)
CHAPTER SEVEN The Grey Ecology of Zombie Fiction (Lars Schmeink)
CHAPTER EIGHT Climate Change and Grief: How to Mourn a Mammoth in Alice Major’s “Welcome to the Anthropocene” (Tathagata So
CHAPTER NINE Eco-Recovery Memoir and the Medical-Environmental Humanities (Samantha Walton)
PART two Environmental Toxicity and Public Health
CHAPTER TEN Pathogenic (Auto)Ecologies: Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Mechanisms in Environmental Autobiography (Sofia Vari
CHAPTER ELEVEN Toward an Ethics of Transcorporeality and Public Health in Taiwanese Ecopathodocumentary1 (Robin Ch
CHAPTER TWELVE Slow Violence, Environmental Toxins, and Systemic Racism: Revisiting Lorde’s Cancer Journals in the Twenty-Fi
CHAPTER THIRTEEN “Reframing Care” in the Age of a Novel Corona Virus: Food as Medicine on the Farms of Two Physician-Farmers (
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Poetry and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: Metabolic Pathways of Flesh (Nikoleta Zampaki)
PART three Varieties of Entanglement: Landscapes, Bodyscapes, Micro- and Macro-Biota
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Health, Disease, and the Body in Ecofeminist Theory: Entangled Vulnerabilities (Susanne Lettow)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Gut Feeling: The Emergence of Human Microbiota Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon (Jorge Marcone)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Performing Damaged Land-/Bodyscape in the Niger Delta: Transcorporeal Explorations of Nnimmo Bassey’s We Th
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Scapegoating in Times of Pan-Epidemic: Mimesis, Identity Crisis, and the Buddhist Phármakon (Chia-ju
CHAPTER NINETEEN Fighting the Spread of Diseases with Words: From Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947) to Tony Hillerman’s The Fir
CHAPTER TWENTY From the Clinical to the Ecocultural: Literature, Health, and Ethnoecomedicine (Animesh Roy)
PART four Exemplifying Specific Cultural Approaches to the Convergences of Environment, Health, and the Arts
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Ayurvedic Vision on Health and Environment (Raghul V. Rajan)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Health and Hygiene Discourses in the Early Twentieth Century: The Making of a Modern Odia Body (Animesh
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (Un)sustainable Ecology: Modern and Indigenous Approaches to Health Care in Amazônia ( Marcos Coló
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Nature and Traditional Medicine in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart (Chinonye Ekw
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE The Tales of Chinese Herbs: Rethinking Environmental Medicine through Documentaries on Traditional Chinese
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Literary Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Intercorporeality in Aboriginal Australian Poetry: “Into the Sap Stream
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Turkish Classical Song Lyrics and Related Idioms for a Literary Therapy for Curing Ecodepression: An Ecolo
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Expressing Concepts of Environment through Concepts of Madness in Some Irish Literature: Astray at Home (
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Epilogue: Our Bodies, Our Minds, Our Planet
Index

Citation preview

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO THE MEDICAL-ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO THE MEDICAL-ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES Edited by Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Vidya Sarveswaran and contributors, 2022 The editors and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Terry Woodley Cover image: Cremation site at Chattogram city, designed for those who have died from Covid-19 © IHSAN EESA / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9730-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9731-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-9732-9 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

A cknowledgments   1 Introduction: Toward a Medical-Environmental Humanities. Why Now?  Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran

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Part I Conceptualizing Convergence: Econarratology and Narrative Medicine, Graphic Medicine and Environmental Texts, Virology, Grey Ecology, and Ecopsychology 2 Narrative Knowing and Narrative Practice: Opportunities for Reciprocal Learning across Science-Facing Humanities  Eric Morel

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3 Black Lives Matter in Flint, Michigan: Narrative Medicine and Ecocriticism in Goliath and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9  Mita Banerjee

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4 Graphic Medicine and Ecological Consciousness: Paula Knight’s The Facts of Life  Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Chinmay Murali

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5 Fungi Umwelt  Maria Whiteman

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6 Contagious History: The Imagination of the Viruses  Z. Gizem Yilmaz Karahan

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7 The Grey Ecology of Zombie Fiction  Lars Schmeink

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8 Climate Change and Grief: How to Mourn a Mammoth in Alice Major’s “Welcome to the Anthropocene”  Tathagata Som 9 Eco-Recovery Memoir and the Medical-Environmental Humanities  Samantha Walton

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Contents

Part II Environmental Toxicity and Public Health 10  Pathogenic (Auto)Ecologies: Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Mechanisms in Environmental Autobiography  Sofia Varino

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11  Toward an Ethics of Transcorporeality and Public Health in Taiwanese Ecopathodocumentary  Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai

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12  Slow Violence, Environmental Toxins, and Systemic Racism: Revisiting Lorde’s Cancer Journals in the Twenty-First Century  Heather Leigh Ramos

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13  “Reframing Care” in the Age of a Novel Corona Virus: Food as Medicine on the Farms of Two Physician-Farmers  Kathryn Yalan Chang

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14  Poetry and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: Metabolic Pathways of Flesh  Nikoleta Zampaki

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Part III Varieties of Entanglement: Landscapes, Bodyscapes, Micro- and Macro-Biota 15 Health, Disease, and the Body in Ecofeminist Theory: Entangled Vulnerabilities  Susanne Lettow

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16 A Gut Feeling: The Emergence of Human Microbiota Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon  Jorge Marcone

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17 Performing Damaged Land-/Bodyscape in the Niger Delta: Transcorporeal Explorations of Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood  Henry Obi Ajumeze

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18 Scapegoating in Times of Pan-Epidemic: Mimesis, Identity Crisis, and the Buddhist Phármakon  Chia-ju Chang

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19 Fighting the Spread of Diseases with Words: From Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947) to Tony Hillerman’s The First Eagle (1998)  Françoise Besson

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20 From the Clinical to the Ecocultural: Literature, Health, and Ethnoecomedicine  Animesh Roy

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Part IV Exemplifying Specific Cultural Approaches to the Convergences of Environment, Health, and the Arts 21 Ayurvedic Vision on Health and Environment  Raghul V. Rajan

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22 Health and Hygiene Discourses in the Early Twentieth Century: The Making of a Modern Odia Body  Animesh Mohapatra and Jyotirmaya Tripathy

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23 (Un)sustainable Ecology: Modern and Indigenous Approaches to Health Care in Amazônia  Marcos Colón

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24 Nature and Traditional Medicine in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart  Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu

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25 The Tales of Chinese Herbs: Rethinking Environmental Medicine through Documentaries on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)  Kiu-wai Chu

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26 Literary Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Intercorporeality in Aboriginal Australian Poetry: “Into the Sap Stream”  John Charles Ryan

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27 Turkish Classical Song Lyrics and Related Idioms for a Literary Therapy for Curing Ecodepression: An Ecological Cognitive Semantic Approach  Fazila Derya Agis

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28 Expressing Concepts of Environment through Concepts of Madness in Some Irish Literature: Astray at Home  Tess Maginess

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29 Epilogue: Our Bodies, Our Minds, Our Planet  You Don’t Know What You Got ’Til It’s Gone  Scott Slovic The Gasping Turtle and Other Hypoxia Narratives: Prana in a Threatened World  Swarnalatha Rangarajan Dying to Breathe: Fear as a Comorbidity in the Desert  Vidya Sarveswaran

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L ist of C ontributors   I ndex

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to place on record the invaluable editorial assistance provided by Ms. Ranjani Srinivasan and Ms. Ritu Jangird.

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Toward a MedicalEnvironmental Humanities. Why Now? SCOTT SLOVIC, SWARNALATHA RANGARAJAN, AND VIDYA SARVESWARAN

There seems to be a universal human tendency to take good health—and other fortunate blessings— for granted. When we’re young and energetic, when our lives appear to be progressing without a hitch, we may be inclined to ignore the inevitable frailty of our physical being and the potential for psychological distress and despair. Life without friction is not conducive to pause and reflection, you might say. For better or worse, we accrue friction as our lives unfold. Through natural wear and tear or through the unanticipated occurrence of injury or illness, all of us, at one point or another, experience physical and/or mental challenges. This may be when we finally realize our bodies and minds require attention and care. In other words, recognizing our vulnerability is a process of becoming aware, or more deeply aware, of our very existence. Much the same trajectory seems to occur with our awareness of the natural world, or at least this may have been the case prior to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of the modern environmental movement, which is crisis-focused and is predicated on a declensionist narrative: the formerly Edenic planet has declined from its one-time purity (and health) as a result of human activity. Arguably, the vulnerability of the natural world, ranging in scale from the threats experienced by individual organisms to infirmity on the biospheric scale, is the subtext of nearly all contemporary environmental thought and policy. The parallel between human health and unhealth and that of the natural world has long been recognized in popular culture. We can see the rubric of health and medicine, like that of militarism, woven into the fabric of our environmental consciousness. NGOs and for-profit companies seek to “heal” the Earth and “defend” our natural resources: see Healing the Earth, Inc., and the Natural Resources Defense Council, as cases in point. More recently, and with a certain sense of irony, journalists have noted that the Covid-19 pandemic may be “healing the earth” by reducing our species’ carbon footprint, at least temporarily.

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities

Perhaps one of the most meaningful theoretical angles that supports the parallel analysis of human and planetary health is the development of precarity theory, based on the early work of Judith Butler and others, and developed more recently by Pramod K. Nayar in such books as Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017) and Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019). The earlier book about Bhopal, India, argues that the terrible Union Carbide chemical accident of 1984 has continued to haunt society (both locally and globally) for more than thirty years, characterizing Bhopali lives and stimulating public concern about the dangers of industrial society and the unethical practices of multinational corporations in externalizing the risks and costs of their activities. Nayar articulates both aesthetic and psychological dimensions of the aftermath of the 1984 disaster, and in doing so, he helps to create a framework for a broader medical-environmental analytical paradigm in the environmental humanities, one that illuminates the inextricable linkages between human and environmental health and frailty. Just as Nayar shows how various cultural representations of vulnerable Bhopali lives have the potential to enhance public awareness of ongoing ecological and biopolitical threats in the context of industrial activities in specific parts of the world, the growing field of humanities-based medical-environmental studies not only describes situations of precarity endured by human and natural communities but also offers prescriptions for remedying or at least mitigating these threats. In his more recent book, Nayar explicitly states that “the precariat” (those who experience precarity) includes not only diverse human beings but also nonhuman subjects. He argues that “ecological disaster and eco-apocalypse along with different states of ecoprecarity are central to contemporary ‘environmentality’,” the term Lawrence Buell used in 2005 to describe “the modes through which literary and cultural texts—from cinema to fiction—engage with ecological issues and concerns” (7–8). Ecoprecarity highlights the “contingent nature” of the earth, what Nayar calls “the beauty, fragility, and singularity of the planet we inhabit,” which “we stand to lose if we do not take care of our only home” (2019: 9–10). This handbook emerges implicitly from the spirit articulated in Nayar’s recent work that explores the shared precarity of human and nonhuman life on the earth. The essays collected here trace the intersections between ecocriticism (and other subfields within the environmental humanities) and the medical humanities, shedding light on the ways in which literature and other forms of cultural expression address our understanding of human minds and bodies within the context of the physical environment. Theories of disease, disrepair, treatment, recovery, and health, from various cultures, point to the diversity of potential approaches to the intersection between the medical and environmental humanities at the heart of this project. In addition to the obvious (and scarcely perceptible) physical aspects of disease and contamination, in the twenty-first century we must learn to understand the mental health implications of climate change, the anxiety caused by increasingly toxic environmental conditions, and the overarching challenges of facing vast, slow processes that jeopardize not only the more-than-human world but also our own safety. The essays in this book aim to reveal our ecological predicament as a simultaneous threat to human health. Nayar’s attention to the biopolitical aspect of public health—the idea that a person’s status in society is deeply linked to that person’s physical condition—aligns closely with the approaches emphasized in another foundational volume that paved the way for this project: Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara’s Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (2017). Those who are most vulnerable to illness or disability caused by industrial disasters such as the Union Carbide leak in Bhopal are the people who live near or downwind/downstream from

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industrial sites or locations where various kinds of waste are stored. Others forms of vulnerability, as Ray and Sibara explain, are those where social class or immigration status, including the lives of migrant farmworkers, results in particular exposure to hazardous labor conditions. Attention to the ability-disability spectrum facilitates critique of some of the underlying assumptions of environmentalism, such as the idea that robust physical activity is the “normal” way to experience the natural world. Just as Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier helped to raise awareness of the varieties of environmental thought represented by the categories of “full-stomach” and “empty-belly” worldviews, the linkage between disability studies and the environmental humanities sensitizes readers to the varieties of “environmental bodies” and the implications of this diversity for human experience of the physical environment. Many of the chapters collected here explicitly or indirectly build upon recent theoretical work in the fields of material ecocriticism and affective ecocriticism. In their introduction to the 2014 volume Material Ecocriticism, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann state that “the ‘material turn’ [in ecocriticism] is an extensive conversation across the territories of the sciences and the humanities and embraces such fields as philosophy, quantum physics, biology, sociology, feminist theories, anthropology, archeology, and cultural studies, just to name a few” (2). While Iovino and Oppermann do not name medicine and public health explicitly here, it is clear from early examples of material ecocriticism, such as Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), that the medical ramifications of our “transcorporeal” connections with the physical world are essential foci of this material turn. More recently, with the 2018 collection Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino have formally established a subfield of ecocritical analysis that highlights the psychological aspects of human experiences in relation to the physical environment, often emphasizing the clinical (or therapeutic) features of this psychological territory. This recent interest in psychological ecocriticism, in its focus on emotion, differs from the psychological ecocriticism that scholars such as Scott Slovic, in Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992) and other articles, have long been practicing and from the recent studies of readers’ attitudes toward environmental experience and other species that have begun emerging in the empirical research of Wojciech Malecki, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Contributors to Affective Ecocriticism address such psychological conditions as anxiety, solastalgic distress, homesickness, ecophobia, and grief. Sarah Jaquette Ray’s article for the collection, “Coming of Age at the End of the World: The Affective Arc of Undergraduate Environmental Studies Curricula,” overlaps with the approach developed in her 2020 monograph A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. This work, in turn, builds upon the tradition of psychological ecocriticism pioneered by such publications as Mark Allister’s work on “relational autobiography” in Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography (2001) and Susan Rowland’s explanation of the psychology of human estrangement from nature in The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung (2011). Heather Houser’s Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014) draws together both the psychological and bodily dimensions of “sickness,” as represented in the fictional narratives of such authors as David Foster Wallace and Leslie Marmon Silko, as a way of exploring how literature encourages readers’ environmental consciousness. This handbook is divided into four major sections: Part I, Conceptualizing Convergence: Econarratology and Narrative Medicine, Graphic Medicine and Environmental

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities

Texts, Virology, Gray Ecology, and Ecopsychology; Part II, Environmental Toxicity and Public Health; Part III, Varieties of Entanglement: Landscapes, Bodyscapes, Micro- and Macro-Biota; and Part IV, Exemplifying Specific Cultural Approaches to the Convergence of Environment, Health, and the Arts. The general tilt of the collection is from textual and medical theory to the conjunction of pollution, toxicity, and public health; to varieties of land-body entanglement; and finally to traditional, relatively localized cultural expressions of the convergence of medical and environmental philosophies. The book opens with Eric Morel’s tracing of the intersections between econarratology and narrative medicine, which he sees as an opportunity to create broader avenues for interdisciplinary collaboration in the environmental humanities. The particular focus for Morel’s chapter is the role of narrative in bridging the gap between the humanities and the sciences. Using the example of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a citizen science project that has been operating along the American shoreline from Alaska to California for nearly two decades, he finds that stories told by citizen participants in the project have been particularly interesting in how they seem to have enabled volunteers to think about bird and human death, approaching a topic (mortality) of particular importance in both the environmental and medical humanities. He proposes the idea of “citizen econarratology” as a new way of collecting stories from volunteers and professional scientists in both environmental and, potentially, medical contexts. Mita Banerjee’s analysis of a well-known public health and environmental justice crisis—the case of contaminated drinking water and associated health problems in Flint, Michigan—follows directly from Morel’s study. Banerjee articulates the theory and methodology of narrative medicine in her study, critiquing the scope of “stories of illness” in that they often fail to encompass and validate the full dimensionality of people’s lives, beyond their status as victims of an illness. Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Chinmay Murali push the boundaries of medical and ecological narrative by exploring an innovative ecopathological discourse in the medium of comics. In particular, they focus their study on Paula Knight’s graphic memoir, The Facts of Life, which raises the idea of planting trees as a way of coping psychologically with infertility. The graphic medium offers new opportunities for representing the subjective dimensions of illness and ecological engagement. Maria Whiteman’s chapter takes connectivity in a very different direction, considering fungi (mushrooms) as a nexus of philosophical, medical, ecological, and cultural “interconnectivity.” In “going fungal” (allowing herself to be “overwhelmed and overtaken” by the world of mushrooms), Whiteman finds herself thinking deeply about what it means to live together on the planet with other organisms, asking fundamental questions about “health” and “well-being.” “How do we begin putting these terms into context in a world we share with other organisms?” she asks. “Perhaps, we can imagine a Mobius strip between ourselves and the ecosystem.” As a visual artist, she describes the process of producing a series of photographs of mycelium (the structures through which mushrooms receive nutrients from the environment), which she exhibited alongside living fungi. Z. Gizem Yilmaz Karahan takes a step back to contemplate what we can learn from viruses and other aspects of the pandemic in order to overcome the pitfalls of human exceptionalism and the flawed ontological separation of human and nonhuman beings. Her survey of “multispecies storytelling” (Donna Haraway’s term) in viral literature ranges from historical accounts of Machu Picchu and other ancient civilizations to Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man. The Covid-19 pandemic thus becomes an occasion to reconsider “relational ontologies,” a central theoretical issue in the environmental humanities. Using the framework of “critical posthumanism,” Lars Schmeink also

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addresses key lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that human life exists in relation to other life forms and that we must “become-with” these nonhuman phenomena. Schmeink adopts Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s term “grey ecology” to describe the “disanthropocentric” relationships between phenomena, or “objects,” beyond human understanding, and he turns to zombie texts such as Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later and Robert Kirkman’s comic The Walking Dead, among others, in order to demonstrate what a posthuman reading might look like. The “medical” subtext of such stories is often indirectly represented in these works, which are set either in the aftermath of human disappearance (following the onset of a catastrophic contagion) or during the process of human extinction. What is critical to recognize, in any case, is how posthumanism and grey ecology enable readers and viewers of zombie texts to appreciate the decentering of the human. While several chapters in this opening section emphasize physical threats to human health and survival posed by pandemics and related forms of contagion, Tathagata Som turns to what may be the single greatest overarching health risk: climate change. He argues that medical humanities has yet to confront this challenge or to consider the discourse of climate grief, which is a means of addressing the mental health effects of climate crisis. Som focuses his study on Alice Major’s “Welcome to the Anthropocene” as an example of “reparative poetry,” not only revealing key flaws in human thinking and action that have contributed to climate change, but also showing how “mourning the damage already done can pave the way for the prevention of damage yet to be done.” Responding to Renee Lertzman’s observation in Environmental Melancholia (2015) that societal failure to respond to catastrophic environmental change causes apathy and hopelessness, Som claims that certain literary texts can teach us how repair our own emotional condition during this time of anthropocenic despair. At the same time, he points out, following Judith Butler, that effective mourning can bolster political activism, which may ultimately lead to more resilient communities and have a material influence on the state of the world. This chapter, in its focus on the conjunction of eco-depression, mourning, and reparation, brings the environmental humanities into conversation with the “mental health humanities.” Along similar lines, Samantha Walton addresses both mental health aspects of environmental experience and the use of literature in achieving and recording recovery from psychological trauma. Walton, however, does not focus her chapter specifically on psychological distress caused by environmental anxiety. Instead, she puts forward the “eco-recovery memoir” as a means of recognizing the natural world as a “potent agent capable of influencing mental health outcomes” more broadly. The examples she uses— Luke Turner’s Out of the Woods, Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, and Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar—address the concept of the “nature cure” (to use Richard Mabey’s term) in response to a wide range of psychological conditions, from autism to depression and sexual trauma. Part II of the book turns toward a particularly ubiquitous concern in the Anthropocene, the public health ramifications of widespread toxicity, a byproduct of industrialization. What we find in these chapters are a variety of examples of how the environmental humanities seek to provide new communication genres and vocabularies for registering and illuminating the medical consequences of environmental contamination. Sofia Varino traces the intersections between the physical and psychological experience of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) in several examples of “autoecological” narratives, including Aurora Levins Morales’s memoir Kindling, the poetry of Peggy Munson, and Susan Abod’s documentary films Homesick and Funny You Don’t Look Sick. She argues that such MCS narratives call attention to an “environmentally charged politics of health

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and healing,” challenging the tendency to distinguish between “internal (physiological, genetic) and external (social, environmental, epigenetic) models of illness and health.” Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai identifies a specific textual mode—the “ecopathodocumentary”—that aims to overcome public and governmental inattention to the public health problems caused by air pollution. This is a spin-off from the genre Anne H. Hawkins has labeled the “ecopathography,” referring to an “autobiography that recounts a person’s experience of illness or disease resulting from a toxic environment.” Tsai asserts that “we live in an age of air pollution,” pointing to industrialization and urbanization as the chief causes of this looming crisis. Using the familiar environmental frameworks of “transcorporeality” (from Stacy Alaimo) and “slow violence” (from Rob Nixon [2011]), his chapter analyzes, in particular, three Taiwanese ecopathodocumentaries: Scott Wen-Chang Chi’s The Poisoned Sky, Chi Po-Lin’s Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, and Hsiao-Li Wang’s Particulate Matters. Audre Lorde’s 1980 Cancer Journals emerged as a central text for scholars working in the field of material ecocriticism when Alaimo emphasized its importance in Bodily Natures and other studies, and Heather Leigh Ramos highlights not only the material biomedical aspects of Lorde’s work but also its significance in showing how systemic racism contributes to health disparities and environmental inequalities. Ramos’s chapter, which also applies Nixon’s concept of slow violence, demonstrates the value of bringing together the medical and environmental humanities as a way of reinforcing and shedding light on contemporary social movements, such as Black Lives Matter. The public aspect of Lorde’s work is of particular importance to Ramos, who argues that Lorde relies upon “visibility strategies to move from private suffering to coalition-building and organizing.” Lorde’s work, claims Ramos, “provides us tools for resisting environmental and medical injustices that disproportionately affect marginalized bodies, particularly Black women.” Kathryn Yalan Chang’s study of two examples of “physician-farmers,” one from Taiwan and the other from New Jersey in the United States, is relevant to the fungal angle of Whiteman’s essay from Part 1 in its focus on the profound linkage between food and medicine. She also introduces the ethical idea of “health disparities and social inequities in the food system” into her discussion, taking on the social justice perspective that is frequently important in environmental humanities research. From “worn-out soils” to “unhealthy bodies,” Chang and the physician-farmers she studies appreciate the interwoven predicaments of the physical environment and the health of human communities, just as other branches of the environmental humanities, including postcolonial ecocriticism, operate on the premise of shared imperilment and protection of the human and nonhuman realms. Chang invokes the Covid-19 pandemic as a way of highlighting the notion of a “global syndemic,” a widespread concatenation of multiple crises, for which revamping human food systems may be part of the solution. Nikoleta Zampaki proposes a new category of artistic expression that she calls “Metabolic Poetics,” interweaving ecological and biomedical information as a way of vivifying human metabolic processes, including the ways in which environmental toxins penetrate and pass through our bodies. Her study highlights such work as Adam Dickinson’s poetry collection Anatomic and Pinar Yoldas’s mixed-media artwork titled Ecosystem of Excess. This chapter, which builds upon philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of “flesh,” shows how Metabolic Poetics reveals the complex intersections between “nature and the body, science and culture, and biosphere and Technosphere.” Convergences, intersections—and now entanglements. Obviously, a handbook devoted to bringing together two multidimensional disciplines, each devoted to positive societal impact, will be rife with examples of vocabularies, methodologies, and perspectives coming together. Part III

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foregrounds the rubric of multi-scalar entanglement as a dominant metaphor. In addressing the concept of “entangled vulnerabilities,” Susanne Lettow extends the work of such ecofeminist scholars and queer theorists as Julie Sze, Nina Lykke, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Y. Chen and emphasizes the stratification, or inequality, of exposure to toxins and other environmental risks, defining “stratified vulnerability” as a “material-semiotic” idea. She also underscores the point that “the vulnerability of human bodies is closely entangled with the well-being of other living beings.” While all of the chapters in this book demonstrate what academic administrators tend to describe as “use-inspired basic research” to capture the combined exploration of fundamental ideas and pursuit of societal applications, Jorge Marcone’s contribution is perhaps unique in its explicit engagement with the groundbreaking Microbiota Vault project, which focuses on conserving diverse microbiota in order to ensure the long-term health of humanity. Marcone’s work, based in Peru, analyzes the socioecological aspects of Amazonian indigenous and mestizo stories in the contexts of food, nutrition, and diet. Just as studies such as Lettow’s aim to recognize diverse experiences of medical-ecological vulnerability, Marcone’s research and the broader concerns of the Global Microbiome Network (GloMiNe) emerge from a sense of the vital, practical importance of recognizing and preserving diversity, as reduced microbial diversity is an underlying factor of autoimmune diseases, metabolism disorders, and autism spectrum disorder. In keeping with the multi-scalar aspect of this section of the handbook, Marcone’s project addresses the global health implications of safeguarding diverse microbiota. Henry Obi Ajumeze approaches the medical-ecological question of scale in a rather different way by analyzing Nigerian poet Nnimmo Bassey’s 2002 poetic manifesto We Thought It Was Oil, But It Was Blood. Working with the familiar environmental humanities rubrics of slow violence and transcorporeality, Ajumeze demonstrates how Bassey’s work simultaneously contemplates the scale of the Niger Delta landscape and the scale of the human bodies affected by the injection of toxins through oil extraction. The “entanglements” explored in this work include the landscape/bodyscape conflation and the “neoliberal entanglements” of various corporations and governmental entities that are complicit in the pollution-causing activities. A key function of the medical and environmental humanities is to engage with harmful, unjust situations in the health and ecological spheres, and this is precisely what we see in the work of Bassey and Ajumeze. Chia-ju Chang’s chapter also engages with medicalenvironmental injustice, but in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using René Girard’s mimetic and scapegoat theories, Chang argues that the Western subject tends problematically to externalize and demonize disease and other species, leading to an emotionally cathartic but ultimately unjust and unhealthy scapegoating of disease itself and possible carriers of disease. Working on various scales, Chang explains how American responses to the coronavirus included reductive, counterproductive finger-pointing toward other nations (namely, China), toward social “others” (Chinese Americans, and members of other cultural groups), and toward other species (including the possible zoonotic sources of the virus, bats and pangolins). She proposes the Buddhist concept of pharmakon as a non-mimetic, non-dualistic alternative to the deeply engrained Western epistemology rooted in mimetic dualism. Françoise Besson’s analysis of Albert Camus’s classic novel of disease, La Peste, and Tony Hillerman’s more recent novel, The First Eagle, which takes place in Navajo country in the American Southwest, revisits the questions of disease origin raised in Chang’s chapter, as she explores questions of the spread of disease as represented European and American fiction. Much as Chang concludes that it can be helpful to seek non-Western alternatives to such epistemologies as Cartesian dualism, Besson finds hopeful solutions to contagion in the literature she discusses,

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particularly in the traditional, plant-focused healing ceremonies of the Hopi and Navajo people, which are integrated into Tony Hillerman’s stories. Animesh Roy coins the term “ethnoecomedicine” to describe the complex “entanglements” between biotic elements and sociocultural constructions that guide indigenous theories of disease and healing. Roy points to a variety of South Asian and African writings, including such works as Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, as a lens through which to understand the ecological, physical, and psychological nexus of ethnoecomedicine. Regional case studies from around the world are important in many chapters throughout this volume, but specific cultural approaches to the conjunction of medical and environmental thought are foregrounded in Part IV. The purpose of dedicating an entire section of the book to unique cultural traditions is to drive home the plurality of significant cultural traditions that energize this project of integrating the medical-environmental humanities. And although there are particular reasons for pursuing such an integration at this time in history, as discussed below, this effort is not new—in fact, in some societies there has never been a de facto separation of medical thought and environmental thought. The following chapters reveal this vividly. Raghul Rajan, for instance, introduces the ancient medical-ecological philosophy of Ayurveda from the Indian subcontinent, which is based upon the premise that the human body is intrinsically part of the universe, not separate from it. Rajan’s chapter articulates a philosophical system that beautifully exemplifies the holistic convergence of human and environmental health that underlies the concept of this handbook. From the abstract philosophical realm of Ayurveda in the previous chapter, Animesh Mohapatra and Jyotirmaya Tripathy turn to the complex sociopolitical process by which citizens and medical practitioners in the region of Odisha, on the eastern coast of India, sought to balance indigenous medical knowledge systems with Western ideas about the body and medicine during the early-twentieth-century period of British colonialism. Mohapatra and Tripathy demonstrate a historical approach to understanding the challenges of balancing vernacular and colonial medicine. Marcos Colón, along similar lines, examines a contemporary situation with the Zo’é indigenous people from Pará State, Brazil, and a project underway to bring modern health care to the Zo’é in the forest rather than requiring them to travel to the city for access to modern medical treatment. Colón’s discussion of “culturality” and the practical efforts to reinforce the forest-based lives of an indigenous community by bringing modern medicine to them in Amazonia offers a novel approach to cultural preservation at a time when Western doctors are actively trying both to cure physical ailments and protect native culture. Literature is often a powerful lens into the cultural particularities of medical and environmental thought, and this is the focus of Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu’s study of several examples of twentiethand twenty-first-century African (primarily West African) fiction. Ekwueme-Ugwu finds that the there is a rich vein of medical environmentalism in African cultural traditions, but that nature-based medical practices often compete with supernatural theories of wellness and healing. Chinese culture, too, is famous for its intricate theories of herbal medicine and fundamental connections between natural processes and the workings of the human body. Kiu-wai Chu relies upon documentary films and comic sketches in his introduction to core concepts of traditional Chinese medicine. “Herbal medicine” takes on a rather different meaning in John Charles Ryan’s study of Australian aboriginal concepts of the interdependencies between human bodies and plant bodies. Other chapters in this volume have used the key concept of transcorporeality, from the field of material ecocriticism, to emphasize the vulnerability of human bodies to contaminants released into the environmental

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through industrial activity. Ryan also uses the idea of transcorporeality, but in this case to clarify the salutary aboriginal notion of human–plant inter- and transcorporeality, by which human bodies exist in ways that are coextensive with other bodies that exist in nature. Ryan uses the work of aboriginal poets to reveal and explain indigenous theories of human and environmental health. Mental health also often has distinctive relevance to specific cultural traditions and histories. Fazila Derya Agis explores this tracing the healing ecolinguistic elements in Turkish folk music dating back to the Ottoman Empire, with a particular interest in how song lyrics emphasizing natural metaphors (especially linked to animals and plants) help to ease cases of depression among listeners. Tess Maginess relies on well-known examples of Irish poetry in order to think about the motif of madness in connection with physical environments, with places, locating this work within specific contexts of Irish history. Readers of this book may ask, “Why now? Given that there is already a substantial history of looking at the human mind and body in relation to the environment, why choose this moment to explicitly seek to bring the medical and environmental humanities into concert as a common framework for understanding human experience?” The answer may be both autobiographical and historical. To be brazenly self-revelatory, as aging scholars with aging family members, our sensitivity to our own physical conditions (from aching muscles to weakening eyes) and how these affect our engagement with the world have awakened us to the profound relevance of medicine to environmental thought and experience. We began discussing this project in 2019, prior to our awareness of what would become the most significant public health crisis of our lifetimes: the Covid-19 pandemic. Much of our work on this book has taken place during lockdown conditions in India, and while fastidiously wearing a mask and practicing social distancing in the United States. This introduction was drafted in Ürgüp, Turkey, during a national lockdown, while monitoring the rise and fall of new cases of infection and numbers of new deaths. At the time of this writing, more than 580,000 people have died from Covid in the United States, 270,000 in India. In other words, we are now more acutely aware of the precarity of our own health and the mental strains of prolonged anxiety and social isolation than ever before in our lives. Our experience of the pandemic has driven home the inseparability of human health and environmental health, attaching a resounding exclamation mark to the importance of this project. During the early months of the pandemic, in 2020, Steven Hartman, Joni Adamson, Greta Gaard, and Serpil Oppermann coordinated a special cluster of articles offering environmental humanities responses to this unique public health crisis for the website Bifrostonline. In their introduction titled “Through the Portal of COVID-19: Visioning the Environmental Humanities as a Community of Purpose,” they cite David Quammen’s eloquent statement from his prescient book, Spillover (2011), on zoonotic disease: “In fact, there is no ‘natural world,’ it’s a bad and artificial phrase. There is only the world” (2020: 518). In fact, our experience of this dramatic and traumatic pandemic has driven home to us that there is no “human health” and “environmental health.” There is only health—and the absence of health. There is only precarity, experienced admittedly in variable degrees according to just and unjust social and economic systems, but an overarching and fundamental precarity that encompasses all of us, regardless of nationality and ethnicity and species. Obviously, we did not welcome the onset of the Covid pandemic as we worked on this book, but we quickly recognized that this public health crisis reinforced the urgency of yoking together scholarly traditions—the medical humanities and the environmental humanities—that had previously existed mostly in parallel but largely independent spaces. We anticipate that this will no longer be the case.

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REFERENCES Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allister, M. (2001), Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bladow, K., and J. Ladino, eds. (2018), Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Buell, L. (2005), The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hartman, S., J. Adamson, G. Gaard, and S. Oppermann (2020), “Through the Portal of COVID-19: Visioning the Environmental Humanities as a Community of Purpose,” Bifrost Online. Available online: https://bifros​tonl​ ine.org/ste​ven-hart​man-joni-adam​son-greta-gaard-ser​pil-opperm​ann/. Accessed May 19, 2021. Houser, H. (2014), Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, New York: Columbia University Press. Iovino, S., and S. Oppermann, eds. (2014), Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lertzman, R. (2015), Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement, London: Routledge. Lorde, A. ([1980] 2020), The Cancer Journals, New York: Penguin. Nayar, P. K. (2017), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Nayar, P. K. (2019), Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture, New York: Routledge. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quammen, D. (2011), Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, New York: Norton. Ray, S. J. (2020), A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ray, S. J., and J. Sibara, eds. (2017), Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rowland, S. (2011), The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung, London: Routledge. Slovic, S. (1992), Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

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PART ONE

Conceptualizing Convergence: Econarratology and Narrative Medicine, Graphic Medicine and Environmental Texts, Virology, Grey Ecology, and Ecopsychology

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CHAPTER TWO

Narrative Knowing and Narrative Practice: Opportunities for Reciprocal Learning across Science-Facing Humanities ERIC MOREL

In opening a state-of-the-field essay for the American Comparative Literature Association on the environmental humanities, Ursula Heise surveys a spate of emergent humanities initiatives directing research in the prior two decades, succinctly describing the medical humanities among them as “a new interest in how story-telling functions in medical contexts and how medical issues are represented in literature, film, and the visual arts” (Heise 2014) before delving into existing work and comparatist opportunities within the environmental humanities. The tasks Heise lays out for environmental humanists are less defined by the embattled and “clichéd concept of ‘interdisciplinarity’ ” (2014) and more by investigating various rhetorics, identifying and investigating concepts across disciplines, translating humanistic research to other audiences, and serving as the conceptual basis for cultural deliberation in the face of environmental concerns. Capacious though that program is, it notably retains the second of the two tasks she ascribed to the medical humanities while eliding the first: understanding “how story-telling functions in [environmental] contexts” (2014). That gap is all the more surprising since Heise’s first book on comparative postmodernisms, Chronoschisms (1997), was deeply informed by narrative theory, and Heise has consistently remained one of ecocriticism’s most lively and persuasive attendants to matters of form generally and narrative form in particular. Heise’s proposals fall squarely within the second of three narratives about the humanities surveyed by Howard Brody ([2009] 2011) in an essay that cautions against pursuing a semantically overburdened project in the medical humanities. The humanities, he notes, are frequently invoked to mean distinct and potentially conflicting things: a set of sometimes-related disciplines separated and formalized into curricula, a Renaissance-inspired agenda of critical reflection toward wisdom, and lastly a sort of friendly and compassionate space for appreciation and other forms of personal

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response. Heise is clearly willing to do away with the first, as she says outright that she prefers the heading of environmental humanities, and there is no trace of the third in her suggestions. But in falling so squarely into the area of critical reflection, her argument and her dismissal of interdisciplinarity find themselves in danger of what Brody identifies as this second narrative’s cerebral detachment, which risks collapsing back into the first narrative—as writing for the venue of a comparative literature society also perhaps enacts. My essay, then, proposes a kind of work within the environmental humanities that brings back attention to storytelling in environmental contexts as a way to offer space for alternative humanist work.1 Drawing directly from the work in the medical humanities of Rita Charon and narrative medicine, I argue that environmental humanists’ expertise in narrative knowing has potential to open interdisciplinary avenues of collaboration in environmental studies. I go on to repay the medical humanities for their insight by suggesting how the environmental and medical humanities as co-travelers can layer or extend concerns in narrative medicine. Before turning to my example texts, which come from citizen science blog pages, it is worthwhile to elaborate on Charon’s case for narrative knowing in the medical humanities and identify econarratology as a bridge for this work into the environmental humanities.

NARRATIVE IN THE SCIENCE-FACING HUMANITIES Although much doctoral training persists in training scholars who define their work within the categories of period and nation that typify the humanities’ job market, humanist scholars can develop attunement to a range of matters while engaging in the wide reading and analytical maneuvers they undertake to enter their disciplines. Rita Charon’s work on narrative is premised on this same observation, and her influential Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006) lays out narrative theory’s potential applicability to contexts in her medical practice despite its development from within studies of the novel. Specifically, those contexts included the interpretive process of diagnosis based on patient accounts of their condition, as well as doctors’ often unvoiced responses to the encounters that comprise patients’ treatment. For Charon and others in the medical humanities, a simple but key warrant undergirding this interdisciplinary bridge was recognition that the labels of “doctor” and “patient” were obscuring the shared humanity of both participants. To see both parties as full people invited humanist training, as these full people are not immediately known to one another but revealed through experience and narration. Based on close reading practices drawn from literary study and narrative theory’s insights into elements of narrative form and process, Charon was able to advocate for narrative as a means toward reflection capable of demonstrably better care outcomes. She structures opportunities for storytelling in patient visits and practitioner self-reflection both. Similar opportunities for storytelling are possible in environmental contexts, even though ecological crisis often lacks the clarity of doctor-patient relationships and even though the multispecies entanglements of environmental challenges present many stakeholders humans cannot yet hear. The opportunities arise in any number of scenarios when humans use narrative to communicate with one another about the cause-and-effect dynamics of situations or about their own experiences I would like to acknowledge and thank Benjamin Streeter and Matthew M. Low, who both provided feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. 1

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engaging any of those situations. Environmental humanists already thinking along similar lines here have included Scott Slovic (both independently in Going Away to Think [2008] and together with Terre Satterfield [2004]), Kate Rigby (2015), and Candis Callison (2014), among others who recognize practical benefits of even informal kinds of storytelling. The field of environmental studies is actually replete with occasions of narrative knowing, but often the narratives are given over to the social sciences as qualitative data to mine, not as themselves valuable knowledge. In this chapter, I narrow my focus to the realm of citizen science; storytelling in citizen science projects is still often underused or under-realized, but the interface that citizen science projects occasion between publics and scientific researchers is a fruitful one for humanists to observe and elaborate. The benefits of storytelling have garnered increased attention in the sciences generally, but various studies of citizen science implicitly or explicitly suggest that storytelling has benefits for facilitating connections between scientists, citizen science projects, and volunteers in particular. Martin Krzywinski and Alberto Cairo, for example, writing in Nature Methods, recommend to their more general scientific audience that “stories have the capacity to delight and surprise and to spark creativity by making meaningful connections between data and the ideas, interests and lives of your readers” (2013: 687), and the appearance of such sentences in scientific journals already heralds some readiness for interdisciplinary collaboration. Krzywinski and Cairo’s point finds an echo in the citizen science–specific findings of researchers Arnold J. H. van Vliety, Wichertje A. Bron, and Sara Mulder (2014), who advocate the use of mass media to communicate the work of citizen science projects. They observe positive trends between projects able to form relationships with journalists who recognized the scientists as tellers of engaging stories, on the one hand, and stronger volunteer recruitment, engagement, and retention, on the other. And while their finding that communicating their research helped generate wider interest may not be entirely surprising, it is worthwhile to note that reading their study brings out that the process simply encouraged greater dialogue and inquiry among the public, communication partners, and scientists—and these forms of dialogue helped refine the shape of studies as well as further communications. The correlation is neither simple nor direct, but encouraging well-informed storytelling encourages better science. Connections between the environmental humanities and narrative medicine seem largely still unbroached, but there has been an increased interest in narrative theory among environmental humanists. That interest has given rise to the term “econarratology,” which covers various projects and does not prescribe a single approach from within either ecocriticism or narrative theory, the two subfields that it joins. Although a handful of environmental humanists and narrative theorists had started publishing pieces with bibliographies that included scholarship from both areas of study, it was Erin James who first used the term in The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (2015) and defined it so that it could encompass its breadth, writing that “it maintains an interest in studying the relationship between literature and the physical environment, but does so with sensitivity to the literary structures and devices that we use to communicate representations of the physical environment to each other via narratives” (2015: 23). Perhaps even more succinctly, James and Morel summarize that the term entails “paired consideration of material environments and their representation and narrative forms of understanding” (2020: 1). Pairing ecocritical work with narrative medicine would constitute a potential strand of econarratology, then, and putting that pairing to work in citizen science projects would fit alongside efforts to apply econarratology practically by Matthew M. Low (2020) and others. Like narrative medicine, this econarratological work would draw from its humanist forebears to “recognize, interpret,

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and be moved to action by” (Charon 2001: 83) the experiences of citizen science volunteers and scientists, encouraging and then reflecting on narrative telling toward greater care for matter and life beyond the human. Although it sometimes goes by other names (e.g., community-based monitoring, community science, etc.), citizen science generally designates projects where ordinary people, as amateur scientists, engage in data collection and sometimes analysis, usually as coordinated by or in conjunction with academic researchers. The advertised benefits for such projects are several for all parties involved, but most generally they benefit scientists by harnessing wider resources for collection of data beyond the means of typical research teams, and volunteers in turn benefit from increased felt agency within environmental problems, increased science literacy and transparency, and new avenues of social connection (Toomey and Domroese 2013; Groulx et al. 2017). In addition to the forms of connection generated among professional and volunteer scientists themselves, these projects also connect various publics to scientific research either through their own blogs and other social media appendages, or else through earned coverage in mainstream publications.2 Citizen science projects that dedicate website space to the stories of their volunteers are still uncommon, likely because projects need to attain a certain scale and funding level before they have the resources dedicated to producing such web content. It remains much more common to have articles that generalize the volunteer experience or quote volunteers briefly as part of larger developments in the project. The University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) Coastal Research Volunteers (CRV) program and the University of Washington’s Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), though, have websites with blog pages that engage in stories by and about participants that will serve, for my purposes here, as insider “stories from practice” (Charon 2001: 84). As such, they suffice to make preliminary examples for what narrative knowing in citizen science might look like and do.

ECONARRATOLOGY AS NARRATIVE CITIZEN SCIENCE Narrative practice may offer citizen science a variety of insights, but foremost among them may be opportunities for professional and citizen scientists to better know and understand one another and their relationship. There have been many projects that stalled from problems of engagement and retention, and such breakdowns have been attributed to multiple factors, including volunteers losing sight of purpose or expressing doubtful feelings doubt about their data’s value (Frensley et al. 2017). Lead scientists, meanwhile, for all their power and expertise, are recording higher and higher rates of burnout and mental illness tied to their environmental work (Clayton 2018). These circumstances should occasion investigation of “divides” (Charon 2006: 19) akin to those Charon identifies between patients and doctors. In the context of citizen science, the divides that emerge from these two posts are between the scientist experts in the projects and the citizen scientist volunteers; these divides may not be as fraught as those in medicine, but they do have repercussions for how scientific knowledge is shared through these projects’ work. Although only a small initial

Websites for popular science publications such as National Geographic (Ullric 2012) and Scientific American (2020) have their own citizen science portals, whereas broader news venues more typically cover timely, specific projects. For instance, see Busch (2013), Twilley (2016, 2018), Blakemore (2020), and Khan (2020). Projects with local foci are even more likely to earn coverage in more local outlets; see Bush (2017). 2

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sample, two entries from the UNH’s Sea Grant site introducing an intern and spotlighting a lead scientist involved in the project can serve to start this conversation. One link from the CRV “Stories” page is titled “Oysters, horseshoe crabs, and Snapchat, oh my!” (Burns 2017), and its teaser text reads, “Oysters, horseshoe crabs, and … Snapchat? Our Doyle Fellow intern, Trevor, has been keeping busy this summer.” Particularly because it is linked from a “Stories” page, a reader may reasonably expect a narrative account of Trevor’s summer. And the entry is a narrative, though for the most part Trevor features only fleetingly in it. The first sentence of the post gives an overview: “Over the last few weeks I have spent my fellowship working on several projects with The Sea Grant and The Nature Conservancy” (2017). Then, in a similar style, the next three paragraphs begin with sentences in the first person and summarizing a month’s work, but the paragraphs themselves mostly consist of exposition explaining key parts of each task, such as Snapchat and The Beaches Conference. There are, occasionally, still first-person statements, but they are more evaluative than narrative (“I thought the conference was great”) (2017). For the most part, then, Trevor’s account of the summer is largely externalized—he spotlights the project more than his participation or agency in it. This changes at the close of the third body paragraph. This paragraph begins like the others, saying that Trevor’s most recent task was “helping” (2017) with a Nature Conservancy oyster restoration program. As with other body paragraphs, Trevor notes the goals and methods of the program before ending with the first use of first-person plural in the post: “We then placed the cages into large tanks and added oyster spawn that was estimated to be 12.5 million oyster larvae” (2017). Instead of the conclusion paragraph one might expect from what has been, up to this point, a little bit like a five-paragraph essay, Trevor continues the narration across the paragraph break: After the larvae settle out of the water column onto the shells, the being to grow [sic]. After a few weeks, we took the cages out of the tanks and tied them onto a raft in Great Bay for them to grow large enough to see them. This week we took cages out of the water to count the spat, baby oysters, on the shells of some cages to get a subsample of the success rate of the spawn settling. For the rest of the summer the cages will be delivered to volunteers around Great Bay that will monitor the growth of their cage from their docks. At the end of the summer the oysters will be added to the existing oyster reef in Great Bay to help restore the depleted population. (2017) The first-person plural pronoun never has a clear antecedent, which is itself interesting because it marks a sense of involvement in a larger project where Trevor’s “I” becomes undistinguished from the larger project (2017). Although the “Snapchat takeover” was arguably more Trevor’s own project and although he claims to have “learned so much” from the conference, this final paragraph of the narrative has the most detailed word choices—such as “subsample of the success rate of the spawn settling”—and narrates a continuity through the last three sentences’ future tense for Trevor’s work (2017). In other words, the post’s narrative authority strengthens at the moments when Trevor understands his contribution as part of a collective task. Further support for this reading comes from the later echo of the verb “help” (2017) with how Trevor’s post transitioned into talking about participating in the oyster restoration project to begin with. By way of contrast, a different post related to the program titled “Spotlight on UNH’s Dr. David Burdick” (Alger 2018) does not present a narrative by Burdick but relates a short interview between him and a later intern, Mary Kate Alger. It opens,

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Dr. David Burdick plays a big role in [Coastal Research Volunteers]’s efforts to restore sand dune habitat in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but this work is just a part of Dr. Burdick’s extensive research on tidal wetlands. In this interview we’ll learn more about his involvement in dune restoration and get a more in-depth look into some of his other work. (2018) This initial imbalance between his playing “a big role” in the project despite its being “just a part” of his work is borne out by the interview, which actually says little about Burdick’s “involvement” and instead mostly plumbs his inspiration for conservation work. In the most CRV-related question, “How long have you worked with CRV?,” Burdick does answer, “I have worked with the CRV from their inception. They have helped with planting marshes at restoration sites, worked to restore dunes and helped assess plants in our sentinel salt marsh sites” (2018). What stands out from this answer, perhaps especially after a close reading of Trevor’s post, is Burdick’s quick and passively phrased answer to the main question followed by the unprompted discussion of the volunteers’ work, which is phrased more actively and concretely—and which twice uses “helped.” Another significant difference is that he maintains an “I” and “They” split; he does not use “We.” There is a use of the first-person plural possessive “our,” but that “our” seems to refer to the restoration program, not himself and the volunteers per se. The volunteers are of course a substantial part of the program, but Burdick seems to maintain a project ownership to which they contribute but only vaguely share. This is not to suggest that Burdick comes across as egotistical or possessive in the post overall; when asked about his “most interesting research question” (2018), he credits a team and is generally more engaging: Perhaps most interesting is working to understand how human activities impact anchor species in special habitats like salt marshes and seagrass beds. For example, we build docks out into the water for our recreational boats, but shading from these docks can lead to loss of eelgrass habitat. I found it ironic that docks cause seagrass plants to grow taller just before they die-out under docks. More importantly, my team learned that dock designs allowing more light to reach the bottom also supported eelgrass beds. Most emotionally rewarding is restoring or creating these habitats so they will provide benefits to local communities into the future. (2018) Like Trevor’s post, this answer signals both active interest and closes on a sense of perpetuity, and the content signals collaboration not only between Burdick and his team but also, more indirectly, multispecies collaboration of human dock-builders, eelgrass, eelgrass bed inhabitants, and then wider local communities. What narrative close reading uncovers across these two posts, then, are at least two divides, or two intervention points, for the econarratologist to recognize and respond to. The first and most direct divide across these two posts we might call feelings of contribution, participation, and agency. Trevor’s narrative reflects feeling like part of something; Burdick’s account suggests distinct, probably tiered, roles. The second and less obvious divide these posts evince might be described as divisions of inspirational labor. Trevor’s experience was more novel to him, so it was deemed worth a storytelling post, and Trevor himself conveys having done work of value. To Burdick, the same experiences may have felt iterative and barely worth telling, making his “I have worked with the CRV from their inception” (2018) seem like all that needed saying. When asked to inspire or motivate readers, Burdick was asked less to tell stories and more to identify charismatic species. There are many reasons that professional scientists might be more likely to be interviewed

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than asked to narrate stories of their experiences, but econarratology would offer a tool for helping scientists see their own relation to the tasks of community knowledge-gathering more clearly. Scientists are increasingly being asked to share narratives about their science to members of the public, and econarratology may have the benefit of offering a venue to practice and become more aware of those storytelling practices. There are reasons, institutional and otherwise, why humanists might not feel incentivized to take on long-term roles as humanists linked to individual projects. Many of them have to do with the administrative structures and assessment in Brody’s first sense of the humanities. Humanists, too, are still seldom trained to collaborate in research. But if, as the editors of one recent collection in the environmental humanities put it, it is still the aspiration of the environmental humanities to have “relevance across disciplines” (Barry and Welstead 2017: 6), new kinds of research and new professional paths may need to be innovated.

CRITICAL OVERLAPS: THE CASE OF COASST Through econarratology as a practice for increasing storytelling in citizen science, narrative medicine and the medical humanities can spur new environmental humanist collaborations and conclusions. To suggest that the exchange between these science-facing humanities is not purely one-sided, I turn now to a different blog from the opposite side of the United States to suggest how the exploration of citizen science narratives can provide extensions and conversation of interest to medical humanists. While citizen science projects range massively in subject and scope, it remains true that many of the topics requiring the scale of citizen science to engage in data collection implicitly require facing the finiteness of life and the boundedness of the human lifespan’s temporal dimension—one of the challenges Charon identifies as central to the rise of narrative medicine and its ethics of encountering illness. Indeed, it is unsurprising that many texts will blur lines between environmental and medical humanists as interest groups, from Terry Tempest Williams’s memoir of toxicology, illness, and ecology, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1998); to Sheri Fink’s harrowing record of imbricated environmental and humanitarian crises, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (2013); to the environmental justice memoir of Iraqi American pediatric doctor Mona Hanna-Attisha, What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (2018). Similarities between the approaches can be rooted once again in Charon’s book, which made the case for “narrative knowledge” so compellingly (2006). “Unlike scientific knowledge or epidemiological knowledge,” she writes, “which tries to discover things about the natural world that are universally true or at least appear true to any observer, narrative knowledge enables one individual to understand particular events befalling another individual not as an instance of something that is universally true but as a singular and meaningful situation” (2006: 9). This insight resonates remarkably with a point made by the ecocritic Laura Dassow Walls in an essay published very shortly thereafter, where she refutes C. P. Snow’s reduction of the arts to a medium of translation for other forms of knowledge. Writing about literature generally and not only narrative, Walls claims, “As a site on which a particular experience is played out, literature cannot be reduced or abstracted without destroying the intricate interrelationships that make it literature— interrelationships between words, histories, writer, and reader, for starters” (2007: 203). Reductions and summaries, she continues, are possible, but not substitutes:

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The contrast, in brief, is this: the knowledge of science is distilled, abstracted, reduced, in order to be highly mobile, to travel from the laboratory or field to the wider society, across continents and centuries, the way a mathematical formula can be abstracted and applied anywhere, infinitely. By contrast, the knowledge of literature cannot be mobilized; it is inseparable from experience, dependent on direct participation. (2007: 203) Such tensions between individual experience and traveling knowledge could be found in any of the books mentioned above, but turning to the COASST blog helps to see how narratives about citizen science can bring out the information from the field and “direct participation” Walls mentions. The Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) has been operating for nineteen years, training volunteers to conduct surveys of beaches across much of the length of the continental US Pacific Coast from Alaska to California. Volunteers locate and catalog both dead seabirds and waste debris to establish ecological baselines and assess ecological conditions across the region. Partly because it is so well established, its website is an appealing and engaging place to learn about the program’s activity. Like the UNH’s CRV program, the site shares posts about participants, but, unlike UNH, COASST has a staff member, Eric Wagner, who has authored all eight of the profiles published as part of the larger blog since 2018. As such, these posts are less clearly the narratives of the participants themselves, but their common authorship does allow for the quoted words of participants to stand out all the more. No doubt because the blog entries are all single-authored by an agent with an interest in publicizing the success and value of the project, the overwhelming common theme across the stories of participants’ joining and continued engagement with COASST is the desire to be part of a large effort that exceeds the scope and capabilities of any individual. Particularly since the volunteers featured on the blog recognize and celebrate their potential to serve as public ambassadors of the scientific knowledge collected and generated by the project, medical humanists broadly and maybe narrative medicine researchers more specifically may be interested to see how issues related to ones they’re familiar with get worked out in an adjacent context. For example, Charon observes as one of her four important divides that doctors and patients relate to mortality differently, because “doctors may look upon death as a technical defeat, whereas patients may see death as both unthinkable and inevitable” (Charon 2006: 22). The way COASST’s blog entries approach death while asserting the meaningfulness of time spent doing the work by volunteers offers a view at a slant for medical humanists on the questions of understanding illness and death across the patient-doctor divide. That is, projects like COASST are at once a safer space for such questions—insomuch as the deaths of birds and other animal life are often easier for humans to face and reconcile than human death—but are also potentially more overwhelming to the extent that environmental challenges raise the specter of species death for the human species as commonly understood. As science-facing humanities fields, the environmental and medical humanities stand to learn from their respective approaches to these related questions. COASST citizen scientists survey dead birds; it’s an unusual hobby. In explaining its appeal, many of the entries, in either the volunteers’ words or Wagner’s, explain volunteers’ ability to engage in this task by drawing on previous education or professional experience: “Both of us having done so much science, we were used to dissecting frogs and worms,” Paul says. “The dead body thing doesn’t bother us too much.” (Wagner 2018f) [Jeanne] also spent hours in a cadaver lab, so, as she says, “even if I hadn’t done the dead bird thing before, I had done the dead body thing.” (Wagner 2018d)

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“Being a nurse, I’ve been around death before,” Charlene says. (Wagner 2018b) “In junior high school I dissected a frog, and that’s about it as far as biology training goes,” he [Mark] says. “But crime scene training, I’ve had a lot of that over the years, just doing search warrants and things like that.” (Wagner 2018e) Any seabird biologist will tell you—even those outside of COASST—that dead birds are part of the trade, but Williams has taken that maxim to a certain extreme. (Wagner 2019) In fact, most of the volunteers seem to join the program with some in-built scientific interest and literacy. Perhaps as a result, volunteers seem to develop, even if they don’t have it at first, an ability to treat the bird deaths as the result of scientific forces rather than mourning each one— which several acknowledge is a strange outcome: ‘ “At first dealing with the dead birds made me kind of sad, but now not so much,’ Mallory says. ‘You know it’s coming, so you kind of get used to it” ’ (Wagner 2018a). Narrative theory since Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980) has attended to temporal relationships including iterative phenomena and their impact on sense making. It’s notable that a goal of the citizen science program would be to construct iterative science literacy encounters, but how and when narratives of the iterative construct the meaning of death in particular as emotionally distant (which is likely necessary in some measure for volunteers) is something econarratologists could observe and that medical humanists might compare to patterns in the training of narrative medicine. This is no less the case because the narratives of citizen science in the COASST blog routinely reflect on participation as time well spent, often on the grounds of increasing scientific knowledge or aiding in science communication: “I like that we’re keeping our finger on the pulse of real research,” Paul says. “It feels good to contribute to the data that researchers are actually using.” (Wagner 2018f) “One of the things I don’t think the lay public understands is how important a baseline is,” she says. COASST gives her a chance to explain that importance. (Wagner 2018c) “It’s nice to know you’re helping to solve a problem.” (Wagner 2018a) “It’s critical,” Charlene says, “to use citizen science not just to gather data, but also to reach a larger audience.” (Wagner 2018b) Miranda likes that he is adding a small piece to a potentially enormous puzzle, and he knows from experience how small puzzle pieces can be the key to the whole thing. (Wagner 2018e) Language across these posts like “feels good,” “It’s nice to know,” and “It’s critical” (Wagner 2018f,a,c) all suggest emotional dimensions that come into play when positioning citizen scientists relative to their projects and the act of data collection, which is valued not simply by the amount of data produced but by routes that extend into the personal and are expressed and therefore knowable in narrative telling. In just a couple of the entries, this valuation of time has an implied relationship to the volunteers’ own age and implicit mortality—notably Diane and Dave Bilderback’s entry mentions an intent to “pass along” an “ethic of attention” (Wagner 2018c) cultivated across their collective observations. How medical patients come to see time differently as a result of increased science literacy they gain from their medical encounters—and/or how the proximity of one’s own

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mortality thwarts such reflections that are invited in citizen science projects—may be an area for growth in narrative medicine, as doctors work to not only address problems but also encourage patients to narrate futures for their health. Ultimately, what the environmental humanities may offer most helpfully to the medical humanities is simply an interested travel companion of sorts. Although their subjects of study differ in important ways, some of the challenges are still similar enough to make for comparing narrative strategies and stances toward scientific knowledge in the fields they face. The Bilderbacks’ profile, for example, features a narrative progression that diminishes the participants being profiled. Unlike other posts, it begins with the location, notes its proximity to where the couple lives, and only then narrates their introduction to the program; after that, the post essentially returns to the beach at Bandon as its focal point, interwoven with comments by Diane about their involvement, before ending with her observation that “you can see the cycles, you really understand what the beach goes through” (Wagner 2018c). The choice to narrate a place that will outlast its volunteers and then close on the idea of the cycles of the place that extend beyond their lifespan essentially folds the mortality of the participants into a longer scientific arc and creates a continuity out of finitude. The tendency of the COASST blog posts to value scientific data production while grounding that value in individual experiences raises a bifurcation in the blog’s communication, because while the numbers of dead birds are extractable, as Charon and Walls mentioned, the standout features of the blog entries is the opposite, highlighting the wonderfully particular experiences of the volunteers. This irony has not been lost on the researchers involved in COASST, who captured it differently in an article that found one of the effects of the project to be a place attachment whereby the beaches surveyed became not just assigned square footage of coastal space for volunteers but “their” beaches. Analyzing the responses of volunteers, He et al. find that “dominant motivations to participate appear to be situation or context oriented,” and that “participants clearly understand their role as having both scientific and social aspects” (2019: 33); such findings result from logistically elaborate projects by scientists seeking to better understand their volunteers, but they are more readily accessible to the close reader of individual and aggregated narratives. As such, an econarratology of citizen science resembles narrative medicine in the possibilities for exploring the kinds of narrative knowledge gathered in scientific contexts but attuned to the lives of people as something more than abstractable scientific data. That resemblance presents possibilities for codeveloping further tools and methods.

CONCLUSION The medical humanities convene a space where scholarly exploration of concepts can permeate and be permeated by practical contexts. Econarratology fits well within this space because both ecocriticism and narrative theory have histories of putting the practical and the scholarly in dialogue. Ecocritical citations to this effect commonly include Glen Love’s Practical Ecocriticism (2003) but may also include Scott Slovic’s Going Away to Think (2008), which in its first chapter memorably features Slovic as the ecocritic who becomes a triangulating point between a nest of robins and a poster-sized etching of William Blake’s (2008: 2), thus holding and attending to practical and intellectual concerns. Narrative theory, meanwhile, has been part of narrative “turns” in various fields (Kreiswirth 2008), including the study of law. Even though the core thinkers of narratology may be thought of as concerned with abstract theoretical models, a narratologist with no less stature

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than Mieke Bal has written, in an essay titled “The Point of Narratology” (1990), that narratology is and must be practically engaged. As she puts it, “narrative entertains—displays and hides—a special relationship between people—individuals socially embedded and working collectively—and their language: a relation of representation,” a hypothesis she follows up with scientists as her examples (1990: 738). For her part, Erin James has stated from the outset that econarratology weaves together these intellectual lineages, and thus a practical orientation is traceable in her own Storyworld Accord, with the political project embedded in her use of “accord” (2015). If work in this area were to move forward, it would be most productive to work with narratives written by participants more regularly and more intentionally, rather than blogs. Therefore, econarratologists doing this work would benefit from reviewing the research on parallel charting by Charon and others and establishing relationships with citizen science projects. “Parallel” charting (2006) refers to a record Charon asks residents to create that exists separately from but alongside the standardized practice of medical charting, and it requires the students to write entries “indexed for a particular patient,” meaning it remembers the specific personhood of the patient rather than depersonalizing their symptoms into an abstraction. Charon calls this practice “narrative writing in the service of the care of particular patient” (2006: 157). Importantly, she distinguishes parallel charting from free-floating diaristic practice and insists that the chart record impressions from the encounter of medical practitioner and patient. As she writes, “the goals are to enable them to recognize more fully what their patients endure and to examine explicitly their own journeys through medicine” (2006: 156). Crucially, the students read these charts in small groups, where the skills of literary close reading are then brought to bear on their telling. In her examples, details visible to a close reader—such as pronoun shifts, verb tense inconsistencies, or resonant word choices—draw out elements of her residents’ personalities and various facets of care. It is imaginable that econarratologists could run similar groups with citizen science volunteers and lead scientists, both of whom are facing these scientific problems at different levels. Admittedly, citizen science projects already involve a lot of work. Finding and incorporating humanists into projects and grant applications may present real pragmatic barriers to incorporating econarratology. But it is because—not in spite of—this workload that collecting narratives from volunteers and professional scientists involved in citizen science may be crucial. If the narratives remain uncollected and unexamined, significant portions of the projects stand to be forgotten and unavailable to learn from. For one thing, the work of econarratology I have suggested here involves valuable reflection that may appeal to funders and other project stakeholders. And because science is at its core attentive, observational work, the training of attention and more self-aware relationships to knowledge that parallel charting and conversation involve could augment the quality of the datagathering itself, making citizen econarratology more literally a part of and not apart from the core goals of the projects themselves.

REFERENCES Alger, M. K. (2018), “Spotlight on UNH’s Dr. David Burdick,” New Hampshire Sea Grant, April 5. Available online: https://seagrant.unh.edu/spotlight-unhs-dr-david-burdick. Bal, M. (1990), “The Point of Narratology,” Poetics Today, 11 (4): 727–53. Barry, P., and W. Welstead (2017), “Ecocriticism Extends Its Boundaries,” in Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities, 1–13, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Brody, H. ([2009] 2011), “Defining the Medical Humanities: Three Conceptions and Three Narratives,” Journal of the Medical Humanities, 32: 1–7. Blakemore, E. (2020), “Galaxy Cruise, a Citizen Science Project, Seeks Volunteers to Help Classify Images of ‘Galactic Interactions,’” Washington Post, March 7. Available online: https://www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/scie​ nce/gal​axy-cru​ise-a-citi​zen-scie​nce-proj​ect-is-look​ing-to-class​ify-ima​ges-of-galac​tic-inter​acti​ons-and-thi​nksvol​unte​ers/2020/03/06/5f7e9​dfc-5e60-11ea-b29b-9db​42f7​803a​7_st​ory.html. Burns, T. (2017), “Oysters, Horseshoe Crabs, and Snapchat, Oh My!” New Hampshire Sea Grant, August 4. Available online: https://seagrant.unh.edu/oysters-horseshoe-crabs-and-snapchat-oh-my. Busch, A. (2013), “Why I Count Glass Eels,” New York Times, March 30. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes. com/2013/03/31/sun​day-rev​iew/why-a-citi​zen-scient​ist-cou​nts-glass-eels.html. Accessed March 21, 2022. Bush, E. (2017), “Citizen Scientists Track Effects of Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest,” Seattle Times, August 7. Available online: https://www.seatt​leti​mes.com/life/outdo​ors/citi​zen-sci​enti​sts-track-effe​cts-of-clim​ ate-cha​nge-in-the-northw​est/. Accessed March 21, 2022. Callison, C. (2014), How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Charon, R. (2001), “Narrative Medicine: Form, Function, and Ethics,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 134 (1): 83–7. Charon, R. (2006), Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clayton, S. (2018), “Mental Health Risk and Resilience among Climate Scientists,” Nature Climate Change, 8: 260–1. Fink, S. (2013), Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, New York: Crown Publishers. Frensley, T., A. Crall, M. Stern, R. Jordan, S. Gray, M. Prysby, G. Newman, C. Hmelo-Silver, D. Mellor, and J. Huang (2017), “Bridging the Benefits of Online and Community Supported Citizen Science: A Case Study on Motivation and Retention with Conservation-Oriented Volunteers,” Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 2 (1): 1–14. Genette, G. (1980), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Groulx, M., M. C. Brisbois, C. J. Lemieux, A. Winegardner, and L. Fishback (2017), “A Role for Nature-Based Citizen Science in Promoting Individual and Collective Climate Change Action? A Systematic Review of Learning Outcomes,” Science Communication, 39 (1): 45–76. Hanna-Attisha, M. (2018), What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City, New York: One World. He, Y., J. K. Parrish, S. Rowe, and T. Jones (2019), “Evolving Interest and Sense of Self in an Environmental Citizen Science Program,” Ecology and Society, 24 (2): 33–57. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/sta​ ble/26796​955. Accessed March 21, 2022. Heise, U. (1997), Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heise, U. (2014), “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities,” The 2014–2015 Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature, March 9. Available online: https://state​ofth​edis​cipl​ine.acla. org/entry/comp​arat​ive-lit​erat​ure-and-enviro​nmen​tal-hum​anit​ies. Accessed March 21, 2022. James, E. (2015), The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. James, E., and E. Morel (2020), “Introduction: Notes toward New Econarratologies,” in E. James and E. Morel (eds.), Environment and Narrative: New Direction in Econarratology, 1–24, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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Khan, A. (2020), “How Citizen Scientists Can Help Fight COVID-19,” Los Angeles Times, April 14. Available online: https://www.lati​mes.com/scie​nce/story/2020-04-14/how-citi​zen-sci​enti​sts-can-help-fight-covid-19. Accessed March 21, 2022. Kreiswirth, M. (2008), “Narrative Turn in the Humanities,” in D. Herman, M. Jahn, and M. Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 377–82, New York: Routledge. Krzywinski, M., and A. Cairo (2013), “Storytelling,” Nature Methods, 10 (8): 687. Love, G. (2003), Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Low, M. M. (2020), “Finding a Practical Narratology in the Work of Restoration Ecology,” in E. James and E. Morel (eds.), Environment and Narrative: New Direction in Econarratology, 147–64, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Rigby, K. (2015), Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Satterfield, T., and S. Slovic (2004), What’s Nature Worth?: Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Scientific American (2020), “Education: Citizen Science,” Scientificamerican.com. Available online: https://www. sci​enti​fica​meri​can.com/citi​zen-scie​nce/. Accessed March 21, 2022. Slovic, S. (2008), Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility, Reno: University of Nevada Press. Toomey, A. H., and M. C. Domroese (2013), “Can Citizen Science Lead to Positive Conservation Attitudes and Behaviors?,” Human Ecology Review, 20 (1): 50–62. Twilley, N. (2016), “What’s Lurking in Your Showerhead,” New Yorker, December 8. Available online: https://www. newyor​ker.com/tech/ann​als-of-tec​hnol​ogy/whats-lurk​ing-in-your-sho​werh​ead. Accessed March 21, 2022. Twilley, N. (2018), “With Bugs, You’re Never Home Alone.” New York Times, October 29. Available online: https:// www.nyti​mes.com/2018/10/29/scie​nce/spi​der-ins​ect-sur​vey.html. Accessed March 21, 2022. Ullric, C. (2012) “Citizen Science,” National Geographic, May 16. Available online: https://www.nat​iona​lgeo​grap​ hic.org/encyc​lope​dia/citi​zen-scie​nce/. Accessed March 21, 2022. van Vliet, A. J. H., W. A. Bron, and S. Mulder (2014), “The How and Why of Societal Publications for Citizen Science Projects and Scientists,” International Journal of Biometeorology, 58: 565–77. Wagner, E. (2018a), “Participant Profile: Amanda and Mallory Millay,” COASST.org (blog), May 31. Available online: https://coa​sst.org/news-views/blog/part​icip​ant-prof​i le-ama​nda-and-mall​ory-mil​lay/. Accessed May 14, 2021. Wagner, E. (2018b), “Participant Profile: Charlene McAllister,” COASST.org (blog), October 2. Available online: https://coa​sst.org/news-views/blog/part​icip​ant-prof​i le-charl​ene-mca​llis​ter/. Accessed May 14, 2021. Wagner, E. (2018c), “Participant Profile: Diane and Dave Bilderback,” COASST.org (blog), April 10. Available online: https://coa​sst.org/news-views/blog/part​icip​ant-prof​i le-diane-and-dave-bil​derb​ack/. Accessed May 14, 2021. Wagner, E. (2018d), “Participant Profile: Jeanne Finke,” COASST.org (blog), February 21. Available online: https:// coa​sst.org/news-views/blog/part​icip​ant-prof​i le-jea​nne-finke/. Accessed May 14, 2021. Wagner, E. (2018e), “Participant Profile: Mark Miranda,” COASST.org (blog), November 7. Available online: https://coa​sst.org/news-views/blog/part​icip​ant-prof​i le-mark-mira​nda/. Accessed May 14, 2021. Wagner, E. (2018f), “Participant Profile: Paul Allan,” COASST.org (blog), January 3. Available online: https://coa​ sst.org/news-views/blog/part​icip​ant-prof​i le-paul-allan/. Accessed May 14, 2021.

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Wagner, E. (2019), “Participant Profile: Wendy Williams,” COASST.org (blog), March 7. Available online: https:// coa​sst.org/news-views/blog/part​icip​ant-prof​i le-wendy-willi​ams/. Accessed May 14, 2021. Walls, L. D. (2007), “Seeking Common Ground: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities,” in A. M. Ingram, I. Marshall, D. J. Philippon, and A. W. Sweeting (eds.), Coming Into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory, 199–208, Athens: Georgia University Press. Williams, T. T. ([1991] 1998), Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, New York: Vintage Books.

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CHAPTER THREE

Black Lives Matter in Flint, Michigan: Narrative Medicine and Ecocriticism in Goliath and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 MITA BANERJEE

One of the defining characteristics of the twenty-first century, cultural theorist Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht has predicted, will be the struggle for natural resources. Among these resources, the fight for clean, uncontaminated water may come to be the most acute. Gumbrecht writes, Recently, my eldest son … spoke with remarkable professional matter-of-factness of a world war for resources. I would certainly escape it, and he possibly would, too. But his daughter—my granddaughter Clara—would not. The last part of what he said affected me profoundly—“it hit close to home,” as one says, and in a more profound way than the abstractions of philosophical ethics ever could. All the same—apart from a somewhat vague “general experience”—it is not entirely clear why the life and potential suffering of my granddaughter gripped me in such a singularly intense way. (2014: 79) Water occupies a central position as a scarce environmental resource over which the “global war” for resources, to use Gumbrecht’s phrase, is being fought. The United Nations acknowledged in 2010 that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights and established the UN Resolution 64/292, which held that the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realisation of all human rights. The Resolution calls upon States and international organisations to provide financial resources, help capacity-building and technology transfer to help countries, in particular developing countries, to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all. (“International Decade for Action” 2014)

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The declaration was part of a “decade for action,” centered on “water for life” from 2005 to 2015. As part of this initiative, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights argued that the right to clean water was essentially a human rights issue: The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights. Comment No. 15 also defined the right to water as the right of everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable and physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. (“International Decade for Action” 2014) It may be no coincidence, then, that Gumbrecht speaks of an impending “war” for natural resources in the same year that the United Nations passes its resolution about water as fundamental for human dignity. Both Gumbrecht’s cultural diagnosis, or rather, his prognosis, and the UN declaration on “water for life” emerged in 2010. What is common to both these scenarios—Gumbrecht’s cultural prediction and the new UN guideline—is a denaturalizing of water both as a resource and as a human right. Where, previously, the fact that water is one of the central building blocks of all human and nonhuman life may simply have been taken for granted, water has now become newly visible. The United Nations sees a need to establish a new guideline only once a given human right—here, the right of access to clean and uncontaminated water—has ceased to be “natural.” Not incidentally, water studies may come to be one of the key disciplines of the new millennium. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, water research has come to the forefront of research in the life sciences as scientists search for new methodologies: scientists are looking for ways to make industrial production more sustainable; the same is true for studies in agricultural science (Markland et al. 2018). Conversely, water research is also increasingly being addressed in the cultural and social sciences, which assess and interrogate the relationship between water and social justice issues. How do we make sure, these studies ask, that the right to clean water is granted to all social groups, regardless of their income, ethnicity, or social status? In these considerations, medicine may come to play a major part. Since medicine is not only a scientific, but also a social practice, it is key to linking scientific analysis—such as the bacteriological investigation of water quality— to social concerns. It is hence essential to explore what may be termed the culture of medicine (Quevedo 2008): social determinants such as poverty, debt, unemployment, and socioeconomic and educational status may affect the degree to which certain communities have access to medical care. Moreover, these factors may render some communities more prone to disease. This is also true of health risks caused by environmental hazards or lack of resources. Thus, contaminated water, an indicator of racially biased policies of environmental protection (Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2002: 4), may be found in working-class or immigrant neighborhoods to an extent that is disproportionate when compared with white, middle-class neighborhoods. Water, this chapter sets out to illustrate, is at the core of what Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sareswaran have called a “medical-ecological framework.” In this context, it is important to consider the role of supranational institutions in guaranteeing the health and well-being of all citizens. It is significant in this context that the declaration of the right of access to clean water as a human right was issued by the United Nations. The aim of the United Nations is to ensure the global “protection of human rights and social development” (“Vision Statement”) As the “water for life initiative” indicates, there is a direct link between the protection of human rights, on the one hand, and medical rights, on the other. This suggests that the actions taken by the United Nations, as a global organization, complement measures taken by the World Health

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Organization, which is specifically concerned with the protection of global health. Moreover, as the UN initiative “water for life” indicates, there is a connection between law and medicine, between human rights and medical justice. The right to health and well-being thus has to be safeguarded by particular legal measures. However, it is important to note that the United Nations can only recommend legislation that can then be adopted by national governments. These recommendations are not legally binding. In this context, it may be fruitful to explore the role of cultural texts in creating an awareness of the recommendations issued by the United Nations. Cultural documents such as films, novels, autobiographies, and blogs, to name only a few, can convey a vivid image of the consequences of environmental hazards and the resulting health disparities. By raising public awareness about these concerns, cultural texts can contribute to creating a social climate that can in turn ultimately give rise to new legislative measures. As Ian Haney López (1996) has suggested, there is a double bind between the legal and the social spheres. In the paragraphs that follow, I would like to map the role of water and its relevance for a “medical-ecological” framework onto a cultural context. I seek to explore the juncture when water emerges as a topos in literature and in popular culture. I will then link the idea of water rights to the methodology of narrative medicine. In this context, the introduction of environmental humanities to narrative medicine may serve to fill a lacuna. Given its specific location in a medical setting, narrative medicine must necessarily be concerned with the present. It sets out to “hono[r]‌ the stories of illness” (Charon 2006: ix) that patients tell to their physicians. Its aim is to heed the patient narrative in all its personal complexity. As Rita Charon writes, “from a confluence of narrative studies and clinical practices, we have developed an increasingly nuanced view of the workings of the narrative, relational, and reflexive processes of healthcare” (Charon et al. 2016: 1). If narrative medicine is concerned with the present, however, environmental or ecological humanities are centrally concerned with the future. In this chapter, I argue that a medical ecological framework may be key in enhancing the temporality of narrative medicine. Arguably, narrative medicine sets in only once illness begins. As a methodology for enhancing the clinical practice of medicine, narrative medicine is necessarily reactive; its temporality is that of the present. It is in the sense of such temporality that this chapter proposes that narrative medicine can fruitfully be combined with ecocriticism. Ecocritical narratives, arguably, have a seismographic function: they can predict or warn against health hazards long before they may actually manifest themselves materially. In this vein, ecocriticism has recently zoomed in on conceptualizations of water in the social imagination, such as “water imagery and narrative” (Slovic 2017: 13; Rangarajan and Varma 2018). In these instances, water is understood both as a resource for human life and, in the case of polluted water, a health risk. The temporality of ecocriticism can hence comprise not only the present and the past but also the future. If narrative medicine “honors the stories of illness” in the present (Charon 2006: ix), ecocriticism looks at the stories of peoples’ lives before they actually become patients. In fact, such future-oriented ecocriticism, by drawing attention to toxic environments, wants to prevent these life stories from ever becoming narratives of illness. The convergence between narrative medicine and ecocriticism in a “medical-ecological” framework proposed by Slovic, Rangarajan, and Sarveswaran hence seems not only timely but highly necessary as well. Moreover, a medical-ecological model may be the key for future developments in narrative medicine for more reasons than one. Given its focus on clinical medicine, narrative medicine has

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understandably been concerned with the role of the individual. The patient is the author of her own illness narrative. Narrative medicine is at its most powerful where it asks us to understand this patient narrative in all its cultural complexity and personal detail. Charon “traces the origins and conceptual foundations of what came in the 1920s to be called close reading, that form of reading in which every word counts, in which no textual feature is squandered for its contribution to the meaning of the words” (Charon et al. 2016: 8). However, what may be receding from view in this context is the relationship between the individual and the collective, the personal and the social environment that an individual is immersed in. How would our perspective change if we looked at how the patient narrative is embedded in the collective experience, especially experiences stemming from trauma, racism, and other forms of social inequity? In this vein, this chapter will try to address a more recent development in narrative medicine: the intersection between narrative medicine and social justice studies. As Charon writes in the introduction to The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (2016), narrative medicine “emerged to challenge a reductionist, fragmented medicine that holds little regard for the singular aspects of a patient’s life and to protest social injustice of a global healthcare system that countenances tremendous health disparities and discriminatory policies and practices” (Charon et al. 2016: 1). As Charon’s description indicates, narrative medicine has originally been developed as a clinical practice: a way of training medical practitioners to listen closely to patients’ stories. The question that the present chapter wants to ask, however, is the following: what narrative can medicine bring not only to the medical classroom but also to the analysis of literary and cultural texts? In other words, if narrative medicine emerged as a methodology that brings the tools of literary analysis to the practice of clinical medicine, I want to ask the obverse question (Banerjee 2018): how can narrative medicine be “reimported” into the literature classroom? How can it sharpen our focus on forms of embodiment in literary texts, and the material dimension of illness and social justice violations? In this chapter, I will investigate potential connections between narrative medicine, on the one hand, and social justice concerns, on the other. In the following paragraphs, I will analyze two very different texts about environmental destruction and its impact on individuals and collectives: the TV series Goliath and the documentary film Fahrenheit 11/9 by Michael Moore. I will investigate the role of narrative medicine in reading these representations as patient narratives. This chapter tries to demonstrate that narrative medicine can be brought to the analysis of literary or filmic texts by highlighting patient narratives at the core of these representations. It is important to note here, however, that these individual narratives may not at first glance appear to be patient narratives; they may be revealed as such only if we employ the methodology of narrative medicine as an alternative tool for close reading. In applying narrative medicine to the analysis of filmic representation, I will explore the relationship between water, social justice, and health disparity. In my search for this intersection, I will first turn to a filmic narrative that may at first seem an unlikely candidate for the practice of narrative medicine: the science fiction series Goliath. In this context, it may be interesting to note that within narrative medicine, there has been a debate on which texts and genres work best in a narrative medicine classroom. Crucially, Danielle Spencer and Maura Spiegel have drawn attention to the fact that literary texts may be more powerful than other texts—such as nonfiction and/or popular literature—in bringing about a change of perspective and a heightened sense of empathy. Spencer and Spiegel write,

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We explore the clinical applications of literary knowledge. A recent study published in Science found that subjects performed better on tests measuring theory of mind, social perception, and emotional intelligence after reading literary fiction. Notably, those who read nonfiction or popular fiction did not perform as well. (2016: 16) However, the present chapter is not concerned with the use of literature in the medical classroom but, rather, seeks to elicit ways in which narrative medicine as a practice of reading can fruitfully contribute to literary and cultural analysis. I suggest that even as there may be a significant difference in the narrative complexity of texts from popular culture as compared to literary representations, the reading of both genres may benefit from an intervention by narrative medicine. This may be particularly relevant when it comes to issues of social justice at the intersection of health hazards and environmental destruction. Filmic representations can raise pertinent questions of who is recognized as a patient and victim of environmental hazards. These questions are important because they orient the viewer toward identifying with certain forms of suffering and alternatively lead the viewer away from certain other forms of suffering that remain obscured in cultural spaces. In the next section of this chapter, I will argue that an episode of the science fiction series Goliath can be read as a patient narrative; however, the episode does not ultimately relate issues of illness and environmental hazard to questions of social disparity.

GOLIATH: THE THRILL OF DRILLING FOR WATER The first episode of the third season of the science fiction series Goliath, released on Amazon Prime in 2016, is set in a dystopian future. The episode titled “The Subsidence Adventure” opens with the portrayal of a middle-aged couple peacefully asleep in their middle-class home. Their day has been uneventful, except for the uncanny appearance of a large raven, potentially the harbinger of a dismal future. In the middle of the night, the couple’s dog begins to growl and soon heads out the front door. The woman wakes up to find out what had caused the dog alarm and follows it into the open field ahead of her into the family-owned vineyard in order to investigate when the ground suddenly gives way and swallows her up. The scenario that follows is dystopian and throws light on the plummeting water resources in the area as a result of unethical water extractivist practices. The couple lives in California’s Central Valley, an environment that is devoid of water. The manmade drought is the direct result of giant water companies that ferociously drill for water in the manner in which companies used to drill for oil in former times. As a result, water has now become a commodity in the hands of only a select few. The filmic narrative portrays a David and Goliath battle between the widower, Gene, and the megalithic company. Gene hires the lawyer Billy McBride in order to redress the blatant injustice of civilians being killed by corporate greed: Gene: The fall broke her neck. Dog survived. Stayed with her right to the end. Billy McBride: I’m real sorry about this, Gene. She was a hell of a girl. Gene: Yeah, well. She thought the world of you, too. Always said you were the best. Billy McBride: She would have been a hell of a lot better than me if she had gone into practice. Gene: Look I’m glad you reconsidered this case. And I’m sure Bobby would as well. These neighbors of mine, they drill all around here, sucking up the water right and left, which makes the ground unstable. Now, someone has to be responsible. My wife is dead. (Goliath 2016)

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A number of factors are significant here. First, it is important to note that water and the access to water have ceased to be a human right. Water is now only in the hands of a privileged few; it has become the monopoly of the water company rather than being publicly available to the citizenry as a whole. Second, however, it is equally significant to consider the affect that the episode evokes as a reaction to economic injustice. At the core of Goliath, there is an implied outrage against corporate greed and an empathy for the victims who have to pay for this greed with their own health and even sometimes their own lives. The question that I would like to ask in this chapter, however, begins with a fundamental distrust of Goliath’s central premise. What if, I would like to inquire, the struggle for water were not a matter of science fiction but of everyday life? What if for some communities in the contemporary United States, the fight over the right of access to clean, uncontaminated water were part of a dystopia of the present? As Joni Adamson has noted, “60 percent of African American and Latino communities and over 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans live in areas with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites” (Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2002: 4). Adamson’s work on the intersection between environmentalism and social justice is significant for a number of reasons. It is especially important in that it draws attention to social and medical inequities within the United States as a nation-state. Adamson emphasizes that the right to access uncontaminated water varies widely among different communities within the United States and that the disastrous effects of toxic waste have disproportionately affected poor communities and communities of color. What this implies, then, is that the right to health and well-being is unevenly distributed within one and the same nation-state. Adamson’s work is hence an important supplement to the UN declaration about the right of access to clean water that is emphatic about the measures to be taken “in particular [in] developing countries” (“International Decade for Action” 2014). What the Flint water crisis and the cases described by Adamson make clear, however, is that the problem is by no means limited to the so-called developing world but is likely to occur in the affluent Global North countries like the United States. In this context, Adamson, Evans, and Stein refer to the concept of “environmental racism,” which can be defined as racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and the enforcement of regulation and laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, [and] the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities. (2002: 4) In Goliath, however, this scenario has been turned on its head. First and foremost, Goliath argues that this struggle for water is set in the future, not in the present. Second, the victims of this waterdriven greed are a white, middle-class couple. This focus, I would like to suggest, has profound implications for the series’ portrayal of the link between environmental justice and health disparities. As Adamson, Evans, and Stein outline, a lack of access to clean water and to living conditions free from toxins currently affect minority communities in the United States to a disproportionate extent (2002: 4). While the episode of Goliath does portray the disastrous effect of environmental destruction and agrarian mismanagement, it does not address questions of social disparity. As I will elaborate below, the episode has the potential to be read as a patient narrative since it dramatizes the horrific consequences of an unequal distribution of resources. However, it ultimately falls short of engaging in social critique because questions of a lack of economic privilege are entirely absent from the film. Ethnic or poor communities are entirely absent from the filmic narrative.

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What happens, we may want to inquire, through this change in perspective? Arguably, this shift from ethnic minorities to a white, middle-class mainstream makes the scenario of Goliath all the more problematic. It implies that a social justice issue becomes a matter of major concern only once this issue has come to afflict white, middle-class communities. If this can happen to an affluent couple, the episode suggests, it can happen to anyone. The science fiction element and the dystopian underpinning of the series could not be more disturbing in this context. We are shocked at the moral and social injustice of the scarcity of water only once its victims happen to be white and middle class. What would this imply, however, about those who have no such lobby? This has profound implications for the question of rights. If access to clean water, as the United Nations reminds us, is a human right, are we disturbed by the absence of such a right regardless of who suffers from it? Do we pity some victims more than others? The moral outrage at the heart of Goliath, I would like to argue, is that it is unthinkable that the dominant culture be deprived of the right to clean water. What this scenario naturalizes, by implication, is the idea that ethnic minorities may be cut off from water supplies not as a shocking exception but as a matter of everyday reality. The scarcity of water as a natural resource becomes shocking, then, only once it has “reached” a white, middle-class public. It can be argued, then, that the filmic narrative of Goliath falls short of its actual potential. As I have argued at the beginning of this chapter, cultural texts such as films or series can help raise awareness about the effects of environmental pollution and environmental racism. To be sure, Goliath does portray the lives of a middle-aged, white, middle-class couple affected by environmental destruction. However, it entirely omits to address the question whether such environmental injustice affects not only affluent white neighborhoods, but also—perhaps to an even greater extent—poor and ethnic communities. Even more problematically, the episode turns the question of rights on its head. Whereas in real life, as Adamson, Evans, and Stein have demonstrated, those who suffer from contaminated water are disproportionately of ethnic descent, Goliath features Native Americans as employees of the water company who clearly condone its cutthroat policy. Finally, there is closure to the injustice narrative that Goliath tells: not only can the middle-class widower afford a good lawyer, but justice is ultimately restored perhaps not as an actual outcome of the lawsuit but by the viewer’s outrage at a dystopian scenario that must never translate into reality. So far, I have been concerned with the issue of environmental destruction in Goliath. I would now like to consider the potential of reading the episode in the framework of narrative medicine. At first glance, it may be significant here that the episode is not so much concerned with an illness on the basis of contaminated water but with a death that results from the sheer absence of water. The episode, we may argue, revolves not so much about illness than about deaths caused by a lack of water. The protagonist’s wife is killed by the fact that water has been monopolized through corporate greed. Goliath may thus be more concerned with issues of environmental destruction than with stories of illness. What the episode does touch upon, however, is the idea of trauma and its relationship to social injustice. Gene, the widower, dedicates his life to redressing the wrong that has been inflicted on him by monopoly capitalism. This trauma is all the more pronounced because so far, the greed of the companies drilling for water has gone unchecked. Crucially, narrative medicine has stressed that a “story of illness” can be told either by the patient herself or by her relatives (Charon 2006). This, it can be proposed, is the potential that the episode of Goliath may hold in terms of narrative medicine. Gene is ultimately unable to prevent his wife’s death, which is due to environmental destruction. To be sure, the episode itself does not address issues of race and

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class or the fact of racially and socially disenfranchised communities being at a much higher risk of suffering from environment-related health risks. However, in the image of Gene contemplating his wife’s unfair death caused by economic greed, these questions are at least hinted at in Goliath, even as an overt addressing of race and class is absent from the filmic narrative. It can thus be argued that Goliath’s white, middle-class protagonist verges on patienthood. Goliath can thus accommodate stories of illness (with regard to the trauma that results from bereavement) as long as they concern white, middle-class protagonists. This points to a crucial intersection between narrative, medicine, and cultural representation. One of the most central questions that we may ask in this context is the following: whose narrative is being represented as a narrative of suffering and of illness? Cultural texts can elicit empathy by making the reader or viewer witness stories of illness. This is key when it comes to questions of social representations. Whom do we empathize with in Goliath? As I have suggested above, questions of race and class are absent from this episode of the science fiction series. In the fictional scenario envisioned by the series, Goliath zooms in on a white, middle-class couple that bears the burden of corporate capitalism. There are two alternative interpretations for this form of representation. One way of analyzing Goliath would hold that the white, affluent couple functions as a stand-in or surrogate for all individuals and communities affected by environmental injustice. From this perspective, both the couple’s ethnicity and their social status would be irrelevant. Only their role as victims of environmental destruction would be important. This reading would lend itself to an analysis of the episode based on a particular form of narrative medicine. Such an interpretation would zoom in on the loss of the wife’s life and the trauma experienced by her husband. This reading of the episode would be diametrically opposed to the other interpretation of Goliath. This second perspective would draw the politics of surrogacy into doubt. It would argue that the episode effaces from view the connection between issues of social and economic disparity, on the one hand, and the health risks entailed by environmental destruction, on the other. I will now turn both to Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 11/9 and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, to investigate how the questions asked by narrative medicine can be fruitfully combined with concerns of racial and social injustice.

BLACK LIVES IN FLINT: MOORE’S FAHRENHEIT 11/9 The question asked by Moore’s recent documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 stands in direct contrast to Goliath’s disturbing science fiction scenario. What if for some US citizens, Moore inquires, the world that Goliath portrays as a scenario of the future were not science fiction? What if this struggle for water was real, and a struggle of the present? Seen from this perspective, Goliath’s main message may actually seem cynical. It is in this context that I would like to superimpose Goliath’s dystopian outlook on the real-life dystopia of Flint, Michigan. Like Goliath, if with completely inverse signification, Fahrenheit 11/9 begins as a narrative of economic interest. Governor Snyder, a character in the film, devises a plan to fuel the economy of Flint, a town that is predominantly African American and poor white. As a tribute to the companies who have invested into his election campaign, he proposes to build new water pipes. However, this involves switching the water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River: [A photo of Governor Rick Snyder giving a speech in front of the US flag is shown. Moore’s voice-over begins.]

Black Lives Matter in Flint, Michigan

Moore:

Moore:

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Governor Synder wanted to flex his new autocratic powers. He saw an opportunity to take advantage of the poor city and the country. And … [a map of the Great Lakes is shown] … of the largest source of fresh water in the world. [Another photo of Snyder at a speech is shown.] Option A was that he could just leave well enough alone. After all, for five decades the city of Flint got its water from Lake Huron. [A video shot of Lake Huron’s scenery and clear water is shown.] A ten-thousand-yearold pure glacier lake—water delivered to Flint through publicly owned pipelines. Or … [we see another picture of Snyder] … there was option B: Why not build a new, completely unnecessary pipeline that would benefit investors, his major campaign donors, and banks, like Wells Fargo. The only catch was that while the new pipeline was being built, Flint would have to switch over from Lake Huron … [Video shots of Flint river’s dirty water full of litter and debris are displayed.] … to the industrial sewage ditch known as Flint river. (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018)

What emerges in this context is a dismal intersection between environmental and medical narratives. The damage done to the health of Flint’s inhabitants, the film describes, is both immediate and longterm. Due to the switching of water supplies, Flint’s population suffered a massive lead poisoning, a disaster that especially affected the children (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018): [Video recording of Snyder and his team toasting and drinking Flint water.] All: Here’s to Flint! Moore [as a voice-over]: Here is his team toasting each other over what would amount to, in essence, a slow-motion ethnic cleansing. [Cut to a WNEM news recording.] Reporter: Some residents are wondering: Will we see a change? [WNEM cuts to press conference recording.] Daugherty Johnson [Utilities administrator]: No, average residents won’t notice any of this. [The clip cuts to a private recording of someone filling their bucket with the new Flint water. It’s orange. Moore’s voice-over continues.] Moore: Within days, the average residents noticed the difference. [Another private recording of Flint’s orange water filling a bathtub is played.] Moore: A big difference. Child [from off-camera in the recording]: That’s nasty. [The camera cuts to a young African American girl drinking a glass of water, followed by a picture collage of people experiencing the symptoms Moore lists, mainly featuring small African American children.] Moore: Their hair started to fall out, skin rashes appeared all over their bodies, and the children got sick. [The camera shows a young white father with this infant son, followed by video shots of Hurley Medical Center.] Moore: Parents, whose children showed no symptoms, were still worried that they might be sick, because as one doctor noticed, … [A photo of Mona Hanna-Attisha treating an African American infant is displayed.] Moore: … nearly every child had ingested lead. (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018)

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A number of aspects are significant about this passage. First and foremost, it is the color of the water coming out of residents’ taps that is significant here. The drinking water that now fills children’s cups happens to be orange. In this context, it is significant to mention that the UN declaration about water as a human right specifies a number of factors that this right involves. Interestingly enough, color is one of these features specifically singled out by the declaration as being key to the link between water and human dignity. As the UN website suggests, the quality of water should be “Acceptable. Water should be of an acceptable colour, odour and taste for each personal or domestic use” (“International Decade for Action” 2014). It is important to note that this scene at first appears as an uncanny echo of Goliath: corporate greed has endangered the lives of innocent citizens, who have been caught unaware by the company’s schemes. Yet, unlike the depiction in Goliath, this water stunt, and the damage to human health that is accepted as collateral damage, does not lead to moral outrage and public dismay. Unlike the white, middle-class couple in Goliath’s fictional suburbia, the citizens of Flint are unable to afford good lawyers, and their cry for help goes unheard. Their lawyer, however, eventually turns out to be the town’s pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. It was she who recognizes the damage that has been done to Flint’s children. As a doctor, she is able to diagnose this damage both in terms of its immediate and future effects. It is here that Moore’s film about the real-life dystopia of Flint, Michigan, resonates with the idea of narrative medicine. What would happen if narrative medicine is woven into a reading of the event in Flint? Observed from this perspective, Moore’s documentary can be interpreted as a story of illness. Yet, what is central to this story is that it is not so much a story of present illness but of a future lack of well-being. What is so devastating about the event in Flint is that this is a story of prospective illness. Moore’s film intervenes into the debate on the Flint water scandal by describing this catastrophe in a way that corresponds to the vision of narrative medicine. Moreover, the film can also be said to enhance the temporality at the core of narrative medicine. Fahrenheit 11/9 features narratives of illness not only in the present but also in the future. It is in this concept of a story of prospective illness that the narrative of Fahrenheit 11/9 and of Hanna-Attisha’s subsequent book, What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Hope and Resistance in an American City (2018), become all the more powerful. They link environmental injustice with social injustice, and they ask a question that is also at the heart of Goliath about whether white middle-class citizens would be subjected to such a blatant disregard of human rights. At the core of Moore’s documentary and Hanna-Attisha’s book is the intersection of the medical and the social. As Hanna-Attisha writes, the Flint water crisis was about much more than water: The crisis manifested itself in water—and in the bodies of the most vulnerable among us, children who drank that water and ate meals cooked with that water, and babies who guzzled bottles of formula mixed with that water. … But this is also a story about the deeper crises we’re facing right now in our country: a breakdown in democracy; the disintegration of critical infrastructure due to inequality and austerity; environmental injustice that disproportionately affects the poor and black; the abandonment of civic responsibility and our deep obligations as human beings to care and provide for one another. (2018: 13) As patients, and even more crucially, as individuals who, due to lead poisoning, may become patients in the future, the children’s narratives are being told by a filmmaker and a pediatrician who speak on their behalf. Here, narrative medicine as a methodology helps elucidate the complexity

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of stories about human illness and is complemented by social justice studies. It is through this dialogue that the social location of the young patients becomes visible. The point to be made here is crucial: without this social location, both Moore and Hanna-Attisha convey how these children would not have become patients to begin with. If the story told in Moore’s documentary about the events in Flint, Michigan, is a story of illness, it may also be read as a prognosis of future illness. Even as the damage that has been done by the lead poisoning is evident in the children’s hair loss and skin rashes, Hanna-Attisha reminds us that the harshest health effects are yet to manifest themselves: Hanna-Attisha: There is no safe level of lead in a body of anybody. There is no safe level of lead. It is potent, and it is irreversible, which means once it is in your blood it wreaks havoc. Moore: What do you mean irreversible—for how long? Hanna-Attisha: Forever! [A kindergarten playroom is shown, with children—most of them African American—watching a puppet show. This is followed by a close-up shot of a child playing with toys at a table, preceded by a shot of the same playroom featuring children running around, and another close-up shot of a child practicing writing. Hanna-Attisha’s voice-over can be heard simultaneously.] Hanna-Attisha: It literally drops IQ levels of children, it leads to impulse disorder, then memory issues, violent behavior, aggressiveness. It also impacts your DNA. Moms exposed to lead—you can see the DNA changes in their grandchildren. (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018) The dialogue between Fahrenheit 11/9 and the methodology of narrative medicine is crucial on a number of levels. First, it highlights the connection between environmental hazards and illness. Second, it enhances the temporal scope of narrative medicine. Hanna-Attisha emphasizes in an interview contained in the film that the narrative straddles both present and future illness since the damage caused by lead poisoning can affect multiple generations. Third, there is the question of authorship here: in the framework of the film, the “story of illness” (Charon 2006) is narrated by multiple authors—by the parents of the young patients, by their pediatrician, and by Moore as a documentary filmmaker. It is part of Moore’s signature gesture as a director, moreover, to highlight the myriad elements that co-constitute a present reality that arches into a dystopian future. He does not refrain from making a point that is particularly cynical: when officials learn that the water supplied by the Flint River is corrosive, they immediately see to it that the water supply is switched back. Yet this switch is meant to solely benefit the GM car factory: [The camera shows the Michigan State Capitol building and its busy street, while Moore’s voiceover begins.] Moore:

Word of the developing disaster reached the governor’s office. [A picture of Rick Snyder is shown.] And so, he quietly dispatched an aide to Flint to find out what exactly was going on. [The camera cuts to a rural living area of Flint, one of the front yard’s displays the American flag turned upside down.] The report came back with bad news.

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[Excerpts of email reports are shown in close-up, with the following words highlighted in blue: “October 14, 2014,” “As you know,” “bacterial contamination,” “long-term damage,” “fecal coliform,” “downright scary,” “I have not copied DEQ on this message for the FOIA reasons,” “get back on the Detroit [Lake Huron] system,” “out of control.” Moore: The state investigator recommended switching immediately back to the Lake Huron water. But the governor seemed to have other thoughts. Like getting PR people to make the problem go away. [An NBC25 recording of Jason Lorenz, PR Manager of Flint, is played.] Lorenz: Water that is leaving the plant, is always ensured to be at the top-notch of quality. Moore: For the governor, there was an even greater tragedy. [A PBSNews recording of Flint River is played, followed by an NBC25 recording of an automobile assembly line, as well as a Reinventing Michigan recording of a car piece being dipped in muddy water. Moore’s simultaneous voice-over is heard.] Moore: The Flint River water was corroding the auto parts at the General Motors factory. When governor heard this, he blew his top. After all, General Motors had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Governors Association to help elect candidates like Rick Snyder. And here he was, damaging their property. For Governor Snyder that was a bridge too far. He immediately ordered the water in Flint to be switched back to Lake Huron, but only for the General Motors factory. The people of Flint would continue to drink the poisoned water. (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018) The contrast between the imaginary scenario of Goliath and the real-life situation of Flint, Michigan, could not be more blatant here. Goliath is narrated in such a way that it urges the viewer to side, we take sides, with the victims and to be outraged at corporate greed. In Flint, Michigan, by contrast, the company carries the day, and no one is concerned about the victims’ suffering. It is in this context, furthermore, that instead of a lawyer, whose fees the victims cannot afford, we have a whistleblower, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. What is significant here is that life writing and narrative medicine are deeply interwoven. This best observed when Hanna Attisha begins her plea for the rights of the Flint inhabitants to health and to water uncontaminated by dangerous lead levels by referring to her own life narrative as an immigrant to the United States. Hanna-Attisha: I wasn’t born here, and we came to this country very much for that American Dream. Uhm, and, you know, with nothing besides education—my Dad was a GM employee, my Mom was a teacher, benefitted from Union contracts, send their kids to two, you know, to Michigan’s public schools. The American Dream worked for us, it worked for me and my family the way that it does not work for the kids that I take care of in my clinic every day. They are literally waking up to a nightmare. A nightmare of injustice, poverty, lost democracy. And that is another lesson that we learn from Flint. Moore: Maybe that’s why it’s called a dream, because it’s not a reality for everybody. Hanna-Attisha: No, it’s not. Moore: Right? Hanna-Attisha: No, there are multiple Americas. (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018)

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In this context, the question of rights looms particularly large. In 2010, the United Nations declared the right to clean water as a human right (“International Decade for Action” 2014). In 2018, following the events of Flint, Michigan, Hanna-Attisha, the whistleblower, linked this right to the American dream. She emphasizes that the right to water must be recognized, in addition to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For her, the American Dream has now become a health narrative (Hanna-Attisha 2018). Medical and environmental concerns are deeply interwoven here. Moreover, it is important to note that Fahrenheit 11/9 not only tells us a story of narrative medicine but also highlights the link between health justice and social inequality. As the documentary emphasizes, the victims of the Flint water scandal comprise not only African American but also poor white inhabitants. Fahrenheit 11/9 tells us a particular story of illness, which is rooted not only in racial but also in social inequality. Moreover, at the core of this narrative of illness, there is also the task of coalition building. Only if African American and poor white inhabitants of Flint join forces can the injustice of the water scandal be addressed. As this chapter has tried to demonstrate, water has become a topos not only in literature and popular culture but also in the legal arena. The 2010 UN Declaration, which calls for a right to clean water that must be available to all citizens of a given nation, drives home the point that water is no longer something that we can take for granted (“International Decade for Action” 2014). At the same time, the absence of the right to uncontaminated water is not only a social or legal concern but also a medical liability. As I have attempted to show in this chapter, ecocritical concerns must necessarily be tied to medical issues: the absence of clean water for the citizens of Flint has been a matter not only of environmental justice but also of medical risk. The film thus drives home the point that it may be fatal to divorce economic developments from their environmental consequences and to separate environmental concerns from matters of health and well-being. As the man-made disaster of Flint, Michigan, shows, each of these paradigms is incomplete without the other. If we look only at environmental justice issues, we may fail to take into account the human dimension of these issues. Moore’s film can thus be seen to invite a “medical-ecological” perspective on the catastrophe of Flint: his filmic narrative enables us to look not only at the ways in which the environmental balance is jeopardized but also at the human lives that bear the burden of such jeopardy. The aim of this chapter was to show that narrative medicine and the methodology of ecocriticism can be complimentary. Ecocriticism may serve to enhance the temporality of narrative medicine, because it is focused not only on the present but also on the future. Unlike Goliath, Moore’s film connects questions raised by narrative medicine with an astute analysis of matters or race and class. Environmental destruction, as Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 and HannaAttisha’s What the Eyes Don’t See powerfully demonstrate, is not only ecologically damaging but also has far-reaching medical consequences. These consequences, moreover, may disproportionately affect people of color and poor white communities. In this context, it is all the more powerful that Hanna-Attisha’s account of the medical-environmental disaster of Flint, Michigan, should be subtitled “A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City” (Hanna-Attisha 2018). She writes, Resilience isn’t something you are born with. It isn’t a trait that you have or don’t have. It’s learned. This means that for every child in a toxic environment or unraveling community—both of which take a terrible toll on childhood development and can have lasting effects—there is hope. (2018: 14)

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What emerges from both Hanna-Attisha’s book and Moore’s documentary film is the reminder that communities resist the ongoing medical and environmental hazards that they have been exposed to. In this resistance, a medical-ecological framework may be crucial.

REFERENCES Adamson, J., M. M. Evans, and R. Stein (2002), “Introduction: Environmental Justice Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy,” in J. Adamson, M. M. Evans, and R. Stein (eds.), The Environmental Justice Reader, 3–14, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Banerjee, Mita (2018), Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine and the Power of Autobiography, Heidelberg: Winter. Charon, R. (2006), Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Charon, R., S. Dasgupta, N. Hermann, C. Irvine, E. R. Marcus, E. Rivera Colón, D. Spencer, and M. Spiegel (2016), The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018), [Film] Dir. Michael Moore, USA: Midwestern Films. Goliath (2016), [Online Series], Amazon Prime, January. Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich (2014), Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Hanna-Attisha, M. (2018), What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City, London: One World. “International Decade for Action ‘WATER FOR LIFE’ 2005–2015” (2014). Available online: https://www.un.org/ wat​erfo​rlif​edec​ade/human​_rig​ht_t​o_wa​ter.shtml. López, I. H. (1996), White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, New York: New York University Press. Markland, S., D. Ingram, K. Kniel, and M. Sharma (2018), “Water for Agriculture: The Convergence of Sustainability and Safety,” in S. Thakur and K. Kniel (eds.), Preharvest Food Safety, 143–57, Hoboken, NJ: American Society for Microbiology. Quevedo, S. (2008), “Culture and Medicine: Reflections on Identity and Community in an Age of Pluralism,” The Permanente Journal, 12 (1): 62–7. Rangarajan, S., and S. Varma (2018), “The Politics of Land, Water and Toxins: Reading the Life-narratives of Three Women Oikos-carers from Kerala,” in D. A. Vakoch and S. Mickey (eds.), Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment, 167–84, New York: Routledge. Slovic, S. (2017), “Liquid Scale: Trans-Scalar Thinking and the Perception of Water,” in J. Costlow, Y. Haila, and A. Rosenholm (eds.), Water in Social Imagination: from Technological Optimism to Contemporary Environmentalism, 11–27, Leiden: Brill. Spencer, D., and M. Spiegel (2016), “This Is What We Do, and These Things Happen: Literature, Experience, Emotion, and Relationality in the Classroom,” in Rita Charon et al. (eds.), The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, 37–59, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations, “Vision Statement,” General Assembly of the United Nations. Available online: https://www. un.org/pga/74/docume​nts/vis​ion-statem​ent/#:~:text=As%20we%20all%20k​now%2C%20our,other%20b​ reac​hes%20of%20the%20pe​ace%E2%80%9D.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Graphic Medicine and Ecological Consciousness: Paula Knight’s The Facts of Life SATHYARAJ VENKATESAN AND CHINMAY MURALI

INTRODUCTION Graphic medicine is an emerging interdisciplinary field that combines the discourse of health care and the medium of comics. Drawn primarily by patients/caregivers/physicians, graphic pathographies (illness narratives in comics) present nuanced issues centered on the lived and subjective realities of illness that are often disregarded in the mainstream discourses of health care and medicine. Among the many thematic nodes, coping with the predicament of illness is a prominent and recurrent one. Paula Knight’s graphic memoir, The Facts of Life, attains significance in such a context in that the author illuminates the prospect of pursuing ecological alternatives as a method of coping with infertility. Apportioned into three parts, Knight’s narrative centers on Polly, the alter ego of the author, as it visually documents her growing up in the North East England, sexual awakening, education, and career as an artist. In the latter half of the memoir, Knight poignantly portrays the protagonist’s tenacious struggle with infertility and its attendant psychosocial challenges. The narrative concludes with Polly coping with her illness predicament through a dedicated pursuit of art and ecology. As such, The Facts of Life is a productive visual site where environment and health intersect to constitute a singular coping practice. Drawing from these cues, this chapter examines how such a visual site displaces and sublimates the female subject’s infertile predicament by offering the pursuit of ecological alternatives as a viable panacea. The chapter demonstrates how the author’s interest in ecology and wildlife and her involvement in environmental initiatives, such as planting trees for the National Forest’s “Grow a Seed from Tree” scheme, enabled her to positively cope with her condition. The chapter also argues that the author’s gesture of transforming a barren landscape into a small forest through her ecological initiatives expands the notion of mothering from its restrictive and hegemonic designs, making it equally rewarding for the self and the community. In so doing, the article illustrates the role of ecology and environment in coping and healing

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in the context of illness and suffering. Given the nascence of graphic medicine and health humanities, it would be instructive to review some of the central tenants of these discourses before we set to analyze Knight’s The Facts of Life.

PROLEGOMENON TO THE PLANETARY HEALTH HUMANITIES In his landmark essay titled “Planetary Health Humanities—Responding to COVID Time,” Bradley Lewis (2020) presents the central tenets of planetary health humanities. Viewed from the context of Covid-19, the article is a clarion call for the modification of health humanities, wherein one has to expand the realm of health care by promoting planetary health and well-being. The starting point of planetary health, so to speak, is the 2015 Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on Planetary Health (CPH) (Horton and Lo 2015: 1921). The commission was composed of a diverse group of scientific contributors from medicine, ecology, biodiversity, and environmental health. The Foundation emphasized the need to create the field of “planetary health” as an extension of their public health work. In yet another definition, “planetary health” is defined as the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends (Whitmee et al. 2015: 1978). Moving beyond a biopsychosocial phenomenon (BPS), planetary health as a discourse and as a movement addresses “how best to protect and promote human health in the Anthropocene epoch” (Whitmee et al. 2015: 1978). Three key drivers of environmental and health deterioration, to paraphrase Lewis, are resource consumption, overpopulation, and technology (Lewis 2020: 3). The 17 Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs designed by the United Nations are aligned to mitigate the effects of these three features by working on key areas like poverty, hunger, education, inequality, sanitation, and social justice, among others (Lewis 2020: 3). The Covid-19 crisis provides stark evidence of CPH and UN SDGs and the need to interlink planetary health and well-being with human political, economic, and social systems. Environmental damage has created not only the conditions for novel zoonotic pathogens and emerging infectious disease (EIDs) but also a rapid escalation of the consequences of the virus by social determinants of disease. As a result, well-being (both physical and mental) occupies the center stage in discussions about SDGs. In recent times, health humanities has undergone dramatic epistemological and disciplinary development in that it moves beyond the immediate concerns of the clinic to include and address health promotion, activism, and environmental issues. Meaningful resistance to biomedicine’s obsession with biology began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, George Engel in his “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine” (1977) argued for an expanded “biopsychosocial” systems approach to medicine, which included not only the patients’ bodies but also their psychic life and their social context. While Eric Cassell in “The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine” (1982) redefined the goals of medicine not as the battle against disease but as the tending to the phenomenology of human suffering, Ian McWhinney, in a different register, urged medicine to adopt a phenomenology-oriented “person-centered” approach that “should aim to understand the meaning of illness for the patient as well as provide a clinical diagnosis” (1986: 873). As Paul Crawford puts it in his introduction to the Routledge Companion to Health Humanities, “health humanities has moved beyond a predominating concern with training health professionals through the arts and humanities” (2020: 3). Rather than being an add-on or a mere application of perspectives from the humanities on medicine and healthcare,

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health humanities embraces alternative and post-disciplinary possibilities for understanding illness and healing from multiple perspectives. A coalition between environmental humanities and health humanities is one such postdisciplinary possibility that is not only enabling and empowering but also ethical and topical. Like health humanities, environmental humanities is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary field that “combine[s] humanities domains of eco-criticism, environmental philosophy, environmental history, feminist/queer/indigenous science and technology studies, and a range of environmentally engaged arts practices all in the service of environmental sustainability” (Lewis 2020: 8). Environmental humanities has always goaded to move beyond the nature/culture divide to understand the many entanglements, including the way this binary (nature/culture) has organized and fragmented human knowledge and academic disciplines. Current pandemics have just accelerated and compelled us to imagine multiple possibilities of cross-pollinating environmental and health/medical humanities to planetary health humanities. More particularly, such a planetary and environmental health alliance leads, both theoretically and in practice, to blueprint our entangled existence, interdependence, and the nature of our existence itself. For instance, referring to Covid-19, the environmental humanities scholar, Natalie Porter, uses the term “risky zoographies” not only to signal the zoonotic origins of the virus but also to reflect on how “ecological factors, interpersonal networks, and global market dynamics” (2012: 103) combine to create novel and emergent zoonotic disease risks. Put boldly, planetary health in situating “human health within human systems” (Horton and Lo 2015: 1921) expands our understanding of mental health, infectious disease, and noncommunicable diseases, among others, to investigate the role of environment, nature, and the new geological era (the Anthropocene) itself. Planetary health humanities, in a sense, articulates the wisdom of a “wake-up call” narrative for our increasingly risky zoographies. Planetary health humanities, in a sense, articulates the wisdom of a “wake-up call” narrative for our increasingly risky zoographies and also attends to social systems and environmental factors. Such an approach that insists on strategic continuity between/among differentiated knowledge systems has tremendous potential not only in creating transformative narratives and healthcare practices but also in redefining health not as ontologically given but as an outcome of disparate components within and between various socioeconomic and ecological factors. While there are many verbal narratives that illustrate such an entangled existence, the forthcoming Crude, a memoir by Pablo Fajardo and Sophie Tardy-Joubert (illustrated by Damien Roudeau and translated by Hannah Chute) is a case in point in that it documents the horrors of oil waste in the Amazon and its impact on its population (such as miscarriage in women and congenital disorders). In such a context, the arts and humanities can unify mankind in several ways. It can contribute to “individual and collective happiness” (Small 2014: 6) and offer a deeper understanding of happiness, enrich character development, and provide direct pleasure or hedonism. Besides the question of human happiness, the humanities teach, as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine maintains, “close reading practices as an essential tool, an appreciation for context across time and space, qualitative analysis of social structures and relationships, the importance of perspective, the capacity for empathic understanding, analysis of the structure of an argument (or of the analysis itself), and study of phenomenology in the human world” (2018: 60). Furthermore, the arts and humanities not only reflect the crisis but also critique the existing practices to imagine multiple (alternate) possibilities.

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GRAPHIC MEDICINE: DEFINITIONS AND SCOPE As an emerging interdisciplinary field that is inspired by the central tenets of narrative medicine and health humanities, graphic medicine has ushered in novel perspectives and unique approaches in the discourses of health, illness, and medicine. Rightly defined as the “intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare” (Czerwiec et al. 2015: 1), graphic medicine recognizes the potency of words and images not only to convey health information but also to capture lived realities of illness and suffering. Subverting the epistemic hegemony of medical practitioners, graphic medical narratives on various illness conditions foreground the singularity of patients’ perspective that has often been silenced in the mainstream discourses. To quote Susan Squier, one of the pioneering members of the graphic medicine movement, graphic pathographies address those “aspects of social experience that escape both the normal realms of medicine and the comforts of canonical literature” (2008: 130). The criticality of the medium of comics in this enterprise lies in the fact that “comics have often been associated with cultural changes and are ideal for exploring taboo or forbidden areas of illness and healthcare” (Czerwiec et al. 2015: 3). As such, by exploiting comics’ affordances, graphic medicine generates a creative space and a verbal–visual vocabulary for sufferers to articulate their tabooed and silenced experiential realities of illness. Mostly autobiographical, graphic pathographies address diverse themes such as doctor–patient relationships, commercialization and industrialization of health care, patient identity, challenges of caregiving, death and grieving, illness and coping, and sociocultural attitudes toward illness, among others. Seminal graphic medical texts that received critical acclaim include Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer (2006), Frederik Peeters’s Blue Pills (2008), Marisa Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen (2009), Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (2010), Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me (2012), David Wojnarowicz and James Romberge’s 7 Miles a Second (2013), Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor (2014), Peter Dunlap-Shohl’s My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson’s (2015), M. K. Czerwiec’s Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 (2017), and Georgia Webber’s Dumb: Living without a Voice (2018). Notably, there exists a growing corpus of graphic memoirs on women’s reproductive disorders, specifically infertility. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, graphic medical narratives such as Phoebe Potts’s Good Eggs (2010), Emily Steinberg’s Broken Eggs (2014), Paula Knight’s The Facts of Life (2017), Jenell Johnson’s Present/Perfect (2018), and Sheila Alexander’s I(V)F: A Memoir of Infertility (2019) explore the personal, medical, and cultural experience of women’s infertility and its attendant challenges. Knight’s The Facts of Life, read through an ecocritical lens, attains special significance among women’s graphic memoirs on infertility. The narrative illuminates the role of the natural world in the context of coping with an illness. Although graphic medicine is not immediately relevant to environmental humanities and planetary health, ecology functions as a defense mechanism and also constitutes as a coping strategy to reduce the impact of various stressors experienced by Knight.

INFERTILITY AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF COPING From a medical point of view, infertility is “a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse” (World Health Organization 2009: n.p.). Despite being a gender-neutral health

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condition affecting “an estimated 48.5 million couples worldwide” (Mascarenhas et al. 2012: n.p.), women are often blamed and stigmatized for the couple’s childlessness. Cultural scripts not only valorize motherhood but also interlace maternity and femininity, causing severe psychic harm to childless women. Pronatal discourses and institutions establish the maternal role as the sole path of women’s self-fulfillment, thereby alienating non-mothers from their female identity. As such, most women endure infertility “not simply as the physical dysfunction of the mechanistic body, but as the disorder of the body, self and world” (Toombs 1988: 202). While navigating infertility, suffering subjects are forced to “reconcile their opposing identities of self, views of the world, and images of an anticipated future” (McCarthy 2008: 320). The stigma surrounding women’s infertility engenders in childless women complex and precarious affective states that include self-doubt and self-loathing. As Christine Dunkel-Schetter and Marcl Lobel observe, the emotional cost of infertility involves a sense of loss of control over the present and the future (1991: 33), compounded by varied feelings such as grief and depression, anger, guilt, shock or denial, and anxiety (30). As a condition that threatens the sufferer’s sense of self, navigating infertility involves “an experience of intense suffering coupled with an introspective effort to rediscover a sense of self and a feeling of balance, purpose, and meaning in their lives” (McCarthy 2008: 320). Put differently, coping in the context of infertility requires “serious effort and continuous work to adapt practically to its limitations and to adjust psychologically to the pain, restricted horizons, and frustration it brings” (Carel 2007: 3). Here, Knight’s graphic narrative that foregrounds the role of nature and ecology in the context of coping with infertility attains relevance.

THE FACTS OF LIFE: TEXT AND CONTEXTS Published in 2017, The Facts of Life is the culmination of Knight’s autobiographical exploration of the themes of infertility and miscarriage in comics and comic strips such as How a Baby Is Made (2007), Spooky Womb (2012), and X-Utero (2012). Apportioned into three parts and a prologue, The Facts of Life centers on Polly, the alter ego of the author. The first half of the memoir visually documents the protagonist’s birth and growing up in North East England, sexual awakening, education, and career as an artist. Coalescing the personal and the political, the narrative juxtaposes the protagonist’s birth in 1969 with some of the historically significant events such as the Apollo 11 landing men on the moon and women’s equal-pay demonstration at Trafalgar Square. Additionally, the author notes that an increased availability of the contraceptive pill on the National Health Service enabled women to delay or forgo pregnancy “in favour of education and career” (Knight 2017: 14). Despite this socio-scientific and medical advancement brought about by modernity, the author observes, a woman’s identity and self-fulfillment were still tied to childbearing and domesticity. Furthermore, the memoir recounts how the protagonist was culturally conditioned as a young girl to aspire for motherhood as her future identity. In her adulthood, Polly was forced to make a choice between her career as a cartoonist and maternity. Polly prioritizes the latter over the former, but the protagonist and her partner Jack’s repeated attempts to conceive fail. Complex and layered, the second half of the memoir poignantly portrays Polly’s tenacious struggle with infertility, aggravated by chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). After multiple miscarriages and treatment failures, the couple abnegates their pursuit of parenthood. Although psychologically devastating, infertility

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offers the protagonist an opportunity to reexamine her notions of motherhood and its ideological foundations. Polly investigates the ideology of pronatalism that entwines maternity and femininity. Here, the memoirist attempts a thorough critique of pronatalism for its glorification of motherhood that stigmatizes and marginalizes infertile women. The memoir concludes with Polly embracing her non-mother identity and coping with her illness predicament through a dedicated pursuit of art and ecology. In a talk on The Facts of Life, Knight succinctly delineates the role of nature in the memoir as it enabled her to cope with childlessness thus: For me personally, I found the natural world was a great comfort in coming to terms with loss and not having children and in the book, I often use nature as metaphor for human condition. I’m interested in how human beings think they are somehow apart from nature when in fact they are very much a part of nature, and my subject matter is a personal proof of that. (Knight 2018) As Knight observes, the protagonist’s deep attachment with the natural world, her dedicated involvement in ecological initiatives, and nature’s healing power constitute a major theme in the memoir. The author illustrates how the natural world enables her to positively cope with her illness predicament in multiple ways. Additionally, metaphors and images drawn from the natural world constitute a major formal aspect of the memoir. Taking these cues, this chapter examines how The Facts of Life becomes a productive visual site where environment and health intersect to constitute a singular coping practice. In so doing, the chapter illustrates the role of ecology and environment in coping and healing in the context of illness and suffering.

METAPHORS, NATURAL IMAGERY, AND ANIMAL ECOLOGY Thematically and formally, nature and ecology perform multiple functions in Knight’s graphic memoir. The author uses a woodgrain pattern throughout the book and the narrative is laden with natural imagery and metaphors drawn from nature and ecology. The memoirist comments on the use of nature metaphors in the book thus: “I often use nature metaphorically for added poignancy or a more poetic way of communicating something than a simple head-to-head conversation would have” (Knight 2018). Interestingly, each of the three parts of the memoir begins with an image drawn from nature. While the first part opens with an image of a seed falling on to the ground from a plant, the second part begins with the image of a squirrel picking the fallen seed that was depicted in the first part. The first image in the third part, on the other hand, depicts the seed sprouting. Interestingly, each of these images succinctly conveys each phase in the author’s life as narrated in the memoir. While the first part describes her birth and upbringing, the second part delineates her formative years, and the third and final part narrates the birth of a new artistic and eco-conscious identity in her. Again, the book, which is dedicated to the author’s partner John, bears in its dedication page the image of a pair of swans collecting dry stems to make a nest. Notably, the image reappears in the narrative when the protagonist and her partner happen to see a pair of swans struggling to make a nest on the banks of River Avon as “the tides repeatedly thwarted their futile nesting attempts” (Knight 2017: 126). The protagonist immediately relates to the swans’ predicament as Polly herself has repeatedly been failing in her attempt to conceive a child and build a traditional family. As such, the image of the swans on the dedication page metaphorically depicts the author and her

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partner’s struggle with infertility. Knight deploys several animal metaphors to describe her struggles with CFS. One predominant metaphor for fatigue is the tortoise that often carries weight over its shell further dragging its pace. In the afterword to the memoir, Knight remarks thus: “A tortoise is perhaps an obvious choice to illustrate fatigue, since it moves so slowly” (Knight 2017: 238). Polly often metaphorically turns into the tortoise across panels when she suffers from fatigue (Knight 2017: 80, 86, 134, 141). The throat problems that Polly suffered due to hypothyroidism is metaphorically represented as frogs that croak in her throat (Knight 2017: 86). The intense muscle pain that accompanies CFS is further expressed as an elephant that rests over Polly’s body (Knight 2017: 141). While these animals represent her struggles with illness, Knight chooses the metaphor of birds that float across the expanse of the sky in expressing her “intoxicating sense of freedom” (Knight 2017: 189) she experienced in liberation from social stereotypes.

ECOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF HEALING AND COPING The prologue to The Facts of Life opens with a splash page depicting a barren landscape. The subsequent sections of the prologue visualize the protagonist Polly and her partner Jack unloading saplings from their car, enthusiastically receiving instructions from a volunteer, and carrying the saplings in a wheelbarrow with shovels to the barren landscape. Through a series of ensuing panels that depict the vast landscape through long and medium-range shots, the author shows Polly and Jack planting the saplings and later holding hands and contently watching the saplings they planted together. The prologue concludes with a splash page that depicts a giant tree in the background and a short panel next to it in which Polly and Jack are pictured as having coffee after planting the saplings. Here, through the visualization of an imaginative tree in the background, the author juxtaposes the present and the future, suggesting how the protagonist’s gesture of planting saplings in a barren landscape would transform the landscape into a forest. Interestingly, in the afterword to The Facts of Life, Knight details the rationale behind the inclusion of the prologue with silent visuals of the protagonist and her partner planting saplings in a barren land. The author recounts that after undergoing a series of infertility treatments, Knight and her partner give up their pursuit of parenthood, and instead, the couple focus on other aspects of life that involve creativity and nurturing. Accordingly, Knight and her partner join National Forest’s “Grow a Seed from Tree” scheme and participate in an ecological initiative of planting acorns in Poppy Wood in Derbyshire. In the afterword, the author records the significance of her involvement in that ecological initiative thus: “After being unable to grow life in my body, it felt restorative and hopeful to make a contribution towards new ecosystems and communities—to help regenerate what used to be a damaged and barren landscape” (Knight 2017: 238). Evident as it were, Knight’s gesture of turning her creative and nurturing impulses toward nature is emotionally fulfilling for the author herself and ecologically rewarding for the community at large. Thus, Knight’s involvement in ecological initiatives is a loftier enterprise than her pursuit of biological motherhood. Again, in an email interview, the author assumes an eco-sensitive perspective and notes how her involvement in ecological initiatives enabled her to have a broader understanding of motherhood, beyond the biological: Collecting acorns and waiting for them to sprout was exciting and positive in absence of being able to grow life in my own body. We planted them in The National Forest (in central England)

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in their third year. I think having children can give people a sense of life after life, and, for me, planting the trees provided that same sense: Trees last longer than people and are more environmentally friendly because they gobble up CO2 rather than creating it. (qtd. in Venkatesan and Murali 2020: 11) Here, apart from suggesting the creative and healing potential of her ecological initiative, Knight also offers an oblique critique of overpopulation and its attendant environmental challenges. Further, Knight’s involvement in environmental initiatives such as “Grow a Seed from Tree” enables her to have a “small connection to the future” (Knight 2017: 238) even in the absence of biological children. In a sense, by channelizing the creative and nurturing facets of her personality toward the natural world, Knight foregrounds her involvement and interest in ecology as a mothering practice, as an alternative to biological motherhood. In a similar vein, Knight delineates in the main text of the narrative how her dedicated involvement in the natural world and wildlife enabled her to better cope with the predicament of childlessness. Particularly, the author notes that after undergoing physically and psychologically vexing treatments for infertility, her priorities in life changed from having a traditional family, children, and a stable job to that of a dedicated pursuit of art and the natural world. As such, the protagonist Polly comments on her renewed interest in nature and wildlife thus: “Fulfilment could be found in ways other than having a baby” (Knight 2017:195). The following panels picture the protagonist finding emotional fulfillment through watching and feeding birds, keeping bees, and planting saplings. Elsewhere, the protagonist is pictured as elated and thrilled after watching an acorn seed, which she had planted, sprout. The splash page portrays the sprouted acorn in a pot as surrounded by radiant rays, signifying the sense of hope and renewal it engenders in the protagonist. Interestingly, the author had drawn the image of her embryo in a similar fashion, as surrounded by radiant rays, after receiving the news of her pregnancy; but later Polly loses her embryo. Therefore, the splash page depicting the sprouted acorn surrounded by radiant rays symbolically signifies the author’s psychological transformation in which the sight of a sprouted acorn offers her emotional fulfillment similar to the news of pregnancy. There are also several occasions in the memoir where the protagonist is portrayed as finding solace in nature while simultaneously navigating through infertility and CFS. For instance, after undergoing a miscarriage, Polly walks on the banks of River Towy and comments on experiencing the empowering and soothing power of the river thus: “The unbidden rhythm of this weighty body of water was somehow comforting: nothing could prevent its tides. The river carried my troubles away” (Knight 2017: 119). Here the mighty river not only offers a psychological relief for the author from her physical ordeals of illness but also provides her with the much-needed strength to encounter future troubles. Later, while struggling from CFS, the author imagines herself as a huge tree, with branches growing out of her hands and her head, filling her with a “sense of newness … and strength” (Knight 2017: 192). Knight’s visualization of Polly as a huge tree with several strong branches and the sense of “newness” and “strength” it engenders in her signify the role of nature in providing the author with relief, strength, and a sense of renewal in the context of a physically and psychologically debilitating illness. In sum, the memoir illustrates how the author becomes aware of the healing power of nature, drawing sustenance from nature and ecology while navigating the physical and psychic ordeals of illness. For the author, interest and involvement in nature and ecology become a new and distinct coping practice.

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CONCLUSION Paula Knight’s graphic medical narrative on infertility, The Facts of Life, is a productive visual site where health and ecology intersect. Knight not only strews the narrative with metaphors and images drawn from the natural world but also documents how she draws solace and strength from nature and ecology while coping with multiple illnesses. Having gone through the ordeals of infertility, which is aggravated by bouts of CFS, the protagonist channelizes her creative and nurturing impulses toward art and ecology. Apart from offering a soothing relief from the trauma of illness, the natural world enables the author to develop a broader and loftier perspective toward motherhood. Through her dedicated involvement in environmental initiatives such as National Forest’s “Grow a Seed from Tree” scheme, the author positively copes with her infertile subjectivity. As such, the ecological alternative to biological motherhood displaces and sublimates her infertile predicament. Further, the protagonist’s involvement in transforming a barren landscape into a small forest through her ecological initiatives expands the notion of mothering from its hegemonic designs, making it equally rewarding for the self and the community. To conclude, while Knight’s narrative illustrates the role of ecology and environment in coping and healing in the context of illness and suffering, it also demonstrates the usefulness of posthuman and ecological consciousness.

REFERENCES Carel, H. (2007), “Can I Be Ill and Happy?,” Philosophia, 35: 95–110. Cassell, E. (1982), “The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine,” New England Journal of Medicine, 306 (11): 639–45. Crawford, Paul, Brian Brown, and Andrea Charise, eds. (2020), The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities, New York: Routledge. Czerwiec, M. K., I. Williams, S. M. Squier, M. J. Green, K. R. Myers, and S. T. Smith (2015), Graphic Medicine Manifesto, University Park: Penn State University Press. Dunkel-Schetter, C., and M. Lobel (1991), “Psychological Reactions to Infertility,” in A. L. Stanton and C. Dunkel-Schetter (eds.), Infertility: Perspectives from Stress and Coping Research, 29–57, New York: Springer. Engel, G. (1977), “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine,” Science, 196 (4286):129–36. Horton, R., and S. Lo (2015), “Planetary Health: A New Science for Exceptional Action,” Lancet, 386: 1920–2. Lewis, B. (2020), “Planetary Health Humanities-Responding to COVID Time,’’ Journal of Medical Humanities, 42 (1): 3–16. DOI: 10.1007/s10912-020-09670-2. Knight, P. (2017), The Facts of Life, Latvia: Myriad. Knight, P. (2018), “The Facts of Life,” author talk by Paula Knight, July 22. Available online: https://www.yout​ ube.com/watch?v=idUC​JWkE​v2U. Accessed December 2, 2020. Mascarenhas, M. N., S. R. Flaxman, T. Boerma, S. Vanderpoel, and G. A. Stevens (2012), “National, Regional, and Global Trends in Infertility Prevalence since 1990: A Systematic Analysis of 277 Health Surveys,” PLoS Med, 9 (12): e1001356. DOI: 10.1371/journal. pmed.1001356. McCarthy, P. M. (2008), “Women’s Lived Experience of Infertility after Unsuccessful Medical Intervention,” Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, 53 (4): 319–24. McWhinney, I. (1986), “Are We on the Brink of a Major Transformation in Clinical Method?,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, 35: 873–8.

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2018), The Integration of the Humanities and Arts With Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches From the Same Tree, Washington, DC: National Academies Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/24988. Porter, N. (2012), “Risky Zoographies: The Limits of Place in Avian Flu Management,” Environmental Humanities, 1:103–21. Small, H. (2014), Value of the Humanities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Squier, S. M. (2008), “Literature and Medicine, Future Tense: Making It Graphic,” Literature and Medicine, 27 (2): 124–52. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.0.0031. Toombs, S. K. (1988), “Illness and the Paradigm of Lived Body,” Theoretical Medicine, 9 (2): 201–26. DOI: 10.1007/bf00489413. Venkatesan, S., and C. Murali (2020), “Drawing Infertility: An Interview with Paula Knight, Jenell Johnson, Emily Steinberg, and Phoebe Potts,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2020.1764074. Whitmee, S., A. Haines, C. Beyrer, F. Boltz, A. G. Capon, B. F. de Souza Dias, A. Ezeh, H. Frumkin, P. Gong, P. Head, R. Horton, G. M. Mace, R. Marten, S. S. Myers, S. Nishtar, S. A. Osofsky, S. K. Pattanayak, M. J. Pongsiri, C. Romanelli, A. Soucat, J. Vega, and D. Yach (2015), “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch: Report of the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on Planetary Health,” Lancet, 386 (10007): 1973–2028. World Health Organization (WHO) (2009), “Revised Glossary on Assisted Reproductive Terminology (ART).” Available online: http://www.who.int/rep​rodu​ctiv​ehea​lth/publi​cati​ons/infe​rtil​ity/art_t​ermi​nolo​gy2/en/. Accessed October 10, 2020.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Fungi Umwelt MARIA WHITEMAN

Fungi has awakened an ecological awareness of the fundamental role organisms have in our ecosystem. I walk in the forest every day in every season. There is so much to learn that it humbles me to think I’ll never possibly understand how all of nature and the cosmos have an interconnectivity surrounding me from under my feet to the air I am breathing to the planets in the sky. It’s a wonder that fungi, dead logs, leaves, plants, and trees have so much to do with our ability to live on this planet and even more so to teach us. I want to begin my chapter by talking about my experience with mushrooms, ecology, and the relationship to soil while also focusing on how they are imperative to the health of humans and the condition of the planet. Another essential point I want to express is that learning about our own entangled interspecies relationship to organisms is only the beginning of a healthy perspective. In other words, a holistic perspective on our entangled species relationships focuses on the multiple ways in which disease brings into sharp focus the intimate relationships humans share with other species. The idea of health for human beings and also for the planet requires a critical environmental analysis of the dynamic production of life that results from such imbricated human and nonhuman interactions through the arc of time. My interest in fungi has taken me on a journey to the Northwest Cascades to join mycologist Ja Schindler, who leads fungi workshops on his farm four times a year with a group called “Fungi for the People” (FFTP). The course immerses in fungi: foraging, cuisine, cultivating, lab work, inoculating, making substrates, sterilizing, pasteurizing, composting, farming, and harvesting. I’ve worked with FFTP three times and will go back for one more workshop to finalize my work on bioremediation or myco-remediation. The pleasure at the end was learning about the medicinal qualities of Lion’s Mane, Reishi, Cordyceps, Turkey tails, Chaga, and many other fungi. We sat around a fire and tasted a dozen medicinal mushroom teas, discussing, discovering, and describing what our taste buds were experiencing. The calm and euphoria were so delightful that we were all producing our own mycelia network with each other in the barn that day. Overcome by this world I had gone “fungal” (Sheldrake 2020: 209). It was one of the most change-altering experiences. One reflection that really stood out for me is no one ever asks “what you do” but rather how did you get here, when did mushrooms come into your life? Mushrooms seem to attract the most interesting people, drawing on everyone’s energy

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FIGURE 5.1  Images by Maria Whiteman: “Caring” Silverprint.

FIGURE 5.2  Images by Maria Whiteman: “Symbiosis” Silverprint.

and playfulness, building incredible bonds. We were learning about all the sweetness of the earth by touch, sound, taste, and sight. FFTP is held on an organic farm—it’s everything mushrooms exploding all your senses. The fungi world is illuminating and took me by surprise. I felt as though I had been given a secret about the universe, an inside look to an intelligence that’s been around for millions of years, and as a matter of fact, it has. In a scientific article a friend sent to me about “deep ancient fungi,” Henrik Drake gives us a glimpse of how far back in time fungi can be discovered (Drake et al. 2021: 30) (Figure 5.2):

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The findings suggest that fungi may be widespread decomposers of organic matter and overlooked symbiotic partners to other, more primitive, microorganisms, thereby capable of enhancing the production of greenhouse gases in the vast rock-hosted deep biosphere. Radioisotopic dating of tiny calcite crystals formed following microbial methane formation revealed an age of the fungi fossils to around 39 million years ago, more than 300 million years after the meteorite impact. (Henrik Drake, of the Linnaeus University, Sweden) The science reveals interesting facts about fungi organisms, while at the same time the plethora of literature being published in the last ten years about our ecosystem and bringing to light interconnectivity between ecology and ourselves is promising. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poetic writing and storytelling in Braiding Sweetgrass (2012) is an engaging book on ecology, science, plants, fungi, and botany. Kimmerer sheds light and knowledge between both science and her own indigenous culture. She shares memories about her grandfather and growing up with a curiosity about the ecology of plants and flowers. Her exploration and questions take her to university to eventually become a renowned ecologist. Kimmerer reminds us how indigenous cultures for hundreds of years had names for plants, roots, fungi, and trees because of many of their medical properties and healing power. Kimmerer recalls, “Puhpowee,” a word that captures fungi temporality and energy, “the force which causes mushrooms to push up overnight” (Kimmerer 2012: 79). The force is the word that stands out, a perfect description of a kingdom outside our language. I have often experienced the forest the morning after a warm rain, which draws out smells of mushrooms engulfing the air. It’s strong enough to make your taste buds tingle with a rich earthy flavor of nature. Puhpohwee is why moist soiled debris can turn into a cosmic sight with zillions of fungi spreading across the forest floor. There are also several species of fungi that trigger the “force” associated with weather such as thunder storms called “thunder-aroused mushrooms.” For example, Amanita muscaria (Kakulja’) means “lightening-bolt” according to Chinese text by Ishiwara Gusha who wrote The History of Mushroom (c. 1811), “who notes three types of fungi species directly associated with thunder” (Stephenson 2010: 299).1 The Chinese have been foraging and cultivating mushrooms for thousands of years for food, medicines, and teas, and over the last twenty years the Western world is catching on thanks to mycologist Paul Stamets, philosopher Terrence McKenna, anthropologist Anna Tsing, botanist Robin Kimmerer, biologist Merlin Sheldrake, ecologist Suzanne Simard, writer Michael Pollan, and many others who are significant to the fungi movement.

UNEARTHING Paul Stamet’s Running Mycelium (2005) inspired me to take notice of the fungi world and I soon developed an interest in mushrooms when I became attracted to the uncanniness of the organism and its architecture. Immediately recognizing the alien qualities of fungi, I wanted to learn, research, and integrate this remarkable organism into my artwork (Stamets 2005: 12). My position as Artist in Social Practice at Indiana University, Bloomington, with the Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) created an environment with several opportunities enabling me to work with scientists and mycologists. The ERI is an extraordinary institute that serves as a think tank 1

McCoy, P. (2016), Radical Mycology: A Treaties on Seeing and Working with Fungi, Portland, OR: Chthaeus Press, 79.

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dealing with a changing climate, and it is composed of multidisciplinary crossovers between scientists, social scientists, curators, environmental lawyers, and environmental historians. Janet McCabe, our director, has been a great leader of the ERI, who has been an inspiration to all the visiting fellows. McCabe has made it possible for the cross-pollination of disciplines to collaborate on projects together. It is not a surprise that she joined President Biden’s administration as Deputy Administer for the Environmental Protection Agency (Clean Air Act) in Washington, DC, in 2021. The unique setting of the environment has the most engaging researchers involved by crosspollination from one discipline to another. ERI is remarkable by creating an interdisciplinary melting pot. Upon my arrival, I started talking to scientists and figuring out the various ways to combine art, science, and ecology in some elaborate web as I knocked on several doors in the biology department to talk to ecologists, botanists, and tree scientists. To my fortune, I was able to connect immediately with Distinguished Professor Roger Hangarter, a plant physiologist researching nitrogen in plants, a PhD student Katie Biedler researching mycorrhizae relationships with trees and fungi and soon afterwards a mycologist in Westfir, Oregon. All of these important collaborations would change my relationship to the natural world and expand and deepen my connection to the forests (Figure 5.3). In Figure 5.3, what we see above the surface is the mushroom or fruiting body of a much larger organism. As Steven Stephenson explains, an ectomycorrhizal association begins with the hyphae of an ectomycorrhiza-forming plant (Stephenson 2010: 13). These hyphae appear to be attracted to actively growing root tips, possibly in response to the presence of substances being excluded by the root tips. Once in contact with the root, the hyphae proliferate to give rise to a covering (called a mantle or a sheath) that extends over the outside of the root. The thickness of the covering varies for ectomycorrhiza-forming fungi but often comprises 20–30 percent of the total volume

FIGURE 5.3  Images by Maria Whiteman: “Cosmic Ecology” Silverprint.

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of those portions of the root where the mantle is fully developed. To put things in perspective, this subterranean rhizome is the largest organism on the planet. The hyphae are the single and multicellular strands that form the mycelium, the actual stretchy hairs that show themselves when the decomposition is in process. Mycelia and hyphae are team players, one of our soil champions working in a colony or in a vast network to transport nutrients. The mutual—hence mutualism— agreement between fungi is their connection through a feeding system whereby fungi absorb nutrients from the decaying matter and send them through the mycelium in exchange for the carbohydrates they receive from the plants. However, the exchange is not only with plants and trees but also with bees, insects, termites, and beetles. The mycorrhizal relationship is essential to the overall health of the forests and to our health. Every part of this ecology is essential to the signification between species (Stamets 2005: 19–21; Stephenson 2010: 15). Below the surface is a sprawling network of fungal mycelium, often referred to as the wood-wide web. A rhizome of threadlike fungal cells (hyphae) forms a web and can take on different ecological roles with other organisms, including other fungi through mutualistic or parasitic relationships. Fungi that form mutualistic associations with plants, known as mycorrhizal fungi, create vital networks that provide nutrients to plants in exchange for energy in the form of sugars, while others are free-living, saprotrophic fungi that obtain carbon and energy from decaying organic matter and return nutrients to the soil and are considered to be recyclers in the forest (Stamets 2005: 19). There are other associations of entanglement that mushrooms have with other species, such as symbiotic/parasitic relationships with insects and termites. In some cases with certain types of ants and nematodes, the mycelium crawls inside insect bodies and transforms the insects into zombies. Merlin Sheldrake calls this “fungus in ant’s clothing”; the Latin name of the type of mushroom is Orphiocordyceps, also known as Cordyceps (Sheldrake 2020: 109). The inter-organism connectivity “inherits the pharmacological talent for infecting and manipulating ants in order to ultimately to achieve what is called “fitness” (106). The theory of fitness is fascinating because it takes a singular act and incorporates an entire ecosystem enabling species to reproduce. In other words, the act of the ant traversing to the highest part of a tree to hold a death grip on a leaf and die while the fungus uses the body as a substrate and begins the fruiting process in order to sporulate (106). The notion of “fitness” reminds me of “umwelt” when the organisms share their environment, the biological “epicenter between communication and signification.” The sharing mechanisms of survival in keeping a community alive is far beyond what scientists thought of as species relying on each other or competitors to survive. It’s one species helping another species and so on and so on. Scientists are recently discovering the community at large that is entangled and interconnected on many multilayered facets. So how can we begin thinking with organisms? Curiosity and paying attention to the natural environment is how it started with me. Sheldrake calls it “becoming fungi,” meaning that as soon as you realize the importance of paying close attention to mushrooms, it feels like you have entered into an alternative universe. My hikes turned into exploring, searching, and discovery, which took me off the trails and into the deep forest. Anna Tsing’s observation, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, resonated with me: “Mushroom tracks are elusive and enigmatic; following them takes me on a wild ride—trespassing every boundary” (2017: 137). Trekking on paths that crisscross will send you in various directions; a common joke among mushroom foragers is that it takes an entire day to hike a mile, and returning with a basket full of insatiable mushrooms to cook and make teas. Tsing’s assemblages on the matsutake mushroom are bringing together, collecting, and interconnecting, which the rhizome makes possible through its specific communities

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and economies. Tsing narrates this through stories in the “ecological communities and open-ended gatherings” exemplified globally in the fungi markets (138). There is something odd and strangely magical being around a group of people who are into fungi and share a love for foraging mushrooms. We crowd around a discovered mushroom, smelling, tasting, and examining every inch of it to be sure to correctly identify it. A community of wonder is part of the fungi trajectory and involves meeting people that share your passion. The group I spent time with in Oregon at the FFTP workshop were from all over the world—Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Siberia, Nigeria and other places I can’t recall. On the first day all of us met, we formed a circle and each had to share what brought us to Oregon to learn about mushrooms. There were three gentlemen attending the workshop for very serious reasons that had to do with their health. Two of the men were both diagnosed with fourth-stage cancer and were in remission. One of the two spoke more openly about why he wanted to learn as much as possible about fungi for medicinal purposes because he believed that drinking Chaga tea daily made from tinctures in the past few years have saved his life. He went on to explain a story he read, an account concerning a village in Russia (where Chaga is considered a native fungus) that has the lowest cancer rate because of the Chaga mushroom being part of the villager’s way of life. Cancer rates have been very high in parts of Russia where heavy industry dominates the landscape, all except for this one village. He claimed that he was at this workshop for a second time since there was so much information to acquire, and, most importantly, he wanted to bring this knowledge back to his community where he lived. Below is a description of what mushroom farmers most commonly sell on their websites across the United States and why they have become so popular in our culture today. This is a list of only a few mushrooms described on Hawk Meadow Farm’s (HMB) website about the medicinal properties of fungi:2 Lion’s Mane (Hericium): has immunostimulating effects but has also shown promise in the regeneration of damaged nerve cells, stimulation of nerve growth factor (NGF) in the central and peripheral nervous system, repair of neurological degradation from senility, and improvement of cognitive function, memory loss, and reflexes. Turkey Tails (Trametes versicolor): active in protecting and enhancing the immune system. Possesses antitumor, anticancer, and anti-inflammatory properties. Helps to alleviate chemotherapy symptoms and aids in pain relief. Increases energy and stamina. Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum): possesses antitumor, anticancer, immunomodulatory, and immunotherapeutic qualities. It has also been found to inhibit platelet aggregation and to lower blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. Chaga (Inonotus obliquus): known for its full spectrum of immune-stimulating phytochemicals. It is rich in beta glucans, which have immunomodulating activities and readily promotes white blood cell activation. Chaga has shown promise as an anticancer agent as well as an antiviral agent. Alcohol extracts of Chaga have shown the capability to decrease the inflammation response in the body. Maitake (Grifola frondosa): Mushroom has been used in traditional Eastern medicine as an immune system enhancer. Researchers have also indicated that Maitake has the ability to 2

Hawk Meadow Farm: https://www.haw​kmea​dowf​arm.com/.

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regulate blood pressure, glucose, insulin, and both serum and liver lipids, such as cholesterol, triglycerides, and phospholipids. May also be useful for weight loss. Shitake (Lentinula edodes): Notable for its dramatic effects on lowering blood serum cholesterol. It also stimulates the immune system, possessing anticancer, antitumor, antibacterial, and antiviral properties. Recent research shows promise in having an inhibitory effect on celldestroying effects of the HIV virus.

BECOMING ORGANISM So why now is the Western world discovering how important fungi is for our bodies, mind, and ecosystem? Sheldrake’s Entangled Life explains in the most engaging way how fungi “are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere” (2020: 3). In this sense, Sheldrake is not just illustrating the science perspective of fungi, speaking from a biologist’s position, but also acknowledging with enthusiasm about an organism that is multidimensional in its role on the planet. His regard for fungi is more than research; it is rather a passion and respect he has for this astounding organism. What is fortuitous is the beauty and elegance that surface through Sheldrake’s writing, with words and storytelling that enlighten scientists and average reader. Sheldrake’s book on entangled life is timely, especially from a biologist’s perspective, and like Kimmerer, he has a deep love for nature not just from a scientific lens but also what inspired him to become a scientist. It’s the storytelling along with the significance of life experiences and meaningful insights to a magical world. I want to mention how sharing our planet with other organisms is only one step in understanding the role all of us have to the health of our ecosystem. When we use the terms “healthy,” “our health,” or “well-being,” what are we talking about? How do we begin putting these terms into context in a world we share with other organisms? Perhaps we can imagine a Mobius strip between ourselves and the ecosystem? Timing is everything and only a stone throw from the Anthropocene’s timeline of the carbon footprint humans are reproducing. How can we determine what is next if humans are not paying attention to how much time has to do with the destruction of ecosystems? When I think of “health,” I think clean, unpolluted, thriving, strong, wellness, wholesome, and many other nouns we are all familiar with. If “healthy” were a colorful dream it would be a verdant lush forest combined with a rainbow coral reef of sea anemone, trying to communicate to humans about not destroying their species. We recognize healthy when we see a green forest and witness vibrant growing organisms. One way of learning and understanding an organism is paying attention and realizing that there are several biological variables existing at different temporalities as we do. The temporal framework an organism has is ontologically evolving and occurs due to a productive habitat. Considering the timing and nurturing entailed for the next generation to process and adapt takes a certain amount of trial and error. If the organism is unhappy, several repercussions result into a colonization of contaminates. I have witnessed the demise and positive outcomes many times working closely with mycelium. I worked alongside a biologist at Indiana University who gave me permission to work in the biolab in a clean zone and uncontaminated space. It is in the lab where the fungi is removed from the natural environment and placed in an artificial environment

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preventing contamination. I produced several bodies of work that emerged from the art and science connection. I was learning how to cultivate several different species of fungi keeping the airtight flow-hood lab as sanitized as possible, especially when removing tissue and placing them in agar plates. I began experimenting with different agar recipes, even adding a beautiful bright blue food coloring to magnify the mycelium as it is cultivated in the agar. This is how I produced my next body of work on mycelium. One component of the artwork was photographing mycelium under the microscope, witnessing the organism still alive and thriving. My intention for the photos was to draw out the connection with cosmology since the microscope lens zooms in to examine beauty the human eye cannot witness. The photos were exhibited with the installation “Living with Mycelium” in the “State of Nature” show at Grunwald Art Gallery in 2020. I wanted the installation to have actual mycelium growing and fruiting throughout the exhibition. In other words, the art piece would be biological living art work. Timing was a serious consideration in how the mycelium would propagate and grow and how long it would take. To better understand the complicated and multifarious life fungi have, this is where I draw from Samantha Frost, who explains “organisms in temporal terms,” which leads to what she calls a “temporal disjunction” in the most insightful perception on thinking with an organism: Suspend the suspension of time and insist on conceiving of each and every organism—and each and every generation of organisms—as coming into being, persisting and growing, and passing out of existence. If we endeavor always to consider organisms living lifetimes and reproducing in those lifetimes then we will be able to appreciate that what makes any given organism distinctive vis-à-vis its habitat in a kind of temporal disjunction. (Frost 2016: 122) Frost is explaining the becoming of an organism and how it engages in cellular activity within its habitat and alternative temporality. A community of micro-ecosystems moving in, out, around, and through a cellular fabric containing and loosening in their environment. It is never just one component but many working together. There are so many variables and participants in what affects and changes living organisms. In my work “Living with Mycelium,” I was creating habitats for the organism to actively change and transform. When I think of mycelium growing and moving through its shared orbit of microorganisms in the becoming process of a larger form, I see how the hyphae extend themselves to broaden growth in exchange for nutrients. This process of uberbiological in the fungi umwelt is to reproduce and assist the other organism’s survival. Mycelium is multitasking by participating in a community to keep the chain of supply available and to produce the habitat to further its own progeny. By observing the body of the organism “shaping its own composing and decomposing” so that the growth of the reproductive cycle can continue the next generation to sporulate is how mushrooms reproduce and spread their seeds (Frost 2016: 122). Frost calls it “uberbiological,” meaning there are “environmental mechanisms where shaping extends and is realized in the development and growth of subsequent generations of organisms” and therefore, continue reproducing (122). The results of paying close attention to my mycelium was making sure to keep the environment I was providing as healthy as possible, and in exchange, the fruits of my labor would become beneficial by the fruiting mushrooms. This is the exchange between humans and fungi. The health of a planet and the effect of that planet’s elements, especially air and water, on humans are significant when you pause to reflect on how humans cannot survive for more than a few minutes without air and days without water. So significantly that if you take those two elements

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FIGURE 5.4  Images by Maria Whiteman: “Closing” Silverprint.

away, meaning you can’t breathe air or drink water, life perishes quickly. A healthy planet is to care about the future and recognize how climate change is connected to the distress to all humans and nonhumans. Jeffrey Cohen’s book Elemental Ecocriticism draws a wonderful picture about the “cosmologist, physicist and poet Empedocles who said that ‘all matter consists of four elements air, water, fire and earth combined with love’ ” (2015: 3). This quote struck me as to how love is linked to the elements, knitting them together as if inseparable. In order to have a balance between the elements—fire, water, air, and earth—we have to love and take care of the planet we live on. One way to take care of ourselves is to love where we live (Figure 5.4). Recently at the ERI I was invited to work with biologist Jen Lau to collaborate on a soil and fungi project. Fungi and soil go hand in hand. The hyphae that grow in long rhizomatic threads consist of enzymes that break down bacteria and move through soil in search of hosts. Bioremediation is the process to clean up environmental chemicals and toxins with microorganisms. These “rhizomorphs” are essential players nurturing survivors. It’s at the soil level that fungi decompose organic matter to absorb nutrients and make rich soil. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, in “Re-animating soils:Transforming human-soil affections through science, culture and community” opens up a new window on “human–soil” relationships where she articulates the “imaginaries of soil life in science and the intimate entanglement with soil aliveness: biological wonder and life as regenerations.” (2019: 397) One could think of the imaginaries within bioremediation like a detoxification or cleansing process inside the earth, like an understory of soil having a colonoscopy. An opening to a world below our feet acknowledging the universe working to make it possible to grow the food we eat and the gardens we sustain. As part of the collaboration with Professor Lau, my art piece will focus on the myco-remediation by experimenting and growing various plants with mycelium and plants without mycelium. I will begin the art process with cultures of mycorrhizae fungi in petri dishes to produce hyphae growth. The final piece will consist of various plants growing in soil as a creative environment where the viewer can witness the mycelia pushing through the soil connecting to the plant roots. The purpose of the project is to draw public awareness by focusing on soil and farming especially in states like Indiana where there are so many massive crops in the agro-industry, depleting the soil of all its nutrients. Myco-remediation is the fungi inside the soil releasing enzymes that break down the multiple bacteria to filter the soil into a healthy compost. I want to end my chapter addressing

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FIGURE 5.5  Images by Maria Whiteman: “Extension” Silverprint. Source: Exhibition 2022 “Fungus et Umbra Sumus” at Arts Place, Hugh N. Ronald Gallery, Portland, IN.

myco-remediation by rethinking the concept of health regarding an organism like mycelium and how it plays a role in a healthy planet directly linked to humans, and why care is so essential. The fascination with mycelia is the intelligence and systemic structure of the organism and its connection to humans. I can start by explaining about saprotroph mushrooms—they are decomposers growing inside and outside dead trees, logs, stumps, and roots. The saprotrophs break down the lignin and cellulose in the dead wood with hyphae and enzymes consisting of microorganisms to produce nutrients to other species. The rhizomatic network reaches distances that make it the largest organism on the planet. Fungi are the “navigators of their natural environment, and continue to survive the impacts of human activity and natural disaster” and does so by breaking down matter using digestive enzymes. However, it is important to realize that the fungi in turn must be fed in order for the mycelia network to decompose the toxins (McCoy 2016: 335). Myco-remediation might end up being the answer to the mountainous landfill problem that sit like mine fields giving off gases. Mushrooms have been around for billions of years to continue its fungi kingdom, perfecting the ability to consume and mastering decomposition, decay, and recycling in order to appease itself; “with hundreds such examples fungi can transform many common pollutants in soil and

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waterways that endanger lives whether human or otherwise” (Sheldrake 2020: 185). If fungi can assist in cleaning up and filtering toxins in soil, this may end up being the potential just needed for contaminated sites, chemical spills, and so on. More research needs to be done since only certain fungi species will be productive in cleaning up environmental detritus. In fact, many companies are designing and manufacturing mycelium as building and packaging material to replace styrofoam, insulation, bricks, and clothing to resolve one aspect of the biodegradable urgency. One has to imagine all of the material made from chemicals that ends up in our landfills and the harm this has caused to our planet. The newest invention with mycelium is a biodegradable material that can simultaneously break down different toxins and also compost the soil. As an artist I believe working with fungi will offer the art world more opportunities to create interesting ways to produce art out of mycelium. In the “State of Nature” exhibition, I presented my mycelium photographs with fresh agar plates and a growing Reishi sheath to illustrate all the possiblities fungi have in our world (Figure 5.5).

REFERENCES Bellacasa, Maria Puig de la (2019), “Re-animating soils: Transforming human-soil affections through science, culture and community,” Sociological Review Monographs, 67: 391–407. Cohen, J. (2015), Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Wind and Fire, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Drake, H., M. Ivarsson, C. Heim, O. Snoeyenbos-West, S. Bengston, V. Belianova, and M. Whitehouse (2021), “Fossilized Anaerobic and Possibly Methanogenesis-Fueling Fungi Identified Deep within the Siljan Impact Structure, Sweden,” Commun Earth Environment, 2 (34). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43​247-021-00107-9. Frost, S. (2016), Bioculture Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kimmerer, R. W. (2012), Braiding Sweetgrass, Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. McCoy, P. (2016), Radical Mycology: A Treaties on Seeing and Working with Fungi, Portland, OR: Chthaeus Press. Sheldrake, M. (2020), Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Future, New York: Random House. Stamets, P. (2005), Running Mycelium: How Mushrooms Can Save the World, Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. Stephenson, S. (2010), The Kingdom Fungi: The Biology of Mushrooms, Molds and Lichens, Portland, OR: Timber Press. Tsing A. (2017), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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CHAPTER SIX

Contagious History: The Imagination of the Viruses Z. GIZEM YILMAZ KARAHAN

Some disorder had surely crept into the course of the elements, destroying their benignant influence. Shelley ([1826] 2004: 183) Through incessant efforts to commandeer a host cell by using its machinery for organic embodiment and reproduction, viruses reflect their desire for survival especially in the contagious history of humankind. Demonstrating their art of survival in a world where every being is in a constant battle to survive, “the virus hijacks our cells to create millions more versions of itself ” when “it gets into a human airway” (Kaplan, Wan, and Achenbach 2020). Creating a multispecies formation, human and viral agencies intersect to form a random happening out of multiple possibilities of becomings, hinting at a posthuman concurrence—though a lethal one in our case. New materialist theories have emphasized the agential autonomy of the nonhuman world that disregards taxonomic boundaries and has the capacity to influence various dimensions of human life. That is to say, geographical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural dimensions of human life actively and closely interact with certain natural and zoonotic viruses. This interaction turns into reciprocal “relational ontologies,” in Karen Barad’s terms (Barad 2012). For example, the novel dynamics of the current SARS-Cov-2 outbreak illustrate the random happenings of intermingled “relational ontologies,” combining human and nonhuman agencies into a lethal disease. Apart from describing the coordination of human and nonhuman agencies as a zoonotic disease, the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak also actively influences most cultural practices, whether religion or education. From this perspective, the current pandemic illustrates the entanglement of matter and discourse. In the interest of contributing to the articulation of the posthuman concurrences, this chapter analyzes the history of contagious diseases in order to track their stories inscribed onto the earth by coordinating viral stories with the “storied matter” (Oppermann 2013: 55) concept of material ecocriticism. The year of the pandemic, 2020, has also been a year of sociopolitical and economic turbulence and natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, grasshopper infestations, and civil uprisings. We are further compelled to adapt to a new world system in which every agency is digitally connected to one another. Inclined to put the blame on a nonhuman scapegoat, human

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beings projected dystopian scenarios imagining a malignant nature intentionally acting against humanity, prompting ecophobia, which is basically a feeling of “antipathy toward nature” (Estok 2018: 1). Theorizing ecophobia, Simon Estok notes that it is rooted in “modernity’s irrational fear of nature and hence has created an antagonism between humans and their environments” (1). Attending to Estok’s theory, ecophobia does not deny any possible lethal outcomes in a material-discursive formation. Indeed, we see an example of such a lethal outcome in the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Ecophobia is rather related to human psychology of ascribing lethal roles to Nature. Articulating Nature as a place for terror and enmity reinforces “(and paradoxically erasing through the anthropomorphic gesture of attributing Nature volitional motive rather than simply agency) a binary of human and nonhuman” (Estok 2018: 50). From this perspective, an underlying fear of a thwarted agency and an irrational fear animates human–nonhuman relations in ecophobia. To overcome this mentality, perhaps we should start looking at our relations with the nonhuman world as perennial becomings with potential to change all the time, and not as intentional outcomes of subjectivities. To make it clear, the physical environment cannot plan to take revenge on humanity for their manipulations and misuses, as all the formations unintentionally happen at constant “intraactions.” Drawing upon quantum physics and feminist theories, Barad formulates a posthumanist theory, which she terms “agential realism.” This term treats agency as “not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity” (2007: 177) but as “an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements” (2012: 54). Pointing to confluent becomings, agency is rather a “‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices-iterative reconfigurings of topological manifolds of spacetimematter relations-through the dynamics of intraactivity” (Barad 2007: 178; original emphasis). To put it somewhat differently, subjectivities are not granted but constantly emerging, and this points to how the world is indeed posthuman. This intraactivity Barad mentions is not only about earthly formations, but it is also related to the constant transformations of the cosmic energies, together creating a unique cosmic story. Elaborating on the notion of intra-action, Barad uses Bohr’s philosophy to consolidate how boundaries and definitions are articulated merely in discursive systems. Bohr’s objection to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to find the reason for the change from a wave pattern to a particle pattern actually comports with the core argument of posthumanism. Bohr fundamentally argues that what is at issue is not uncertainty at all, but rather indeterminacy. That is, when we make a measurement, what happens is that it is not a matter of disturbing something and our knowledge is uncertain as a result, but rather there are not inherent properties and there are not inherent boundaries of things that we want to call entities before the measurement intra-action. That is, Bohr is saying that things are indeterminate; there are no things before the measurement, and that the very act of measurement produces determinate boundaries and properties of things. (Barad 2012: 62) Bohr underlines the random happenings of diffused agencies without taking any privileged positions, hence rupturing the superiority of human beings settled by the Enlightenment ideologies. Displacing humans from their “observer” positions, he underlines that there is no observer or observed. This is rather a universe of constant transformations without any definite borders and determined roles. Katherine Hayles also makes a similar remark stating that “subjectivity is emergent rather than given, distributed rather than located solely in consciousness, emerging from and integrated

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into a chaotic world rather than occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it” (1999: 291). Barad’s agential realism and Hayles’s speculations on posthumanism further rework and provide frameworks to perceive a co-narration that we can observe in the terrestrial stories told by every being—human and nonhuman. Looking at the historical stories told by viral and bacterial agencies, one can see how viruses confuse what is human with the nonhuman. Standing “on the boundary between living and non-living, able to interfere with homeostasis” (Poian and Castanho 2015: 10), viruses push a redefinition of what it means to be human. Illustrating its agential narration on human bodies, contagious diseases invoke the materiality of human bodies inhabited by a million nonhuman beings such as germs, viruses, bacteria, and elemental bodies like water. This agential narration further ignores any social privileges, as they can inscribe their lethal stories onto all kinds of human bodies, rich or poor. It further reminds humanity of the eternal fear of existence, that is the mortality of the flesh. For instance, the serial killer of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (1614), Bosola, articulates this fear of being imprisoned in decaying flesh in the following manner: Thou art a box of worme-seede, at best, but a salvatory of greene mummey: what’s this flesh? a little cruded milke, phantasticall puffe-paste: our bodies are weaker then those paper prisons boyes use to keepe flies in: more contemptible: since ours is to preserve earth-wormes: didst thou ever see a Larke in a cage? such is the soule in the body: this world is like her little turfe of grasse, and the Heaven ore our heades, like her looking glasse, onely gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compasse of our prison. (Webster 1927: 4. 2. 96–7) This quotation shows how humans feel entrapped in their bodies, preventing their eternal intellectual ascent. Disease outbreaks similarly question the limits of human by emphasizing that the definition of human is not fixed and determinate, but open to transformations through various diffracted agencies. Narrating the records of a survivor of a plague that hit the whole world in her dystopia entitled The Last Man (1826), Mary Shelley describes one of those transformations in the plague inflicting a year in which “man died not … by the hand of man” (2004: 175). Questioning what it means and how it feels to be the only human being on earth, Verney, the protagonist, experiences the failure of anthropocentric superiority of human species: “Now is man lord of the creation? Look at him—ha! I see plague!” (252). Further making a reference to Hamlet’s philosophical queries on his ontological and epistemological existence, Verney, himself quoting from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, realizes the vanity of calling “ourselves the ‘paragon of animals,’ and, lo! We were a ‘quintessence of dust’ ” (318) in the face of a deadly plague. The Last Man also acknowledges the intra-relation of human and nonhuman using the example of a plague, referred to as the “invincible monster” (176), since the air “is empoisoned, and each human being inhales death, even while in youth and health, their hopes are in the flower” (186). The plague also manifests its intra-activity transforming societies in various geographies, changing the “golden country of Persia, sandy country of Arabs, fertile Hindustan, crowded China, vast America, beautiful Circassia and Georgia, and little England” (186–7) into desolate tombs and utter ruins. It also renders all tradespeople bankrupt, hence rupturing all economic, social, and political activities. Killing human beings, sparing only Verney, the last man, the plague in Shelley’s imagination signifies an “interplay of human and nonhuman forces” (Bennett 2010: 31) that displays its lethal agency in a posthuman concurrence.

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Existing on the threshold between living and nonliving, viruses contribute to the definition of this posthuman concurrence and entanglement. The philosophy of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics operates on the conviction that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (2003: 11). Therefore the outbreak of disease entails the asymmetrical distribution of power that leads to a lethal posthuman formation where viral and bacterial agencies are given a sovereign status in exerting “control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (Mbembe 2003: 12). Verney, in Shelley’s The Last Man, submits his agency to the plague that subjugates life to death, which results in its becoming the powerholder. Plagues not only hold power in terms of exerting ultimate control over materiality and mortality of human beings, but also have the capacity to disrupt societal formations and institutions. Aligning with this observation, the Sumero-Babylonian Atra-hasis (eighteenth century BCE) records how the Sumerian gods sent various disasters to punish humans for overpopulating, hence creating a sonic overload to the earth. One of those disasters is a deadly sickness that tortures every human and disrupts the order of the civilization. In the Assyrian recension of the epic, written on cuneiform clay tablets, Enlil, god of earth, voices his unrest because of the endless noise of humanity as follows: The noise of mankind has become too intense for me, I have got disturbed [with] their noise, [With] their uproar sleep does not overcome me. Command that there be plague, Let Namtar diminish their noise. Let disease, sickness, plague and pestilence Blow upon them like a tornado. (Lambert and Millard 1969: 107) With this disease that blows upon the Sumerians like a tornado, Atra-hasis, the protagonist, narrates how “the human race is groaning” under the burden of the God-sent disease that “is consuming the land” (107). Further describing how it ruptured the familial relationships and social roles designed discursively in institutions, the epic captures the plague stripping away the veneer of civilization from human beings and in the process reducing them to mere animals engaged in the feverish struggle for survival: Daughter watched the mother’s [going in], [But the mother would not] open her door [to the daughter]. [The daughter] watched [the scales (at the sale) of the mother], The mother watched [the scales (at the sale) of the daughter]. [When the sixth year arrived] [They served up] the daughter for dinner, They served up [the son for food]. [… were filled …] One [house] consumed another, Their [faces] were overlaid [like dead malt]. [The peoples] were living [on the edge] of death. (113) Centuries later, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) in Decameron (1353) engages a similar representation of plague as dehumanizing agent that wrenches the essence of humanity from people:

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One citizen avoided the next, … men and women alike were possessed by such a visceral terror of this scourge that a man would desert his own brother, uncle would forsake his nephew, sister her brother, and often a wife her husband. What is more, believe it or not, mothers and fathers would avoid visiting and tending their children, they would virtually disown them. (1998: 10) These two literary representations show that plagues transform the social orders by bringing a kind of “end” to the existing systems. Rather than a dystopic perception, however, contagious diseases deserve credit for telling posthuman stories imprinted on the human and nonhuman bodies, agents and factors, radically altering social, political, geographical, economic, and material practices. Borrowing the current Covid-19 outbreak as an example, Hayles notes that this virus evokes the “horrific force that although humans are dominant within our ecological niche, many other niches exist that may overlap with ours and that operate by entirely different rules. It screams at jet-engine volume that we are interdependent not only with each other but also with the entire ecology of the earth” (2020; original emphasis). Consistent with Hayles’s recent observation on Covid-19, Donna Haraway’s queries on the distinction between human and nonhuman are noteworthy here. A look at the contagions throughout history shows how deeply they have changed cultural practices. From this perspective, they give us “the knowledge that we have never been human and so are not caught in that cyclopean trap of mind and matter, action and passion, actor and instrument. Because we have never been the philosopher’s human, we are bodies in braided, ontic, and antic relatings” (2008: 165). We are porous bodies onto which posthuman stories of varied agential encounters, including viral and bacterial encounters, are inscribed each moment. We are intertangled becomings whose agencies constantly change in consequence of each encounter with other agents including diseases. This makes us intertangled with various agents. We are indeed the universe, not in the humanist sense, though, but in terms of becoming a part of constant terrestrial and cosmic energies, affecting and being affected. We can actually track the traces of the contagious history in our DNA, our cosmic storage and scribe. Storing every information from the spark of the first human life on the earth, DNA tells our cosmic stories, hence becoming the grand storyteller. Entailing the story of human evolution in every segment (Jones 2000: 3), information and codes in our DNA also change constantly in the face of various happenings and formations, raising the awareness of a posthuman world. Lethal stories voiced by intermittent outbreaks throughout traceable history are encoded in our DNA. As David Clark submits, due to constant epidemics throughout history, “distinct acquired genetic changes now protect us against many individual infections. We still carry these modifications in our DNA sequences, and recent investigations are revealing a steady stream of such genetic alterations, many surprisingly recent. Thus, in many ways, we are what disease has made us” (2010: 5). Clark’s speculations uncover the intra-activity, to echo Barad, inhabited within human agency. The investigation of diseases further underlines the posthuman imagination beyond human capability as viral and bacterial epidemics are elemental formations entangled in volatile dynamics of human and nonhuman realms, thereby mitigating the subjective and superior position of humans as so-called meaning producers. As theorized by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, material ecocriticism draws attention to how humans are enmeshed in volatile planetary systems by taking narrative agency of all the beings in possible mutual intermeshments as the focal point of its argument. Submitting the narrative

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agency to agencies ranging from subatomic particles to stellar energies, material ecocriticism posits how agencies of endless formations are enacted by human and nonhuman forces in the form of storytelling. These narratives of power are manifested not only in the elemental turbulences like “the eruption of volcanoes, the rumbling vibrations of earthquakes, the contingencies of hurricanes and storms, the formation of metals, the perduring lithic compositions, the delicate patterns of spider webs, the intricate songs of whales, the coordinated dance of bees, and in species encounters” but also in dark ecological forces like “assemblages of toxic chemicals, multiplying layers of pollution moving in and across landscapes, waterscapes and air with lethal effects on human and nonhuman bodies” (Oppermann 2013: 59). When we take contagious diseases into the consideration of storied matter, their agencies are actually filled with potential lethal stories along with certain physical mutations and societal transformations. Analyzing historical disease outbreaks allows us to develop a critical stance within which to house our perspectives about material and posthuman stories beyond the ken of human imagination. Showing the entanglement of matter and discourse, culture and nature, the analysis of disease outbreaks deduces the dynamics of risky and volatile “contact zones [of human and nonhuman concurrence] with diverse situated thinking, feeling, and narrating” (Haraway 2018: 102), hence inviting us “to rethink the questions of agency, creativity, imagination, and narrativity” (Oppermann 2013: 55). Overpopulation, consequent inadequate fields, changing trade routes, climate change, depletion of the local natural resources, wars, conquests, and epidemics are the main rhizomes of those contact zones, out of which a civilization may disappear from the historical table. Transmitting a disease to a community that is not immune to that disease alters both the material and cultural formations in that community. History shows that such close encounters to the diseases generally result from certain colonial practices. Surveying some examples from history attests to this observation. For instance, the main reason for the eradication of two civilizations—including Machu Picchu and Tulum, which is a city of Maya Civilization surrounded and protected by walls on the coast of the Caribbean region—is supposedly the spread of diseases such as smallpox, measles, cocoliztli, salmonella, and mumps that came from Europe, which killed most of the local people who were immunologically unprotected from that disease (How It Works 2019: 140–1). Likewise, La Ciudad Perdida in Colombia succumbed to the destructive force of a number of diseases erstwhile unknown to the Colombian community, and the carriers of these diseases are reputedly Spanish invaders (104). The abandonment of Paestum (around 500 AD), located in Italy on the coast of Tyrrhenian Sea, is tied to the immense malaria outbreak from which the citydwellers suffered severely (145). A more specific example can be located in the findings of a disease that killed five to fifteen million of the Aztec population, which corresponds to “the decimation of the native population in Mexico between 1519–1600 … [as] one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history” (Acuna-Soto et al. 2005: 406). These findings were part of a research conducted in the Max Planck Institute led by the evolutionary geneticist Johannes Krause, examining the DNA codes in the teeth of twenty-nine people buried in the highlands of the south of Mexico. These findings concluded that the deadly epidemic of salmonella destroyed the unique Aztec culture in the sixteenth century (Bulut 2020). Tracing these historical contagious diseases back to the loss of influential civilizations allows space for posthumanist discussions of how agentic diseases are interwoven with cultural transformations. The spatial-temporal history of disease formations makes us rethink these multitime outbreaks embodying intraspecies formations along with dynamic possibilities of nonhuman

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happenings in discursive and material practices. Exhibiting recalcitrance in submitting to human agency, disease outbreaks showcase a narrative that is beyond human, voicing a story through which nonhuman energies, economic policies, geographical power dynamics, political forces, monetary sources, and social and cultural relations exhibit their intra-creativities. Apart from illustrating lethal narrations eradicating civilizations from history, disease outbreaks that are enmeshed with active compositions of cultural imaginations are forceful reminders of “storied matter encoded with a mesh of meanings and narrative trajectories that can challenge the cultural dominants” (Oppermann 2018: 10). Projecting material and discursive formations beyond human control and intervention, the narrative impact of agent contagious diseases resides in the travel writings of the Ottoman explorer and traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682). Evliya Çelebi not only mentions a number of contagious diseases he witnessed during his travels but also defines how these diseases are intermingled with cultural imaginaries in his Seyâhatnâme (Travel Writings). For example, he mentions how the neighborhood, Yedi Kule, which means “seven towers,” is named after plague-stricken repercussions: “During the time of Non-Muslims, this neighborhood was where people coming from infected places waited for seven days. During these quarantine days, it was forbidden for them to enter İstanbul” (1969: 92). This example shows the narrative power of plague on cultural spaces, hence recalling a cultural and material concurrence. Evliya Çelebi further exemplifies the intra-activity of plague in the material embodiment of an eighty-archine long column, which is believed to have been charmed to protect humanity against plagues, and how its destruction to construct the Beyazıd Hân Turkish bath leads to a disease-infected İstanbul even killing one of Sultan Beyazıd’s sons (58). Incorporating cultural imagination and anxieties with the materiality of diseases, these examples provide striking instances of posthumanist narratives, demonstrating how the agency of the contagious diseases transforms cultural imagination. Brian Deyo posits that culture, philosophy, religion, stories, and myth all function to make us feel “number one,” providing us with “the very means by which human beings posit themselves within a universe of purpose and meaning” (2019: 449). But these examples also uncover that cultural stories inscribed onto spaces and material formations shatter our “number one” position, since a closer look at these stories unravels a posthuman collaboration between human and nonhuman narrative agencies. That is to say, human imagination that transmutes a column into a magical token, infusing it with a divine spirit that can protect the city from the deadly arrows of the plague, points to the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman in narratives. Homer’s Iliad (eighth century BCE) imagines a similar divine attribution to the plague outbreaks, highlighting how people in the Mycenaean period correlated the plague with a displeased God. Inflicting a plague on Agamemnon and his men, Apollo represents a divine force fulfilling the request of one of his priests: “Hear me, Apollo, lord of the silver bow, protector of Chryse and holy Cilla, and mighty ruler over Tenedos! Plague-god, if ever I built a temple that pleased you, if ever I burnt you offerings of the fat thighs of bulls or goats, grant me this wish. Make the Greeks pay with your arrows for my tears.” So he spoke in prayer, and Phoebus Apollo heard him and came down in fury from the heights of Olympus, his bow and covered quiver on his back. With every movement of the furious god, the arrows rattled on his shoulders, and his descent was like nightfall. He settled down some way from the ships and shot an arrow, with a terrifying twang from his silver bow. He attacked the mules first and the swift dogs; then he aimed his sharp arrows at the men, and

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struck again and again. Day and night, packed funeral pyres burned. For nine days the god’s arrows rained down on the camp. (2003: 5) Such representations indeed consolidate the location of contagious diseases as “tokens of divine displeasure” in most of the ancient cultures, coordinating the remedy with an effort “to appease the offended deity” (Gills 2013: 406). On the one hand, this coordination attributes divine roles to the disease formations. On the other hand, it resonates an ecophobic imagination that projects catastrophe in Nature supposedly plotting against humans with a deadly intention. Both cases, though, illustrate the narrative impact of contagious diseases on cultural and ritual doctrines. Ancient medicine connately captures the moment where ritualistic medical discourse intersects with material contagious diseases. An ancient Greek healing tradition, for example, coordinates its power “with the cult of Asclepios, a mythic hero who emerged as a lesser god in the Greek pantheon of the sixth century B.C.E. The sick would repair to the temple of the god and perform ritual sacrifices and baths, followed by a crucial ‘incubation sleep’ in which dreams and visions appeared to the sufferer” (Hays 2009: 9–10). Moreover, those dreams and visions revealed the true method for the treatment of the diseased within “an appropriate therapeutic regimen, which might include bathing, rest, the administration of drugs, and attention to diet” (10). This creates an amazing similarity between methods prescribed for protecting oneself from contagious diseases such as resting, eating well, using medicine, and the healing power of water ranging from the ancient Greece to the modern world. By choosing a divine medium to convey natural-cultural stories of contagious diseases and the treatments, ancient medicine reveals a narration of storied matter, telling the story of the diseases by means of ritualistic details. Treatment rituals exhibit the intra-creativities of medical discourse enmeshed with material formations of diseases, religious and ritualistic doctrines, and cultural imaginations. These details that found expression in Aesculapian medical discourse were later repeated in the Hippocratic (c. 460–c. 360 BCE) and Galenic (129–c. 210 CE) traditions, which also imply an interest in the coevolution of human bodies with nonhuman forces embodied in elemental agencies. The Empedoclean worldview, especially the Galenic tradition, positions the body as being “alive with flows of heat and cold, fluxes of phlegm and blood and choler that in their changing distributions connect the body to perturbations in the weather, the rising of the moon, the distant circuit of the stars” (Cohen 2003: xiii). Emphasizing that order should be restored in order to get over any kind of sickness, Galenic tradition pays attention to the balance of bodily humors or liquids, represented by the four elemental bodies, thereby linking the bodily balance to nonhuman actors. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man also points out the imbalance as the cause of the deadly plague: “Some disorder had surely crept into the course of the elements, destroying their benignant influence” (2004: 183). Further allying this balance with eating, drinking, or breathing, Galenic tradition underlines how the four main elements, referred to as rhizomata of the universe by Empedocles, “entered the body through food, drink, and the atmosphere, and the processes of digestion and respiration converted those elements into the four Hippocratic humors: fire into yellow bile, air into blood, water into phlegm, earth into black bile, … [which] carried the ‘spirits’ or active principles that caused the body to function” (Hays 2009: 12). This elemental correlation show how human bodies, affected by “the eternal whirl of the planets” (Cohen 2003: xvi), become a site of concurrent agencies, whether stellar or terrestrial.

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Similarly, using the healing powers of elemental (water) and acoustic (music) agencies in treating physical and mental sicknesses, Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu (1385–1468), a Turkish surgeon, draws medical miniatures on the treatments of certain diseases, including contagious ones like leprosy and plague, in his works entitled Cerrahiyyetü’l Haniyye (1465) and Mücerreb-nâme (1468). These miniatures are particularly significant in reflecting the agential capacity of certain contagious diseases in their enmeshments with human forces, hence creating an amalgam of human and nonhuman imaginations. This amalgam indeed invokes posthumanist definitions of performativity and agencies, signifying how “we dwell in a world crisscrossed by nonhuman agencies, which combine and collide with the agentic field of our species” (Oppermann 2013: 64). As a repository of medical knowledge, professional experience, diseases, treatments, cultural imagination, geographical influences, and earthly and cosmic energies, Sabuncuoğlu presents an outline of storied matter in his medical miniatures. In conceptually fusing human imaginations and nonhuman narrations on onto-epistemological levels, using Barad’s term (2007: 185), the historical outlook on contagious diseases that were quite efficient in shaping cultural transformations parade a posthuman interference. Acknowledging this interference inextricably displaces human beings as the sole story producers. In a manner that resonates with Oppermann and Iovino’s material ecocriticism, the historical timeline of contagious diseases mirrors multispecies and multi-time imagination and storytelling, clarifying the effects of nonhuman agents upon discursive formations. Numerous experiences of contagious diseases throughout history proclaim the eradication of human mastery over nonhuman formations. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century, as we face a deadly pandemic, our practices are still contingent on the idea of human and nonhuman separation. Maybe it is now time to reconsider our relationships with the physical environments to reroute our agential encounters. We should start listening to the nonhuman stories.

REFERENCES Acuna-Soto, R., D. W. Stahle, M. D. Therrel, S. G. Chavez, and M. K. Cleaveland (2005), “Drought, Epidemic Disease, and the Fall of Classic Period Cultures in Mesoamerica (AD 750–950): Hemorrhagic Fevers as a Cause of Massive Population Loss,” Medical Hypotheses, 65: 405–9. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2012), “Interview with Karen Barad,” in R. Dolphijn and I. van der Tuin (eds.), New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, 48–70, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boccaccio, G. (1998), The Decameron, trans. Guido Waldman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bulut, S. (2020), “Salmonella Salgını: Bir Uygarlığı Yok Eden Hastalık,” Milliyet, March 12. Available online:  https://www.milli​yet.com.tr/sal​mone​lla-salg​ini-bir-uygarl​igi-yok-eden-hasta​lik-mola​tik-14493/. Accessed July 5, 2021. Clark, D. P. (2010), Germs, Genes, and Civilization: How Epidemics Shaped Who We Are Today, New Jersey: Pearson Education. Cohen, J. J. (2003), Medieval Identity Machines, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deyo, B. (2019), “Ecophobia, the Anthropocene, and the Denial of Death,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 26 (2): 442–55.

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Estok, S. C. (2018), The Ecophobia Hypothesis, New York: Routledge. Evliya Ç. (1969), Seyahatname. Vols. 1. & 2, Istanbul: Kardeş Matbaası. Gills, J. (2013), “The Mathematical Theory of Epidemics,” Interdisciplinary Science Review, 4 (4): 306–14. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2018), “Staying with the Trouble for Multispecies Environmental Justice,” Dialogues in Human Geography, 8 (1): 102–5. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2020), “Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus,” Critical Inquiry, April 17. Available online: https://crit​ inq.wordpr​ess.com/2020/04/17/novel-cor​ona-posthu​man-virus/. Accessed August 10, 2021. Hays, J. N. (2009), The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Homer ([1488] 2003), The Iliad, London: Penguin Books. Original work eighth century BCE. How It Works Özel Sayı Eskiçağ Tarihi: Kayıp Şehirler (Special Issue Ancient History: Lost Cities), İstanbul: Doğan Burda Dergi Yayıncılık ve Pazarlama A.Ş., 2019. Jones, S. (2000), The Language of Genes, London: Flamingo. Kaplan, S., W. Wan and J. Achenbach (2020), “The Coronavirus Isn’t Alive. That’s Why It’s so Hard to Kill,” Washington Post, March 23. Available online: https://www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/hea​lth/2020/03/23/coro​navi​ rus-isnt-alive-thats-why-its-so-hard-kill/. Accessed August 5, 2021. Lambert, W. G., and A. R. Millard (1969), Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, A. (2003), “Necropolitics,” trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture, 15 (1): 11–40. Oppermann, S. (2013), “Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied Matter,” Frame, 26 (2): 55–69. Oppermann, S. (2018), “The Scale of the Anthropocene: Material Ecocritical Reflections,” Mosaic, 51 (3): 1–17. Poian, A. T. Da, and M. A. R. B. Castanho (2015), Integrative Human Biochemistry: A Textbook for Medical Biochemistry, New York: Springer. Shelley, M. ([1826] 2004), The Last Man, Ware: Wordsworth Classics. Webster, J. (1927), The Complete Works of John Webster, vol. II, ed. F. L. Lucas, London: Chatto and Windus.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Grey Ecology of Zombie Fiction LARS SCHMEINK

A pandemic, such as the one we are experiencing with SARS-CoV2, is a threat to many of the systems that shape our human existence: health-related, social, cultural, political, economic, and ecological. This is especially true today with many of these systems complexly interwoven and globally connected. As Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker have pointed out, contagion as a concept, “defying fantasies of control, corroding internal integrity, and ignoring the borders that define and defend identity,” can be “considered a threat to individual, national and global security” (2001: 1). The pandemic demonstrates how vulnerable borders are—not just national borders as the virus sweeps across the globe, but also our bodily integrity as another life form inserts itself into our cells. Culturally speaking, our identity is at stake, as the boundary between ourselves and the other is “paradoxically made visible through its crossing in the process of contagion” (Bashford and Hooker 2001: 9). Contagion thus highlights the human(ist) self-conception of exceptionalism, of a separate realm of humanness, of “the belief that human access sits at the center of being, organizing and regulating it like an ontological watchmaker” (Bogost 2012: 5). Recent critical theory, such as critical posthumanism or object-oriented ontology, has revealed this assumption to be faulty. Ideals of human purity and undisturbed embodiment are negated by the fact that “human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such” (Haraway 2008: 3). Humans are already hybrid and symbiotic systems of life, playing host to a variety of microbial life forms necessary for human survival. As Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan point out, the “human is an integrated colony of amoeboid beings” (cited in Rackham 2001: 222)—the boundary of self and other rather perforated than solid, the concept of bodily integrity a cultural myth. Furthermore, human beings are not exceptional in their ontology, not “monarchs of being but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings” (Bryant 2011: 40). For critical posthumanism, this hybrid and relational existence is central to dethroning the human(ist) subject position; instead of understanding the human as one form of life in relation to others, a posthuman existence always is defined by becoming-with other life. Object-oriented ontology goes even further in postulating that objects or things are

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at the center of philosophical inquiry: “We humans are elements, but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest. OOO contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally” (Bogost 2012: 6). For theorists such as Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, or Timothy Morton, any object (matter, thing) at any scale can be put into relation to any other object; each object can act as agent or force upon others; each object needs to be seen as “subjectless … [,]‌an object that is for-itself” (Bryant 2011: 19). For the human as object, then, we are not only entangled with thousands of smaller objects as described above, but we are also implicated in objects so large and massively distributed that they are unthinkable, beyond the scale of human empirical comprehension. Morton refers to these as hyperobjects and reminds us that as humans we are “part of an entity that is now a geophysical force on a planetary scale” (2016: 9). We are all part of the human species, an object so powerful it changes the planet itself. Global warming or the anthropocene are beyond individual understanding, yet we are all individually responsible for them as members of the human species. Contagion is another of these hyperobjects, at once too large to comprehend and yet entangled with each of our individual lives. To better conceptualize the nexus of anthropocene and contagion, and to understand the environmental and medical relations these objects form, a new ecology is needed that reflects this changed ontology. For Morton, this is a dark ecology, representing the “the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale: dinner table, house, street, neighborhood, Earth, biosphere, ecosystem, city, bioregion, country, tectonic plate … inextricably bound up with different kinds of timescale: dinner party, family generation, evolution, climate, (human) ‘world history,’ DNA, lifetime, vacation, geology” (2016: 10). In a similar fashion, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points toward a “grey ecology [that] is inhuman,” reflecting a “disanthropocentrism” and allowing us to describe relations of objects beyond the human grasp (2017: 381–2). For Cohen, grey ecology—like Morton’s dark ecology—pushes our limits of understanding; it “propels us beyond our own finitude, opens us to alien scales of both being (the micro and the macro) and time (the effervescent, barely glimpsed; the geologic, in which life proceeds at a billion-year pace)” (383). Even before our contemporary moment of SARS-CoV2, the cultural imagination had found a vital representation of grey ecology, of contagion, of the massive distribution of the hyperobject of humanity, of the anthropocene, of the virus that we become-with: the zombie. In zombie fictions since the turn of the century, the zombie has become the “antisubject” of posthumanism, revealing “the insufficiency of the dialectical model (subject–object)” (Lauro and Embry 2008: 87). Starting with Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later (2002), the zombie has adapted to our contagious moment, the anthropocene, and its grey ecology: in the film, zombies are “the unintended result of biomedical experimentation. … The zombie here moves from living dead to infected living … [;]‌zombification is a viral disease that affects all who die” (Servitje and Vint 2016: xiv). But even if we realize that “we are the walking dead!,” as Robert Kirkman’s (cited in Canavan 2017: 422) comic The Walking Dead so aptly puts it, that we already carry the zombifying virus in us, we can hardly imagine the zombie as anything but the other, a monstrous crossing of boundaries. Yet, this position reveals a deeply engrained anthropocentrism; it is fixated on the zombie as a threat to “our” lives, inevitably focusing the story on us, “the monarchs of being” (Bryant 2011: 40). Instead, one could read zombie fictions disanthropocentrically, focusing on the relations of other objects (matter, things) in this grey ecology and becoming aware of “the larger implications that what we are really witnessing

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in a zombie narrative is a form of violent, transformative renewal” (Christie 2011: 62). This chapter proposes just that, a posthuman reading of the grey ecology that determines zombie fiction.

THE MACRO-SCALE: EARTH MAGNITUDE With the pandemic raging across the globe, we might lose sight of other threats to our human existence: global warming, climate change, the destruction of our natural habitat. Even before the medical turn of the zombie, the zombie was representative of the destruction that the human species could wreak on the earth; it was, as Sarah Juliet Lauro has argued, “reflective of capitalist consumer culture” (2016: 15). In the zombie’s mindless destruction, its unstoppable spread across the globe and into every geographical territory, and its proliferation by making copies of itself, it is “the perfect metaphor not only for how capitalism transforms its subjects but also for its relentless and devastating virologic march across the globe” (Canavan 2017: 414). As a hyperobject, the human species has become the virus that has infected the global systems and destructively changed its cells. For Morton, considering the human as species—and ourselves an entangled part of this— is uncanny because it requires us to think on “Earth magnitude” about “ecological embodiment and interdependence” (2016: 36), to see our closeness to and involvement in what happens and yet abstractly realize its complexity. The zombie evokes a similar uncanniness, a closeness in ontology: “Viruses (mostly) travel between like species, and the job of the average zombie seems to be to (1) eat as many people as possible and (2) infect as many people as possible” (Webb and Byrnand 2017: 111–12). Zombies are threatening to us because we recognize ourselves in them; they represent the inhuman potential that our existence already carries within it. From a disanthropocentric position, though, zombies are just another life form, and seen from earth magnitude, one that is less destructive than humans. From the point of view of earth as object, there is no ethical evaluation of humans dying and zombies becoming the dominant species. Bogost argues that ethics are relative only to our human values, that preserving human life is not good in and of itself: “ ‘Preservation’ turns out to be an object-relative concept. If [an object] is a system, then objects appear, generate, collapse, and hide both within and without it with great regularity” Bogost (2012: 75). For earth as object, there is no ethical relevance concerning which other objects are present or not, there is no preference to humans over zombies. Yet, considering the anthropocene, the magnitude of the influence of the human species, it seems worth considering how a zombie contagion might relate to other objects within the system. In his book, The World without Us, Alan Weisman explores the idea of what would happen to the planet if the human species suddenly vanished: “Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what’s left” (2008: 4). He describes how nature returns to those places that humans inhabited and reveals the changes that take place on another—and to humans quite alien—timeline. Houses and whole cities, he argues, would crumble and be swallowed up by nature growing back. What is challenging to us, though, is that this image needs a different scale of perception, a grey ecology that has to be sped up to make a human mind understand: “After 500 years, what is left depends on where in the world you lived. If the climate was temperate, a forest stands in place of a suburb; minus a few hills, it’s begun to resemble what it was before developers, or the farmers they expropriated, first saw it” (2008: 18). Weisman’s prose seems oriented toward a return to a “better” world, as if the human presence disturbed something that was “good” to begin with, thus falling into the trap that ethical judgments are always based on

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human values. On earth magnitude, neither the world before nor the world after humans is any less “good” or “bad,” though. Nonetheless, Weisman’s account is more provocative in its detail than any zombie (or zombielike) fiction describing a contagion and the end of humanity so far. With its focus on the human survivors of a zombie apocalypse, zombie fictions do not permit the alien timescales needed to explore the changes afforded by grey ecology. What happens to earth after the human has faded is not within the scope of zombie fiction to tell. We can only see the timid beginnings of “nature taking back the Earth.” In AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–22) TV series, a few scenes, early in the series, play in Atlanta. The scenes focus on the chaos left by humans evacuating the city, the empty streets, and the abandoned buildings. The city is a monument to what has been, a signifier of the absence of human interaction. The asphalt and cement have not even cracked yet. We find similar depictions in a wide variety of zombie fictions that focus on the immediate outbreak or the few days or weeks after. The prime example here might be the beginning scenes of 28 Days Later in which the city of London is featured as uncannily devoid of human presence. Since our focus remains moored in human time scales, change in the object that is the city is only recognizable in relation to the human. Further along the grey ecological time scale, I Am Legend (2007) presents us with New York a few years into a global pandemic, a contagion killing 90 percent of the human population and turning the remaining 10 percent into “Darkseekers,” part zombie, part vampires. Buildings and infrastructure have cracked and started crumbling, leaving space for weeds, flowers, and grasses to claim the roads. Bushes and trees have started growing more wildly and claimed unused spaces. As Weisman points out, when infrastructure collapses, “new growth will rush in. Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one” (2008: 28). Not only plants have returned to the city, but animals also fill the gaps left by humans. Birds swoop through the streets in large flocks and herds of wild deer roam the city. In one of the most iconic scenes of the film, we see the protagonist hunting in Times Square, which has turned into a savanna, all of the concrete overgrown by tall grass. A pride of lions—likely escaped from the Bronx Zoo—sees it as its territory. And while the image of African predators claiming New York’s most recognizable landmark is, of course, hyperbole, the trajectory of nature taking a hold of the human city forces us to think that this grey ecology pushes upon us “the task of thinking at temporal and spatial scales that are unfamiliar, even monstrously gigantic” (Morton 2016: 25). The zombie video game The Last of Us Part II (2020) pushes the grey ecology timescale further to a decade or two, showing cities crumbling, concrete sagging and ground water seeping through. Streets and buildings in the games are overgrown by grasses, moss, and vines, which slowly disintegrate the constructions. Trees have grown in the ruins of buildings; animals inhabit the cities. In the game, the city of Seattle is largely flooded, as its adjacent body of water, Puget Sound, overwhelmed human-made shorelines. Just as in I Am Legend, the game here plays with the uncanniness of earth magnitude, displaying for us an image at once recognizable and alien: “The notion that someday nature could swallow whole something so colossal and concrete as a modern city doesn’t slide easily into our imaginations. The sheer titanic presence of a New York City resists efforts to picture it wasting away” (Weisman 2008: 21). Yet, no ethics are involved, the human absence is neither better nor worse for the object system that is the city; as Bogost (2012: 75) reminds us, decay and destruction, growth and creation are object-relative and not in and of themselves ethical values. In the end, I Am Legend even emphasizes the message that Darkseekers replace humans, that they are

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a new species of posthuman existence, adapted to the post-virus world. The virus, human-created, has irrevocably changed not just earth but also the hyperobject of the human. In many zombie fictions, then, nonhuman objects, both living and inanimate, are only indirectly influenced by the viral contagion, merely caught in the anthropocene aftereffects of humanity disappearing. Some zombie fictions, though, do portray nonhuman animals directly caught up in the viral contagion and being similarly zombified. In most cases, though, the nonhuman zombies are present as mere narrative gimmicks. The common trope is the contagion moving between humans and their companion species, pets and farm animals—echoed in SARS-CoV2 originating in bats and spreading to human populations, or mink populations in fur farms infected with the virus and thus culled to stop the spread. In Hell of the Living Dead (1980), an infected cat provides a major jump scare by escaping from a dead body. In REC (2007), the contagion moves across the species barrier from an infected dog to the human population, while in 28 Days Later it is an infected monkey. A more eccentric example can be found in Paolo Bacigalupi’s satirical young adult novel Zombie Baseball Beatdown (2013), which comments on factory farming and inhumane food production by zombifying the cattle and having it run amok in the rural Midwest. Similarly, New Zealand’s horror comedy Black Sheep (2006) is a satirical take on genetic engineering in farming, centering on zombified sheep. These last two examples, of course, turn on the idea that animals kept for their use-value to humans turn the tables of consumption on us and start eating humans. As Jane Bennett argues on eating, its metabolization of matter is symbolic of the dissolution of categorial boundaries: “Human and nonhuman bodies recorporealize in response to each other; both exercise formative power and both offer themselves as matter to be acted on. Eating appears as a series of mutual transformations in which the border between inside and outside becomes blurry” (2010: 49). The categorial boundaries between the human and the environment evaporate. The anthropocentric focus is thrown into question by the nonhuman objects claiming agency, trajectory, and motivation. The most extreme example of nonhuman zombie vitality can be found in the Resident Evil franchise, in the video game series (aka Biohazard, Capcom, 1996–) and to a lesser extent also the adapted film series (2002–16). Here, the genetically engineered viruses of Umbrella Corporation are experimentally released on animal populations to gauge their potential for medical or weapons research, thus following the anthropocentric hierarchization of nonhuman objects as biomatter to exploit. The game series explores laboratory experiments on rats, dogs, spiders, and bats but suggests that all animal life can be infected by the zombifying viruses, mostly by contagious matter being ingested and thus introduced into a wide variety of food chains (BradyGames 2006: 174–215).1 The game wiki lists, among others, zombie alligators, elephants, hyenas, and lions that were infected when Raccoon City, including its zoo, was destroyed. Especially in its unforeseen zombification of zoo animals, the games thus comment on the unintentional scope of genetic engineering, the unforeseen range of the ripple effects that the human species as hyperobject creates. The films are less explicit about the contagion spreading to all life, concentrating on the effect of a horrified humanity discovering its vulnerability to animals “normally” seen as inferior and harmless. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) makes use of a massive flock of zombified crows in a scene reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) to reveal how the virus contagion

1

See also the Resident Evil Wiki: https://resid​ente​vil.fan​dom.com/wiki/Irreg​ular​_mut​ant. Accessed December 26, 2020.

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has turned the small and useful animals into deadly attackers. As with human zombies, it is their sheer mass that is overwhelming. In addition, it is no coincidence that the birds are crows. These carrion eaters usually clean up decaying bodies, so their natural drive to pick at corpses inevitably has turned them into zombies by ingesting contaminated human flesh. Once more, zombie fiction helps showcase the unintentional spread of human action, the consequences of our entanglement in a hyperobject so massive it is beyond our cognitive grasp. In the introduction to the film, the narrative voice-over explains that not just humans were infected, but that the planet itself died because of the virus: “Lakes and rivers dried up, forests became deserts and whole continents were reduced to nothing more than barren wastelands. Slowly but surely, the Earth began to wither and die” (Resident Evil: Extinction 2007). In the film, it is never made explicit how this happens, but in the game world, the zombifying virus is also aggressively inserting itself into plant life, which becomes semi-sentient and carnivorous (BradyGames 2006: 210–11). The franchise thus seems to suggest that considering the anthropocene scale of our actions, all life would become caught in the categorial liminality of undeath. And while Resident Evil: Extinction may thus indicate an ethical value judgment—“the Earth dying is bad”—one does not have to agree. Remembering Bogost’s (2012: 75) statement about ethics being “object-relative,” the system (earth) is not better or worse for some elements (humans, animals, plants) to disappear and others (zombies) to take over. Deserts are not inherently less valuable than fields; they are only so for humans growing their food. The vision that is haunting zombie fictions such as Resident Evil: Extinction, then, is that however the world is changed by us—sometimes unwittingly—it might not actually be meant for us. Taking a macro perspective on earth magnitude, zombie fictions show us that we are just one element, one object among many that exist, and that we are irrelevant on the alien timescale of a grey ecology.

THE MICRO-SCALE: VIRIA, PROTISTA, AND FUNGI But the alien scales of grey ecology also provide a different focus: inward, smaller, and faster than that of human perception. Zombie fictions are just as productive there, shocking us into the realization that we are not cordoned off from other lives, but instead symbiotic from birth: “Our body of matter, our left-handed pathway, the dark fleshy arena, our own swarming cellular republic, is a hive of activity—the activity of viral otherness” (Rackham 2001: 222). The most obvious exploration of this micro-realm of objects (viruses, bacteria, fungi, and many more) is that the zombie itself is a human corpse animated by these other objects. From our human(ist) perspective, then, the zombie points toward death and endings; it is a signifier of the past, of the “subject” we once were. But as Cohen remarks, the opposite is actually true: Decomposition is the flourishing of bacteria, the autonomy of the world, an unyielding demonstration of the inhuman agency that resides in the pieces and substances that we totalize for a while into a body we call ours. Decay is a process of transformation. It seems final, fatal, and terminal, but this activity is future directed, creative, and uninterested in our mourning. (2017: 389) The decaying corpses of Resident Evil or The Walking Dead are new objects forming and emerging from the objects that used to be human. The resemblance and the recognition that we are alike, similar in our ontology, is what makes the zombies so uncanny and generates in us a desire to reaffirm the boundaries. Their presence is a constant reminder that we are, in fact, already infected,

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that we carry within “us” thousands, if not millions, of objects that are not “us”: “A human is made up of nonhuman components and is directly related to nonhumans. … Let alone my bacterial microbiome: there are more bacteria in ‘me’ than ‘human’ components” (Morton 2016: 18). The shambling zombie of old, then, is an image of what awaits in the future, a breakdown of the identity we assume we have, a decay of the body whose integrity we want to secure. Keeping them at bay is literally what keeps us alive—zombies are representations of death waiting: “Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable” (Pegg 2008: n.p.). But the zombie has changed, become viral, a signifier not so much of looming death and the end of our future but of the swift wreckage that our lives can become. For Sherryl Vint, “the reconfiguration of zombies from the living-dead to the infected-living” is an adaptation to the biopolitical regime of neoliberalism that patrols the live-death boundary, the infected zombie an image of us “surviving, but not really alive,” persisting “in a future without hope, a paradoxical future without a future” (2017: 172). Vint’s reading is brilliantly insightful but remains focused on the infected-living seen from the human, a representation of “biological bodies without human subjectivity” (2017: 175). In this sense, rapidly changing our status, from subject to object, evokes feelings of powerlessness, of easily becoming the monstrous ourselves. But this reading is moored in the subject–object divide; it inevitably assigns value to being human (alive, healthy) and denies this value to being zombie (dead, infected). However, zombie fictions also invite us to read them disanthropocentrically, to explore the grey ecology of their complexly nonhuman life. As with the macro-scale of earth magnitude, most zombie fictions do not allow for an extended view of the micro-scale of viral (fungal, bacterial, etc.) contagion. In The Walking Dead’s second season, a view of the zombies as entangled beings with “vitality,” that is, the capacity “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010: viii), is rejected outright. The season offers an attempt, strongly motivated by religious values of life, to treat zombies as humans becoming-with a virus, which fails when the group of survivors violently reinforce the subject–object divide. The season’s antagonist brutally demonstrates that the zombies are objects that can be mutilated without prejudice: shooting a zombie again and again, watching it get back up every time, drives home the idea that no human could be treated this way. The violence of the hierarchical divide between what is dead and what is alive centrally motivates our ethical disengagement. Zombies are seen as monstrous other, as objects without subject status, thus making them a target, “against whom the most horrendous violence may be ethically perpetrated” (Cohen 2017: 385). Viewing the zombie as dead matter, devoid of agency or vitality, allows us to destroy and erase it. But more recent zombie fictions have dissolved the boundaries that allow us to see zombies as dead matter. In The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), we encounter a variety of stages of zombies, suggesting development and trajectory. In the film, a fungal infection similar to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis—the famous fungus that creates “zombie ants”—has infected most humans and turned them into “hungries,” a variant of the infected-living that is fast-moving and violently attacking humans to spread the infection. Dormant until activated by human scent or noise and attacking mercilessly, the hungries are described by the film’s authority figures—military personnel and scientists—as nonhuman and solely motivated by the fungus’s drive to spread: the fungus has taken control of the body, it enacts its own biological programming. But this is an anthropocentric view, allowing the destruction of hungries without guilt or doubt.

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The film undermines this view when the humans encounter hungries that do not blindly follow instinct but seem to enact human behavior, such as a woman pushing a pram, while all other hungries around her stand and wait for sensory input to activate their inert urges. Another scene shows a hungry banging its head on a metal locker, trying to free itself from shackles. These behaviors are clearly not fungus-driven, hinting at a more complex relation between fungus and human host. The complexity of the entanglement of objects is best exemplified by another variant of the hungries, a group of children infected while still inside the wombs of their mothers and thus partially immune to the effects of the fungus. Exhibiting the mindless drive to spread the fungus only when provoked, these children otherwise appear to be human, with reason, emotion, and agency. But they are infected nonetheless, when viewed scientifically, as scientist Dr. Caldwell explains to Melanie, the hungry-child protagonist: “In dissection it’s very clear. The fungus is wrapped around your brain like ivy around an oak tree” (The Girl with All the Gifts 2016). Caldwell starts the film with the hypothesis that Melanie and the others are not children, but rather that the fungus “presents as children” and, in fact, “does their thinking for them” (The Girl with All the Gifts 2016); that the children are mimicking human behavior and that there is no higher brain function. Clearly based in the subject–object hierarchy and used as ethical insulation against empathy, the children are used for experimentation and study, discarded once they lose their usefulness. Melanie and the other children are, in fact, posthuman beings entangled with other life and matter on a micro-scale and shaping a new grey ecology. As Victoria Carrington points out, the children are “an evolutionary leap. A new form of life suited to changed conditions … [and] the rise of the new world order” (2016: 32). So, in the final conflict of the film, Melanie decides not to sacrifice herself to save the old world from dying. Instead, she asks Caldwell, “Why should we have to die for you to live?” (The Girl with All the Gifts 2016). She then sets out to release more fungal spores, killing the rest of the humans in the process to ensure an unthreatened existence for the infected children. Here, the film decides against an anthropocentric view, allowing the symbiotic fungal-human relation to flourish. The world becomes posthuman, moving into a grey ecology in which the fungus is central to the makeup of the biological world. How deeply the grey ecology of the film is entangled with the fungus becomes obvious in its development in and on the human body. While the cinematic action clings to hungries vividly attacking the human survivors, some depictions of the infected show them stationary, waiting for an external stimulus to engage with. Swaying in place, the hungries resemble overgrown trees, with rashes blooming on their skin, sometimes fuzzy, at other times hardened and chipping. The fungus seems to actively change the human body, decomposing it from the inside, growing on its outside. When the human body remains inactive, due to lack of stimulus, it becomes a source of nutrients for the next stage of the fungus. Falling down into a heap of human tissue, the fungus grows vines and roots, on which sporangia, hard shells with more spores to spread, develop. Growing out of human bodies, the fungus uses infrastructure like lamp posts or buildings to reach up high into the wind, where the sporangia wait for a catalyst-like fire to open and release their spores. It is this image that perfectly encapsulates the grey ecology of entangled objects—all hierarchies of matter completely fade into nothingness as fungal growth makes use of the human (its bodies, its creations) to usher in a new world. The suggestion that the human body functions as a source for another world, via the changing metaphor of the zombie, is also at the heart of another recent zombie narrative: Carolina Hellsgård’s Ever After (orig. Endzeit, 2018). Shifting discourse away from science and toward a folkloristic

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tradition, the film enacts the zombie contagion as nature’s way to eliminate humanity. Outside of the two remaining cities, forests and fields are growing wildly and nature flourishes, thus pointing to the macro-scale of earth magnitude. While this mythical component complicates the reading (especially in its personification of Mother Nature), the film nonetheless innovates its depiction of the zombies. Zombies, not the infected-living but the living-dead, are understood as a form of vibrant matter, with “lively powers of material formations” (Bennett 2010: vii). On their dead bodies grow plants, moss, and fungi, which turn them into living gardens and make use of their decomposing matter. The zombie becomes the composting ground for new life. It seems a natural progression, as zombie bodies need some form of energy to sustain them, to keep them from decomposing. With a lack of new humans to infect and consume, the zombie would return to a state of rest, in which the natural processes of decomposition take over. The grey ecology of zombie narratives is an essential part of the medical-environmental humanities in that it allows us to conceptualize both the alien timescale of earth magnitude and the biological entanglements of being on a micro-scale inside our bodies. In these narratives, human intervention causes the toxicity, radiation, viral mutation, or other change to our bodies resulting in zombification. Therefore, they can be read as exploring environmental concerns over the anthropocene and how they become intricately linked to medical issues—in becoming undead, the zombie discursively returns the human into the fold of all vibrant matter, rejecting its privileged position. Zombie fictions provide the fertile ground for a new world, a world that will live, adapt to a posthuman existence, and move beyond the anthropocene. They allow us to imagine a world without us and to explore the possibilities of an ecology that does not privilege the human but is decentered, a grey ecology.

REFERENCES 28 Days Later (2002), [Film] Dir. D. Boyle, UK: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Bacigalupi, Paolo (2013), Zombie Baseball Beatdown, New York: Little, Brown. Bashford, A., and C. Hooker (2001), “Introduction: Contagion, Modernity and Postmodernity,” in A. Bashford and C. Hooker (eds.), Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, 1–12, New York: Routledge. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Black Sheep (2006), [Film] Dir. J. King, New Zealand: Escapade Pictures. Bogost, I. (2012), Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. BradyGames (2006), Resident Evil Archives, Capcom/Future Press. Bryant, L. R. (2011), The Democracy of Objects, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Canavan, G. (2017), “ ‘We are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” in S. J. Lauro (ed.), Zombie Theory: A Reader, 413–32, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carrington, V. (2016), “The ‘Next People’: And the Zombies Shall Inherit the Earth,” in: V. Carrington, J. Rowsell, E. Priyadharshini, and R. Westrup (eds.), Generation Z: Zombies, Popular Culture and Educating Youth, 21–35, Wiesbaden: Springer. Christie, D. (2011), “And the Dead Shall Walk,” in D. Christie and S. J. Lauro (eds.), Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, 61–5, New York: Fordham University Press. Cohen, J. J. (2017), “Grey: A Zombie Ecology,” in S. J. Lauro (ed.), Zombie Theory: A Reader, 381–94, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Everafter (2018), [Film] Orig. Endzeit, dir. C. Hellsgård, Germany: Grown Up Films.

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The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), [Film] Dir. C. McCarthy, UK: Warner Bros. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hell of the Living Dead (1980), [Film] Dir. B. Mattei, Spain: Beatrice Film. I Am Legend (2007), [Film] Dir. F. Lawrence, USA: Warner Bros. The Last of Us Part II (2020), [Video game] Creat. Neil Druckman, Anthony Newman, Kurt Magenau, USA: Naughty Dog. Lauro, S. J. (2016), “Preface Zombies Today,” in V. Carrington, J. Rowsell, E. Priyadharshini, and R. Westrup (eds.), Generation Z: Zombies, Popular Culture and Educating Youth, 11–19, Wiesbaden: Springer. Lauro, S. J., and K. Embry (2008), “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Boundary 2, 35 (1): 85–108. Morton, T. (2016), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, New York: Columbia University Press. Pegg, S. (2008), “The Dead and the Quick,” The Guardian, November 4. Available online: https://www.theg​uard​ ian.com/media/2008/nov/04/tel​evis​ion-simon-pegg-dead-set. Accessed March 20, 2022. Rackham, M. (2001), “Carrier—Becoming Symborg,” in A. Bashford and C. Hooker (eds.), Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, 217–26, New York: Routledge. REC (2002), [Film] Dir. J. Balagueró and P. Plaza, Spain: Castaleo. Resident Evil (1996–), [Video game series], aka Biohazard, Creat. Shinji Mikami, Japan: Capcom. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), [Film] Dir. R. Mulcahy, UK: Sony Pictures. Servitje, L., and S. Vint (2016), “Preface,” in L. Servitje and S. Vint (eds.), The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image, xi–xxiii, University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press. Vint, S. (2017), “Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, and Zombies,” in S. J. Lauro (ed.), Zombie Theory: A Reader, 171–82, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. The Walking Dead (2010–22), [Series] Creat. Frank Darabont. USA: AMC. Webb, J., and S. Byrnand (2017), “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope,” in S. J. Lauro (ed.), Zombie Theory: A Reader, 111–23, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weisman, A. (2008), The World without Us. New York: Picador.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Climate Change and Grief: How to Mourn a Mammoth in Alice Major’s “Welcome to the Anthropocene” TATHAGATA SOM

CLIMATE GRIEF AND REPARATIVE POETRY In his groundbreaking 2002 article “Geology of Mankind,” geologist Paul Crutzen proposed that the term “Anthropocene” be assigned to “the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch” (Crutzen 2002: 23). In that article, Crutzen points out that as a geological epoch, the Anthropocene is marked by species loss and the transformation of the natural world by human beings. He mentions the disappearance of tropical rainforests as well as increased dam-building to posit that the scale of human impact on the planet has become unprecedented (23). Although there is a lack of consensus within the scientific community about when the Anthropocene actually began, we know that humans have been interfering with natural processes for centuries. Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin argue that the disappearance of the Pleistocene megafauna, such as the giant sloth and woolly mammoth, had something to do with the emergence of human beings as a species because “almost all of the documented megafauna losses coincide closely with the expansion of Homo sapiens” (Lewis and Maslin 2018: 106). Not only have human beings changed the biodiversity of earth, but they have also actively modified the planet’s environment for their own use. For example, “early agriculture,” as Lewis and Maslin note, “influenced atmospheric greenhouse gases that stabilized global climate and may have delayed the next ice age from starting, allowing sufficient time for large-scale complex civilizations to develop” (117). Although anthropogenic loss of species and changes in the natural world have been taking place for centuries, now we know that the processes of species loss and environmental change have accelerated over the last couple of hundred years. Earth’s geological sediments bear the record of human interference in natural processes, the most dramatic of which started with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where “one of the most widespread markers of the Industrial Revolution in

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geological archives are spherical carbonaceous particles, created following the high-temperature combustion of fossil fuels” (213). These markers provide empirical basis to support discourses of climate change both in the sciences and humanities. As geological actors, human beings are confronted with great responsibility in the Anthropocene. Although human beings have a tendency to alter their physical environments to fit their needs, the historical emergence of colonial modernity and a capitalist world system created the conditions for anthropogenic climate change. Since anthropogenic climate change is historical in nature, it lies within the domain of human agency to fight it. While there are growing concerns about sea level rise and deforestation among the vulnerable communities living in coastal regions and the indigenous peoples living on forestlands, the response of countries with some of the largest carbon footprints such as the United States, Russia, and China have been disappointing. The 2017 US decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement of 2015 is an instance in point (Shear 2017).1 Although the United States has rejoined the Paris Agreement under the new leadership of Joe Biden and pledged to cut carbon emissions by half by 2030, we are yet to see the materialization of Biden’s climate goals.2 Ever since Crutzen proposed the idea of a human-dominated geological epoch, the term “Anthropocene” has become popular in the humanities. In recent years, numerous books have been written on the Anthropocene and its literary, historical, psychological, and cultural significance. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History: Four Theses (2011) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), for example, have initiated a rethinking of modernity and progress from a geological perspective. Similarly, the psychological toll of climate change and environmental degradation is now widely studied. According to Thomas Doherty, “any of the interlinked problems within climate change—poverty, inequality, loss of treasured places, species extinction, threats to our well-being or livelihood—can hook us emotionally and intellectually” (2017: 28). Since climate change is a continuous process, acts of resilience and reparation are also ongoing.3 Building communities where members share grief can be one way of dealing with the psychological impact of climate change. In the context of climate change and mourning, Ashlee Cunsolo Willox argues that “mourning, and the associated work, is one of the most fundamental capacities of being human, and may provide the means to move ever deeper into the sensorial present with humans and non-humans” (2012: 156; original emphasis). Although climate change remains one of the greatest health risks all over the world, as an issue, it has not been adequately addressed in critical medical humanities. In its turn, the medical humanities is yet to make effective interventions in the discourses of mourning and grief from climate change and environmental degradation. Such a disconnect between the two fields leads Jonathan Coope to argue that “reframing healthcare narrative ecologically, while critiquing narratives that compartmentalise medicine apart from its ecological contexts, may offer a significant opportunity for the medical humanities, and a significant responsibility” (2021: 123). The issue of climate change is part scientific The Paris Agreement is the international agreement, reached at COP21 in 2015, on limiting “global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to preindustrial levels” (see “The Paris Agreement”). 2 For more on the challenges to Biden’s climate goals, see Eberhart (2021). 3 The concept of resilience has been challenged over the last couple of decades for its complicity in hegemonic policies supporting global capitalism. For more on the critique of resilience, see Mackinnon and Derickson (2012). However, it is my contention that resilience is the appropriate term to use in the context of climate change related emotional distress. In this chapter, by resilience I mean the ability of human beings to maintain political climate alliance and activism in the face of political apathy. 1

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and part humanistic in its scope4 and dissolves any severe distinction between nature and culture, on the one hand, and the empirical and the phenomenological, on the other. Critical medical humanities, similarly, is marked by the “entanglement” of various disciplines, methodologies, and epistemologies (Whitehead and Wood 2016: 8–9). According to Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, what holds together much of the research employing “entanglement” is an intuition that some set of things, commonly held to be separate from one another (indeed, that define themselves precisely with reference to their separability)—science and justice, humans and non-human, settlers and natives—not only might have something in common, but also, in fact, may be quite inseparable from one another. (2016: 39; original emphasis) In this context, literary studies, especially ecocriticism, which often works form a liminal and nonanthropocentric position, can help bridge the gap between medical humanities and climate science. The connections between literature and mental health can be traced back to Aristotle, who noted how experiencing literary works can help reduce negative emotions among readers/audience. Interpreting Aristotle’s use of the term “catharsis” in Poetics, P. Weller and L. Golden note that Aristotle saw the cathartic process, which gives expression to emotions “in a wisely regulated manner,” as an antidote to the “anarchy in the soul” (2012). The Aristotelean idea of catharsis continues to greatly influence contemporary medical discourses, especially those that use art and literature as a healing medium. Poetry therapy, for example, helps survivors of trauma and domestic abuse to come to terms with unpleasant memories and understand themselves better. Cora E. Masson, for example, recounts how, while coming out of an abusive relationship, poetry sustained her: “In times of doubt, when I wonder if I made the right choice, I can read my own words and know for certain that I did. In times of joy in my new-found freedom, I have started to write poetry to record my pleasurable experiences. Those, too, I can reflect on times of grief and remember that things are getting better” (2019: 6). For Masson, poetry works as a reminder of the importance of emotions, especially those emotions that are devalued or unrecognized in society. Similarly, for a psychiatrist like Robert Carroll, who holds that “people are frequently moved to write poems in times of extremity” (2005: 162), poetry is the expression of taboo and extreme experiences. Thus, by connecting the writer and the reader to the experience of traumatic events, poetry can become reparative in the process of healing through the individual act of writing down one’s negative emotions and the communal act of reading and sharing such expression. Poetry can, in such time, build communities of sharing: the reader and the writer share a space of grief and trauma or the readers of a poem, by reading comments on the poem and commenting on the poem themselves, create a community for the sharing of grief and trauma. Richard Bruce Hovey and colleagues emphasize that “the sharing of cathartic poetry also opens up a space for dialogue, for exchange (the hermeneutical), which is central to healing” (2018). In the context of climate change–related grief and trauma, then, the practice of writing, reading, and sharing poetry can provide a valuable platform for building resilient and resistant communities. This chapter closely reads Alice Major’s 2018 poem “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” a long meditation on the implications of living in a geological epoch driven by human beings, to argue that reading poetry about climate change and environmental degradation can be therapeutic and For more on how the climate crisis has dissolved the artificial boundaries of human and natural history, see Chakrabarty (2012: 1–18). 4

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can help effect positive political changes. Major’s poem links political inertia to a lack of mourning, an activity usually not explicitly talked about in discourses on anthropogenic climate change. “Welcome to the Anthropocene” appears in Major’s eponymous eleventh anthology. Although the book is comprised of poems of various lengths on various subjects, the titular poem is the longest and most complicated in structure. Both a response to and parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1734), “Welcome” is divided into ten sections, each section drawing inspiration from a specific idea in Pope’s poem. As the title suggests, the poem welcomes the readers to a new world created by human beings’ interference with Nature. Thematically, the poem is marked by “the duality of the Anthropocene: our despair in the face of it and the fact that whether we avoid, protest, reform, or embrace this new world, we are still in it” (Rogers 2018). Individuals who want to participate in processes of healing and reparation often despair in the face of the complexities of global capitalism and national and international politics. In her book Environmental Melancholia (2015), Renee Lertzman investigates how “people may care deeply about the planet and its precious places, lakes and rivers, about the quality of air, forests, and oceans, as well as the other beings with whom we share such places, yet find themselves unable to act on this care or concern” (2015: 5). Systemic failures to address climate change and environmental degradation often cause apathy; this features as a central concept in Lertzman’s book. According to Lertzman, “environmental crises invoke rupture in terms of who we are, what it means to be human beings in the context of nature and what we know as socially constructed rational and scientific beings” (7). This rupture is not always explicit or palpable, but insidiously permeates everyday activities. Wendy S. Shaw and Alastair Bonnett echo Lertzman’s views about the complex nature of human reactions to the crisis of anthropogenic climate change when they write, “There is a high level of awareness about environmental crises that are unfolding, but the capacity to meaningfully respond appears to be lacking, particularly in the context of consumer capitalism and its associated demands in the everyday. This is a complex phenomenon that cannot usefully be reduced to the indifference of a feckless generation” (2016: 568). Glenn Albrecht coins a new term, “solastalgia” (2019: 38), to accurately capture the feeling of homesickness when one’s environment is degraded, creating a feeling of exile in home. He explains, “The negative transformation of a loved place triggers a negative emotion in the whole person who is still emplaced. Their love for their place remains, but they yearn for those positive elements of place that gave them such a positive sense of place prior to the ‘invasion’ ” (32). Hence, it is important to address and come to terms with the range of negative emotions climate change-induced loss gives rise to. In the next section I will discuss how, through an engagement with the issue of loss and human interference in the natural world, “Welcome” draws attention to the political possibilities of mourning.

HOW TO MOURN A MAMMOTH Major’s poem is remarkable in situating the question of mourning at the heart of climate change discourse. In “Welcome,” Major identifies humans’ inability to mourn the loss of other species as the root cause of global apathy in the face of climate change and makes an appeal for engaging with negative emotions for a more potent climate activism. Deploying satire, bathos, and juxtaposition, Major communicates the sense of despondency and apathy most people feel in the face of the climate crisis. Each section of the poem can be divided into two structural parts: descriptive and meditative. The descriptive part is playful yet matter-of-fact, and dotted with scientific facts and allusions. For

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example, at the beginning of the second section, while underlining the genetic interconnectedness of all living beings, the narrator notes how “philandering bacteria” swap genes among humans, chimpanzees, and fruit flies (2018: 9). The meditative part is, by contrast, emotional and reflective, as is exemplified by the ending of the second section: “Though it’s excessive to excoriate/ all geneticist, it’s appropriate/ for us to demonstrate humility” (10). The two parts spiral around a center marked by climate anxiety—the consciousness of a crisis too big to be contained within the double-helix of the poem’s structure. And in the final section of the poem, the narrator appeals for hoping “humbly” (25) because “we are here, and we cannot help it” (25). “Welcome” responds to climate anxiety by dealing with the limits and possibilities of human agency. Timothy Clark rightly notes that the global environmental crisis is also a crisis of human agency. For, despite the “Anthropocene” nickname, the supposed emergence of humanity as a pseudo-geological force is not the manifestation of human agency, but of a realm of unintended consequences in the Earth System, one in which “humanity” is felt to become weirdly impersonalized, the total effect of its actions disjunct from the plans or aims of individual people or nations. (2020: 70) Drawing on Pope’s Essay, Major’s narrator posits that the very idea of human agency is an outcrop of pride and pretension. Major mixes the philosophical satire of Pope with state-ofthe-art scientific knowledge to craft a satirical reflection on humankind’s position in the larger scheme of things. Major’s choice of Pope’s Essay as an intertextual reference is apt because Pope’s poem does exactly the same thing with regard to seventeenth-century epistemic systems. Tom Jones notes that Pope’s ambition in writing Essay involved synthesizing “the great diversity of thinking in the allied disciplines with something to say about where humans find themselves in the universe (anthropology, cosmology, metaphysics, moral psychology, physics, theology— just to begin the list)” (2016: xv). Major’s poem is equally ambitious in terms of the range of disciplines it draws on. While the biological sciences are the most alluded to disciplines in the poem, Major’s narrator also engages with subjects as diverse as astrophysics (2018: 22) and contemporary world politics (19). But the differences between Essay and “Welcome” should also be noted. Major’s narrator speaks from within a disaster zone, a place ravaged by humankind’s uncontrolled experiments with Nature. Due to the nature of climate change, there is a sense of urgency in Major’s poem that is missing from Essay, which is “less concerned with the mutability of the world than with the mutability of human judgments” (Jones 2016: xxiii). Pope’s intertextual literary allusions are replaced by complex scientific references to “Black-6 Mouse” (2018: 7), “HOX and PAX” (9) genes, or “Rattus norvegicus” (13)—the scientific name of the brown rat, a species most commonly used in laboratories. The combination of the poetic and the scientific creates a dense and interdisciplinary text that requires that the reader become attuned to the way Major marshals various disciplines and their peculiar terminologies to create a richly textured reading experience. Each section of “Welcome” begins with a quotation from Pope’s Essay and the rest of the section elaborates and comments on that quotation. The first section, for instance, takes Pope’s condemnation of “reas’ning Pride” (2016: 15) that makes people “quit their sphere, and rush into the skies” (15) as its epigraph and explores how unconditional belief in scientific and technological mastery over nature is a sin. The descriptive part of the section points out, in a detached tone, how science interferes with nature, and the meditative part uses a collection of adjectives and nouns to

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establish moral judgment. After providing a catalogue of genetically modified dogs, mice, fish, and flies, the narrator rhetorically asks, But is it not the sin of pride that we express? Hubris personified? We will not admit to limits, will not hold back rash actions for sober thought about the unintended consequences of what we’ve set into motion, the immenseness of what our broken chain links might turn loose— chaotic spiralling of feedback loops, exponential impacts. (Major 2018: 8) In this stanza, the world we inhabit is spiraling out of control because we have broken the Great Chain of Being. Words like “pride,” “hubris,” “rash,” “unintended,” and “chaotic spiralling” set the dominant mood of despondency in this section, which culminates in “our bestiary/ of created things” looking “sadly back at us/ from beyond the paling of our apparatus” (9). The successive images of animals and insects genetically modified for humankind’s “rainbow whims” (7) creates a sense of what Clarke alludes to as “Anthropocene horror” (2020: 61). Delineating the difference between ecological grief and Anthropocene horror, Clarke observes that ecological grief is a reaction to the loss of “[a]‌specific landscape, place, or species” (61; original emphasis) whereas Anthropocene horror is the grief becoming “a pervasive affect in daily life” (62). Clarke further elucidates: “ ‘Grief ’ may still suggest a lack of implication in the loss, but ‘horror’ is more appropriate when part of the sadness at issue is from living in a context of latent environmental violence and feeling personally trapped in its wrongs” (62). Although Major’s poem invokes a feeling of dread akin to Anthropocene horror, I contend that environmental grief and mourning is the central concern of the poem because, as I will explore below, its references to loss are, indeed, about specific species or landscapes. One vital difference between Pope and Major is that Pope has the comfort of faith in a rational God. In Pope’s Essay, the narrator proposes to St. John, the recipient of his epistles, that they try to “vindicate the ways of God to Man” (2016: 7). The allusion to Milton’s epic poem is obvious. Pope’s trust in a transcendental God, whose design of the universe is beyond the limited rational capacity of mortals, is as firm as that of Milton’s. But for the narrator in “Welcome,” Nature takes the place of God and the vertical Great Chain of Being of Christian theology is replaced with “a horizontal loop that rearranges/ life repeatedly” (2018: 9). In fact, humankind’s belief in a vertical, hierarchical chain is one of the points of critique in “Welcome,” as the poem’s narrator notes, “Not chain, not ladder—we’re relatives, a clade” (10). “Welcome” is an example of what Douglas H. White and Thomas P. Tierney call “satires on mankind,” a genre of satire that “are aimed more at the unjustified pride from which man’s self-image comes, or to which it leads, than the philosophical material of the image” (1987: 28). White and Tierney’s definition of the satire on humankind tells us that such satire achieves its end not primarily through philosophical arguments but through what Pope calls “wit”—a complex idea that refers “to a liveliness, a brightness, a creativity” (28). Although “Welcome” incorporates wit in its exposition of human pride, the poem’s driving force is despair caused by anthropogenic destructions of the natural world. Major’s poem is as much situated in the scientific truth of climate change as it is in the rhetorical flourish of satire

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on humankind. In fact, both the descriptive and the meditative sections of the poem are results of climate anxiety, which motivates the dialectic between the descriptive and the meditative sections. Major’s own comments about the relationship between science and poetry merit mention here. When asked about the creative appropriation of scientific concepts, Major replies that “if the point of your poem is to talk about some mathematical concept and how it is used in the world, then yes, you do have to get it right. Or at least as right as you can, given that even scientists have trouble translating their equations into language and images that the rest of us can follow” (Sechrist 2020). Although critical of the ways in which science has interfered with Nature and landed humankind in a predicament, “Welcome,” uses science responsibly because Major’s accuracy in her use of scientific allusions is intimately tied to the context in which such allusions circulate. That does not mean that Major does not undermine the ways in which science has been interpreted in Western modernity. A satire on humankind, “Welcome” targets the way false or distorted concepts about a species and its attributes proliferate in our cultural imaginary. According to Major, the belief in human exceptionalism—the belief that human beings are exceptional in the animal kingdom because of their rationality—is a pernicious sentiment. For Major’s narrator, intelligence is not “a separate limb/ or magic faculty inserted in/ our brains” (2018: 11); rather, it is an elaboration (through millennia of tiny, patient trials-and-errors) of the skills required by any animal that has been wired for movement in the world. (11) In these lines, drawn from the third section, Major challenges human exceptionalism when it comes to intelligence, a fallacy arising from retroactively ascribing inevitability to something that has been a result of constant “trials-and-errors.” Western philosophy and science often present human consciousness as separate from its surroundings, and the Cartesian duality of mind and body still persists in many scientific discourses. It has to be noted here, however, that the allusion to Nature’s “patient/ trials-and-errors” shows that for the narrator of “Welcome,” Nature is agential. While White and Tierney situate Pope’s Essay in the tradition of satires on humankind, they also point out one caveat: while Pope “ridicules the conventional inflated estimate of man’s nature, he takes the additional step of praising the soundness of creation as a whole” (1987: 31). Similarly, for Major, the natural order “is more inventive/ than ourselves. Her secrets are undreamt-of ” (2018: 13), and the fact that human beings are not concerned about anthropogenic extinction only goes on to prove that “we are too myopic/ to see this slender loss might mean a space/ is closed, a possibility effaced” (14). The conflict between the myopia of humans and the inventiveness of nature informs the environmental vision of “Welcome” as Major leads the reader through a tour of the new man-made hell called the Anthropocene. The playfulness of the descriptive sections and the melancholia of the meditative sections complement each other, giving rise to a conceptual, tonal, and affective ambivalence in the experience of the poem as a whole. Much like Pope’s Essay, Major’s poem generates a number of emotions to convey a sense of urgency. The playfulness of the descriptive sections is often ironic, as in the section where the narrator welcomes the “transgenic zebrafish” (7) with “trademarked colours” (7) that are bred “to decorate café aquariums/ in colour schemes to match our rainbow whims” (7). The phrases “trademarked colours” and “our rainbow whims” ironically draw attention

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to meaningless human appropriations of the genetic materials of animals. The humor puts human failures in a geological and planetary perspective and by doing so, “Welcome” communicates the narrator’s sense of frustration and melancholia. By contrasting the comic aspect of human failures and their serious consequences, Major highlights a sense of urgency. Her use of bathos is a good instance in point. Bathos is an excellent poetic device for exposing the vanity of assuming human beings are agential independently of nature because it has a long history, beginning with Pope, of being deployed in order to undermine authority and authenticity. Referring to Pope’s Peri Bathous (1727), where the concept of bathos first appears in its modern usage, H. Brown and S. Gee note that Pope “presents bathos as an attempt at elevated expression that misfires, creating a sudden transition from the sublime to the ridiculous” (2012). In Essay, Pope uses bathos to ridicule human beings’ excessive pride. For example, while exposing human insignificance in the face of Fate, Pope’s juxtaposes the end of “a hero” with the fall of “a sparrow” (2016: 12) and the burst of “a bubble” with the destruction of “a world” (12). Pope’s bathetic juxtapositions find parallels in Major’s “Welcome,” but while Pope ridicules human pretensions to mastery over Fate, human beings’ inability to take collective action against climate change is the point of Major’s critique. For example, Major’s comparisons of climate fear to “a gas/ after too rich a meal” (2018: 5) and of climate doubt to “effluvia wafting from our garbage dunes” (5) trenchantly recalls Pope’s bathetic coinages. After all, inaction in the face of a global climate crisis makes human beings nothing more than “dumb actors in their own demise” (16), thus undermining the fool’s dream of freedom and self-determination. Bathos is also a constitutive element of the poem’s reparative agenda, and after the anagnorisis that comes in the wake of the poem’s bathetic juxtapositions (that human beings are unconscious victims of their own violence), Major suggests that there is a way of overcoming apathy and acting in a meaningful way. Such a reparative move can be seen when Major links global political apathy to a lack of mourning: “We don’t mourn the passing of the mammoth/ every morning, nor the vanishing of the giant sloth” (15), pointing out how important it is to situate questions of human emotional responses at the center of discourses of climate change. Major’s reference to mourning the mammoth and the giant sloth, positioned right at the middle of the poem in section five, works as a lynchpin that leads the reader into the transformative potential of mourning. The only way to go beyond the political and spiritual apathy of the Anthropocene, Major’s narrator suggests in the poem, is through mourning other species, even those that we hunted to extinction long ago. In the next section, I will discuss how mourning can create a political community and help act collectively in a positive manner.

THE POLITICS OF MOURNING The political dimension of human emotions manifests in grief and mourning. As Judith Butler points out, mourning “furnishes a political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility” (2018: 22). It is no surprise that “Welcome,” a poem so invested in the enmeshed nature of species relations, points out the importance of mourning for emotional nourishment and political activism. The narrator of “Welcome” emphasizes environmental damage of both past time, which generates a sense of loss and calls for grief and mourning, and of the future, which calls for awareness and action. “Welcome” shows how mourning the damage already done can pave the way for the prevention of damage yet to be done. Butler suggests that not only

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is mourning “an insurrection at the level of ontology” (33) by which a new understanding of ontological relations emerge, it is also a reinterpretation of reality itself that urges us to ask: “What is real?” (33). It should be noted here that Butler refers specifically to the lack of mourning for people killed by US forces in the Middle East. However, I use Butler’s concept of mourning in the context of climate change and species extinction as a call to reconceptualize the very self and from thereon, to build a revisionary and revolutionary poetics and politics of collective commitment and transformation. Since the act of mourning initiates a reconceptualization of the self, it belongs neither to the human nor to the nonhuman realms, but rather is situated at an interstice between the two. Moreover, since policies to prevent anthropogenic climate change and extinction must come from humans, non-anthropocentric thinking must also conceptualize what it means to be human in the first place. The double bind of the Anthropocene is that, although we realize that we as a species are historically responsible for climate change and species extinction, it also rests on us to create political communities to fight these two unwanted ramifications of our presence on earth. The problem with humans, according to the narrator of “Welcome,” is that we are too selfcentered and self-obsessed to become politically aware of concerns that do not directly affect us. According to Lesley Head, “even those who accept the science [of climate change] and have strongly supported various emissions reduction schemes have mostly imagined the necessary changes as a variation on business as usual rather than a more fundamental change” (2016: 26). In this light, a shift occurs in the eighth section of “Welcome”: the narrator points out a disjunction between the collective good of humans and the interests of political leaders, who “try to carve/ our common interests into fragments” (2018: 23) so that “we cannot see/ beyond the dark in our vicinity” (23). Soon after this critique of political responses to climate change, the narrator crafts an apostrophe to earth which emerges in the form of a prayer. Addressing earth, the narrator hopes to learn from “a murmuration of starlings” because the starlings are leaderless, and are guided “not from centre, but from rim” (24). Challenging human exceptionalism, the narrator indicates that the wisdom needed to mourn human-induced losses must come from the planet, or Nature. But this wisdom is made of scientific facts that can be incorporated into a planetary understanding of the world. Mourning would induce an ontological reconceptualization of what it means to be human and, more importantly, what it means to be nonhuman. Grief and mourning are important activities that not only nourish individual emotional lives, but also create resilient communities. Butler points out the necessity to stay with the grieving process: “I do not think that successful grieving implies that one has forgotten another person or that something else has come along to take its place, as if full substitutability were something for which we might strive” (2018: 21). Indeed, grief, when perceived as something to get over with, does not become regenerative. J. Earl Rogers notes in a similar vein, Grief takes many forms according to our personal makeup, our relationship to what has been lost or the person who has died, and how the loss has affected the meaning in our lives. Unfortunately, all too often, our society dictates that for successful mourning we must disengage from the deceased and “let go.” We are told that we need to “move on” and “accept” the death of a loved one. These terms, however, seem to limit the process of grief, and the cultural need for “closure” denies any form of continued relationship with the person who died. (2007: 21) “Welcome” is about the process of staying with the grief and learning from it. Major’s narrator, by satirizing the way humans behave with regard to earth and its inhabitants, tells us how to behave

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ethically and responsibly. So, how are we to mourn the extinction of the mammoth? The first thing that we need to do is to let go of the kind of pride Pope warns of in the epigraph to the first section of “Welcome.” The narrator asks us, repeating Pope, to “hope humbly” (Major 2018: 25; Pope 2016: 13). This conclusion is arrived at through a dialectical synthesis of the playful descriptive parts and the melancholic meditative parts of the poem. Grief and mourning are instrumental in letting go of pride, which exposes human vulnerability, as Butler notes through the rhetorical questions: “If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive or powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical life of one another?” (2018: 30). Participating in acts of mourning and grief can make us recognize that the feeling of bodily and emotional vulnerability can make resilient communities ethically aware of the nonhuman world. The only way we can mourn the mammoth is by creating a culture of mourning that does not shy away from negative emotions but rather stays with the grief and participates in mourning as a communal process of rethinking what it means to be human. Let us return to the question of human involvement in the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, especially the mammoth. In Twilight of the Mammoths (2005), Paul S. Martin argues that human beings drove the woolly mammoth, along with most late Pleistocene megafauna, to extinction. This anthropogenic extinction theory—also known as the overkill theory—is one of the most compelling explanations for the sudden large-scale extinction of giant mammals towards the end of the last ice age. Martin writes that “the sweep of extinctions of large mammals began gradually and inconspicuously in Africa over two million years ago, intensified in Europe beginning with the extinction of the Neanderthals 50,000 years ago, hit hard in Australia 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, and exploded in the Americas around 13,000 years ago. … These extinctions reflect the spread of our species” (2005: 59; added emphasis). As this chronological progression of megafauna extinction shows us, human beings have been changing their environments since their first emergence in Africa, and our role in the current extinction event—increasingly being referred to as “the sixth extinction” (2015: 3)—is a continuation of how we have always behaved as a species. But, as a species, we have reached a planetary limit in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch in which our every action generates opposite and exponential reactions. Thinking about and learning from our geological history might help us understand and mentally prepare for the tasks ahead of us in the present. Martin speculates that if even a number of the extinct megafauna were present today, their existence would have made us aware of our planetary impact, and “impulses for conservation and preservation could have been awakened far earlier and more powerfully. … A corollary is that greater awareness now of these long-extinct mammals may still energize conservation efforts. Knowing that we have lost far more than we had ever imagined makes it even more vital to preserve what we have left” (56). Major’s narrator would agree with Martin’s hope that being aware of past environmental loss can prepare the groundwork for a renewed engagement in the protection efforts of current species. But for a greater awareness and understanding of the richness of earth history, we need to learn how to mourn and stay with negative emotions. In current political debates on climate change, there is an obsession over the future, and quite rightly so. But concerns for the future should not overwhelm our sense of the past because the past holds the emotional reserve from which we draw strength for our present decisions. This is a point that “Welcome” makes quite movingly. And in many ways, as Andreas Malm argues, “global warming is a result of actions in the past. Every molecule of CO2 above the pre-industrial level resides in the atmosphere

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because humans have burnt trees and other plants and, preponderantly, fossil fuels over the course of time” (2018: 5). If the current crisis is a result of past actions, it is worth keeping in mind that those past actions were undertaken with the idea of a progressivist understanding of future. As Head notes, “a key characteristic of the Enlightenment tradition has been that of a hopeful future, the possibility of striving for improvement, both individual and collective. Yet the progressivist view of the future that inspired modernity has helped create the problem” (2016: 167). A greater understanding of and connection to our history, both human and geological, is needed to ground our current grief in political awareness. The year 2020 made it clear that, after the spread of Covid-19, globalization and citizens’ relationship to their nation-states cannot remain the same. Arjun Appadurai, writing for TIME magazine, posits that while the current pandemic has given “the nation state a fresh lease on life,” it has also made citizens “newly aware of their own power and agency in securing the survival and prosperity of their own nation states” (2020). The pandemic has caused a surge in research in communal grief and mourning because of how it is changing the “revered customs and rituals around death and dying throughout the world” (Hamid and Jahangir 2020). Medical scientists and humanities scholars have been brought together by the pandemic in a manner similar to how climate change initiated a dialogue between the physical sciences and humanities. As interdisciplinary fields, both medical and environmental humanities can be brought together into a fruitful dialogue to address the combined ecological and health risks of climate change and environmental degradation. In “Welcome,” Major’s narrator is critical of humans as a species for denying the truth that “none of us survives alone” (2018: 21). But our species history also shows us how we have overcome community-level challenges and addressed issues that can only be addressed collectively. It is only through the acknowledgement and mourning of our loss that we can transcend individualism and become a “force field, tightly/ coupled to the world” (27) made of both humans and nonhumans.

REFERENCES Albrecht, G. A. (2019), “Solastalgia: The Homesickness You Have at Home,” in Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, 27–62, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Appadurai, A. (2020), “Coronavirus Won’t Kill Globalization. But it Will Look Different after the Pandemic.” TIME, May 19. Available online: https://time.com/5838​751/global​izat​ion-coro​navi​rus/. Accessed March 19, 2022. Brown, H., and S. Gee (2012), “Bathos,” in R. Green, S. Cushman, C. Cavanaugh, J. Ramazami, and P. Rouzer (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., 128, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. http://ezpr​oxy.lib.ucalg​ary.ca/login?url=https://sea​rch.cre​dore​fere​nce.com/cont​ent/entry/prpoe​try/bat​ hos/0?instit​utio​nId=261. Accessed March 19, 2022. Butler, J. (2006), Precarious Life, New York: Verso. Carroll, R. (2005), “Finding the Word to Say it: The Healing Power of Poetry.” eCAM, 2 (2): 161–72. Chakrabarty, D. (2009), “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (2): 197–222. Chakrabarty, D. (2012), “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History, 43 (1): 1–18. Clark, T. (2020), “Ecological Grief and Anthropocene Horror,” American Imago, 77 (1): 61–80. Coope, J. (2021), “On the Need for an Ecologically Dimensioned Medical Humanities,” Medical Humanities, 47 (1): 123–7.

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Crutzen, P. (2002), “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, 415: 23. Available online: https://www.nat​ure.com/artic​ les/4150​23a. Accessed March 19, 2022. Doherty, T. (2017), “A Closer Look: A Clinical Psychologist’s Take on Climate Change,” in Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance, 28–32, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica. Available online: www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-healthclimate.pdf. Accessed March 19, 2022. Eberhart, D. (2021), “President Biden’s Climate Plan Is More Revolution than Transition,” Forbes, July 3. Available online: https://www.for​bes.com/sites/dane​berh​art/2021/07/03/presid​ent-bid​ens-clim​ate-plan-is-more-rev​olut​ ion-than-tra​nsit​ion/?sh=59b30​5de4​59e. Accessed March 19, 2022. Fitzgerald, D., and F. Callard (2016), “Entangling the Medical Humanities,” in A. Whitehead, A. Woods, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton, and J. Richards (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Medical Humanities, 35–49, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ghosh, A. (2016), The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, New Delhi: Penguin Random House India. Hamid, W., and M. S. Jahangir (2020), “Dying, Death, and Mourning Amid COVID-19 Pandemic in Kashmir: A Qualitative Study,” OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, Online First: 1–26. Available online: https://journ​ als.sage​pub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00302​2282​0953​708. Accessed July 28, 2021. Head, L. (2016), Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, New York: Routledge. Hovey, R. B., V. C. Khayat, and E. Feig (2018), “Cathartic Poetry: Healing through Narrative,” The Permanente Journal, 22 (3). Available online: www.thepermanentejournal.org/issues/2018/summer/6784-poetry.html. Accessed July 25, 2020. Jones, T. (2016), “Introduction,” in Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, xv–cxii, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kolbert, E. (2015), “Prologue,” in The Sixth Extinction, 1–4, New Delhi: Bloomsbury. Lertzman, R. (2015), “Introduction,” in Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement, 3–17, New York: Routledge. Lewis, S. L., and M. A. Maslin (2018), The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, London: Penguin Books. Mackinnon, D., and K. D. Derickson (2012), “From Resilience to Resourcefulness: A Critique of Resilience Policy and Activism,” Progress in Human Geography, 37 (2): 253–70. Major, A. (2018), “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” in Welcome to the Anthropocene, 7–27, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Malm, A. (2018), “Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition,” in The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, 1–20, New York: Verso. Martin, P. S. (2005), “Overview of Overkill,” in Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, California: University of California Press, ProQuest Ebook Central. Available online: http://ebook​ cent​ral.proqu​est.com/lib/ucalg​ary-ebo​oks/det​ail.act​ion?docID=254​860. Accessed March 19, 2022. Masson, C. E. (2019), “Writing and Healing: Poetry as a Tool in Leaving and Recovering from Abusive Relationships,” Journal of Poetry Therapy, 33 (1): 1–7. Pope, A. (2016), An Essay on Man, ed. with an introduction by Tom Jones, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rogers, H. (2018), “ ‘The Great Chain of Being’: Alice Major’s ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 27. Available online: www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/great-chain-alice-majorswelcome-anthropocene/#. Accessed March 19, 2022. Rogers, J. E. (2007), The Art of Grief: The Use of Expressive Arts in a Grief Support Group, New York: Routledge.

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Sechrist, S. (2020), “Go Figure: Intersections with Poet Alice Major,” Bloom, April 7. Available online: https:// bloom-site.com/2020/04/07/go-fig​ure-inters​ecti​ons-with-poet-alice-major/?fbc​lid=IwAR1uKC8QwNjUo9q4r_ L​F_rx​ylX6​u5VS​VMKX​SHtJ​qKo1​eFk-gwEx2​vX8W​7m8. Accessed March 19, 2022. Shaw, W. S., and A. Bonnett (2016), “Environmental Crisis, Narcissism, and the Work of Grief,” Cultural Geographies, 23 (4): 565–79. Shear, M. D. (2017), “Trump Will Withdraw US from Paris Climate Agreement,” New York Times, June 1. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/2017/06/01/clim​ate/trump-paris-clim​ate-agreem​ent.html. Accessed March 19, 2022. “The Paris Agreement,” United Nations Climate Change. Available online: https://unf​ccc.int/proc​ess-and-meeti​ ngs/the-paris-agreem​ent/the-paris-agreem​ent. Accessed July 28, 2021. Weller, P., and L. Golden (2012), “Catharsis,” in R. Green, S. Cushman, C. Cavanaugh, J. Ramazami, and P. Rouzer (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., 214–16, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Available online: http://ezpr​oxy.lib.ucalg​ary.ca/login?url=https://sea​rch.cre​dore​fere​nce.com/ cont​ent/entry/prpoe​try/cathar​sis/0?instit​utio​nId=261. Accessed March 19, 2022. White, D. H., and T. P. Tierney (1987), “ ‘An Essay on Man’ and the Tradition of Satires on Mankind,” Modern Philology, 85 (1): 27–41. Whitehead, A., and A. Wood (2016), “Introduction,” in A. Whitehead, A. Woods, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton, and J. Richards (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Medical Humanities, 1–31, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Willox, A. C. (2012), “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” Ethics and the Environment, 17 (2): 137–64.

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CHAPTER NINE

Eco-Recovery Memoir and the Medical-Environmental Humanities SAMANTHA WALTON

Over the last fifteen years, a new kind of nature memoir has risen to prominence in the UK. While traditional nature writing has always dramatized the involvement of the writer in the landscapes and species observed, this subgenre of New Nature Writing emphatically centers the affective, physiological, and psychological dimensions of nature engagement. I call this genre-within-agenre “eco-recovery memoir.” This helps to emphasize the interdependence of psychological and ecological themes, and to signal the importance of its narratives of refuge, healing, and recovery in the context of nature. Blending the familiar form of the nature journal with the more confessional form of the mental health memoir, its authors explore how the experience of low mood, emotional disturbance, and/or mental health treatment may be influenced by spending time out of doors, in contact with wild or domesticated animals and landscapes. Eco-recovery memoirs should be of obvious interest to researchers in both the environmental and medical humanities. Literary environmentalism—ecocriticism—has long been concerned with understanding and transforming humanity’s relations with places and forms of life classified as “nature.” Eco-recovery memoir intersects with ecocriticism’s core concerns by proposing that human health and well-being are in some way dependent on the natural world. At the very least, the morethan-human provides the context for emotional support and recovery. At its boldest, eco-recovery memoir describes nature as a potent agent capable of influencing mental health outcomes: in effect, changing us, and influencing how we feel, and interact with and within the world. Eco-recovery memoirs should also be of interest to the emerging medical-ecological humanities because they advance understanding of what the “nature” that so affects us actually is. As environmental humanities scholars continue to refine and define the many cultural meanings and permutations of “nature,” the version of nature represented in eco-recovery memoir connects the responsive natural world of Romanticism with the more scientific version of healing nature distinguished in numerous environmental psy-disciplines and subfields. Whether it is the “greenspace” of environmental psychology and public health studies, or the “therapeutic landscapes” of health

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care design, “healing nature” holds specific technical meanings in intersecting scientific and medical fields. How eco-recovery memoir represents the scientific and cultural meanings of this natural world of healing and recovery has implications for popular understanding of health, and personal and cultural attitudes to the natural world. Books in this subgenre are now manifold. Beginning with Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure (2005), which connects recovery from a sudden experience of depression with the spring arrival of a flock of swifts, subsequent nature books have addressed the connection between mental health and outdoor swimming, birding, climbing, and foraging, particularly within the flourishing “sub-sub-genre” of hybridized memoir, “how-to,” and self-help guides.1 Indeed, the genre has been so successful as to have produced anti-nature cure response in the form of Luke Turner’s Out of the Woods (2019), a book about all the ways in which walks to Epping Forest fail to address the long-term harm of internalized biphobia and sexual trauma. Mindful of the expanse of books available, this chapter will look at four texts in closer detail: Turner’s Out of the Woods; Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk (2014), which explores falconry, grief and depression; Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016), a study of recovery from addiction in Orkney; and Chris Packham’s childhood memoir Fingers in the Sparkle Jar (2016), which describes how nature provided refuge for the young Packham in the years before he received an autism diagnosis. While the author/narrators’ experiences differ in many ways, each book reflects on the relationship between mental health and nature, combining writing about place, animals and ecosystems with writing that is candid and personally revealing. As this chapter aims to show, reading these books in the context of contemporary (and often interconnected) mental health and environmental crises demands an integration of academic approaches from both environmental and health humanities. However, reflecting critically on the science, storytelling, and politics of natural healing also raises challenges for both fields, revealing tensions inherent in the task of bringing the eco and the medical together. How these tensions are observed and resolved matters. In the course of this analysis, I propose ways of reading eco-recovery memoirs that are attentive to the ecological commitments of the environmental humanities, and also the person-centered and social justice approaches of critical health humanities. Human and natural health are not in opposition, but neither do they effortlessly overlap. A more complex and critical understanding of the place of nature in care is needed if we aim to advance environmental medical humanities and assure that they both attend to the real causes of human and ecological suffering.

ECO-RECOVERY MEMOIR: ORIGINS AND TROPES To begin, what is the eco-recovery genre, and how is it different from traditional and the New Nature Writing? Many classics of nature writing are biographical, and a fair few can be described as psychological in scope and tone. From W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (2002) with its meditations on exile, loss, and landscape, to J. A. Baker’s elegy to isolation and obsession in The Peregrine (1967) and Nan Shepherd’s tender, philosophical reflections on the nature of selfhood and the workings of the body-mind in The Living Mountain (1977), nature and travel writing has long been used to On swimming, see Fitzmaurice (2017), Lee (2017), and Minihane (2018); on birding, see Harkness (2020); on climbing, see Perrin (2010); on foraging/self-help, see Mitchell (2018); and Douglas (2020). 1

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explore personal identity and emotional experience in the context of place. This is, in no small part, because as well as drawing from older traditions of natural history and travelogue, nature writing also has roots in the Romantic movement. Thomas Gray’s melancholic “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) perfected the trope of writing about landscape and natural influences in a melancholic tone, while the Lyrical Ballads (1798) coauthored by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth put subjectivity and moment-by-moment experience in natural settings under a literary lens. The poet’s work, according to Wordsworth and Coleridge, was to consider how “man and the objects that surround him” act and re-act “upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 2013: 106) Introspective and autobiographical writing was the natural outcome of such a poetics, with monumental works like Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1805/1850) tracing the influences of natural settings on mood and character, or the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s masterpiece Walden (1854), with its interest in the transformative potential of wilderness to identity, imagination, and moral sentiments. In spite of considerable literary innovation in the meantime, twenty-first-century nature writing remains remarkably Romantic in its conceptualization of humanity and nature. Nature engagement remains educative and restorative, humanity responsive and attuned to receive nature’s gifts. In part, eco-recovery memoir simply crystalizes existing tendencies. Nature writing in the long-Romantic tradition tends to accept that a degree of melancholia, even despair, is an intrinsic and even desirable aspect of human experience; in nature, these feelings find a place of sympathy, freedom of expression, and potential transformation. However, eco-recovery memoir is distinguished by its explicit reflection on the diagnostic categories of modern psychiatry. In eco-recovery memoir, the author/narrator’s suffering is realized to be out of the ordinary, undesirable, and a threat to health. Therefore, the genre innovates by blending the conventions of the mental health memoir—with its distinct rhythms of illness, diagnosis, treatment, and recovery—with the formula of the nature journal. This blending has proven effortless, largely because the signature “journey” structure of mental health and nature memoir serves these stories well. Much New Nature Writing without a recovery element focuses on journeys to “find” key species (e.g., Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington [2018] and Cold Blood, Richard Kerridge [2014]), or to uncover stories and lesser-known scientific facts about liminal landscapes (Strands, Jean Sprackland [2012]; The Library of Ice, Nancy Campbell [2019]. In each case, the journey intersects with some personal experience of the author: homesickness, grief, the illness of a family member, or a complex relationship with a father all unravel in dialogue with geographical and ecological explorations. To this extent, eco-recovery memoir corresponds with the trend in health memoir to focus on journeys of healing in search of a cure. Mental health and recovery memoirs have been framed, variously, as a contemporary form of confessional spiritual literature, a fetishization of pain (nicknamed “misery-lit” or “trauma porn”), and a vital, empowering space to reclaim and reframe painful personal experience, with benefits for writers and readers alike (Mercer 2019; RennickEgglestone et al. 2019). The overarching narrative is recovery, although more recent forays in the genre are increasingly interested in the far more common experience of living with the realities of mental illness. Blended with the nature journal, the eco-recovery memoir proposes that rather than finding resolution in medicines or traditional talking therapy, we might find succor in a connection to the natural world.

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Connection is more than an offhand term for this relationship: it is the primary replacement for psychiatric treatment. Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, first published in 2005, is a convincing candidate for first eco-recovery memoir and takes connection as its guiding metaphor. The book explores Mabey’s experience of depression, charting the progress of the illness against the story of the Romantic poet John Clare. Clare was committed to asylums for much of his life, with experiences worsening after his move from the rural landscapes of his early life. In a moment of empathetic association, Mabey interprets Clare’s illness as a consequence of displacement, of disconnection from the wildlife and landscapes of his native rural home. Concerned as Mabey has long been with the industrialization of the countryside, he identifies closely with Clare’s elegiac melancholia and finds in it an explanation for his own emotional dip and withdrawal. For Mabey, depression is connected to his experience of moving from one deeply loved place to a strange one, and losing track of a flock of swifts he has been watching for much of his life. The depression that coincides with his house move severs Mabey’s interest in life, breaking his relationship with the natural world: “I stopped having ideas. I lost my taste and hunger for work. I gave up going into the country, effectively cutting myself off from the main source of stimulus in my life” (53). When recovery comes, it coincides with the spring arrival of swifts in his new home, which he has since learnt to love and to know if not with the intimacy of the native, then with the fresh wonder of the migrant. Human psychology, Mabey concludes, is connected with natural rhythms and cycles. Depression feels to him like a natural response to displacement, a kind of “vegetative retreat” akin to a natural process like animal hibernation, but also “unnatural” processes, such as modernity. Experiencing an illness that is at once inside and outside of nature, he seeks mainstream treatment (pharmaceuticals, hospitalization, therapy) and alternative ones (nature, writing, love). Ultimately, he concludes that “it was regaining that imaginative relationship with the world beyond that was my ‘nature cure’ ” (64). Nature in its own right, and as the matter of creative reflection at the core of his writerly life, has saved him. The straightforward satisfaction of the recovery is further emphasized by the fact that the recovery “journey” is summarized in the first third of the book, to be reflected upon for its remainder as a crisis already averted. Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016) shares Mabey’s interest in connection. As a child, Liptrot grew up in the Scottish archipelago of Orkney, with a father who experienced mental illness and periods of hospitalization. In the early pages of The Outrun, Liptrot describes how she moved to London as a young woman and there suffered from alcoholism, depression, and obsessive compulsive behaviors. Realizing that the city was a toxic environment, Liptrot returned to Orkney, first to work on an RSPB conservation project monitoring numbers of the threatened corncrake on the mainland, and then to overwinter in a cottage on the tiny island of Papa Westray, population: ninety. The book chronicles how she swaps nights of partying and drinking with hours driving around the island, listening out for the call of birds. She goes wild swimming in Orkney’s freezing seas and watches for passing whales and shipping containers. Pacing around St Tredwell’s Loch, she reflects on the medieval saints and pilgrims who marked the site as sacred. It’s not a religious story, but nature, in The Outrun, is a transformative space, a site of restoration and re-creation: I’m conducting my own form of therapy through long walks, cold swims and methodically reading old journals. I’m learning to savour and identify freedom: freedom of place, freedom from damaging compulsion. I’m filling the void with new knowledge and moments of beauty. (180)

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Contrasting the city with the islands, she finds that nature better mirrors the ups and downs, the emotional intensities of her own inner nature. By connecting with the world, she discovers, she reconnects with herself. This story of reconnection is constructed around visceral metaphors—of tremors, storms, and sea wrecks. Liptrot comes to understand her own mysterious disturbances in concert with the crashing seas and winds which buffet the island: “I grew up in some extremes and later sought them for myself ” (273). She had, she realizes, tried to replace these intensities with the obliterating highs and lows of alcohol and intoxication. She also meditates on the endless looping quality of addiction. Movement to Orkney doesn’t break those cycles, but redirects them. Working for the RSPB corncrake survey means that obsessive compulsive thinking can be meaningfully substituted and redirected through methodical drives around the islands, listening for endangered birds at internals of 200 feet. Likewise, in wild swimming, the hit of cold water is a substitute for cravings and the deeper thirst that alcohol never slaked: “The chilly immersion is addictive, verging on unpleasant at the time, but I find myself craving it” (196). Bodily absorption in water and conversation tasks helps Liptrot achieve a meditative mindfulness inaccessible through formal therapy: AA recommends meditation, which I find hard—I get distracted, upset or fall asleep—so instead I practise my own form of contemplation by walking on the hill and absorbing my surroundings. When I walk, I am soothed by being in motion. My body is occupied and my mind free. (174) In these rapturous and trance-like states, Liptrot achieves a kind of bodily absence which, as the philosopher Drew Leder suggests, is common to communion rituals in numerous global faiths and inherently concerned with establishing a sense of oneness with the living world (Leder 1990). Her experiences are also comparable to the sense of “being away” and fascination spoken of in Attention Restoration Theory. This research, initiated by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in the 1980s, is now one of the major theories of why exposure to natural environments can help us recover from difficult experiences and avoid more serious mental health problems. Restoring exhausted attention and promoting experiences of awe, nature is said to produce experiences of timelessness and immersion of the kind already copiously documented in much nature literature, both modern and Romantic (Kaplan 1995). For Liptrot, nature certainly pushes attention beyond the self, to physical sensations and the lives of animals and ecological processes. These extensions of interest don’t make mental health irrelevant. Care for the self and deeper interest in and understanding of nature are mutually reinforcing. As well as participating in efforts to protect the corncrake, she goes beachcombing for firewood—a vital activity on a cold island without a forest—and in the growing green energy industry of Orkney she finds a models of renewal which guides and reflects her own: Recovery is making use of something once thought worthless. I might have been washed-up but I can be renewed. (276) Like the electricity devices, I’m trying to find the right way to harness the powers and to achieve my aims without being destroyed by the very energy I desire. (273) Personal recovery maps onto ecological recovery in models of recycling and renewables. Although there are contradictions enfolded in the metaphor (to what extent is a person like wave energy, or

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driftwood?), it is still a sign that ecological concerns are not tangential to human stories of personal restoration and may be seen as connected on a more fundamental level.

ECOLOGICAL CRITICISM Although it addresses ecological questions, The Outrun is not an environmentalist book. Few works of recent nature writing could strictly be called environmentalist: the tendency is to address conservation issues implicitly, in asides about the decline of species or worrying climate futures, while centering lyric stories of the narrator’s engagement with the land. This tendency has left the genre—and eco-recovery in particular—vulnerable to critique. Frustrated by the introspective qualities of recent memoirs and authors’ desire for succor and satisfaction from nature, the author Mark Cocker reflects that the real danger is that nature writing becomes a literature of consolation that distracts us from the truth of our fallen countryside, or—just as bad—that it becomes a space for us to talk to ourselves about ourselves, with nature relegated to the background as an attractive green wash. (2015) The New Nature Writing, in Cocker’s opinion, risks becoming a paradoxically anthropocentric enterprise. With its commitment to a nostalgic lyricism, nature writers consistently fail to address the environmental crisis in serious terms, offering resolution of a human quest at the expense of telling hard truths which might affect book sales amongst a complacent nature-loving readership. Mabey’s Nature Cure gets off lightly in Cocker’s critique. Although Mabey dwells in human territory, his works can be characterized as a “movement along a single axis between culture—land practice or literature, science, the visual arts, sculpture, whatever—and nature. It is metaphorically and actually rooted in a soil of real, living things” (Cocker 2015). Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, however, comes under scrutiny. Cocker reflects with disappointment that the book is more interested in charting the author’s relationship with a tamed creature—essentially a pet—than Britain’s wild goshawks. This fascination with the domestic seems to him typical of “a nation in which Plantlife, the environmental organisation that seeks to safeguard our wild native vegetation, has a membership of 10,500, while the Royal Horticultural Society has 434,000 supporters” (Cocker 2015). The issue of whether a preference for tamed nature dominates in recent nature memoirs connects to the wider question Cocker raises about the tendency of the genre to use nature as both backdrop and tool. Tamed goshawks are preferable to wild ones, unproblematic landscapes to the pathos of crashing ecosystems. In the case of eco-recovery memoir, where an author seeks strength and connection in nature, it is perhaps no surprise that an “attractive green wash” has to come to dominate, along with flourishing hedgerows, colorful meadows and other nostalgic markers of a nature-culture at peace with itself, and naturally fitted to support our emotional and psychological recovery. The accusation that eco-recovery memoir promotes human health at the expense of wild and troublesome nature does more than call-out anthropocentric tendencies in the genre. It gets to the heart of the challenge of the medical environmental humanities. At first glance, it would seem that environmental humanities is a natural collaborator with the medical or health humanities. In the most commonsensical and philosophically resonant ways, human health is seen as connected with nature. From deep ecology we inherit the notion of the ecological self, which is most fully realized when in relationships of reciprocity with the biosphere. In critical theory we find Felix

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Guattari’s “three ecologies,” where human subjectivity, sensibility, and feeling are interdependent with organic ecologies, and as vulnerable to depletion or extinction as any natural resource or species. Underpinning diverse writings on place-attachment or place-based ethics is the assumption that through more authentically dwelling in a place—being more perfectly embedded and attuned to its lives, flows and more-than-human temporalities—we may also live in a way that is more “authentic,” more conducive to our own flourishing. Ecocriticism’s origin as a green revival of Romanticism has ensured that assumptions about the health-bringing capacities of nature have been deeply entangled with the field in its many iterations. In the “mute dialogue” between people and place reflected in copious post-Romantic literature and criticism, Nature persists as a metaphor of and agent for growth, healing, redemption. There are, however, points of tension. Many ecocritics are skeptical of the commonsense assumption that nature is “healing,” or indeed that “health” is an appropriate paradigm for thinking about ecosystems. Since he wrote his introduction to the field, Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard notes how health has become “a ubiquitous, vitally important master metaphor” providing “us with a readily understood, emotive way to comprehend matters of stunning complexity such as climate change, biodiversity, and ecological resilience” (2012: 494). As health metaphors migrate into writing about nature, there is an unexamined tendency “to link the destiny of the writing subject and her personal relations to that of the environment besieged by modernity” (494). This can be unhelpful as writers who draw analogies between human and natural health tend to have a limited, homeostatic understanding of the two, and to not take into account the inherent instability of natural systems, be they human or environmental. Garrard’s skepticism chimes with what eco-philosopher Timothy Morton calls the “Bright Green” environmentalist tendency to promote an aestheticized version of “healthful” nature. Instead, he urges ecological thinking that is open to experiences of sickness and melancholy: otherwise, depression comes to be seen as somehow a non-ecological category, something that takes us outside of nature (Morton 2010: 16). This further deepens Western culture’s damaging Romantic divide between “synthetic” culture and pure, untouchable, “holistic” nature. As Mabey’s account of depression as a “vegetative retreat” suggests, seeing oneself as somehow unnatural because of mental illness is less that appealing to many sufferers, and stigmatizing. Returning to Cocker’s criticism, I would argue that MacDonald’s H is for Hawk presents a far more sophisticated story of the relation between health and nature than he suggests. The question of what we ask of nature, and why we believe it should answer, is posed throughout the book, and summarized by MacDonald towards the book’s close: “Those books about people running to the wild to escape their grief and sorrow are part of a much older story, so old its shape is as unconscious and invisible as breathing,” she remarks (2014: 224). MacDonald’s reference is to King Sweeney of Irish legend, who was traumatized in battle, cursed by a priest, and fled to the forest to live out his punishment in the form of a bird. Alluding to one of Celtic culture’s original nature cures, on the surface it conforms to long pastoral and later Romantic tropes of retreat and return. It is, however, facilitated by a transformation that is as disturbing as it is dehumanizing. In various iterations of the story, Sweeney does not recover until he is cared for by a monastery community and welcomed back into the human fold. This story is a model for the kind of nature cure offered in H is for Hawk. A complex, interconnected narrative, it explores the author experience of depression following the death of her father. During the period of grieving, she sets about training a goshawk. Reflections on the often-grueling process

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of taming the bird are interwoven with biographical research into the life of British author T. H. White (1906–1964). A problem figure to say the least, White’s sadistic and chaotic approach to falconry acts as a counterpoint to MacDonald’s more methodical and experienced practice. White serves as a model of how not to immerse oneself in nature, although at points MacDonald finds herself slipping into disturbing forms of engagement with the “wild,” which test the limits of her compassion and blur, in disturbing ways, boundaries between human and animal. Goshawk training is, after all, an isolating hobby. To “break in” a hawk, you have to isolate yourself, staying awake and essentially abusing the hawk until its wildness is lost, and it becomes identified with the trainer. But, Macdonald realizes, it is she who becomes identified with the bird. Nature, rather than being a place to recover, is a space to go mad: For years I’d scoffed at White’s notion of hawk-training as a rite-of-passage. Overblown, I’d thought. Loopy. Because it wasn’t like that. I knew it wasn’t. I’d flown scores of hawks before, and every step of their training was familiar to me. But while the steps were familiar, the person taken them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, selfpossessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of the human life. I was turning into a hawk. (85) This isolating identification continues for many months, as Macdonald closes herself off from expressions of grief and vulnerability, and assistance from her friends. Ultimately, she concludes that the “wild,” at least as it is constructed in the old stories and spoken of as a site of escape by White, is not healing. She must return to a world of human fellowship and connection, as well as engaging with mental health treatment, to achieve equilibrium.

HEALTH HUMANITIES H is for Hawk isn’t an anti-nature cure book, but its implicit nature cure skepticism acts as a welcome counterpart to the “Bright Green” tendencies of the nature cure narrative. Welcome, because how critics address narratives of natural healing matters. Many of these accounts are written by patients and survivors, and as vital as ecocritical skepticism of their framings of nature might be, there is still need to take lived accounts of mental health and recovery seriously. Mabey’s Nature Cure, for example, comes under fire from Garrard for its representation of the relationship between health and nature. “[I]‌f the health metaphor in general seems, on close inspection, worryingly fissile and full of undisclosed normativity, the version employed in Nature Cure depends upon a doctrine of correspondence that is literally medieval,” he writes (Garrard 2012: 500). As Garrard explains, Mabey’s thoughts concerning the connection of mental health to nature alludes to the early modern proto-science of analogies. Described well by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, analogy was believed to account for beneficial relations between things. Astrology, the theory of the humors, and the connection between herbal remedies and ailments of the body: all were explained by the tendency for likeness to create the potential for augury and healing. An anachronistic discourse, its use by Mabey butts awkwardly against his modern psychiatric treatment and, as Garrard contends, is parochially anti-science. What might the health humanities have to say about this ecocritical reading? With its commitment to taking patient accounts seriously, and exploring the personal, spiritual, and cultural dimensions

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of healing, health humanities reminds us to attend to the stories people tell about treatment and recovery. Survivor-led approaches emphasize the importance of centering the voices of people living with mental illness, and taking lived accounts of mental illness and its treatment as meaningful, substantial, and in key ways as authoritative as those of medical experts. Art therapies and narrative approaches to treatment iterate the value of self-expression, creative reflection, and story-making in processes of physical and psychological recovery. Inviting patients to become protagonists in their own treatment “journeys,” practitioners work with patients to explore a blend of person-centered, evidence-based, and idiosyncratic treatments, from dance to music therapy, poetry to psychodrama. More inherently political is the field of Mad Studies, which develops mid-twentieth century anti-psychiatric thought to expose the political, social, and economic dimensions of mental disease, its diagnosis and treatment. Combining attitudes and perspectives from interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies, critical race theory, disability studies, and cultural studies, researchers in Mad Studies are as likely to be working in the academy as on its fringes in online survivor or ex-patient communities. New advances, publications, or outputs may take the form of conventional academic articles, blogs, or crowdsourced reading lists, as communities work collectively to explore alternative ways of describing mental distress and supporting those experiencing it. Defined as it is by opposition to mainstream master narratives of recovery, Mad Studies welcomes personal and idiosyncratic stories of living with mental illness and achieving self-understanding expressed in creative forms (including nature memoir). Informed by health humanities and Mad Studies, it is possible to respect that within Mabey’s mental health narrative, nature, and particularly the swifts, functions as more than metaphor: they are understood as a creative and active agent of recovery.

AGAINST NATURE CURES The reminder that critics should be cautious about imposing mainstream narratives of recovery on mental health memoir is an important check on developments in anti-nature cure critiques, both scholarly and creative. This particularly applies to the first sustained push-back against ecorecovery memoir: Luke Turner’s Out of the Woods (2019). Told through a series of walks around Epping Forest in northeast London, it sets out to demystify the promise of ecological recovery. “Throughout the long, humid month of May I tried to make the forest work for me as a place of respite and healing, in the way we’re always told nature can,” Turner writes, referencing the Japanese trend for shinrin-yoku forest bathing (115). It is not for me to dispute Japan’s learned scientists who study forest bathing, but that spring it was as if the thick air under the leaves and the fog of what my mind had carried into the forest had condensed to drown rather than cleanse me. (116) Out of the Woods details many similar moments of disappointment. Walks in the woods are undercut by experiences of fear, disgust, boredom, and the overwhelming sense that nature was indifferent: “The forest didn’t care” (188). He has a point. Turner struggles with issues the forest cannot possibly know about or remedy. The book addresses trauma and child sexual exploitation, how internalized biphobia and growing up queer under the UK’s repressive Section 28 laws distorted and damaged his relationship with sex and desire. As a space of queer experimentation and encounter, the forest becomes a complex site of re-traumatization: tempting him with hook-ups with men that can be liberatory but also triggering

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unaddressed feelings of shame. Stories of counter-culture and queer expression connected to the forest are seized hungrily and joyfully but do not ultimately relieve him of the sense that the forest is not really a place of comfort, meaning, or connection. After so many grueling and “mute” attempts to find solace in the forest, Turner finds some peace, not in the meditative Romantic pursuit of walking, but in the physical and collective effort of caring for the forest in a voluntary work program. Hours are spent cutting back undergrowth and saplings to create clearings for pasture—a paradoxically creative act of destruction, which is ultimately in the interests of long-term ecological growth. Turner’s moment of “healing”—ambivalent though it may be—is, much like Liptrot’s and Mabey’s, explained through visceral metaphor: It might be temporary, for the mind is never entirely set free from the entanglements it grows for itself. Now, though, I had the tools with which to cut them back, a fire with which to burn. (Turner 2019: 258) It is perhaps ironic that this breakthrough mirrors so closely the moments of metaphorical selfunderstanding found in so many eco-recovery memoirs. It is also quite in keeping with leading explanations of why green therapies may work. Much of the literature concerning the restorative potential of therapeutic horticulture focuses on the importance of metaphors in the process of “reframing” outlook and experience (Stevens 2018; Unruh 2004). Although he set out to disprove the more saccharine Romantic narrative of the nature cure, Turner ends by finding an approach that makes metaphorical sense to him and fits the kind of story he is trying to tell. It is a positive ending to an otherwise critical and pessimistic book. At the same time, it reveals a contradiction inherent to the narrative and the eco-recovery memoir in general. By setting out to tell us what works—or doesn’t—these books tell one person’s story, situating its critiques and affirmations in relation to their personal experience. In societies where mental illness is poorly understood, where treatment and outcomes are unequal and hugely disparate, and where unhelpful advice can lead to stigma and feelings of shame, personal stories of success or failure can have a paradoxically detrimental impact. While normative stories of unproblematic nature healing can be oppressive to sufferers, so too can sweeping critiques of its worthlessness. The impetus for Turner’s own anti-nature cure book was his frustration with the platitudes of nature and well-being advice, and its failure to address his pain. These are necessary criticisms, but the book sometimes handles them clumsily, treating the narrator’s disgust and disappointment as if it was a universal experience, and aversion to the forest a primal instinct encoded in humanity’s DNA (Turner 2019: 117). Repeated reflection on failure to find comfort in nature reflects this writer’s personal truth: but at the same time, dismantling the nature cure narrative—often bitterly—risks mocking and belittling the experiences of others who have found more straightforward comfort that way. Critiquing the nature cure narrative is, ultimately, a fine tightrope: demanding compassion and openness to various experience, while maintaining an acute awareness of what it is about the nature cure narrative that can be both harmful to people, and nature.

THE NATURE AND WELL-BEING MOVEMENT To understand why it may be harmful, it is necessary to place these texts in their wider political context. At the same time as eco-recovery memoir was coming to prominence in the 2000s and 2010s, a nature and well-being movement was gathering steam in the UK.

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While the cultural association between nature and mental health is ancient, cross-cultural, and impossibly complex, since the 1970s, medics have become increasingly concerned with establishing the scientific bases of various nature cures. In modern psychiatry, scientific approaches to measuring the nature cure begin in earnest with the establishment of Attention Restoration Theory, Stress Reduction Theory, shinrin-yoku science in Japan, and a host of more specific and evidence-based green care interventions, from therapeutic horticulture to care farming. Although there are key differences in competing theories, common findings of nature intervention studies conducted from this period to the present day include the following: a reduction in perceived levels of stress and anxiety; improvement in mood and sleep; decrease in negative thoughts and rumination; and greater productivity and focus. With this scientification of the nature cure has come an increased interest in evaluating and validating medical interventions, and a preference for quantifiable impacts and outcomes. Heart rate monitors, blood cortisol level tests, evidence of reduced drug dependency continue to take precedence over qualitative assessments like participant feedback. “Doctors want to see words they understand,” as American MD and researcher of ecological medicine, Sara Warber, explains: “They need to know it’s not just feel-good stuff, there’s some physiology going on too” (Warber 2019). In the UK in the late 2000s, specific funding was released to rigorously evidence the impact nature has on people’s mental health. This served a dual purpose. First, to prove the value of the many informal nature therapies already offered by alternative practitioners and to bring them within the remit of NHS funding and prescribing. Second, to promote the public mental health benefits of simply going outdoors and accessing local nature or what researchers and town planners call “greenspace.” By planning cities in such a way that pedestrians are encouraged—if not compelled— to walk through a green space or planted area, “incidental nature encounters” can be built into their day, and they can get a “dose of nature” without effort (Beery et al. 2017). Ecosystems service and natural capital approaches to measuring such outcomes further reinforce the wider public health benefits of these nature encounters. If it can be proved—or at least convincingly modelled—that a park or greenway lowers stress levels and anxiety in an urban population, then improving access to greenspace becomes a win-win in terms of policy: a population less prone to stress is less likely to seek more complex and expensive mental health treatments, and more likely to be economically productive. Two pieces of research proved pivotal. First, in 2008 the UK government commissioned the think tank, New Economics Foundation (NEF), “to develop a set of evidence-based actions to improve personal well-being” (Aked et al. 2008: 1) Previous research by NEF suggested that in spite of the UK’s strong GDP, the happiness of the population was relatively poor (New Economics Foundation n.d.). What steps could the government take to improve happiness for everyone? Instead of suggesting wide-scale policy measures, the government asked NEF to help them “target the individual,” to empower people to improve their own mental health (Aked et al. 2008: 3-4). Informed by interviews with the public, NEF published a Five Ways to Wellbeing toolkit, with the recommendations: Connect, Be Active, Give, Keep Listening, and Take Notice. These “ways to wellbeing” quickly infiltrated public discourse about well-being and mental health, appearing in schools, GP surgeries, and workplaces. They have even been given a natural twist, as people are urged to improve their well-being in natural environments (Scottish Wildlife Trust 2017). Then, in 2009, National Lottery funding was released to the Ecominds project to support 130 projects in England and study the effectiveness of their outcomes. Ecominds supported outdoor

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therapies for people experiencing mental illness, from horticulture to parkland regeneration, animal assisted therapy to forest mindfulness sessions. Reports on interventions showed an improvement in people’s self-reported sense of well-being, connection with nature, and environmentally friendly attitudes (Bragg, Wood, and Barton 2013). This demonstrated that green care initiatives could share a dual purpose: improving care for wildlife and ecology at the same time as improving mental health recovery. In terms of improving human–nature relations and boosting alternative approaches to health care, this was an overwhelmingly positive result. However, it is also important to note that at the same time as both green-care research (and eco-recovery memoir) reached its zenith, the UK was facing specific internal economic, environmental, and political struggles. These struggles have significantly shaped the landscape of mental illness and its treatment, impacted funded, and significantly influenced outcomes for patients. The 2008 financial crisis led to an intense scrutiny of public finances. Though it was global in origin, the crash took place under a center-left Labour government who had invested in public health services and social welfare spending over their ten years in office. As the 2010 General Election loomed, the opposition Conservative Party criticized Labour’s social policies, blaming them for running public finances into the ground and creating what was termed a “budget deficit.” Balancing the books meant Labour committed further to a neoliberal economic agenda, accepting the deficit narrative and confirming that the public had every right to be frustrated with the perceived excesses of the welfare state. Since 2010, series of center-right governments led by the Conservative party have instituted austerity measures to roll back public financing. Health services, social welfare, public spending, and pensions all suffered cuts. Cuts to mental health services have been particularly badly affected. In 2018, mental health services suffered cuts of £105m in real terms (The Week 2018). The same era of austerity has been defined by a change in social attitudes to disabled people, particularly those suffering from mental illness. People with registered disabilities now have to go through more complex processes to prove they are not “Fit to Work.” The severity of claimants’ conditions, and their right to support, is now being assessed by “experts” from profit-making companies contracted by the public sector. The real social impact of these changes is still barely understood and under-reported. Some facts however, are known. Being disabled under these new arrangements is extremely difficult. Disability activists describe assessments as invasive, dehumanizing, and medically dubious (Hodgson 2017). Claimants with debilitating medical conditions have too often been declared “fit to work” and either have to accept this decision or start the long process of appeal. The system is clunky, the forms and processes difficult to understand. For those who do receive support, payments have decreased, so they barely covered living costs. In 2015, statistics revealed that over three years, 2,380 people died shortly after being declared “fit for work” (Hodgson 2017). In 2019, new figures were released showing that 17,070 people died while waiting to receive decisions on their personal independence payment since 2013 (Bulman 2019). At the same time, the media has whipped up a frenzy of anxiety about benefit scroungers, people “faking” ailments to play the system. Claiming welfare support for illness—particularly mental illness—took on a new meaning in this context. Necessary social support came to be seen as a privilege, even an excess, not a right. People receiving this support describe feelings of guilt, worthlessness, and stress.

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One of the reasons the nature and well-being movement became so attractive to government during these years is that nature interventions are cheap. A workshop run in a forest by a selffunded charity is considerably cheaper than employing a psychotherapist and social worker, or providing pharmaceuticals, where appropriate. Indeed, in the reporting of the success of Ecominds, the financial benefits of the scheme were widely paraded. One 2013 report, “The Economic Benefits of Ecominds,” focuses on a case study of a woman named Joanne. After becoming depressed in her teens and rurally isolated, she achieved confidence and new skills on a care farming project, and eventually went on to start an apprenticeship and paid work on a farm. After telling her story, the report breaks down the money saved on medicines, psychiatric support, and disability support, and recuperated for the public purse in the taxes that “Joanne” went on to contribute after her ecotherapy sessions. Amounting to over £12,000, the therapeutic nature intervention is roundly recognized as a success (Vardakoulias 2013). As personally transformative as the treatment may have been, it demonstrates how central financial efficiency is in justifications of green care treatments. This is problematic, first, because it fits nature cures into the “fit to work” narrative, meeting the need for public sector cuts at the same time as it reproduces the fantasy of the “worthy’ benefits claimant. Such logic crops up in other academic evaluations of the nature cure: for example, the authors of a 2018 report note how high exposure to nature may lower stress, risk of burnout, and “cynicism” and “professional inadequacy” among workers—all of which is to the good in a neoliberal work-oriented society committed to busy-ness as usual (Hyvönen et al. 2018). In terms of practical issues like seeking funding, it raises the further concern that if treatments can’t be shown to be a good investment, and if service-users will never recoup the money spent on them in care through work, will any treatment be offered at all? A second problem concerns the individualization of health care. On the one hand, shift in focus from Joanna as patient to author of her own future is empowering. However, this individualization of responsibility underpins the prevailing ideology of the austerity years: confirming that there is a difference between “grifters”—able to take their recovery into their own hands—and “scroungers.” As far back as 2008, the Five Ways to Wellbeing toolkit chose a “target the individual” approach to empower people to make changes in their own lives. The flip side of this is that mental illness came to be seen as a failure of individual self-care and of learning to cope with stress in appropriate ways. The perfection of this model is the Recovery Star, designed by the Association of Mental Health Providers and recommended by the UK’s Department of Health. With ten points, the star shows the steps an individual needs to take to go from zero, to a fully flourishing life, including progress on areas like “Trust and Hope,” “Relationships,” “Responsibilities,” and of course, “Work” (Triangle n.d.). The recovery star has come under scrutiny in the peri-academic field of Mad Studies. The survivor-led organization Recovery in the Bin, for example, calls the star “a redundant, unhelpful, and blunt tool for narrowly judging how someone should be expected to ‘recover’ ” (Recovery in the Bin 2016). In its place, they propose an UnRecovery Star, which at its points lists obstacles to holistic wellness, including “Poverty,” “Racism,” “Trauma,” and “Loss of Welfare State.” It is described as a “Social Justice tool” which highlights the reasons why we go Mad, but also what can hinder our “recovery” and maintain our distress. We really mean it when we say some of us will never feel “recovered” due

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to the social and economic conditions we experience because they frame everything. (Recovery in the Bin 2016)

MEDICAL ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES The UnRecovery ethos originates in the health humanities at its intersection with Mad Studies and should find sympathetic reception in the environmental humanities. Environmental humanities is a field uniquely positioned to recognize the devastating implications of capitalist extractive logics on the degradation of ecosystems—and has even helpfully named the problem as such in the widely cited term of “Capitolocene.” Ecocritics should have no difficulty in understanding why social justice thinking should lead discussion of treatments and health paradigms, or why neoliberal attitudes to human labor and worth must be rejected. Thinking of mental health or ecology in terms of an investment in human and natural capital is socially pernicious, culturally impoverished, and ethically dubious. These are not the values with which we will address our mental health, or our environmental crisis. In conclusion, then, how does eco-recovery memoir fit into this story, and how might these books be read in a way that offers a critical response to the worse trends in neoliberal natural healing? Reading against the grain, it’s possible to see the rise of eco-recovery memoir as a symptom of attacks on the welfare state in the austerity years. In The Outrun, Amy Liptrot describes the experience of accessing a centrally funded addiction support program in 2014: The Prime Minister was talking tough, picking out addicts and people with weight problems (there were apparently around 80,000 addicts on incapacity benefits, including 42,360 alcoholics—my peers were surprised at how low this number was), saying that the public only wanted to pay taxes “for people incapacitated through no fault of their own.” (2016: 73) Capturing perfectly the punitive and shaming language of the times, Liptrot reveals how this rhetoric contributed to an overestimation of the “problem” by noting that the number of addicts on benefits is much lower than her peers assume. In a further passage, she reflects on her own privilege in being able to access this program: of course, support for people living with addiction should be a right, not a privilege, and her sense of shame and guilt demonstrate how effectively austerity discourse influenced the experience of addicts seeking care. It may even be seen to prompt the more extreme forms of natural healing she seeks—the “run to the wild,” to paraphrase MacDonald, to escape both the temptations of the city and a toxic conservative mental-health discourse. Luke Turner is yet more explicit in his critiques of the inadequacies of mental health support and acknowledged the fact that nature is less of a salve, more of a last resort: “Our mental-health services are woefully underinvested; only those in acute distress are catered for, and even then inadequately” (2019: 189). As someone whose mind straddles “the edges of wilderness,” he is not entitled to acute care, or the talking therapies which might begin to address underlying traumas (189). ‘The past was precisely what we didn’t discuss,” he learns after a demeaning encounter with a therapist. Reductive questionnaires, patronizing “flow charts of worry,” and mind-numbing apps are offered instead. “With everything else failing, in desperation,” he seeks the forest, and the friendship of an outsider figure he knows to be living there. A more patent example of the failings of austerity healthcare, and its relation with the nature cure, is hard to imagine.

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A more implicit critique of the attitudes to nature, mental illness, and neurodiversity that dominated in the austerity years can be found in an eco-recovery work by BBC wildlife presenter Chris Packham. On the surface, Fingers in the Sparkle Jar (2016) is a story of Packham’s childhood fascination with wildlife. But the book is also about his experience of growing up with undiagnosed autism: its publication coincided with a documentary exploring the negative and positive impact of receiving an adult diagnosis, and wider public-consciousness raising about the realities of living with autism. Packham reveals these realities by recounting his childhood experiences. There is an obsessive quality to his love of nature, a tendency to urgently identify with creaturely pleasure and animal suffering. His young narrator/protagonist displays extraordinary levels of compassion with the secret lives of forests, waterways, and the critters who dwell there. With the benefit of hindsight and self-understanding opened up by diagnosis, Packham is able to make sense of his childhood feelings of fascination, as well as his experience of difference: “The boy was bright but struggled in the classroom and he was impossible to connect with other than through the things that clearly obsessed him,” he reflects, writing in the third person (213). Autism can affect social interaction, and certainly young Chris makes connections with animals, in a way that is impossible with children his own age. Forests, fields, and streams offer a site of acceptance, empathy, and solace, parallel to the disconcerting, threatening, and prejudiced human social world. However, nature in itself is not enough. As compelling as wildlife is, it cannot protect him from experiences of depression and suicidal ideation. Autism, importantly, is not to blame for his suffering. While Packham connects his heightened sense of compassion for animal life with neurodiversity, it is bullying, exclusion, and self-loathing that bring the most anguish. Most debilitating of all is the careless cruelty of other children towards animals. The “sparkle jar” of the title is taken from a chapter in which he peers into a jar of swirling minnows captured in a ditch. In the jar, he writes, “I identified the essence of pure and simple and beautiful life” (131). In the next moment, a group of older boys throw his bike into the canal, upending him and sending the jar flying. “All that life vanished in a single moment of violence and all that remained was a massive shocking vacuum that no one else on earth could ever experience or understand” (134). It is in such moments that the book’s fundamental deviation from “Bright Green” nature cures is most palpable. In a social and medical context in which autism is still pathologized, and where disturbing promotion of “cures” stigmatize and other the experiences of autistic people, Packham’s intense identification with creaturely suffering, actually reveals the shortcomings of a neurotypical indifference to animal pain common to young boys. His autism offers a path to respect and care for nature which will define his life as a wildlife presenter and campaigner. His neurodiversity is valued and a vital underpinning to his ethical relations with life. What remains un-recovered is his mental health. In chapters detailing conversations with his therapist, an adult Packham opens up about ongoing issues with suicidal thoughts and depression. Many of these conversations cycle around feelings of hopelessness and failure, a disconnection from other people, and a terrible sense that he’s not done enough to protect the things he loved— chiefly, a young kestrel he cared for as a boy, whose death is a heartbreaking trauma never to be overcome. The book offers no easy answers, but it shifts the meaning of eco-recovery in radical ways: away from the individualistic logic of self-care in nature to a wider conversation about the social causes of UnRecovery. Bullying and stigmatization, cruelty and callousness, toxic masculinity, and the

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destructive exploitation of nature: all are revealed as part of a failing system where the human and the ecological are held back from flourishing. Packham does not need to be “cured,” because there is nothing wrong with him; society, instead, needs to change. In its radical empathy, its absolute integration of care for the self with unapologetic fury at those who exploit nature, and its awareness that healing and survival are about rebuilding damaged relationships, Fingers in the Sparkle Jar shows us what the eco-recovery memoir, and the medical environmental humanities, might be.

REFERENCES Aked, J., N. Marks, C. Cordon, and S. Thompson (2008), “Five Ways to Wellbeing,” New Economics Foundation, 1: 1–23. Available online: https://newec​onom​ics.org/uplo​ads/files/five-ways-to-wellbe​ing-1.pdf. Accessed April 21, 2021. Beery, T. H., C. M. Raymond, M. Kyttä, A. S. Olafsson, T. Plieninger, M. Sandberg, M. Stenseke, M. Tengö, and K. I. Jönsson (2017), “Fostering Incidental Experiences of Nature through Green Infrastructure Planning,” Ambio, 46: 717–30. Bragg, R., C. Wood, and J. Barton (2013), “Ecominds Effects on Mental Wellbeing: An Evaluation for Mind,” Mind. Available online: https://www.mind.org.uk/media/4418/ecomi​nds-effe​cts-on-men​tal-wellbe​ing-eva​luat​ ion-rep​ort.pdf. Accessed April 21, 2021. Bulman, M. (2019), “More than 17,000 Sick and Disabled People Have Died while Waiting for Welfare Benefits, Figures Show,” Independent, January 14. Available online: https://www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/news/ uk/home-news/pip-wait​ing-time-dea​ths-disab​led-peo​ple-die-dis​abil​ity-benef​i ts-perso​nal-indep​ende​nce-paym​ ent-dwp-a8727​296.html. Accessed April 21, 2021. Cocker, M. (2015), “Death of the Naturalist: Why is the New Nature Writing so Tame?,” New Statesman, June 15. Available online: https://www.newst​ates​man.com/cult​ure/2015/06/death-nat​ural​ist-why-new-nat​ure-writ​ ing-so-tame. Accessed April 21, 2021. Douglas, F. (2020), The Nature Remedy, London: HQ. Fitzmaurice, R. (2017), I Found my Tribe, London: Vintage. Garrard, G. (2012), “Nature Cures? Or How to Police Analogies of Personal and Ecological Health,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19 (3): 494–514. Harkness, J. (2020), Bird Therapy, London: Unbound. Hodgson, C. (2017), “Cruel and Humiliating’: Why Fit-for-Work Tests Are Failing People with Disabilities,” The Guardian, May 22. Available online: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/care​ers/2017/may/22/cruel-and-humi​liat​ ing-why-fit-for-work-tests-are-fail​ing-peo​ple-with-disab​ilit​ies. Accessed April 21, 2021. Hyvönen, K., K. Törnroos, K. Salonen, K. Korpela, T. Feldt, and U. Kinnunen (2018), “Profiles of Nature Exposure and Outdoor Activities Associated with Occupational Well-Being among Employees,” Frontiers in Psychology, 9: 1–3. Kaplan, S. (1995), “The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward and Integrative Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15: 169–82. Leder, D. (1990), The Absent Body, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lee, J. (2017), Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes, London: Virago. Liptrot, A. (2016), The Outrun, Edinburgh: Canongate. Mabey, R. (2008), Nature Cure, London: Vintage. Macdonald, H. (2014), H is for Hawk, London: Jonathan Cape.

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Mercer, J.A. (2019), “Writing Transformation: Using Addiction Recovery Memoirs Toward Personal and Social Change,” Reforming Practical Theology 1: 69–75. Minihane, J. (2018), Floating: A Return to Waterlog, London: Duckworth. Mitchell, E. (2018), The Wild Remedy, London: Michael O’Mara. Morton, T. (2010), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. New Economics Foundation (n.d.), “Happy Planet Index,” New Economics Foundation. Available online: https:// happy​plan​etin​dex.org/. Accessed April 21, 2021. Packham, C. (2016), Fingers in the Sparkle Jar, London: Ebury. Perrin, J. (2010), West: A Journey through the Landscapes of Loss, London: Atlantic. Recovery in the Bin (2016), “Unrecovery Star,” Recovery in the Bin, February. Available online: https://recov​eryi​ nthe​bin.org/unr​ecov​ery-star-2/. Accessed April 21, 2021. Rennick-Egglestone, S., K. Morgan, J. Llewellyn-Beardsley, A. Ramsay, R. McGranahan, S. Gillard, A. Hui, F. Ng, J. Schneider, S. Booth, V. Pinfold, L. Davidson, D. Franklin, S. Bradstreet, S. Arbour, and M. Slade (2019), “Mental Health Recovery Narratives and Their Impact on Recipients: Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 64 (10): 669–79. Scottish Wildlife Trust (2017), “Wild Ways to Wellbeing,” Scottish Wildlife Trust. Available online: https://scotti​ shwi​ldli​fetr​ust.org.uk/2017/05/wild-ways-wellbe​ing/. Accessed April 21, 2021. Stevens, P. (2018), “A Hypnosis Framing of Therapeutic Horticulture for Mental Health Rehabilitation,” The Humanistic Psychologist, 46 (3): 258–73. The Week (2018), “Fact Check: The Truth about Mental Health Funding,” The Week, May 2. Available online: https://www.thew​eek.co.uk/93320/fact-check-the-truth-about-men​tal-hea​lth-fund​ing. Accessed April 21, 2021. Triangle (n.d.), “Recovery Star,” Outcomes Star. Available online: https://www.outco​mess​tar.org.uk/using-the-star/ see-the-stars/recov​ery-star-4/. Accessed April 21, 2021. Turner, L. (2019), Out of the Woods, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Unruh, A. (2004), “The Meaning of Gardens and Gardening in Daily Life: A Comparison between Gardeners with Serious Health Problems and Healthy Participants,” Acta Horticulturae, 639: 69–73. Vardakoulias, O. (2013), “The Economic Benefits of Ecominds,” New Economics Foundation, July. Available online: https://www.mind.org.uk/media-a/4424/the-econo​mic-benef​i ts-of-ecomi​nds-rep​ort.pdf. Accessed April 21, 2021. Warber, S. (2019), “Contact with Nature: Its Role in Health Care,” Keynote talk, Exploring the Pathways linking Biodiversity to Human Health and Well-being, Hanover, September 25–27. Wordsworth, W., and S. T. Coleridge (2013), “Preface,” in Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1802, 95–116, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Environmental Toxicity and Public Health

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CHAPTER TEN

Pathogenic (Auto)Ecologies: Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Mechanisms in Environmental Autobiography SOFIA VARINO

INTRODUCTION: DOING THINGS WITH MCS In North America and Europe, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) is currently recognized by the medical establishment as a disabling disorder with debilitating, and potentially fatal, physical symptoms, which may include shortness of breath and chronic pain. In some contexts, the term is used synonymously with Environmental Illness (EI), and its symptomatology often overlaps with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME). Although the terms “Multiple Chemical Sensitivity” and “Environmental Illness” are sometimes employed interchangeably, throughout this chapter I use the more specific term “Multiple Chemical Sensitivity” to designate a range of sensitivities and intolerances that appear to be triggered by everyday chemical substances, and the term “Environmental Illness” as an umbrella term to designate (auto)immunological responses to chemical as well as nonchemical agents, like mold, dust, and pollen (including MCS and a range of other environmentally related conditions, like allergies and environmental intolerances, as well as conditions caused by environmental exposure, such as Gulf War Syndrome, Sick Building Syndrome, or Beryllium disease). In the currently dominant clinical classification, MCS is described as originating in a patient’s “belief ” about the harmful physical effects of commonly used chemical substances like pesticides, perfume, or paint fumes (Alaimo 2010; Murphy 2006). Data, matter, and experience appear disjointed in dominant MCS practices, posing gridlock dilemmas and seemingly unsolvable clinical enigmas. In this chapter, I focus on two main questions: How might we read autobiographical MCS narratives as materializing, spatializing, embodying an environmentally charged politics of health and healing? And how are these MCS practices spatially bound, geographically situated,

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and oriented toward environmental accounts of illness? In spite of inconclusive studies into the physiological and environmental mechanisms of MCS symptoms, with placebo substances often generating symptoms similar to those caused by the chemical substances patients react to, the disabling effects of the condition are well documented, whether their expression is predominantly immunological, neurological, and/or psychological, or a combination of these (Munson 2000; Murphy 2006; Winder 1994). In this chapter, I deploy three MCS autobiographical narratives (by Aurora Levins Morales, Peggy Munson, and Susan Abod) to consider how environmental conditions become pathogenic. I am especially interested in examining the living body’s capacity to self-organize in a more or less coordinated, consistent response to external and internal conditions, as well as its chaotic, disruptive capacity to act in unruly and harmful ways. I seek to emphasize the tension between internal (physiological, genetic) and external (social, environmental, epigenetic) models of illness and health. It is this movement between external and internal, this flux between inside and outside, that enables me to formulate a politically charged materialist critique of these autobiographical ecologies, or auto-ecologies. I show how each of the autobiographical narratives I examine here mobilizes the “patient” category to interrogate and destabilize biomedical knowledge, proposing alternative ways of doing and knowing MCS. My method for reading the following narratives is informed by transdisciplinary feminist methodologies invested in valuing informal, marginalized, nonexpert forms of knowledge (Diedrich 2007, 2016; Shildrick 2009; Squier 2003; Wendell 1996). Autobiographical narratives produced by patients become a valid form of knowledge production when they are valued as crucial documents for understanding what a medical condition is (its ontology) in terms of what it does (its practices), to use Annemarie Mol’s terminology informed by phenomenology and sociology of science (2002). In this sense, this chapter functions in some ways as a (peri)phenomenological account of MCS, whereby understanding MCS also entails encountering it through accounts of embodied experiences written by patients. Although MCS is not currently recognized as a physical condition per se, but rather as a chronic psychological condition with severely debilitating physical effects, its symptomatology overlaps with more widely recognized chronic conditions, including fibromyalgia and CFS. The extremely intense responses to scents and fragrances reported by MCS patients are especially challenging as objects of study, with patients not affected by MCS also reporting being affected by various scents, especially those with chronic respiratory conditions like asthma. As Mol (2002) observes, medical conditions are distributed across a multitude of specialized and spatialized practices and discourses. However, a medical condition must be sufficiently coordinated to be recognizable as a congruent phenomenon that can be studied, diagnosed, treated, described, and documented. In the case of MCS, there has been just enough coordination among medical specialties for the condition to be recognizable within standard medical practice. In her 2015 keynote at the Lesbian Lives Conference in Brighton (UK), Sara Ahmed observed that “privilege is an energy-saving device” (Ahmed 2017). In the auto(eco)biographical accounts of MCS I examine here, bodies are portrayed as volatile, reactive, sensitive, excessive —they are too active, responding above and beyond normative expectations to common household products, air pollution, scents, and fragrances. MCS bodies seem to waste too much energy and too many resources, their protective mechanisms seemingly disproportionate to the external threat posed by the common chemical substances routinely encountered in everyday modern life. But it would be possible to formulate the opposite argument: the body reacts just enough, giving warning signs and developing mechanisms to protect the organism from the effects of various harmful chemicals.

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It may well be that non-MCS bodies are the ones whose response is inadequate by not reacting enough—perhaps they should be reacting more, or in more straightforward ways, by upping their immune responses to low-level chemical exposures and everyday air pollution. If an MCS response to low-level toxicity were frequent enough, it would be counted as normal and it would thus cease to be considered excessive. What is classified as normal is therefore what has been counted enough times to be measured as frequent. Counting, then, becomes crucial for understanding “sensitivity” to chemicals on clinical terms: since an intense response to low-level toxic exposures has been infrequently documented or observed, it is classified as pathological. As a word, sensitivity carries an affective charge that is hard to escape. Even if the condition is potentially lethal, MCS patients have trouble asserting the gravity of their symptoms as long as they are classified as “sensitivities.” Allergic reactions, on the other hand, hold a very different status, with potentially immediate life-threatening symptoms well established across scientific literatures (Jamieson 2010). This complex relationship between sensitivity and allergy, at times divergent and at others overlapping and nearly indistinguishable, is crucial toward understanding the precarious, contingent foundations of MCS clinical and activist practices. For example, in Abod’s documentary Homesick (which I analyze in more detail later on), MCS is enacted as primarily caused by environmental exposure, and thus spatially and geographically situated as a chronic condition, with the spaces that bodies inhabit depicted as the decisive factors for recovery and symptom management. In one segment of the film, Abod cannot maintain her physical or mental activity levels, as her energy drops after she moves into a new house replete with chemicals she reacts to, but when she is on the road she often expresses delight and relief when spending time at the “chemically safe” homes of recovering MCS patients, spaces that help sustain her wellbeing and vitality. The importance of one’s surroundings for MCS management, convalescence, and recovery reappears again and again in MCS narratives, including in Munson’s and Morales’s writing. In line with these autobiographical ecologies, I remain interested throughout this chapter in how physical, psychological, and neurological states animate organic and inorganic matter, and how ecological and biochemical circuits become affectively and politically charged.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ECOLOGIES OF CHEMICAL SENSITIVITY MCS and other types of environmentally induced chronic illness have sparked interest for a broad range of humanities and social sciences scholars, especially those invested in examining the intersections between environmental justice, racial and gendered violence, occupational health, and labor conditions. Fictional narratives have also explored the consequences for human health of rampant environmental devastation, often tied in with industrialization’s colonial and capitalist enterprises, thus giving form and content to real-life events: the film Safe by Todd Haynes (1995) and the play Heroes and Saints by Cherríe Moraga (1992) both explore MCS and EI in terms of the impact of toxic substances on bodies. Without using an explicit autobiographical register, Rachel Carson’s iconic volume Silent Spring (1962) could be considered an early example of the genre, while around the same time allergist Theron Randolph incorporated first-person accounts by his environmentally intolerant patients into his clinical writings. Michelle Murphy (2006), Stacy Alaimo (2010) and Mel Y. Chen (2012) have all written extensively about MCS, attending both to its clinical and political ramifications. Already tending toward an auto-ecological mode, Chen writes about their own MCS experiences in the “Following Mercurial Affect” chapter of Animacies

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(2012), collapsing the conventions of academic writing by inserting their own disabling condition into the text. In general, autobiographical MCS accounts less attentions than fictional or clinical ones, and a systematic analysis of their contribution to understanding MCS pathogenesis, symptomatology, management, and recovery is still missing. MCS narratives can be placed within a subgenre of literature, the illness memoir, which is embedded in a specific genealogy of life writing and shares some genre conventions with the memoir in general, including a confessional tone, fragmentary structure, and intimate modes of address. Although these autobiographical documents can and do function as critical and philosophical projects in which the authors pursue a range of topics related to their condition, they remain for the most part narratives centered on the individual and collective experience of debility, vulnerability, suffering, progressive decline, and in some cases death. Some key authors of illness memoirs include Audre Lorde, Eve Sedgwick, and Susan Sontag, with scholarly studies like Lisa Diedrich’s analysis of autobiographical illness narratives in Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness (2007) offering an critical overview of this subgenre of life writing. In this chapter, I deploy the term “auto-ecology” in a distinct sense from the much broader genre of environmentally attuned life writing, where Nature (often with a capital N) alongside climate, place, and nonhuman life play key roles. I’m engaging with the concept and practice of autobiographical ecology to name a collective of autobiographical narratives where the (human) self unfolds and multiplies, breaking away from the singularity of individual embodied experience to encompass the unavoidable plurality of a subjectivity that is always already an ecological, biochemical, multispecies phenomenon. What if, as the auto-ecologies I consider below seem to suggest, chemical sensitivity was viewed as a kind of sensitization, as a capacity to detect, recognize, and respond to the harmful effects of certain chemicals? What if neural and biochemical pathways were endowed with increased agency, and what are considered pathogenic mechanisms were regarded as exceptionally attuned responses? To put it another way, what if bodies disabled and debilitated by MCS were not considered defective but rather remarkably effective, and it was the volatility of various industrially produced and circulated substances that was seen as excessive and pathogenic? As a clinical and ecological phenomenon, MCS spreads. For Munson, it is primarily contained within the bounds of the living body; for Abod, it is dispersed among environmental surroundings. And for Morales, is emerges in the continuity between affected bodies and their surroundings, so that environment and self become in fact extensions of one another.

KINDLING In the memoir Kindling: Writings on the Body (2013), Morales assembles a disparate collection of short autobiographical texts, merging her experiences with debilitating chronic illness, sexual violence, and toxic exposure, alongside her lifelong commitment to feminist activism. Acutely aware of how the borders between self and nonself become porous and permeable, Morales weaves an autobiographical narrative where a series of ecopolitical events become her body, demonstrating how pathogenic mechanisms can be at once socially, psychologically, ecologically, and materially embodied. Formally, Morales prefers the fragmented structure of the assemblage while highlighting various thematic continuities among her writings, dispersed across the genres of poetry, lecture, essay, and manual.

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Published by the small women’s press Palabrera Press, the cover features a medical diagram displaying the interstices of internal organs like the heart, lungs, intestines, pancreas, and liver. The image references biomedical knowledge and clinical practice as well as the visceral quality of the living body’s interiority. Since Morales is first and foremost concerned with how the interiority of singular bodies is in fact contiguous with and affected by other interiorities and exteriorities, the image starkly contrasts with the communal, expansive understanding of corporeality that the writing encapsulates. An auto(eco)biographical subjectivity begins to emerge from the beginning of the volume, ripe with physiological responses to the living world, whereby its materiality is consumed, absorbed, expelled, and processed into and out of the visceral cavity of the body. Porous and permeable, Morales’s body appears uncontainable, at once invaded and filled by the excessive activity of an unruly environment whose (eco)biopsychosocial surroundings dramatically affect “those of us whose bodies react faster to poison” (Morales 2013: 73; my emphasis). Crucially, Morales frames MCS and EI as quintessentially temporal phenomena, whereby the relatively shorter timeframe required for a body to summon a response is precisely what defines it as affected by chemical sensitivities. Other bodies might be similarly, or even more severely, affected, but their response is slower, more gradual, and perhaps even delayed. Within the framework of contemporary allopathic clinical practice, the accelerated responses of MCS clinical scenarios are considered excessive and pathogenic. For Morales, however, what is pathogenic are the social and material conditions within which certain (disabled, racialized, gendered) bodies struggle to stay alive. A less pathogenic society might be one where bodies are understood as entirely reliant on their environs for survival. As Morales proposes, “the work of healing justice must include the systematic study of the healing properties of solidarity, and develop ways to cultivate it” (2013: 38). Having endured the violent injustices of a highly privatized US healthcare system, she is eventually able to receive treatment in Cuba, a country with universal access to health care, and documents her experiences in a section titled “Cuba.” In contrast with Munson’s interest in considering how infectious disease mechanisms might participate in the onset of MCS and EI, which I examine in more detail below, Morales prefers to step away from the predominance of germ theories of disease in Western biomedicine to engage with a much broader range of disease mechanisms, including but not privileging the role of infectious disease transmission over the effects of pollutants, chemicals, toxins, environmental pathogens like mold and dust, poor nutrition, and stress caused by exposure to violence, trauma, and poverty. Paying particular attention to the lingering, material effects of racism, ableism, and sexism on living bodies, Morales observes that those affected by EI and MCS are often assumed to be primarily white and privileged, when in fact, “people of color worldwide suffer from much higher levels of exposure to toxins … Environmental illnesses affect many people in poor neighborhoods, but are described differently (as asthma, migraines, allergies, etc.) or never diagnosed at all” (2013: 62). Using exposure as a concept enables Morales to articulate a pathogenic model of MCS according to which a permeable, visceral body interacts with its environment in myriad ways, encountering, absorbing, and processing vast amounts of active matter through physiological mechanisms whose complexity necessarily exceeds any biomedical model or specialty. Clinical practice is thus understood by Morales as a set of provisional, partly improvised, and always limited techniques whose success (definable as the ability to cure, manage, and/or offer relief from a set of symptoms) depends on the specificity of a body’s shifting circumstances over time and across space. Temporality

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and spatiality are therefore two defining variables of chronic illness for Morales, who understands their effects on living bodies to encompass material, social, and psychological dimensions. All processes of healing take place for Morales within a context of political transformation and therefore encompass collective, interconnected, and external aspects, often in productive tension with the individualized, contained, internalized dimensions of pathogenesis. Disability rights activism features prominently in Kindling, alongside references to holistic and alternative health movements. As mentioned above, for Morales solidarity becomes paramount for the act of healing, an embodied practice of connection with others with similar political goals. Drawing from what she calls the “socialist” Cuban model of universal state-sponsored health care, Morales considers the social and emotional bonds of medical treatment. Moving the emphasis from the private sphere of the individual patient whose internal body has stopped working and must be fixed, brought back to normal(izing) productivity and vitality ready to be exploited, Morales advocates for a public, ecological sense of health as expansive and communal. Shifting the focus to the material specificity of certain bodies under certain conditions, Morales considers the mechanisms of healing in terms of plasticity, allowing for medical intervention and eventual transformation, including pharmaceutical or surgical intervention alongside the beneficial material effects of fresh air, clean housing, good nutrition, pleasurable physical activity, supportive social bonds, and political activism. Although Morales considers models of universal health care as “socialist,” in contrast with the rampant capitalism of the profit-driven US health care system, I find it important to note that in fact many countries offering universal access to health care to their citizens are also operating under a capitalist neoliberal economic logic and have in many cases historically profited from colonialist exploitation and genocide and/or from aggressive investment in global markets and extraction of natural resources (for example, Portugal, Germany, Canada, and Norway). Rather than abide by the dominant clinical notion that MCS and EI are “simply” psychological conditions to be treated accordingly via psychotherapeutic methods, Morales considers instead how psychological conditions might be in fact treated environmentally, physically, socially, and politically, as disorders of stress cannot be dissociated from the socioeconomic contexts within which they arise. Although Morales is mindful of the concern within MCS and EI communities about the harmful impact of dismissing those conditions as “merely” psychological, and thus as psychosomatic or even entirely “imaginary”, she prefers to take seriously how emotional and psychological factors might indeed play a role in MCS and EI pathogenic mechanisms, especially when understood in relation to systemic violence and trauma. For Morales, the promises of collective healing and political transformation depend on governments passing environmental regulations to protect human and nonhuman lives; raising awareness about the impact of disabilities and chronic illness on living bodies; and effectively disseminating resources, information, and experiences about staying alive.

THE PATHOLOGICAL ECOPOLITICS OF HOMESICK In her 1995 documentary Funny You Don’t Look Sick, singer and filmmaker Susan Abod documents her personal experiences with MCS and CFS. The documentary narrative is a fairly straightforward one, showing us her coping strategies for managing MCS chronic fatigue and her frustrating search for an environmentally safe apartment where she can avoid daily exposure to chemical substances that make her sick. In 2013, Abod released Homesick, another documentary about MCS, this

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time exploring Abod’s search for new, chemical-free safe housing across the American Southwest through a series of interviews with other MCS chronically ill people who had found (relatively) safe housing. The documentary is reminiscent of the road trip movie genre, including the motif of vignette-like encounters with a series of people and places, and Abod does manage to make her challenging search seem like an exciting adventure, in spite of the many setbacks and the documentary’s unavoidable somber moments. But Abod’s project is not a spontaneous or simply adventurous one, but rather a delicate and well-planned operation, where she finds and contacts patients recovering from MCS, making plans in advance to visit them in their homes, and traveling and sleeping in her chemical-free safe van with its interior completely covered in Denny foil, Abod’s default method for protecting herself from any chemical/toxic object or surface throughout the film.1 Unlike the more strictly autobiographical narrative of Funny You Don’t Look Sick (1995), Homesick (2013) offers a kind of ecologically minded geopolitical mapping of the Unites States territory, using the genres of the road trip movie and of the travelogue or travel documentary to think about chemically and environmentally induced chronic illness. What is most curious about the film is that although the group of individuals that Abod encounters clearly have very different socioeconomic backgrounds and MCS experiences, their accounts of MCS invariably focus on an externally located physical, material world (pesticides, paint fumes, land, nature, fresh air, plaster walls) rather than on their own body’s symptoms, which are relegated to the background. This may be in part because the people she meets are no longer gravely ill with MCS, having substantially recovered or being in the process of convalescence. Or it may be the case that, at least while on camera, it seems more productive to focus on causes (volatile chemical substances in an ecologically disordered world) than on their devastating consequences for an individual’s health and well-being, including loss of employment, family and friends, home and community. As Abod herself observes, patients with severe MCS symptoms living in complete isolation, or in hospitals and emergency rooms, are for obvious reasons not the people she is able to contact or interview. Furthermore, MCS patients have, as Abod also notes in her narration, an abnormally high suicide and mortality rate once the condition reaches a more severe level of immunodeficiency and conditions like cancer begin to develop, either directly related to an MCS clinical scenario or as accompanying conditions. As is sometimes the case with documentary film, Abod’s project functions to some extent as an ethnographic research study, organized around a narrative arc that uses the motif of the quest and mobilizing her encounters with other MCS sufferers to seek information for her own personal use but also to share it with the wider public, alongside with advocacy and activism around MCS visibility and awareness. In creating and circulating this archive of MCS experiences and events, Abod generates a document that can be referred to as a clinical and environmental case study. However, I propose that the films does far more than simply documenting and disseminating ethnographic data, by offering what might prove to be a workable model for conducting MCS clinical research beyond the standard challenge chambers and provocation tests dominating current MCS laboratory research. The scientific commitment to conducting research in a neutral, isolated system that can guarantee replicable methods and repeatable results is in fact introducing unintended variables into MCS studies by being carried out in regular laboratory environments,

1

Denny foil is a double-sided aluminum sheet frequently used as a protective barrier by chemically sensitive people.

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introducing exposure to chemical substances and spaces that is unintended, uncontrolled, and not monitored, eventually compromising the validity and applicability of test results. Since these exposures are scientifically imperceptible (Murphy 2006) in clinical studies, the impact they have on the bodies being studied is not detected nor measured. MCS provocation tests would likely be more reliable and revelatory if they were carried out precisely in the types of inert, isolated chemical-free environments that some of these recovering or recovered MCS patients have created for themselves. Perhaps more importantly, the patients for whom these new homes function in every sense as treatment (and prevention), with at least moderate success in managing, minimizing, or entirely eradicating MCS symptoms, could become clinical case studies for the environmental and immunological mechanisms involved in MCS scenarios. In the scenes where Abod uses Denny foil to cover the interior of the van she travels in (or to cover specific areas inside the several temporary apartments where she lives before she decides to embark on a quest to find a chemical-free safe home), the visual result is reminiscent of a tin spaceship, with its metallic futuristic look and science fiction aesthetics. This image contrasts starkly with the chemical-free safe homes of some of the people affected by MCS that Abod interviews, ranging from rustic style houses with terracotta tiles, bright rooms, and bare white walls, to the sparse minimalist wilderness of cabin woods made of logs, or unremarkable, humble rural homes surrounded by vegetable gardens. These in turn are a world away from the bleak, harsh surroundings of those living in tents and camping vans without heating, forced to survive the night in sleeping bags in an effort to avoid contact with harmful substances. The range of solutions for creating a chemical-free safe home encapsulate a vast spectrum of possibilities, always bound to socioeconomic privilege: from nostalgic replicas of rural life and luxurious tiled minimalism to the brutal hardship of homelessness and to the DIY handcrafted futurism of Abod’s improvised aluminum chambers. Just as MCS spreads, extends, and expands over beyond the containment of (human) embodiment, Abod embarks on an expedition through a vast geographical region, following and mapping MCS beyond the body, the clinic, the home, into the American Southwestern landscape. As patients reveal their stories, a cluster of words begins to take shape: breathing, vomiting, fever, chills, fainting, work, sick. Some of the stories involve loss of employment, loneliness, divorce and abandonment, a sick child who will not stop coughing through the night, a body that keeps breaking down, a fever you can’t shake off. All of them involve homelessness, in less or more privileged circumstances: a sense of betrayal as home becomes the place making you sick, followed by a series of motel rooms and friends’ couches, short-term rentals, tents, and trailer parks. And with it, a loss of personal belongings, often too toxic to keep, from clothes to mattresses, and of belonging—the constant urge to keep moving once the body gathers its strength, and the wild dream of living somewhere, anywhere, where you can breathe without strain and feel good again. The desire to recover a lost, past self permeates these narratives, and nearly every one of the people featured in the film tells a tale of radical change in their lives, moving from the city to the countryside, quitting jobs, giving away or leaving behind all belongings but the bare essentials, developing new social bonds and interests (in chemical-free architecture, scent-free spaces, and organic farming, for instance) and ultimately developing attachments to a new home, place, lifestyle, that does not make them sick. For most of the road trip, Abod is a guest and her interviewees are hospitable hosts. She often seems to stay overnight to enjoy the privilege of sleeping on a bed (in one occasion even sleeping on an outdoor bed to her great delight) and to enjoy homely pleasures like finally sitting on a couch

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without feeling sick. Abod is often elated by the materials used in the homes, exclaiming “I am not leaving!” while happily lounging on a hammock in a large home built from solid wood, which makes her comment wryly in the narration, “She must have had a lot of financial resources. That’s a lot of wood,” as she leaves a particularly luxurious home to continue her trip. While visiting a home with a wall painted with nontoxic plaster, an inert substance Abod touches over and over, she openly expresses her relief and excitement for being surrounded by such a neutral material. Even when one patient’s chemical-free safe housing solution is as humble and straightforward as a small camping tent, Abod and her interviewee share their enthusiasm about the fresh air and simple materials. Significantly, many of the patients describe taking the same steps that immunologist and allergist Randolph recommended sixty years ago, and which are still routinely followed within the much contested field of clinical ecology: move to a new home; get rid of all household chemicals; adopt a chemical-free (or chemically safe) lifestyle by minimizing exposure to chemical substances as much as possible, from food to clothing (Randolph 1962, 1966; Randolph and Moss 1980). Whether of their own volition or guided by an alternative health professional or regular doctor (several of the patients express their frustration with conventional medicine), Abod’s interviewees in Homesick managed MCS by moving to a new environment and finding new ways to belong. Abod herself, after several failed attempts, finally finds a home she can tolerate to settle in. The final sequence of the documentary shows us a selection of MCS patient photographs from around the world, and Abod concludes that increasing MCS awareness about the risks of environmental and chemical exposure may eventually result in better measures for managing what she calls the “chemical soup” we live in. In line with Rachel Carson and Theron Randolph, her recommendation for MCS management and treatment is thus entirely environmental, from personal access to chemical-free safe housing to legislation and regulations to control chemical production and use. The film closes with Abod smiling at the camera while standing by a water stream, and singing “Under Santa Fe Skies,” a song she wrote, as the credits begin to roll: “I woke up so weary this morning / Knowing what’s waiting for me. / I hope I can read the warnings / To find the refuge I seek / To find the home that I need” (Abod 2013).

(AUTO)PATHOGENESIS A large part of author and activist Peggy Munson’s body of work consists of critical and autobiographical writing about MCS and CFS. In her writing, Munson is committed to showing how MCS is hardly ever an isolated condition, but rather one that tends to overlap with various other diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions, with an array of accompanying symptoms that may range from extreme fatigue and chronic pain to neurological and psychological disturbances. Like many patients suffering from MCS, she has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, and CFS, about which she edited an anthology of essays by authors from a variety of expert and nonexpert backgrounds titled Stricken: Chronicles from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (2000). She is also the author of a free downloadable PDF about creating scent-free spaces, written with the needs of MCS sufferers in mind, while extending it to include the needs of those with depleted immune systems and allergic conditions like asthma. Her 2007 novel Origami Striptease was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and her erotic fiction is anthologized in various lesbian and queer anthologies, including several volumes of the annual Best Lesbian Erotica

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series. The same sensuous, intensely stimulating world of physical sensation of her fiction permeates her poetry, whether the subject matter is illness and pain or sexual desire and pleasure. In spite of the unexpected connections between these bodily and affective experiences, pain and pleasure do share common biochemical and neurological pathways, and in the case of MCS (and of the accompanying fibromyalgia and CFS Munson also suffers from), the increased sensitivity can foster enhanced sensation and stimulation. A persistent mixture of physical suffering and pleasure feed into the raw BDSM imaginary of Munson’s erotic fiction, as the author builds a deviant, deliciously perverse queer underworld populated with strict leather daddies and naughty girls entangled in erotic games and power-play scenes. The explicit sexuality of Munson’s erotica may seem to contrast starkly with her autobiographical writing about chronic illness, but in fact I would argue they share a capacity to articulate in vivid detail the intensity of embodied experience across a full spectrum of pain and pleasure, always in relation to other bodies and to the physical surroundings enveloping them. In a similar manner, Munson is able to navigate a broad range of literary styles, delivering unexpected spins on formulaic genre conventions. Navigating queer and disability communities, Munson’s autobiographical writing as activism deals with scientific studies, legislation, public policy, and health activism, often in relation to her disability and to her identity as a queer person. In a 2006 interview on Gender Talk Radio, she observed wryly that although she has not experienced much homophobia in the disability community, which tends to be queer-positive, she has experienced “rampant ableism” in LGBTQ+ communities (2006). Munson highlights during the interview how isolating and damaging MCS can be, excluding sufferers from public spaces, from courtrooms to homeless shelters and centers for victims of domestic violence, which are often not accessible for people with MCS and cannot accommodate the needs of MCS disabling conditions. This exclusion from public spaces also limits her own work as an author, as her public appearances including readings and interviews always take place over the phone, email, or video. While these mediated encounters allow Munson some degree of contact with the public, they also put her at a disadvantage, perhaps most notably when in 2007 the Lambda Awards simply failed to play a DVD of Munson reading from her finalist novel (ostensibly because her work was not properly “lesbian” due to her usage of male pronouns to refer to a sexual encounter between a female character and a trans/non-binary one). In line with the genre of the memoir, Munson’s work is intimate in tone, directly addressing her readers to establish an informal intimacy, especially well suited for the format of the blog. In fact, Munson has been able to actively intervene in the clinical discourses and practices circulating around MCS by using writing as activism to reach her public through her website, social media, and print and online publications. Munson moves among a number of genres, including poetry, essay, manifesto, and autobiography, and her accounts of MCS and its attending conditions are sensuous and persuasive, both dense and elastic, shifting effortlessly among genre conventions. The breadth of Munson’s input is especially astounding since MCS affects cognitive and neural functioning in addition to causing extreme physical depletion (and as I mentioned earlier, the MCS/ ME/fibromyalgia clinical scenario is a fairly common one). In her award-winning 2008 poetry collection Pathogenesis (a title referencing the production, or generation, of pathological conditions), body, doctor, pills, and writing collaborate in the co-creation of the experience of chronic illness. In “Scientific Method,” Munson describes various medical solutions to a variety of problems, inverting medical logic to interrupt the seamless symptom–diagnosis–treatment linear narrative, offering instead a clear articulation of the arbitrary,

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contingent nature of medical interventions. Munson contrasts the partly aleatory mechanisms of medical practice with its very specific, standardized responses to particular symptoms. The inflexible orthodoxy of institutionalized medicine becomes wordplay, as symptoms are juxtaposed with mismatched, ineffective or absurd treatments, with the use of backward slashes serving as an aesthetic strategy of estrangement that emphasizes even as it interrogates and decontextualizes medical and technical terms like “\Cardiomyopathy\” or “\Lymph Adenopathy\” that are part of the lexicons of MCS and of CFS. Some of the verses include the following: “\Encephalitis\. Your thoughts are oversized. Consult a deconstructionist.”; “\Fatigue\. Evolve to a marsupial as you stuff corpses in your anatomical seam.” and “\Diagnosis\ Contort your body into Sanskrit letters. Now you are a performance artist. Forever.” (Munson 2008: 5). Describing in her trademark poetic style the process of diagnosing the bartonella infection that accompanied Lyme disease and MCS/CFS symptoms, Munson writes that “finding the answer to my medical puzzle in Massachusetts was like trying to narrate a fabulist bestiary out of zoomorphic clouds. It was impossible to articulate” (“Strays: Part I” blog entry, May 2, 2010). In a 2016 blog entry, “How I Turned Up Missing” (dated May 25), Munson continues to advocate ACT UP style activism, focusing on protest to increase public awareness about MCS and CFS in order to demand funding for clinical trials, as well as better policies and legislation. Her goal is to raise awareness about these conditions as serious and life-threatening, and treating them as viral conditions with neurological expression, rather than as exclusively environmental or immunological conditions. Munson advocates for strong alliances and sharing of information and resources among patients, allies, and health professionals in protests, public interventions, and media appearances, using political pressure to push for changes in the law, especially disability law, and in medical practice. For example, Munson participated in the online project NO EXIT, where bedridden CFS patients took photographs of themselves, accompanied by a brief paragraph depicting the severely debilitating consequences of the condition. She has also written at length about the necessity of creating scentfree public spaces and events to ensure greater participation of MCS patients in the public sphere, and created the previously mentioned pamphlet describing how to achieve this. In the May 25 post, Munson chronicles the development of her illness by paying special attention to the onset of her “early, shadowy, pre-illness” quasi-symptoms from 1988 to 1992, during what is known as the “prodrome” period of a condition, especially of an infectious one: a set of diffuse, vague symptoms that may be signs of the onset of a serious illness, like in the case of HIV/AIDS, or more controversially the common flu. In AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Susan Sontag explores this lingering state before AIDS symptoms appear, where a person diagnosed as HIV positive is immediately classified as ill, or begins to see themselves as ill, even if their health is not yet impacted. Munson writes about the very opposite: undiagnosed and unspecified, her prodrome symptomatology left her bewildered and lethargic, too tired to work and yet trying to maintain a job at her local Wholefoods while attending college. Munson thus reconsiders how this prodrome period, alongside with her own and other MCS patients’ ensuing severe viral infection symptoms (like fever, aches, lowered immune function), might corroborate the MCS viral hypothesis according to which the condition might be part of a broader clinical scenario directly caused by a depressed immune system due to the impact of a viral infection, especially during the debilitating convalescence period or due to incomplete recovery. Regardless of whether MCS and its myriad symptoms, including those that overlap with CFS and with Lyme disease, are caused by a viral, neurological, or environmental immune response, I want to pause here

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to assess Munson’s rhetorical move in advocating for MCS as virally induced. First, I want to acknowledge the importance of seriously considering that hypothesis and of funding studies into the possible viral causes and/or underlying conditions of MCS so that patients can find relief and better care/management, and possibly even a cure. But alongside that acknowledgement, I also want to examine why placing MCS within the viral condition category, or at least in close contact with it, is so important for Munson. What’s at stake, what are the risks and potential gains, of shifting our understanding of MCS from an environmental chronic condition with possible management via chemical-free safe housing and lifestyle, to a viral infection, potentially curable through pharmaceutical intervention and/or boosting immune system functioning? Whereas MCS causes and treatments remain embedded in uncertainty and ambiguity, with inconclusive studies and indeterminable riddles, placing the condition with the biomedical archive of virology allows for increased determinacy, with viral data, models, concepts, and treatments now enacting MCS across various fields of clinical expertise. The questions shift to more familiar ones, such as “which viral infections might be more likely to produce MCS symptoms during convalescence/recovery?” or “how can a broad-spectrum MCS-specific retroviral treatment be developed?” It is easy to imagine which one an MCS patient might prefer, especially taking into consideration the level of industrialization and ecological calamity, not to mention economic and political upheaval, of our current times. On the other hand, environmentally and ecologically minded physicians, scientists, and health care practitioners warn against the “germ” theory of disease, or the belief that medical conditions are most often caused by specific strands of bacteria, parasites, or viruses, preferring to focus on how the toxins, molds, allergens, and chemicals present in increasingly polluted air, water, and earth affect the health of individuals, communities, and populations. Lack of employment options in rural areas, and thus lack of access to health insurance that can be provided by a full-time position conspire to keep MCS patients bound to their regular jobs until breaking point. Munson herself describes this situation, and the complications of life confined to a cabin in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Furthermore, since scent-free spaces and events are infrequent, and the use of toxic substances in cleaning and in garment production and housing is pervasive, environmental solutions to MCS are complicated, expensive, and socially isolating or even ostracizing. The viral move advocated by Munson would thus be highly beneficial and potentially life-saving for MCS patients, especially for those of lower SES, in demanding new clinical research approaches and treatments. Munson’s position embodies the cultural milieu of industrialized Western(ized) societies regarding expectations about how to address health, illness, and disability issues. Her viral theory of EI and MCS is in line with allopathic medicine’s tendency to find drug-based solutions for acute and chronic conditions, rather than considering the broader impact of environmental pathogens and social inequalities on physiological functioning. Conversely, placing MCS in a psychological context may deter any type of clinical research into its environmental, neurological, or viral pathology. Neurological MCS research, on the other hand, tends to study the pathogenic mechanisms of the condition and continue to open and pursue questions about its causes, which then become neurologically circuited. For example, when Munson writes about MCS-related cognitive impairment, especially in terms of memory loss and fogginess, she refers specifically to the “neurotoxicity” and the neurological impact of toxic chemicals. There is a flexibility and connectivity to neurological tissue, innate perhaps in its materiality and physiology, that invites expansive approaches to the study of physical conditions in relation to environmental factors. In a

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sense, the neurological system is participatory by nature, open to external stimuli and producing/ managing vast amounts of data, impulses, and physiological functions. The permeability and high complexity of neurological and environmental approaches, however, may not serve the urgent needs of MCS patients in life or death situations in quite the same way as the more specialized and determinate viral approach Munson advocates.

CONCLUSION My aim in this chapter has been to show how the ecopathologies of MCS spread across autobiographical narratives like Susan Abod’s documentary films, Peggy Munson’s poetry, and Aurora Levins Morales’s memoir. As is the case with so many other medical conditions, socioeconomic status continues to determine patients’ access to specialized care, diet, housing, assistance, and social support. Privilege thus determines the physical and social environment in which biochemical and neural pathways intersect, saving or expending energy and economic resources for patients and their communities. In an ecologically disordered system, what is spent is not compensated by what is gained. Within this energetic economy, chronic illness and disability become a matter of labor: how much extra energy in terms of metabolic and cellular activity is a body expending, alongside resources like water and nutrients, to enable an apparently unnecessary and possibly damaging immunological response? The circuitry of MCS thus suggests an economy of loss: losing housing and home, losing physical and mental faculties, and losing belongings and social ties. For patients, managing the ecopathogenic mechanisms of MCS is often a matter of being able to radically shift environmental conditions to avoid continued exposure to toxic substances. In the autobiographical MCS narratives I examined here, MCS management is also a matter of autobiographically (re)creating a healing ecology, where the chemically sensitive body can navigate the industrialized environments of late capitalism long enough to document its own disorderly capacity to endure, staying alive against all odds in a pathogenic Anthropocene.

REFERENCES Abod, S. (1995), Funny You Don’t Look Sick, Vimeo Download. Abod, S. (2013), Homesick, Vimeo Download. Ahmed, S. (2015), Keynote Address. Lesbian Lives Conference. Brighton, UK. Ahmed, S. (2017), Living a Feminist Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Amazon.com reviews of Safe (1995), [Film] Dir. Todd Haynes. Available online: https://www.ama​zon.com/ Safe-Todd-Hay​nes/dp/B01​MR0X​15Y/ref=sr_​1_1?crid=1IPMNA​AJ77​E78&keywo​rds=safe+todd+hay​ nes&qid=164 ​ 7 716​ 0 22&spre​ f ix=safe+todd+hay​ n es%2Caps%2C145&sr=8-1#cust​ o mer​ Revi​ e ws. Accessed March 19, 2022. Berg, M., and A. Mol, eds. (1998), Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques and Bodies, Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (2007), “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry, 33: 754–80. Carson, R. ([1962] 2002), Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chen, M. Y. (2012), Animacies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Diedrich, L. (2007), Treatments, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Diedrich, L. (2016), Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grossman, J. (2005), “The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling Good in Todd Haynes’s [Safe] and the American Cultural Landscape,” Other Voices, 2 (3). Jamieson, M. (2010), “Imagining ‘Reactivity’: Allergy within the History of Immunology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 41: 356–66. Mol, A. (2002), The Body Multiple, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moraga, C. (1994), Heroes and Saints & Other Plays, Albuquerque, NM: West End Press. Morales, A. L. (2013), Kindling: Writings on the Body, Cambridge, MA: Palabrera Press. Munson, P., ed. (2000), Stricken: Voices from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Binghamton, NY: The Hayworth Press. Munson, P. (2006), “Interview with Peggy Munson,” Gender Talk Radio Program #570, August 5. Munson, P. (2008), Pathogenesis, Chicago: Playback Books. Munson, P. (2010), “Strays: Part I,” Peggy Munson Blog, May 2. Available online: http://pegg​ymun​son.blogs​pot. com/2010/05/str​ays-since-may-is-lyme-dise​ase.html. Accessed March 19, 2022. Munson, P. (2016), “How I Turned Up Missing,” Peggy Munson Blog, May 25. Available online: http://pegg​ymun​ son.blogs​pot.de/2016/05/how-i-tur​ned-up-miss​ing.html. Accessed March 29, 2020. Murphy, M. (2006), Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Randolph, T (1962), Human Ecology and Susceptibility to the Chemical Environment, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Randolph, T. (1966), “Clinical Ecology as It Affects the Psychiatric Patient,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 12 (4): 245–54. Randolph, T., and R. Moss (1980), An Alternative Approach to Allergies, New York: Lippincott & Crowell. Sontag, S. (1989), AIDS and Its Metaphors, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Shildrick, M. (2009), Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Sexuality and Subjectivity, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Squier, S. (2003), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wendell, S. (1996), The Rejected Body. Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, New York: Routledge. Winder, C. (1994), “Multiple Chemical Sensitivities: Is There a Scientific Basis?,” International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, (66): 213–16.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Toward an Ethics of Transcorporeality and Public Health in Taiwanese Ecopathodocumentary1  ROBIN CHEN-HSING TSAI

INTRODUCTION: AIR TOXINS We live in an age of air pollution. The heavy use of fossil fuel–based energy and other technological products enables us to enjoy the convenience and comfort of life, but a rise in domestic vehicular traffic, industrialization, and dust storms from overseas has created one particular side effect—air pollution—a so-called “invisible killer” hazardous to both the environment and human health. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), air pollution is “the presence of contaminants or pollutant substances in the air that interfere with human health or welfare, or produce other harmful environmental effects” (quoted in Vallero 2007: 3). Similarly in Taiwan, air pollutants are commonly referred to as those “airborne substances sufficient to jeopardize directly or indirectly public health or the living environment” (“Air Pollution Control Act”). For decades, the problem of air pollution has been brushed aside in Taiwan, even when people smell something unpleasant or sense that something is amiss, especially toxic emissions from traffic exhaust or factory discharge. To better understand this mode of toxic existence requires some basic knowledge about the mechanism of airborne toxins, including the physical nature of the agent and the ways in which air pollutants come into contact with the receptor. For public health experts, major threatening air pollutants are particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), lead (Pb), O3, and other contaminants (Mannucci and Franchini 2017: 1). Among these air pollutants, the first five (PM, NO2, SO2, CO, Pb) are called “primary pollutants” because

Here I want to express my deep gratitude to Professors Scott Slovic, Scott Wen-Chang Chi, Guy Redmer, and Darrel Doty for their insightful comments on this chapter. 1

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they are “directly emitted into the atmosphere from various emission sources,” whereas the last one (O3) is classified with “secondary pollutants” due to the fact that it results from potential “chemical processes involving [other] atmospheric constituents” (Mallik 2019: 7; my emphasis). Out of these pollutants, particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5), produced in large part from power plants, factories, and city traffic, is the most notorious. The pernicious effects of PM2.5 induced by air pollution are by far the most deleterious, and the health consequences develop too slowly to be noticed. Sometimes it takes years or decades to manifest the symptoms I will describe below. We can put it this way: the more PM2.5 there is in a city, the shorter the life expectancy will become for its residents (Kelly and Fussel 2015: 633). The sources of airborne toxins can be categorized into two main types: stationary and mobile. Stationary source refers to “any standing structure e.g. building, stack, or set-up which emits or may emit an air pollutant,” while mobile source refers mainly to vehicle exhaust from automobiles, cars, motorcycles, and so on (Mallik 2019: 8). Sad to say, the harmful effects these toxins exert on the human body, vegetation, animals, the atmosphere, and the planet are extensive and varied. In general, there are five major health problems caused by air pollution: (1) allergies; (2) strokes; (3) myocardial infarction; (4) lung cancer; and (5) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. To raise consciousness of these illnesses associated with the public health impact of air pollution, a growing number of documentaries, whose themes focus on the intersection of environmental health and public health, debate whether or not we can find an acceptable balance between ecology and economy. Since human health is embedded in environmental health, we might want to refer to this type of documentary as “ecopathodocumentary,” an amalgamation of “ecopathography” and “documentary,” meaning “documentary about experiences of illness caused by airborne toxins.” The idea of ecopathodocumentary draws on Anne H. Hawkins’s “ecopathography,” which designates “a personal experience of illness with larger environmental, political, or cultural problems” (1999: 129). For Hawkins, ecopathography is a form of autobiography that recounts a person’s experience of illness or disease resulting from a toxic environment. The crux of these ecopathographical writings is to provide “a unique ‘window’ into the experience of their patients” (Hawkins 1999: 129). Interestingly, a plethora of documentaries articulates expressed environmental concerns, such as devastation of the land, grief over the loss of a sense of self in relation to place, and loss of health due to pollution, all of which reverberate in the mind so as to invite action on the part of the viewers. Ecocritics such as Rayson K. Alex, Susan Deborah, and Helen Hughes, to name only a few, have used the ecodocumentary or eco-doc to describe “a complex negotiation between the issues raised by environmental awareness and the demands of documentary film-making” (Alex and Deborah 2016: vii; Hughes 2014: 10). As Scott Slovic aptly argues, “awareness” means “watchfulness” or “mindfulness,” which is in line with Thoreau’s famous sentence: “we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake” (Slovic 1992: 3). His observation hints at a possibility of change in the future when encountering air pollution, if citizens are aware of the connections between pollution and public health. Following the ecocritical insights of these ecoscholars, I attempt to explore how air pollution, as one important public health problem, is represented by ecopathodocumentaries in the context of the environmental and health humanities, particularly focusing on the lives of the local residents or the victims who suffer significant pain due to their exposure to ambient air pollutants. Ecopathodocumentaries differ from ecodocumentaries not in content but in degree. Like most documentaries, ecodocumentaries aspire to be politically transformative. For example, Gongliao,

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How Are You? 貢寮你好嗎 is an ecodocumentary directed by Suxin Tsui 崔愫欣 to report a protest in Gongliao against the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in 2004. The documentary tells how people in Gongliao led an antinuclear movement against the government’s construction of the largest nuclear power plant in Taiwan (Lupke 2012: 157). In a similar vein, ecopathodocumentaries also endeavor to raise ecoconsciousness, but they emphasize the overlap and entanglement of environmental health and human health so as to advocate for new environmental policies and improve health conditions for both humans and nonhumans. In recent years, the health humanities have developed into an important cross-disciplinary field that integrates literature, biology, medicine, and ethics. In contradistinction to traditional medical humanities that highlights the importance of “the medical” in the humanities, the health humanities attempt to be more inclusive and encompass stories of the caregivers, the nurses, or the patients. Critics such as Paul Crawford, Craig Klugman, Terese Jones, Rebecca Garden, and Delese Wear promulgate the importance of the health humanities because it tries to think outside the box to accommodate graphic narratives; these are memoirs of caregivers, health professionals, nurses, and other noncanonical literary outputs (Crawford 2015; Jones, Wear, and Friedman 2016). Thus, the health humanities is aptly defined as “an interdisciplinary field concerned with understanding the human condition of health and illness in order to create knowledgeable and sensitive health care providers, patients, and family caregivers” (Klugman and Lamb 2019: 421– 2). As an important subset of the health humanities, the issue of public health, as represented in these ecopathodocumentaries, equally merits ecocritical explorations. For me, the nature of the ecopathodocumentary is close in spirit to Félix Guattari’s holistic ecosophy—mental, social, and environmental—whose ethico-political vision endows vulnerable subjects with new meanings (Guattari 2000: 28). To illustrate the important public health advocacy that can be done via film, in this chapter, I analyze the negative effects of air pollution on human health in three Taiwanese ecopathodocumentaries— Scott Wen-Chang Chi’s 紀文章 The Poisoned Sky 遮蔽的天空 (2011), Po-Lin Chi’s 齊柏林 Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above 看見台灣 (2013), and Hsiao-Li Wang 王小隸 et al.’s Particulate Matters 浮塵之島 (2019)—which bespeak a seeming airpocalypse by sharing the uncanny lived experience of those abiding in the shadow of smog. In these films, the filmmakers look at environmental problems from a health perspective. Scott Chi criticizes the Taichung Coal Power Plant for the increased incidence of cancer in the greater central Taichung area, while Po-Lin Chi conveys the message that environmental health is a major issue in Taiwan and that humans need to think about how they can coexist with the nonhuman. Wang et al.’s Particulate Matters consists of three narratorial voices: a university student, a cancer patient, and an information engineer. First, I examine the problem of air pollution in Taiwan as one important environmental concern coming from four key sources: industrialization, factory emissions, urban toxic gas, and air pollution from China. Then I look at these documentaries in light of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality” in conjunction with Rob Nixon’s “slow violence,” a term critiquing how corporate decision making can also bring about environmental disruption to those living downwind or dwelling in the epicenter of pollution. In addition, this type of materialist analysis of public health speaks for those people living under the poisoned sky, especially those who are exposed to PM2.5 and other forms of pollution that affect their health and well-being. Finally, I conclude with the observation that research in ecopathodocumentary can be an important addition to the study of the health humanities.

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ENVIRONMENTAL AND HEALTH COMMUNICATION The Poisoned Sky is an ecopathodocumentary by Scott Wen-Chang Chi, a director based in Lukang, Taichung, who chronicles the government’s top-down approach to environmental problems and how local famers fight against air pollution for personal and public health. Originally titled The Covering Sky, which conveys a dual meaning—both “covering” (the story of the sky) and being “covered with” (air pollution in the sky)—Scott Chi’s new title The Poisoned Sky challenges the taken-for-grantedness of air pollution and explores its impact on human health and environmental health. Being an ecopathodoucumentary, Scott Chi records farmers launching a local grassroots movement against air pollution that plagues the farm community, thus pitting themselves against a local corporation and the local government. Being an alternative to mainstream media discourse, Scott Chi’s ecopathodocumentary is a voice from the margin for social intervention. In addition to The Poisoned Sky, Scott Chi’s other documentaries on river bank cementation and unwitting government policies invite us to think, feel, and understand their detrimental effect on the web of life that is intertwined with the environment.2 In The Poisoned Sky, Scott Chi presents the voice of the local farmers who have endured health issues caused by pollution for more than a decade. Their “useless suffering” has reached a tipping point since their bodies have been serving as the test site for toxic air pollutants. However, some government officials ignore the local farmers’ reports of illness—an ecosomatic space against which Chi is fighting. At the outset of the documentary, a slogan reads, “The government should serve the people first,” which carries an ironic overtone for the farmers who attend the public hearing. As an observer of this historical event, Scott Chi interviews those farmer victims who suffer the loss of crops and harvests: “Baskets and baskets of clams are dead before harvesting” principally due to air pollution from the Taichung Coal Power Plant. Scott Chi tries to bring eco-logic to bear against the energy crisis, food chain, and environmental justice so that he can communicate with the general public (the villagers), the corporation, and the central government. In addition to the loss of the crops, air pollution also results in acid rain. When a farmer says, “A drizzle is even worse than a heavy rain,” his tone conveys a sense of despair and hopelessness. For more than a decade, the villagers and farmers have been forced to accept the huge losses triggered by the CO2 and dioxin emissions from the Taichung Coal Power Plant. According to the China News, the CO2 emissions from the Taichung Coal Power Plant are some of the highest in the world, and its air pollutants have plagued the farm crops and livelihood of the local residents. As a result, they complain about the inefficiency of the civil servants who are either blind to all the health problems or ignorant of all the myriad downstream consequences and complications of these environmental ills. In the documentary, then president Ma attended a nongovernmental organization’s (NGO) Environmental Meeting on industrial policies in 2008, but no clear environmental policy was enacted to cope with the stalemate over the environmental struggle between the local people and the government. For the local people, it is absurd for those politicians who discuss CO2 reduction to be taking off of their suit jackets in an air-conditioned room, while stating that air pollution is purely an invention or a false alarm. The local people find themselves heartbroken about the way government officials are dealing with air pollution. In addition to The Poisoned Sky, Scott Chi has also produced many other ecodocumentaries. Among them, Water in Taichung 水台中 laments the separation of water and city due to cementation of the river banks in Taichung. 2

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Unlike Scott Chi’s The Poisoned Sky, Po-Lin Chi’s Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above relies upon visual effects to inspire the viewers to reflect on the environment in Taiwan. Po-Lin Chi, a renowned aerial photographer, won the best documentary prize in the 50th Golden Horse Awards in 2013. In the documentary, he shoots not only the natural beauty of mountains, rivers, forests, rice paddies, and the ocean but also pollution of all sorts in Taiwan. Both Scott Chi and Po-Lin Chi are observers of the ecosystem of Taiwan, but Scott Chi’s ecopathodocumentary is, in a sense, more participatory than Po-Lin Chi’s detached and disinterested bird’s-eye image. However, this does not mean Po-Lin Chi is a deep ecologist, concerned only with the environment and not the people living in it. To become cognizant of Po-Lin Chi’s art of documentary, let me cite his notebook My Heart, My Eye, Beautiful Taiwan 我的心，我的眼，看見台灣： In all the aerial shots ever taken, the photographed mountain and river scenery will never be able to speak regardless of whether it is the majestic Jade Mountain, or the beautiful glistening waves of Penghu Island. In all those pictures seldom do people appear. These aerial shots without people in point of fact are ultimately concerned with people. I do not see only how mankind destroys the environment but also what really is the focus of concern—how does mankind with limited resources co-exist with the rest of the world? This is the viewpoint behind what I want to voice in my documentary Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above. (Chi 2013a: 148; my translation) The above quote portrays Po-Lin Chi’s core idea running through all his documentaries: He is not only concerned with “how mankind destroys the environment” but also cares about the ways “mankind with limited resources co-exists with the rest of the world.” Po-Lin Chi notes that Taiwan is famous for its natural beauty, but some places are disfigured. Po-Lin Chi is very fond of shooting mountains and rivers because they are the progenitors of all living things (Chi 2013b: 10), but he would like to catch the moment when environmental devastation becomes manifest, especially in the wake of natural disaster, such as typhoons, landslides, or other environmental hazards. As an ecologically minded filmmaker, Po-Lin Chi’s uses the documentary to invite the viewers to reflect on the (ab)use of the land. Interestingly, only on one special occasion does he directly discuss the problem of air pollution in Taiwan. The voice-over comments, Playing the tune of economic development, Taiwan has established industrial zones everywhere: one chimney stack after another has been erected far and wide. When the land has been completely saturated, we then compete with the sea—the original beautiful seacoast has become littered with mirage-like islands of plastic refuse floating in the sea. The 250-meter-tall giant smokestack is the marker of Taichung’s Coal Power Plant, the world’s biggest coal-fired power plant. Only by means of that can the industrial and civilian demand for electrical power be met. But the quantity of its carbon dioxide emissions ranks first in the world. In order to deliver electricity to where it’s needed, we have built one high voltage tower after another. (Chi 2013a; my translation) In Po-Lin Chi’s documentary, only scant attention is paid to the problems of air pollution, but it is worthwhile to include this filmic text in that the passage I quote serves as a transition between The Poisoned Sky and Particulate Matters, both of which go into greater detail analyzing the effects of toxic air pollutants on human health. The above commentary indicates that Po-Lin Chi is equally attentive to air pollution in Taiwan: chimney stacks are everywhere and smoke looms large in the sky coming from the Taichung Coal Power Plant. Here we also find in Po-Lin Chi’s commentary an

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echo of Scott Chi’s treatment of air pollution in Taichung. Besides filming the smog hovering in the sky, Po-Lin Chi exposes the contaminants from factory discharge, urbanization, and industrialization in the land, the rivers, and the oceans. Similar to how Po-Lin Chi arouses the public’s conscience via film, Hsiao-Li Wang’s documentary, Particulate Matters, analyzes PM2.5 in both Kaohsiung and Taipei to drive ecocritical discussions of the problem of public health in Taiwan. Structurally, Wang’s ecopathodocumentary consists of three narratives of public health: the story of a university student, the story of a cancer patient, and the story of an information engineer. As air pollution has become part of everyday life in her hometown for almost a decade, Ginnie no longer can keep silent. Ginnie, one of the narrators and protestors who lives in Fengbitou, Kaohsiung, complains that her hometown is besieged by factories and chimneys, noting, Industrial zones surround our neighborhood. The 10 Major Construction Projects were launched 40 years ago, besieging this area with coastal industrial zones. Steel, power, petrochemical, and metal manufacturers have come here to build nearly 500 factories with more than 800 chimneys. The plants emit more than 120 kinds of pollutants. At least 23 of them are proven carcinogens. (Wang et al. 2019; my translation) According to the directorial voice-over, regulations state that there should be “at least a 5-km green belt between an industrial zone and a residential area,” but in Fengbitou, there stands merely “a road” in between residential areas and factories, which is against the law. This poses unimaginable threats to public health. The benzene level is the highest in Taiwan. Ginnie finds herself grief-stricken and is upset about the government’s inability or unwillingness to solve these urgent problems, especially the suggestion that “the entire town move away.” Still worse, she is even asked to provide relevant evidence to prove that air pollution is actually harmful to the health of the local residents. For her, air pollution as a form of slow violence causes lifelong health disruption, but the effects are so gradual that “it is hard to find long-term evidence of factory pollution’s impact.” Sad to say, the local residents are already used to the “fear and trembling” of living under the smokestacks; their attitude toward air pollution turns from “feistiness” to “passivity”; they even agree to move out to start a new life elsewhere. Similar to Scott Chi’s suggestion that there is a lot of disagreement between the local people and the local government, Wang’s documentary portrays Ginnie as an ecological warrior who argues against the relocation suggested by the government. The city government’s “negotiation first, planning later” sounds like empty promises to her ears. It is equally unbelievable when the city government has promised to communicate with the locals, but nothing substantial is achieved because there is no common ground and few meetings are conducted for further clarification about relocation. Both Scott Chi and Hsiao-Li Wang seek environmental communication in a way that is similar to the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s definition of ecological communication as “any communication about the environment that seeks to bring about a change in the structures of the communicative system that is society” (1989: 28). However, there seems to be no (ecological) communication in the government’s interaction with Ginnie and the locals because there is no change in structure and the government has no plan to improve the future environmental degradation. In Wang’s hands, Ginnie, unlike the local residents, is ecologically enlightened and cares about air pollution in her hometown of Fengbitou. She hopes to educate the locals to cultivate a new sense of place and love of their home so that they can make a collective decision regarding whether to stay or move out. Together with her friends, she decides to play movies about the history and past glory

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of her hometown. Instead of being resigned to the idea that “our town is full of chimneys,” Ginnie wants to transform the people’s mindset and “reenchant” her hometown so that they can have a collective cultural memory. In addition, she comments that the five chimneys of the Taichung Coal Power Plant (as depicted in Scott Chi’s The Poisoned Sky) should not be regarded as five incense sticks protecting the local people but as “machines in the garden” disrupting the pastoral peace of the villagers in central Taiwan. Wang’s second story revolves around Selena, aged thirty-seven, a victim of air pollution as well as a cancer patient. She is undergoing chemotherapy and wondering why she got the big C. Selena doesn’t smoke, nor does she have a family history of cancer. Her only hobby is jogging outdoors. According to her doctor, Selena might be an urban victim of PM2.5 as her daily routine followed a pattern: she used to go out to work every day and was exposed to all kinds of car exhaust and toxic pollutants. In the documentary, public health expert Dr. Yi-Fong Su conjectures that it is probably PM2.5 that is the culprit: PM2.5 … enters through our windpipes. So small is this particulate matter that it can pass through alveoli and enter the micro-vessels, affecting the entire system of blood circulation. One type of immune cell in the body is called a “macrophage,” which is responsible for picking up garbage. We’ve found out that, after swallowing PM2.5, macrophages can’t decompose particulate matter, but keep it in themselves. Macrophages get sick in this way, and PM 2.5 can still enter the circulation system [now unimpeded by the immune response]. It will then produce cytokine or inflammatory cytokine reactions. The inflammatory substances stimulate the human body so much that genes can mutate, and cancer can accordingly take shape. (Wang 2019; my translation) Of all the air pollutants, particulate matter is most responsible for human mortality and morbidity (Mallik 2019: 12). For Selena and for doctors, particulate matter is the major carcinogenic risk factor. But PM2.5 has other severe health impacts as well. Wang’s third story is told by a parent, Dr. Chen, who cares about the impact of air pollution on the health of his son, who is heavily allergic to ambient air pollution. Majoring in information engineering, he started doing research on air pollution to ferret out a way to help his son avoid allergens. To learn about the air quality near where he lives, Dr. Chen looked into public databases and found, to his surprise, that the EPA had set up numerous monitoring stations, which only display the general air status of a large region. To improve the situation, he devised a new microsensor installed in his Air Box air filtration system to monitor PM2.5 so that he could offer a real-time air status report of their daily surroundings. Dr. Chen later puts this idea into practice so that more students can benefit from his technological fix. By setting up Air Boxes in primary schools and in high schools, more students can read his microsensor and decide whether or not to stay in the classroom. In Wang’s Particulate Matters, Ginnie’s fight against air pollution in Fengbitou, Selena’s narrative of illness, and Dr. Chen’s invention of Air Boxes indicate that air pollution is an urgent public health issue that affects real lives. As such, it needs to be carefully monitored and regulated.

PUBLIC HEALTH, SLOW VIOLENCE, AND THE ETHICS OF TRANSCORPOREALITY The three ecopathodocumentaries—Scott Wen-Chang Chi’s The Poisoned Sky, Po-Lin Chi’s Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, and Hsiao-Li Wang’s Particulate Matters—all look at air pollution as

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a public health issue and address the local government’s blindness to the smog hovering in the sky. This type of air pollution consisting of dioxins, PM2.5, and other pollutants reminds us of Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence”: By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space. … We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. (Nixon 2011: 2) “Slow violence” refers to a kind of “violence” done imperceptibly to humans and nonhumans, a violence that is invisible to human eyes. In fact, the three ecopathodocumenties are all concerned with slow violence. Scott Chi’s rich description of three major toxins—dioxins, CO2, and acid rain that results from CO2—fits into Nixon’s prognosis in that human afflictions and the long-term effects of air pollution on human health, environmental health, and well-being are forms of slow violence. Similarly, Po-Lin Chi’s aerial view of Taiwan also poignantly records the slow violence done to the environment. In Wang’s ecopathodocumentary, Gennie, Selena, and Dr. Chen’s son are victims of air pollution. As Nixon aptly comments, the locals are “confronted with the militarization of both commerce and development,” and “impoverished communities are often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience” (2011: 4), all of which generates a tug-of-war between regional and national interests. In Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo points out that the human body is entangled with its environment and that, as Moira Gatens states, it “can be composed, recomposed and decomposed by other bodies” (Alaimo 2010: 13). For Alaimo, human bodies are porous and vulnerable; thus, she coins the term “transcorporeality” to describe “the interconnections, interchanges, and transits” between human bodies and the more-than-human world, inviting us to “think across bodies” in that our body is our point of view (2). Since transcorporeality is an interface that connects human bodies with “bodily natures” (such as “nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors”), the bond between humans and their environment becomes affective and interrelational (2). Seen in Alaimo’s perspective, Nixon’s logic of slow violence is transcorporeality: all the toxins, chemicals, and air pollutants will affect human health and induce (dis)ability. Thus, the ethics of transcorporeality denotes vulnerability, demanding an ethic of care. In Scott Chi’s ecopathodocumentary, the local people care about food, pollution, and the deterioration of the environment. To protect food and the environment, they are forced to protest in the streets. For them, the dioxin fallout caused by the Taichung Coal Power Plant can easily accumulate on the leaves of plants, fruits, vegetables, and trees. Similarly, if water and animals, such as ducks and cows, are exposed to toxic air pollutants, the animals will become ill as will the humans who eat them, thus causing many health problems, such as malfunction of the liver, metabolism, and cardiovascular system as well as hypertension, miscarriage, still birth, fetal anomaly, retardation, and cancer. The farmers are the victims who bear the brunt of our reckless industrial push. In addition, CO2 and toxic rain are likely to kill the clams and pollute the crops; they are also likely to befoul the land over a wide area because the “pollutants can travel thousands of kilometers in the

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atmosphere. Those that are transformed into sulfuric and nitric acid aerosols are incorporated into precipitation, which eventually makes contact with the earth’s surface.” One of the farmers who is well aware of the mechanism of air pollution notes that rain water will be polluted and the food chain will be disrupted if we don’t stand up to fight against it: You know what? Clams and dairy products affected by air pollution and dioxin from Taichung Power Plant have an impact on the health of the local people. In addition, rice is also polluted and vegetables become inedible. Because of this, the local alfalfa is contaminated, and we have to import grass from abroad. (Chi 2008; my translation) However, the local government still fails to recognize the importance of environmental health, a situation similar to Luhmann’s observation that “only in exceptional cases … can it [society] start reverberating, can it be set in motion” (1989: 15). What Luhmann emphasizes here is that the structural coupling between the social system and the environment does not guarantee “point-forpoint corrections” (16). In Luhmann’s hands, the relationship between society and environment is asymmetrical. It is a one-way approach to environmental and health communication since society is the boss, not the environment. Alaimo’s multimodal concept of transcorporeality pushes past the arbitrariness of the Luhmannian ecological communication, wishing instead to cultivate ethical subjects “rooted in the ordinary practices of everyday life” (2016: 2). For Alaimo, subject and object are interbeing, full of “risk, harm, culpability and responsibility” (3). Alaimo’s transcorporeality parallels that of Charles Elton’s food chain, which is “built up into complex food-cycles for a whole community” (Elton 1933: 32), especially the preservation of the living organism in a hostile milieu. Unlike Luhmann’s autopoietic social system, Alaimo’s transcorporeality is helpful in expanding the human and morethan-human realms to encompass environmental and health problems. In Scott Chi’s ecopathodocumentary, due to the dioxins contaminating the local Pangola Grass in the Changhua district, dioxins were also found in milk products. Consequently, dairy farmers had to feed milk cows with imported alfalfa from Australia and Bermuda grass from Southern California. Dioxins dissolve in fat but not in water. Thus, if a man consumes food contaminated by dioxins, the toxins will be carried into the body via the liquid, then dissolve in fat and accumulate in the body, retaining them afterwards. Because absorbed dioxins cannot be discharged in water, they become carcinogenic, and the ensuing symptoms of chronic diseases will surface. In addition, they can have impact across generations: nursing mothers can pass dioxins to their babies. Through Alaimo’s transcorporeal inter- or intra-action between living organisms and their environment, these toxic pollutants are at once inside and outside the human body. Historically, the meaning of “environment” has undergone many changes. It refers to a place where a living organism can register its experience and existence.3 From a mechanical perspective, the relationship between a living organism and its environment follows the principle of “action and reaction” because the living organism is forced to adapt to the new environment. From a biological perspective, the relationship between each organism and its environment is mathematical in that a set of values are designed to perform a certain function. For example, “fish don’t live their life themselves, it is the river that makes them lead it” (quoted in Canguilhem 2001: 12). In this The discussions here follow French philosopher George Canguilhem’s seminal article “The Living and Its Milieu” (2001: 7–25). 3

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regard, the behavior of an organism (the fish) is subject to change according to a set of variables (the river). From a vitalist perspective, however, both the living organism and the environment are agentic and co-constitutive, capable of impacting and complementing one another. However, living organisms can malfunction and die in their interaction, adaptation, and intervention with the environment. Although life tends to preserve itself by self-transformation, that transformation could become pathological and symptomatic. Cancer itself is a transformation of cells in response to environmental conditions within the body, and human beings, like other living organisms or entities, fall ill due to environmental pollution via air, water, food, land, and toxic waste. From a materialist perspective, perhaps Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality can be a possible solution to the binary/dualist relation between society and its environment. In other words, transcorporeality is ethically, socially, culturally, and politically transformative. Transcorporeality brings all the elements in a system into play with each other. Within the cycles of a food chain, subject and object are interactive or intra-active—human and nonhuman fight for their lives. Similarly, the government’s top-down approach to constructing a power plant without properly consulting the people impacted by it galvanized local protesters to fight for their health and life. For them, personal health, community health, and environmental health are as important as economic growth. They also complain about the density of power plants in the Taichung-Changhua area that are making the lives of the fishermen and farmers miserable. Agriculture used to support industry, but now industry has pushed agriculture aside with little thought for the farmers, which reflects society’s biases against underprivileged classes. Consequently, the local struggle turned into a public event promoting fairness, as health is a human right that belongs to everyone. Ecocritics such as Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein put it rightly: Environmental justice movements call attention to the ways disparate distribution of wealth and power often leads to correlative social upheaval and the unequal distribution of environmental degradation and/or toxicity. (2002: 5) By appealing to social and environment justice movements, the farmers in the TaichuangChanghua area are willing to battle for the public health, ecological integrity, and well-being of their communities. In response, the corporation pretends to show good will by subsidizing cultural events: “They sponsor all kinds of associations, borough offices and town offices” to win the hearts of the local people. However, due to the persistent critical voice of the local residents, the government eventually decided not to build a new coal-powered plant. Unlike Scott Chi’s treatment of environmental activism, Wang’s documentary adopts different strategies, such as peaceful social protest, the discourse of disease, and alternative thinking, to help the public gain a greater understanding of the lung cancer patient’s experience of illness, especially how it affects the patient and their family. In Taiwan, the pollutant standards index (PSI) refers to six air pollutants, one of them being particulate matter. In the documentary, Dr. Shihsian Lin and Dr. Changchuan Chan, two experts in public health, caution that particulate matter is highly carcinogenic: if the diameter of any particulate matter is over 10, our nostril hairs can filter it, but pollutants such as PM2.5 can easily pass through to our lungs then into our blood vessels, creating problems with the cardiovascular system and causing heart disease, lung cancer, and liver cancer. As a toxic object, PM2.5 is itself an actant that has material force, capable of making an impact on its objects, human and nonhuman. These toxic objects, such as CO2, dioxins, acid rain, and PM2.5, have become a public health event; they should not be regarded merely as “matters of fact” but

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as “matters of concern,” if we look at these toxic objects in terms of Alaimo’s transcorporeality, Elton’s food chains, and Bruno Latour’s actor–network system of interobjectivity. The three ecopathodocumentaries use narratives of illness to convey the experience of those who are living at risk and in pain when facing air pollution. They show how narratives of illness invite reflection about the importance of public health issues in the field of health humanities. As C.-E. A. Winslow’s well-crafted definition shows, public health is the science and the art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts for the sanitation of the environment, the control of community infections, the education of the individual in principles of personal hygiene, the organization of medical and nursing services for the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease, and the development of the social machinery which will ensure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health. (1920: 30) In other words, fighting air pollution must be a collective effort within communities. With this understanding, the “public” part of public health cannot be underestimated. Public health recognizes the risk of pollutants entering the interconnected web of life and causing “ecosickness.”4 Both human and environment are vulnerable when exposed to toxic objects. The ethics of transcorporeality thus provides a chance to take preventive measures adequate for the maintenance of human and environmental health due to the mutually shared precariousness.

CONCLUSION Air pollution, in the form of either smoke or smog, is now recognized as a common public health problem, especially in light of the nexus of place, air, and health. By way of the three ecopathodocumentaries discussed above, we gain insight into how the problem of air pollution can be addressed. In sync with environmental and social justice, public health is not about doomsday warnings but about environmental and health communication. It is inherently ethico-political in its process and structurally linked with government policies. If government-run public health systems fail, social and environmental justice movements stand in for them since health is a human right. It is suggested that the air we breathe should meet the air quality guidelines of the Air Pollution Control Act in Taiwan. Thus, public health is grounded not in biases but in science. In these ecopathodocumentaries, particulate matter, dioxins, and CO2 are associated with a broad number of disease outcomes, and the study of ecopathodocumentaries can convince policy makers to legislate for cleaner air so that we can move toward a healthier environment. Cultivating a sense of ecoknowledge and the right attitude and behavior toward public health, Scott Chi, Po-Lin Chi, and Wang are turning the tide of industrial growth by inviting us to see how air pollution is represented in many narratives of illness and other forms of literary and cultural production. Improving air quality might be a considerable challenge, but these ecopathodocumentaries teach us to reopen the “black box” of air pollution for further literary scrutiny at the crossroads of public In her influential book Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014), Heather Houser refers to a special type of fiction that “joins experiences of ecological and somatic damage through narrative affect” so as to generate the ecological thought (2). 4

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health and ecocriticism. This line of inquiry might be an important addition to the study of the health humanities.

REFERENCES Adamson, J., M. M. Evans, and R. Stein, eds. (2002), The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Alaimo, S. (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, S. (2016), Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Alex, R. K., and S. S. Deborah, eds. (2016), Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Canguilhem, G. (2001), “The Living and Its Milieu,” Grey Room, 3: 6–31. Chi, P.-L. (2013a), Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, DVD. Chi, P.-L. (2013b), My Heart, My Eye, Beautiful Taiwan 我的心，我的眼，看見台灣, Taipei: Yuan Shen. Chi, S. W.-C. (2008), The Poisoned Sky, DVD. Elton, C. (1933), The Ecology of Animals, New York: Methuen. Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton, New York: Continuum. Hawkins, A. H. (1999), “Ecopathography,” Western Journal of Medicine, 171: 127–9. Houser, H. (2014), Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, New York: Columbia University Press. Hughes, H. (2014), Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the Twenty-First Century, New York: Intellect. Kelly, F. J., and J. C. Fussel (2015), “Air Pollution and Public Health: Emerging Hazards and Improved Understanding of Risk,” Environmental Geochemistry and Health, 37: 631–49. Klugman, C., and E. G. Lamb, eds. (2019), Research Methods in Health Humanities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (1996), “Interobjectivity,” Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1 (4): 228–45. Luhmann, N. (1989), Ecological Communication, trans. J. Bednarz Jr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lupke, C. (2012), “Documenting Environmental Protest: Taiwan’s Gongliao Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and the Cultural Politics of Dialogic Artifice,” in S. L.-c. Lin and T.-l. D. Sang (eds.), Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and methods in New Documentaries, 155–82, New York: Routledge. Mallik, C. (2019), “Anthropogenic Sources of Air Pollution,” in P. Saxena and A. Naik (eds.), Air Pollutions: Sources, Impacts and Controls, 6–25, Oxfordshire: CABI. Mannucci, P. M., and M. Franchini (2017), “Health Effects of Ambient Air Pollution in Developing Countries,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14: 1–8. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Slovic, S. (1992), Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Vallero, D. (2007), Fundamentals of Air Pollution, 4th ed. New York: Elsevier. Wang, H.-Li, C.-Y. Ke, T.-J. Lin, and T.-L. Tsai (2019), Particulate Matters, DVD. Winslow, C.-E. A. (1920), “The Untilled Fields of Public Health,” Science, 51 (1306): 23–33.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Slow Violence, Environmental Toxins, and Systemic Racism: Revisiting Lorde’s Cancer Journals in the Twenty-First Century HEATHER LEIGH RAMOS

Forty years after Audre Lorde’s 1980 publication of her Cancer Journals, detailing her own experiences with breast cancer and a mastectomy, breast cancer continues to represent one of the leading causes of cancer deaths among women (Williams and Thompson 2017: 34). Additionally, research confirms that Black women1 still experience higher mortality rates from breast cancer than white women, even as the incident rates among Black women have now risen and equal that of white women (Williams and Thompson 2017: 34). Revisiting Lorde’s Journals in the twenty-first century emphasizes the way systemic racism continues to intersect with health disparities, environmental disparities, and police violence to deem certain groups disposable and offers activist tools for these marginalized bodies. Her entries—and their theoretical connections to “slow violence”—ultimately blur the medical humanities and environmental humanities, and contemporary struggles like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement prove the continued relevancy of Lorde’s resistance to gender, racial, income, health care, and environmental inequality. One of Lorde’s journal entries points to a major cause behind the continued racial disparity between Black women and white women diagnosed with breast cancer: the inability of white women to comprehend the pain Black women experience. This pain is rooted in racism and systemic oppression and amplified by the diary entries within The Cancer Journals. Specifically, Lorde writes To practice intersectional feminism, I am utilizing the identity markers embraced by women writers and activists. Thus, I primarily use the identity marker “Black” throughout this chapter rather than African American, other than when referencing literature that uses “African American,” because Lorde described herself as a Black woman. 1

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in a 1979 entry: “There is no room around me in which to be still, to examine and explore what pain is mine alone—no device to separate my struggle within from my fury at the outside world’s viciousness, the stupid brutal lack of consciousness or concern that passes for the way things are. The arrogant blindness of comfortable white women [emphasis in original]” (Lorde 1997: 10). Lorde’s entry questions the unexamined white privilege of the women who continue to survive the all-too-common breast cancer diagnosis—women like the radical lesbian white feminist Mary Daly who Lorde responds to: “The blood of black women sloshes from coast to coast and Daly says race is of no concern to women” (10). Daly reflects the way white feminists and American society as a whole, including the medical field, fail to account for the importance of intersectionality. This entry indicates the need for activism that links Black women’s struggle with breast cancer to their struggles living within a larger system of racial, class, and gender oppression. In 1992, Lorde died from metastatic cancer and became another casualty of slow violence—“a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight” (Nixon 2011: 2). According to Rob Nixon’s 2011 text Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, the human and environmental victims of slow violence “are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted” (13). Lorde’s emphasis on how Black women are dying because of the “arrogant blindness of comfortable white women” and “stupid brutal lack of consciousness” links racism and chemical exposure as acts of violence, anticipating Nixon’s concept of slow violence. Moreover, Lorde’s identification of white privilege as one of the reasons behind the perpetuation of slow violence against Black women challenges the dominant cancer discourse that centers the experiences of white women. Despite the increasing popularity of Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM) and Pink Ribbon campaigns raising the overall visibility of breast cancer—a reflection of the shift in breast cancer discourse towards philanthropy that occurred in the late 1990s (King 2004: 473–5)—these organizations do not count the largest casualties of breast cancer’s slow and painful violence: Black women. Rather, BCAM and Pink Ribbon campaigns fail to address the root causes of cancer in regard to industrial contaminants, as well as the disparate exposures of Black women. While the 1991 People of Color Summit on Environmental Justice emphasized the environmental roots of cancer in conjunction with racial disparities, the cancer establishment that includes Susan G. Komen refuses to acknowledge the contributions of this Summit and Lorde’s work. Focusing on the role of Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” within environmental justice movements and breast cancer activism, this essay will map the continued slow violence committed against Black women with breast cancer from the 1970s to the twenty-first century while emphasizing the role of coalition-building and visibility strategies depicted by Lorde’s Cancer Journals. I will also discuss some of the grassroots organizing, indebted to Lorde’s work and spearheaded by Black women and other marginalized groups, that has worked to break the silence surrounding the pain of breast cancer and systemic oppression. Using Lorde’s connections of the slow deaths of Black women from breast cancer to the acts of direct police violence against the Black community, I will end with a discussion of the ways in which the dynamics around the BLM Movement call into question Nixon’s theory. During second-wave feminism, Black feminists like Lorde complicated feminist conversations on equality; adding multiple intersectional components to this conversation including race, class, ability, and sexuality, Lorde’s Cancer Journals emphasizes the disproportionate exposures to chemical contamination suffered by Black and other marginalized communities. Turning to the cancer establishment specifically, which she repeatedly critiques throughout her Journals, Lorde cites the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) statistics on survival rates after three years, particularly the drop

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in survival rate from 50 percent “to 30% if you are poor, or Black or in any other way part of the underside of this society” (Lorde 1997: 63). Demonstrating the need for environmental regulation in order to prevent breast cancer diagnoses and the disproportionate deaths of Black or poor women, Lorde connects her breast cancer scars to exposure to environmental contaminants: “For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on” (61). Listing several avenues to which she has been exposed to chemical toxins in connection to her mastectomy scars, Lorde indicts those responsible for producing the contaminants as also responsible for causing cancer, including the multi-billionaire dollar McDonald’s Corporation. Moreover, her use of ACS statistics confirms the populations most affected by the listed contaminants: Black and poor communities. As a form of slow violence, chemical contaminants are not explicitly represented as negative health factors by the dominant American medical establishment, particularly to the communities disproportionately exposed to toxins. Nixon urges that accounting for “the temporal dispersion of slow violence [which] affects the way we perceive and respond to … environmental calamities” requires a re-presenting of the “elusive violence of delayed effects” (Nixon 2011: 3). Lorde anticipates Nixon’s critique and establishes chemical contaminants as violence by linking the terms “cosmic war” and “fight” to the toxins disproportionately affecting Black and poor communities (Lorde 1997: 61); she therefore re-presents the “delayed effects” of environmental violence as more immediate through invoking “war” imagery. Lorde continues this re-presentation by using war rhetoric to also acknowledge cancer as a byproduct of the military-industrial complex, as she fought “the spread of radiation, racism, woman-slaughter, chemical invasion of our food, [and] pollution of our environment” (77). While re-presenting slow violence as a war, Lorde connects racism to the spreading of environmental contaminants to indict the people and systems in power, like the military-industrial complex, responsible for creating and allowing the persistence of actions that reinforce the disposability of marginalized communities. Additionally, her use of the collective pronoun “our” reinforces her focus on coalition-building, as she identifies herself among the casualties of slow violence. Grassroots organizing has also worked to combat slow violence while utilizing some of the strategies Lorde divulges in her Cancer Journals. The first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit listed seventeen Environmental Justice Principles that resonate with Lorde’s strategies involving coalition-building, critiques of militarism, and connecting environmental contamination to racism. According to their Preamble, the purpose of these Principles is “to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression” (“Principles of Environmental Justice”). One of the Principles urging for this liberation “calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food” (“Principles of Environmental Justice”). The demands for protection from environmental hazards and the right to live in a clean environment point toward the environmental causes of cancer and other diseases. Contemplating the seventeen Environmental Justice Principles in conjunction with Lorde’s Journals reveals that her critiques draw on insights and experiences consolidated within the Principles—Principles that reject corporate and military interests for their willingness to profit at the expense of marginalized communities and continue to inform environmental justice organizing.

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Focusing on her own insights as a Black Lesbian poet diagnosed with breast cancer and exposed to chemical contaminants, Lorde’s Cancer Journals also demonstrates the importance of visibility strategies to move from private suffering to coalition-building and organizing. Her immediate experiences with pain in the days following her mastectomy, which Lorde describes in fervor as excruciating, sharp, dull, screeching, burning, stabbing, and pulling apart (1997: 37), make visible the slow violence caused by breast cancer. Her vivid descriptions also “challenge the privileging of the visible” that Nixon urges us to question, while indicating that certain perspectives, including those of women, the poor, and the colonized, are obscured by “hegemonic sight conventions” (Nixon 2011: 15). Furthermore, to overcome the differences of race, class, and sexuality among women, Lorde uses her pain to create a coalition with all women suffering from breast cancer. Identifying the steady increase of breast cancer “among women in America,” Lorde critiques the notion that breast cancer is a “secret personal problem” (1997: 63). While the cancer establishment encourages the wearing of breast prostheses to deal with the “personal problem” of breast cancer, Lorde urges one-breasted women to resist silent passivity by refusing to wear prostheses, remaining visible to all women (1997: 61–3). Even though Lorde’s entries in The Cancer Journals contain several calls to action that emphasize coalition, she still “articulates the life and death consequences of race, class, and other marginalizing identity demarcations upon an individual woman’s experience of breast cancer,” as noted in Tina Richardson’s essay (2003: 130). Lorde’s use of ACS statistics, as well as her discussions of racism, reveal that coalition does not require ignoring differences. Rather, for Lorde, the connection of pain among women can act as a “bridge” over “some of those differences between us” (1997: 22). Lorde’s Cancer Journals thus represents her bridge over the silent toxic rivers weaving women across America—a poetic call to action for grassroots organizing. Calling for the resistance of silences surrounding pain and slow violence through visibility strategies, Lorde also examines the politics behind prostheses through her personal experiences. Lorde critiques in particular the Reach for Recovery program, and related networks for postmastectomy women, that encourage the denial of painful experiences within their bodies and insist upon the covering up of amputations through wearing a prosthesis: “I am personally affronted by the message that I am only acceptable if I look ‘right’ or ‘normal,’ where those norms have nothing to do with my own perceptions of who I am” (66). In one experience, a nurse blatantly scolds Lorde for her refusal to wear a prosthesis and look “normal” because it is “ ‘bad for the morale of the office’ ” (60). The nurse is not concerned with Lorde’s pain, and she is ignorant of the critique of American society inherent in Lorde’s choice to walk around as a one-breasted woman. Specifically, Lorde’s rejection of a prosthetic device in that moment represented a critique of the “silent passivity” leading to the destruction of the earth—a “silent passivity” embedded in systemic racism and environmental contamination (77). By recounting her own experiences with breast cancer as a Black lesbian, Lorde points to the slow violence directed at her body from cancer, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Throughout the entirety of Lorde’s Journals, she rejects the “silent passivity” regarding pain and repeatedly claims her identity as “a black lesbian poet” (18); she describes herself as “a black lesbian feminist mother lover poet” (24), “a black lesbian feminist poet” (28), a “Fat Black Female” (40), and “a 44 year old Black Lesbian Feminist” (57). While Lorde does call for unity of all women experiencing the “pain, despair, fury, sadness and growth” (56) resulting from breast cancer, she still emphasizes, through the repetition of her identity as a Black lesbian, that race and sexuality are defining factors. Toward the end of her Journals, she explicitly questions, “And what Woman

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of Color in America over the age of 15 does not live with the knowledge that our daily lives are stitched with violence and with hatred …?” (78). Writing about the pain, violence, and hatred experienced by Women of Color enables Lorde to challenge privileged white society for rendering Black women’s pain invisible in favor of focusing on the suffering of white women within, for instance, Pink Ribbon campaigns. The Pink Ribbons, Inc. documentary demonstrates the overwhelming prevalence of how Pink Ribbon campaigns foster “silent passivity.” Released thirty years after the publication of Lorde’s Journals, this documentary echoes Lorde’s critique in its treatment of breast cancer campaigns, including Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Ford’s “Warriors in Pink,” and Estée Lauder, that profit from cancer and emphasize early detection, rather than addressing the environmental roots of breast cancer that disproportionately affect Black and poor women. The example of Estée Lauder illustrates the hypocrisy of some profit-based companies that utilize the “Pink Ribbon” as a marketing tool to find a cure for breast cancer, while boosting their sales of products that contain carcinogens (Pool 2011). Of course, Estée Lauder only represents one example of destructive capitalism. As Lorde reminds us, “there is no profit in the prevention of cancer; there is only profit in the treatment of cancer” (Lorde 1997: 74), whether society races for a “cure” or purchases Pink Ribbon consumer items ranging from socks to cars. The capitalist practices described in Pink Ribbons, Inc. echo the critiques waged by Lorde against the marketing of prosthetic devices and against the ACS for failing to publicize the links among breast cancer, chemical contamination, and the consumption of animal fat (1997: 59). The concerns Lorde raises in 1980, regarding the invisibility of slow violence and the high mortality rates from breast cancer, are also prevalent in the 1997 documentary Rachel’s Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer. Describing the stories of eight women diagnosed with breast cancer, this documentary amplifies the voices of marginalized women like Pamela Sims-Durall and Essie Mormen, whilst all the women conduct interviews with doctors, authors, and researchers regarding the causes of breast cancer (Light and Saraf 1997).2 As the two African American women within the documentary, Sims-Durall and Mormen identify their concerns for the breast cancer experiences of African American women particularly. In an interview with Dr. Devra Lee Davis, Mormen asks, “ ‘Do African American women get more breast cancer?’ ” In her response, Dr. Davis sums up the disproportionate effects experienced by African American women: “ ‘African American women in this country do not necessarily get more breast cancer when they’re over 65 than white women, but they die of it more often’ ” (Light and Saraf 1997). SimsDurall also interviews the only African American interviewee within the documentary—Phillip Gardiner, PhD. Sims-Durall inquires of Dr. Gardiner, “ ‘Why is there so little research on African American women and breast cancer?’ ” He responds in a matter-of-fact tone, stating, “ ‘If you did a literature search on breast cancer, you’d literally pick up tens of thousands of scientific journals … but if you look specifically on African American women or Black women, the numbers would drop sometimes below 100’ ” (Light and Saraf 1997). The questions and responses concerning Black women point to the systemic racism embedded within American society and also resonate with the words of Arundhati Roy: “ ‘Once you get used to not seeing something, then, slowly, it’s no longer possible to see it’ ” (Nixon 2011: 1).

2

This documentary positions the women as “daughters” of the American author and biologist Rachel Carson.

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More than twenty years after the release of Rachel’s Daughters, “invisible” health disparities persist and influence the peer-reviewed literature published on breast cancer. Contemplating Dr. Gardiner’s discussion of the low number of scientific journal articles studying African American women, I performed a search of the “studies of incidents of breast cancer in African American women” within the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “the most widely circulated medical journal in the world” with a publishing history dating back to 1883 (“About JAMA”). Out of the eighty-five results pertaining to breast cancer with dates ranging from 1995 to 2020, twentyone articles include discussions focusing on African American women in the “Conclusions and Relevance” sections of the abstracts. While these twenty-one articles seem to reflect the importance of examining African American women in studies on breast cancer, the statistics of the racial makeup of patients studied reveal the way slow violence steeps into medical research. Most of these studies specify that African American women only represented under 17 percent of the participants discussed, or they do not include transparent or accessible data on the racial percentages; in fact, five of these studies showed African American women made up lower than 10 percent of the participants. When these articles are removed from the initial twenty-one articles that seem to foreground African American women, only six articles remain. Within this smaller sample, African American women represent between 21 and 42 percent of the total participants. Significantly, the percentage of white women participants is higher than African American women in almost all of the research reviewed, including five of the six articles that specifically study the impact of breast cancer on African American women. Despite assertions from Stacy Simon that the rate of breast cancer diagnoses of African American women reached the diagnosis rate of white women in 2012 (Simon 2015), the lack of peer-reviewed literature published on African American women in JAMA over a twenty-five-year period is alarming. In other words, Black women are still the casualties of slow violence that are unlikely “to be counted” (Nixon 2011: 13). The fact that African American women receive late-stage breast cancer diagnoses, particularly at younger ages, further demonstrates the disparate effects of slow violence, as well as the need for more representation of Black women in medical research. In 2015, ACS reports on breast cancer rates acknowledge that more so than any other group, African American women receive the deadly diagnosis of “triple negative breast cancer,” which is linked to increased mortality rates (Simon 2015). This rising incidence of African American women diagnosed with breast cancer is presumably per capita, but these reports also identify differences in rates among states such as Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—an area identified by local residents and environmentalists as “ ‘Cancer Alley’ ” because of its proximity to the “Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor” that includes over 125 manufacturing companies with products ranging from plastics to fertilizers (Bullard and Johnson 2000: 566). Furthermore, African American women are more likely than white women to receive diagnoses “at a young age when the disease tends to have the worse prognosis” (Williams and Thompson 2017: 35). Given the fact that younger African American women are diagnosed at later stages with more aggressive subtypes (Simon 2015), it is likely that these late-stage diagnoses can be attributed to disproportionate exposure to toxins, perhaps by living in “Cancer Alley.” Although Williams and Thompson’s 2003–8 study was limited to women living in Missouri, the discussion of racial disparities regarding in prognosis, age of diagnosis, and mortality rates echoes Dr. Gardiner’s remarks over ten years earlier in Rachel’s Daughters. Specifically, he explains that the risk factors for African American women are higher because they have kids younger, get diagnosed

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younger, and have more aggressive tumors (Light and Saraf 1997). While the aforementioned medical studies and discussion of risk factors do not explain why the mortality rates among African American women are higher than that of white women, a longitudinal study conducted from 1990 to 2010 seeking to quantify survival improvement for major cancers concluded that the differences in survival improvement in subpopulations, including African American patients, “may be explained, at least in part, by differences in cancer care” (Zeng et al. 2015: 95). Understanding how slow violence functions in ways that discounts the lives of those most susceptible to its different forms (Nixon 2011: 13), including exposure to environmental toxins and systemic racism within health care practices and treatment, helps to explain these continued disparate mortality rates. Furthermore, “slow violence” is inextricably linked to Nixon’s account of “structural violence,” and both impact Black women at disproportionately high rates. According to Nixon, structural violence ranges “from the unequal morbidity that results from a commodified health care system, to racism itself ” (10). The results of a study published in 2006 on “Delays in Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment by Racial/Ethnic Group” highlight the connection between American health care and structural violence. That is, the results concluded that “African American women experienced the greatest diagnostic, treatment, and clinical delay” (Gorin et al. 2006: 2244). This delayed treatment suggests overall “decreased quality of care among African Americans across the cancer continuum” (2251). Another study, published within JAMA in 2013, focuses on treatment delay time’s (TDT) impact on survival rates from breast cancer. Similar to the 2006 results, this study established that the adverse impact of longer TDT “on survival was more pronounced in African American women, those with public or no insurance, and those with low SES” (Smith, Ziogas, and Anton-Culver 2013: 516). Even though these studies do not attribute the results concerning increased treatment delay to racism and classism within American health care, the connection is clear, and Americans with unacknowledged white middle-class privilege are unwilling to examine the association between our health care system and structural violence. For Black Americans from a lower socioeconomic status (SES) background, the lack of access to privatized insurance represents an additional layer of structural violence resulting from the racism present within the commodified American health care system. Lorde hints at this structural violence in her attention to the “identifiable causes” of cancer as stemming primarily from “exposures to chemical or physical agents in the environment” (1997: 75). These environmental causes of cancer relate to the mounting medical evidence that “breast cancer is a chronic and systemic disease” (75). The first episode of the 2008 documentary Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? shows not only how systemic racial and class inequalities connect to the “identifiable causes” of cancer recognized by Lorde but also how systemic inequalities correlate with overall patterns of poor health. Although this documentary does not focus on breast cancer, the discussions confirm that African Americans experience higher rates of several diseases within the United States and racial discrimination represents an added stressor, one which leads to increased exposure to environmental hazards and unsafe living conditions (Smith 2008). Robert D. Bullard and Glenn Johnson also emphasize the connection of lower SES to increased exposure to environmental hazards: “Many economically impoverished communities and their inhabitants are exposed to greater health hazards in their homes, on their jobs, and in their neighborhoods when compared to their more affluent counterparts” (Bullard and Johnson 2000: 557). Resulting from environmental racism and classism, exposure “to greater health hazards” disproportionately impact racially diverse lower SES communities “located on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ ” (2000: 564).

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The 2007 report on Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, which studied the influence of both class and race on the location of toxic waste facilities, also demonstrates the presence of racial discrimination within the United States, while claiming that race is more important than socioeconomic status “in predicting the location of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities” (Bullard et al. 2007: 62). This well-documented revelation demonstrates the need for raising awareness of structural violence and environmental racism like Lorde does in her Cancer Journals, by urging communal vigilance to obtain accurate information concerning the real causes of cancer. During her emphasis on making visible the “identifiable causes” of cancer, Lorde quickly follows her call for every woman to maintain “a militant responsibility” to “her own health” with repetitions of a collective “we”: “we owe ourselves this information before we may have a reason to use it” (Lorde 1997: 75). The repeated “we” stresses the need for collective action for environmental and health justice. Furthermore, her emphasis on “before” places urgency on the demand for the collective obtaining and spreading of information—before more Black women die from breast cancer. To prevent more deaths of Black women through collective action, one of Lorde’s strategies within her Journals involves making slow violence visible by depicting the physical and psychological pain breast cancer engenders—a strategy incorporated by grassroots movements. Lorde describes her pain in one entry in a way that recalls phantom limb pain where she was reminded of “suffering in a part of [her] which was no longer there” (1997: 38). Through her writing, she works to make visible the way slow violence has brutalized and disfigured the female body. A number of contemporary grassroots organizing movements have embraced this visibility strategy, as circulating images of disfigured female bodies acts as a powerful strategy to combat the “untallied and unremembered” casualties of slow violence (Nixon 2011: 9). Maren Klawiter’s work provides an overview of breast cancer organizing that employ this strategy and emphasize the environmental roots of cancer. One of these grassroots organizers, the Toxic Links Coalition (TLC), holds an annual Toxic Tour event that publicly shames the corporations responsible for contaminating the environment and disfiguring female bodies and calls out the complicit government officials who silently observe the spreading of toxicity (Klawiter 2008: 203–5). During the first 1996 Toxic Tour, the demonstration collectively expressed “rage at the cancer industry’s destruction of the health of all people,” according to Klawiter (206); utilizing the visibility strategy emphasized by Lorde, the Toxic Tour exemplified this rage through images of deformity, specifically with “an exhibit of photographs of women’s nude torsos” showing “many startling images of disfigured women with double mastectomies” (208). These vivid images resonate with Lorde’s descriptions of her phantom limb pain; moreover, photographs of disfigured women reveal the truth behind the amputation of the breasts that some doctors dismiss, in at least one case, by releasing a woman from the hospital one day after undergoing a mastectomy (Light and Saraf 1997). Another example Klawiter depicts in her ethnography emphasizes the importance of raising the visibility of violence against Black women’s bodies in particular. Specifically, Klawiter includes a picture of Essie Mormen, the African American female interviewer in Rachel’s Daughters, participating in the 1996 Race for the Cure in San Francisco; Mormen holds up a sign containing “images of African American women holding plastic containers of toxic chemicals” with their nude bodies “display[ing] various scars and deformities from breast cancer surgery” (Klawiter 2008: 204). This example of visibility connects violence to the history of environmental racism directed at Black bodies and privileges the physical pain that Lorde chastises society for remaining silent about (Lorde 1997: 38). Mormen’s demonstration of breast cancer surgical scars during a

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popular cancer establishment event draws on Lorde’s insistence to wear her scars as an “honorable reminder” that she is a “casualty” of war against chemical contaminants (61). Sixteen years later, Mormen fights the same toxic war as Lorde, which is evident by Mormen’s inclusion of toxic chemical images like plastics. Mormen’s embracing of Lorde’s appeal to “refuse to have [her] scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel” (61) represents a move to raise the visibility of pain, slow violence, and the covering up of pain and violence through reconstruction surgery. Directly linking the disfiguring of the female body to toxins, Mormen’s images show the same violent nature of pain depicted in David Jay’s “The Scar Project.” Jay’s photographs of breast cancer survivors foreground the scars resulting from various types of surgical procedures to treat breast cancer, including the Halsted radical mastectomy (Jay 2012: 40–6). The photographs of the women who stare directly at the camera without smiling indict those responsible for their dismemberment, along with any spectators who observe these images in silent passivity. Captions underneath the images include only the name of each woman. The naming of the women—Emily, Shante, and Tamara—also encourages people viewing the photographs to take action against the destruction of our environment and bodies, while providing real depictions of anger and frustration at the dismembering of bodies that breast cancer survivors can identify with. Moreover, the beginning of Lorde’s Journals includes a relevant pointing at the reader: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you” (1997: 18). Her switch from past to future tense foreshadows the continued degradation of the environment and body. Furthermore, by keeping the “silences” ambiguous, Lorde’s warning serves as a warning to all of us affected by environmental toxins, not just the women dying from breast cancer. This silence is perpetuated by the overt optimism embedded in Pink Ribbon culture, as critiqued in Pink Ribbons, Inc. (Pool 2011), which omits real displays of pain. As Lorde posits, this optimism obscures the reality of the environmental links to breast cancer because it “is easier to demand happiness than to clean up the environment” (Lorde 1997: 76). In contrast to the optimism pushed by Pink Ribbon culture, Lorde’s entries in her Journals urge the creation of a coalition among breast cancer “survivors,” famously envisioning “an army of one-breasted women” descending upon Congress to demand change (1997: 15). In keeping with Lorde’s vision, Andrea Densham traces lesbian participation in both AIDS and breast cancer activism, discussing the emergence of coalitions that formed after the death of Pat Parker, a Black lesbian, in 1989. As a result of a “collective sense of urgency” triggered by Parker’s death, activists created several “lesbian-specific cancer projects, including the Seattle Lesbian Cancer Project, Chicago’s Lesbian Community Cancer Project, and Washington, D.C.’s Susan Hester Mautner Project for Lesbians with Cancer” (Densham 1997: 289). While these projects were not exclusively composed of or started by Black women, they do show how marginalized identities have been used to shape the kind of militant community cohesion (Densham 1997: 293) that Lorde envisions in her call for “an army of one-breasted women.” This cohesion is also present in Rachel’s Daughters according to Marcy Knopf-Newman’s account, as lesbians, working-class women, Latinas, Black women, Native American women, and Chinese American women band together to discern the real causes behind breast cancer (Knopf-Newman 2004: 162). While the inclusion of a diverse group of women attempts to portray a cohesive community of women fighting slow violence, Rachel’s Daughters simultaneously confirms the devaluation of Black women within breast cancer organizing. This devaluation connects to an insight offered in Lorde’s Journals: “Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that

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very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness” (1997: 20). Lorde’s comments point to the widespread racism inherent within American society and the power of racism to render the pain and deaths of Black women invisible. This film includes the voices of two Black women but also confirms their invisibility, given the absence of Black female researchers, authors, and physicians, among the individuals interviewed for the film. The only Black interviewee featured in the film is a male physician. The simultaneous visibility and invisibility of Black women to women with unrecognized white privilege explains why Black women are unlikely “to be counted” as casualties of slow violence (Nixon 2011: 13), demonstrating the lethal consequences of the lack of Black women—let alone Black lesbians—in medicine and medical research. The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves, an anthology edited by Evelyn White in 1990, counters the white privilege narratives that render Black women within the medical field absent and powerless. This collection consists of Black women reaffirming their power by discussing the health issues that act as a “direct response to an alarming health crisis in the African-American community” caused by an increase in deaths of Black women from cancer and drug addiction (White 1990: xiv). Lorde’s contribution to the anthology, entitled “Living with Cancer,” appears in the form of additional journal entries with close ties to her Cancer Journals, particularly when she argues for the importance of “breaking [the] silence about our bodies and our health, even though we have been schooled to be secret and stoical about pain and disease” (35). Like her earlier journal entries from 1979 that stress how “silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness” (Lorde 1997: 62), this 1986 entry calls for the claiming of power by acknowledging slow violence and resisting the invisibility of pain. Lorde’s early journal entry from 1979 points to the way systemic racism results in the unjust deaths of Black women from breast cancer, homophobic and transphobic violence, and police shootings, as she writes, “the blood of black women sloshes from coast to coast” (10). For Lorde, Black women dying from breast cancer reflects the broader devaluation of Black people in America—a devaluation that remains true when the violent murders of at least twelve Black transgender people, including Riah Milton and Brayla Stone, remain unsolved and ignored at a national level (Human Rights Campaign 2020). The BLM movement amplifies resistance to this devaluation and the unjust murders of Black Americans resulting from racist law enforcement practices, a racist judicial system, and rampant transphobia. The BLM movement was started in 2013 by three Black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullers, and Opal Tometi—in response to the 2012 murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin as he walked home from a convenience store and the unjust, yet legal, exoneration of George Zimmerman (Lebron 2017: xi). This exoneration reveals the unfortunate truth behind Lorde’s discussion of Black women’s fears that their “children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street” while white women refuse to acknowledge “the reasons they are dying” (Lorde 1984: 119); racialized fear about life and death persists throughout all of Lorde’s writings from her journal entries to her essays, intersecting with the twenty-first-century concerns amplified by BLM. Lorde’s demands for racial justice have been embodied by the efforts and goals of BLM. Describing her fight against “the racial slaughter … spreading across the U.S.” in the form of police violence, Lorde subsequently demands “justice in the police shotgun killing of a Black grandmother and lynchings in Northern California and in Central Park in New York City” (White 1990: 36). The move of juxtaposing the unjust treatment of Black bodies to the pain of having breast cancer within her Cancer Journals reflects Lorde’s continued investment in the struggle against systemic racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism, which too often represents Black and other marginalized bodies

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as disposable. Lorde’s intersectional discussion of Black disposability echoes the goals of the BLM movement: “We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise”(“About”). Over thirty years prior to the start of the BLM movement, Lorde expressed her concern for the oppression afflicting Black communities through multiple avenues including acts of police violence, which are now highly visible through the increased availability and usage of technology and social media. Christopher Lebron’s recent work in The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea also intersects with Lorde’s call to action and highlights that at least thirty Black women and men have been murdered by police since 2012, yet this list is far from complete (Lebron 2017: x); the recent murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd illustrate how this list continues to grow in 2020 (Cai et al. 2020). One of the examples Lebron delves into in his chapter on “For Our Sons, Daughters, and All Concerned Souls” is the murder of Eleanor Bumpurs in 1984, a Black grandmother with known mental health issues (2020: 67). One police officer fatally shot Bumpurs nine times, while six police officers provided no explanation for why they could not subdue a distressed woman holding a knife without using deadly force (2020: 68); this early example of Black disposability resonates with the “routine” murders that Lorde demands justice for (White 1990: 36). Lebron connects Lorde more directly to his work by recognizing Lorde’s urge “to fully acknowledge the suffering and struggles of women and members of the black LGBT community” (Lebron 2017: xviii). Lorde’s writing ultimately highlights the importance of acknowledging all the Black bodies murdered as a result of rampant racism committed through proximity to toxic waste, lack of access to culturally competent health care, vulnerability to police violence, and transphobic violence directed at the Black transgender community. The Human Rights Campaign documents the discriminatory murders of at least twenty-seven “transgender or gender non-conforming people” in 2019 with the note that “the majority of whom were Black transgender women” (Human Rights Campaign 2020). Therefore, Lebron’s reference to Lorde shows that her struggles against the violence and hatred directed at Black communities, as displayed within her Cancer Journals, unquestionably link to the current deadly struggles of Black bodies resulting from police brutality and other discriminatory violence across the United States. The 2014 murder of Michael Brown—a now well-referenced example of discriminatory police violence—led to a wave of civic protests in the United States against police brutality, spurred on by protests in Ferguson, Missouri. George Lipsitz’s essay describes these protests and directly resonates with Nixon’s conceptual use of “slow violence.” Outlining the context of Michael Brown’s murder as connected to the “slow violence perpetrated by unemployment, educational inequality, environmental racism, housing and food insecurity, and aggressive and oppressive police harassment and brutality” (Lipsitz 2015: 123–4), Lipsitz subsequently describes the sudden violence of Michael Brown’s murder by a police officer. Despite the number of videos available online that captured the shooting of Michael Brown and the violence directed at protesters in Ferguson, the relative unresponsiveness of many white Americans to these images calls into question Nixon’s central emphasis on differentiating between responses to spectacular and “accretive” violence. If white Americans were not moved to action by images of dramatic police violence against marginalized communities in 2014, how can white women be moved to care about the high mortality rates of Black women diagnosed with breast cancer? However, the current national wave of protests in

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response to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in March 2020, among others, have included allies from all backgrounds, showing that perhaps mainstream Americans will no longer ignore the immediate hyper-visible violence and slow violence committed against Black people living in America. Images of police brutality and systemic racism against Black men, women, and queer and trans folks have been spread most recently by national BLM protests occurring across all fifty States (Cai et al. 2020); these protests intersect with Lorde’s linking of the various types of violence directed at Black Americans and provide a relevant criticism of Nixon’s “slow violence” as an explanatory framework for racist violence. In a Cancer Journals passage that reverberates with the 2014 killing of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, Lorde cites links between the mundane deaths of Black women from breast cancer and “12 year old Black boys [being] shot down in the street at random by uniformed men who [are] cleared of any wrong-doing” while “daily gruesome murders of women from coast to coast no longer warrant mention in The N.Y. Times” (Lorde 1997: 77). Based on Nixon’s logic regarding how the privileging of catastrophic events like 9/11 in the media as immediate violence prompts responses from Americans (Nixon 2011: 13), the wide-spread viewing of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck should make visible the too-often invisible murders of Black Americans from police brutality. National protests have amplified the concerns of how being Black in America is potentially lethal—which Lorde’s Journals frequently point to—but some mainstream Americans including politicians and police officers have continued illustrating the structural layers of systemic racism by calling BLM protesters “ ‘thugs’ ”; in September 2020, one of the Louisville police officers investigated for killing Breonna Taylor used this language “in an email to 1,000 other officers” (“Officer Involved” 2020). Thus, mainstream Americans’ inaction and even dismissal in the face of BLM protests demanding change call into question the logic behind Nixon’s differentiation between “slow violence” and hyper-visible violence. The lack of productive public policy responses to the epidemic rates of slow violence committed against the Black community as a whole has persisted since 1980 when Lorde published her Cancer Journals. While grassroots organizing has embraced the visibility strategies depicted in Lorde’s Journals to raise awareness of the disproportionate deaths of African American women from breast cancer, we are still waiting for “the army of one breasted women” that forty years ago Lorde envisioned marching through Capitol Hill (1997: 15). Despite the silent passivity of some privileged white Americans, Lorde’s urging for visibility and coalition-building strategies has been embraced by BLM, which is now a global organization resisting white supremacy in the United States, UK, and Canada (“About”). Alongside the positive effects of the BLM movement, recent publications of Lorde’s work illustrates not only the importance of revisiting her work but the ways in which her work is already being revisited and revalued. Although The Cancer Journals has been out of print for a few years, Penguin Random House released a Penguin Classics version of The Cancer Journals on October 13, 2020, with a foreword by Tracy K. Smith. Renowned Black queer feminist Roxane Gay also edited and wrote an introduction for the 2020 publication of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. In her “Introduction,” Gay argues that “we live in a fractured time, one where difference has become weaponized” (Lorde and Gay 2020: xiii) but, importantly, “Lorde offers us language to articulate how we might heal our fractured sociopolitical climate” (xvi). I further urge that Lorde provides us tools for resisting environmental and medical injustices that disproportionately affect marginalized bodies, particularly Black women.

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REFERENCES “About.” Black Lives Matter. Available online: https://black​live​smat​ter.com/about/. Bullard, R. D., and G. S. Johnson (2000), “Environmental Justice: Grassroots Activism and Its Impact on Public Policy Decision Making,” Journal of Social Issues, 56 (3): 555–78. Bullard, R. D., P. Mohai, R. Saha, and B. Wright (2007), Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty 1987–2007: A Report Prepared for the United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries, Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ. Cai, W., G. Gianordoli, M. McCarthy, J. K. Patel, and S. Reinhard (2020), “How Black Lives Matter Reached Every Corner of the United States,” New York Times, June 13. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/inte​ ract​ive/2020/06/13/us/geo​rge-floyd-prote​sts-cit​ies-pho​tos.html. Densham, A. (1997), “The Marginalized Uses of Power and Identity: Lesbians’ Participation in Breast Cancer and AIDS Activism,” in C. Cohen, K. B. Jones, and J. C. Tronto (eds.), Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader, 284–301, New York: New York University Press. Gorin, S. S., J. E. Heck, B. Cheng, and S. J. Smith (2006), “Delays in Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment by Racial/Ethnic Group,” Archives of Internal Medicine, 166 (20): 2244–52. Human Rights Campaign (2020), “Violence against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2020,” Targeted News Service. Available online: https://www.hrc.org/resour​ces/viole​nce-agai​nst-the-trans-andgen​der-non-con​form​ing-commun​ity-in-2020. Jay, D. (2012), “The SCAR Project,” Social Semiotics: The Body in Breast Cancer, 22 (1): 39–46. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “About JAMA.” JAMA Network. Updated July 2020. Available online: https://jama​netw​ork.com/journ​als/jama/pages/for-auth​ors#fa-about. King, S. (2004), “Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer Activism and the Politics of Philanthropy,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 17 (4): 473–92. Klawiter, M. (2008), The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Knopf-Newman, M. J. (2004), “Public Eyes: Investigating the Causes of Breast Cancer,” in R. Stein (ed.), New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, 161–76, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Lebron, C. J. (2017), The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea, New York: Oxford University Press. Light, A., and I. Saraf, dir. (1997), Rachel’s Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer, New York: Women Make Movies. Lipsitz, G. (2015), “From Plessy to Ferguson,” Cultural Critique, 90 (90): 119–39. Lorde, A. (1984), “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 114–23. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Lorde, A. (1997), The Cancer Journals, special ed., San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Lorde, A., and R, Gay (2020), The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, 1st ed., New York: W. W. Norton . Miller, J. W., J. L. Smith, A. B. Ryerson, T. C. Tucker, and C. Allemani (2017), “Disparities in Breast Cancer Survival in the United States (2001-2009): Findings from the CONCORD-2 Study,” Cancer, 123 (24): 5100–18. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Officer Involved in Breonna Taylor’s Killing Defends Actions, Calls Protesters ‘Thugs’,” Democracy Now!, September 23, 2020. Available online: https://www.democ​racy​now.org/2020/9/23/headli​nes/officer_involved_ in_breonna_taylors_killing_defends_act​ions​_cal​ls_p​rote​ster​s_th​ugs.

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Pool, L., dir. (2011), Pink Ribbons, Inc., San Francisco, CA: First-Run Features and Kanopy. “Principles of Environmental Justice.” Energy Justice Network. Available online: http://www.ejnet.org/ej/pri​ncip​ les.html. Richardson, T. (2003), “Changing Landscapes: Mapping Breast Cancer as an Environmental Justice Issue in Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals,” in S. Mayer (ed.), Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination, 129–47, Münster: LIT. Simon, S. (2015), “Report: Breast Cancer Rates Rising Among African-American Women,” American Cancer Society, October 29. Available online: https://www.can​cer.org/lat​est-news/rep​ort-bre​ast-can​cer-rates-ris​ ing-among-afri​can-ameri​can-women.html. Smith, E. C., A. Ziogas, and H. Anton-Culver (2013), “Delay in Surgical Treatment and Survival after Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Young Women by Race/Ethnicity,” JAMA Surgery, 148 (6): 516–23. Smith, L., dir. (2008), “In Sickness and in Wealth,” in Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel. White, E. C., ed. (1990), The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves, Seattle: Seal Press. Williams, F., and E. Thompson (2017), “Disparities in Breast Cancer Stage at Diagnosis: Importance of Race, Poverty, and Age,” Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice, 10 (3): 34–45. Zeng, C., W. Wen, A. K. Morgans, W. Pao, X.-O. Shu, and W. Zheng (2015), “Disparities by Race, Age, and Sex in the Improvement of Survival for Major Cancers: Results from the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program in the United States, 1990 to 2010,” JAMA Oncology, 1 (1): 88–96.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Reframing Care” in the Age of a Novel Corona Virus: Food as Medicine on the Farms of Two Physician-Farmers KATHRYN YALAN CHANG 1

In an era marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, broken food systems exacerbate the risk of infection and death. In a 2020 special issue of Bifrost, an online project hosted by the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES), environmental humanists raise questions about the term “The New Normal?” Joni Adamson and Steven Hartman, in one of the issue’s essays, respond to the coronavirus and propose ways to see “the shared social, biological, and historical drivers of pandemics” (2020). They define “global syndemic” as a “synergy of epidemics” or “linked epidemics” (2020). Within “syndemic,” the well-being, both now and in the future, of humans and nonhumans are interwoven in a web of interdependence. The environmental humanities offers a new way of thinking, or a “COVID-Mind” (to use ecocritic and environmental humanist Scott Slovic’s term [2020]), to respond to Covid-19 and the world’s failing food systems in the hope that we can eventually transform our global self into a community of care and purpose (Hartman et al. 2020). Environmental humanists have long understood the connections between food insecurity and the development of underlying conditions that put humans at more risk for viruses and other diseases. As ecocritic and environmental humanist Adamson, who studies Annishinabe food activist Winona LaDuke’s idea of medicine food, claims, the food is medicine “not only for the body but for connecting the community spiritually ‘to history, ancestors and the land’ ” (quoted in Adamson 2011: 216). LaDuke argues that the notion of medicine as food links environmental and social

This chapter was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of China (under the grant number MOST 110-2410-H-143-012-). My special thanks go to Professor Joni Adamson for who provides detailed comments and ideas of revision. 1

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injustices to historical food insecurities and reveals that “the recovery of the people is tied to the recovery of food” (quoted in Adamson 2011: 213). Facing our current unstable “normalcy,” rethinking and reviewing diets is a way to confront this dilemma. In this chapter, I apply these ideas to examine two farms, one in Taiwan and the other in Long Valley, New Jersey, USA. Each belongs to physician-farmers. The first is owned by Dr. Xu-ying Li and his wife, Hui-wen Chen (Taiwan). The second belongs to Dr. Ron Weiss (New Jersey). Both physicians regard food not only as providing nutrients but also as a source of medicine. Dr. Li, born in Japan, met Hui-wen Chen, whose family owned a farm in Taiwan. They took up natural farming, cofounding the Tamsui Happiness Farm, located in a rural district in northern New Taipei. Since then, Chen has published several books relating to food and health issues, including Eating in Nature (2009), Happy Dining Table: Food Education from Childhood (2009), and Slow and Natural Life ([2006] 2012). These books emphasize how living on a farm has wholly transformed their family’s health and well-being. Dr. Li, an ophthalmologist, believes their farm situates them on the front lines of defending the whole community’s health. In a similar vein, Dr. Weiss’s farm’s holistic practices can be traced back to his father’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. His father survived for eighteen months despite his doctor predicting that he had one to three months to live. Since then, he has believed in food as the best medicine. As a doctor who advocates for a plant-based diet, Weiss has his clinic located on his farm, Ethos Farm, and prescribes whole food diets for his patients. His website, Ethos Primary Care, demonstrates what he prescribes and how he practices medicine on his farm. Relatedly, environmental humanists are concerned with human health and actively seek to transform themselves into “a community of care” in the face of Covid, especially as it becomes clearer how health disparities and social inequalities in the food system are linked. This chapter will examine some shared perspectives on communities of care that can be found exemplified in Li’s and Weiss’s work as physician-farmers and in developing environmental humanities practices that confront an anthropocentric logic regarding “agroecological practices” (Adamson 2011: 215). In the first section, I will also examine the ethic of care that Maria Puig de la Bellacasa describes as “care as a doing” and care as an ethos “that creates ethical obligation” (2017: 167), and how that applies to holistic health communities and communities of care. I focus first on discussing the problems of conventional agricultural business as matters of fact in the sense that facts can be “rebaptized” as matters of concern regarding the health of the human and nonhuman worlds. The second section will explore the ways food must be produced to be nutritionally robust enough to contribute to human health and immunity. The chapter then applies Bellacasa’s ideas on matters of care, soil communities, and soil time to the practices conducted on the farms of Dr. Li and Chen and Dr. Weiss and to emerging ideas among environmental humanists about communities of care.

AGROBUSINESS FACTS: WORN-OUT SOILS AND UNHEALTHY BODIES Historically, the first agricultural revolution took place around 10,000 BCE as hunter-gatherer societies transitioned to settlement and agriculture. Alongside the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, the second agricultural revolution boosted crop yields by mechanizing the farming process through new inventions and technology (“AP Human Geography” n.d.). The Green Revolution, beginning in the 1940s in Mexico and then expanding to other countries, was a

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promise to solve the food crisis. However, as mass production and high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of crops attracted investment and adoption in the hopes of feeding the rapidly growing population, the Green Revolution fueled an “ongoing expansion of the industrial food system” (Sharma 2019). According to R. Douglas Hurt’s The Green Revolution in the Global South, the Green Revolution in Taiwan could be seen dating back to the early 1920s and continuing until the late 1960s when the Japanese colonial government (1895–1945) “had invested heavily in irrigation, and agricultural scientists produced high-yielding rice varieties by crossbreeding traditional Taiwanese and Japanese varieties,” which doubled crop yields (2020: 77). In the 1950s and 1960s, due to Taiwan’s agricultural scientists developing the world’s first fertilizer-responsive rice variety and governmental support of agriculture, farmers have been encouraged to “achieve high productivity” by using chemical fertilizer and monoculturing the crops (77). Although techno-scientific innovations help agriculture “boost farm fields, alleviate hunger and poverty in many parts of the world, and they offer new medicines to prevent and treat deadly diseases” (Miller 2013: 11), the consequences and contamination that agrochemicals bring to the soil and human bodies are slow violence, to use Rob Nixon’s term, in that the violence is invisible to human eyes since it happens gradually. The Green Revolution has had a disastrous impact on ecosystems, soils, and lands since fertilizers, pesticides, and agrochemicals have been rapidly and broadly applied within conventional agriculture. The “Green” Revolution is not “green” at all because it creates “new scarcities in nature through ecological destruction” (Shiva 2002: 15), causing groundwater depletion, salinization of soil, erosion of soil, soil toxicity, and other long-term negative environmental impacts. Namely, long-term exposure to pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and agrochemicals will result in an increased risk for health problems and worn-out soils. Encouraging doctors to learn from farmers, Dr. Daphne Miller argues that the wisdom of farmers offers insight relevant to medical practices. Miller discusses the relationships between agriculture and medication in her book Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us about Health and Healing (2013), arguing that everyday practices on the farms of Dr. Li and Dr. Weiss prove Miller’s observation that sustainable agriculture is able to teach us about health and healing (2). Both physician-farmers’ insistence on alternative ways of farming suggests that they believe conventional agricultural practices are not sustainable in terms of the health of the earth and the well-being of the human body. Dr. Xu-ying Li, a physician-farmer in Taiwan, has pointed out that the abuse of antibiotics in the current medical treatment of disease shares the same logic as pesticides in conventional agribusinesses (Guo 2007). For Li, agriculture and medicine overlap in many places (Lin 2014). The development of a farm like Li and Chen’s Tamsui Happiness Farm, located at the junction between Tamsui and Sanzhi, northern Taipei, does not happen overnight. The functional and sustainable farm requires long-term trial-and-error efforts and a firm conviction in the value of natural farming. Their endeavor first takes great pains to overcome the stereotype of viewing soil as dirt. Working the worn-out soil is considered valueless in the eyes of people who believe in “technoscientific productionism” (Bellacasa 2017: 169). As Li’s wife Chen admits, when one begins to partake in natural farming, one is usually confronted with cynicism from other farmers who practice conventional agriculture and insist that large quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides are the only way to guarantee productivity and yield a large harvest (Chen [2006] 2012: 80). Aware of the impoverishment of soils due to industrialized agriculture, Chen states that even the polar areas could be contaminated, which tempered her expectation of finding a “pristine land” to

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farm on; it is almost impossible to find arable lands that are entirely free from past pesticide use (64). Fully aware of the risk of practicing traditional ways of agricultural farming, Chen, in her book Slow and Natural Life, asks readers to keep the Rachel-Carson-silent-spring picture in mind when thinking of using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. For example, in order to grow vegetables that people eat in Taiwan, a farmer will spread an average of 1.6 kilograms of agrochemicals in the soils, on the farm trails, and in the waters, which will also cause the demise of all pests, beneficial worms, fish, river prawns, and other microorganisms, and through food chain uptake, even patients undergoing hospice care (39). On the other hand, Li and Chen believe that if farmers make efforts to take care of the soil willingly, year after year, the land will become healthier and be able to attract more and more “members,” both human and nonhuman (64). Likewise, Dr. Ron Weiss, a physician-farmer in the United States, takes “the extermination of the diversity of species and climate change” as a consequence of conventional farming (Huberman 2019: 10). “Factory farming” is the counterpart to “factory medicine,” as Miller points out, because pharmaceutical companies pursue short-term benefit(s) at the risk of creating harmful “long-term side effects.” They focus on organs rather than on organisms and generally disregard “the body’s natural ability to heal” (Miller 2013: 16). Rather than only paying attention to disease symptoms, Weiss runs his farm by prescribing healing diets to his patients, diets that will promote long-term well-being. Dr. Weiss’s Ethos Farm is dedicated to taking care of producers, consumers, and the earth. The theories underpinning his farm help farmers reduce their costs by using hightech labor-saving devices to make this profession more “economically viable” and educate the next generation of doctors by establishing a lifestyle medicine curriculum at New Jersey Medical School (Weiss 2020). Both Li and Weiss were motivated to make these significant changes in their lifestyles by observing how food and diets influence people’s health. Therefore, I would suggest that the transition Dr. Li and Dr. Weiss make from being doctors to being farmers is similar to Bruno Latour’s urge to “rename matters of fact as matters of concern” (Bellacasa 2017: 30).

MATTERS OF CONCERN: “BECOMING” FARMERS The shift by environmental humanists and physicians to matters of concern and matters of care lies in how they suggest humans start by changing their daily diets and exploring the significance of human and nonhuman relations and worlds, which are made up of “technoscience and naturecultures” (Bellacasa 2017: 24). While farmers and physicians devote themselves to building a healthy life circle, most people still flee professions that get dirt under their fingernails. Novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver experimented with farming for one year by eating and growing her food with her family, as recorded in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2017), in which she advocates for the importance of the health of the soil. Kingsolver’s ideas about farmers, in Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future (2017), point to a viable way of life that both Dr. Li and Dr. Weiss would recognize. In her suggestions to the young farmers who become engaged with this great profession, Kingsolver writes that farming as a profession “has a history, a philosophy, a body of science, and whole libraries of accumulated wisdom” (16). She emphasizes that it is a unique moment when people choose to be farmers because many people in her generation were taught to “escap[e]‌from agriculture” (17). Aversive and hostile stereotypes— backwardness, dark skin, and lack of “smarts or ambition”—about farmers and farming still run

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rampant in modern society (17). Challenging this mindset, Kingsolver claims that “we need farmers every single day of our lives, beginning to end, no exceptions” (18). As most people flee “the tyrannies of farm life and rural stultification” (17), both Dr. Li and Dr. Weiss work to change these negative perceptions. Li and Weiss problematize the belief that farming is an inferior profession. It takes great courage to make any lifestyle change. When they voice concern over the well-being of humans and nonhumans, that is the moment of change, transition, and transformation. We are deluded by colossal agribusiness companies about the food they sell and produce. The propaganda and advertisements that such companies broadcast are biased, polemical, and “very political renderings of matters of concern” (Latour 2004: 232). Food is very personal, but to some extent, it is political, too. Industrialized agriculture’s tools, such as new hybrid agrochemicals, cause ecological and economic disasters or damage human bodies and soils, and this eventually leads to the devastation of the environment and uncontrollable disease outbreaks such as Covid-19. Though both physicians changed their lifestyle long before this lethal pandemic, in a critical moment like Covid-19, the virus teaches both them and us to slow down our speedy life and to recognize that we are connected to each other. Our identity during a “syndemic” is “an interbeing, across bodies, species, continents” (“An Environmental Humanities Response” 2020). Having recognized that agribusiness is the current dominant food production system, both the physicians and their families began to learn from farmers and finally determined to reshape their lives. Based on Li and Chen’s shared belief and interests in Shinji Shumeikai, a new Japanese religion devoted to elevating one’s quality of life (Xu 2006: 136), farming for them is like religion, nourishing both their bodies and souls. Etymologically, “Shinji” refers to “divine love,” while “shumei” indicates “supremely bright” and also has the implications of a commitment to “the creation of an ideal state of health, happiness, and harmony by applying Mokihi Okada’s philosophy” (136). In other words, Shinji Shumeikai promotes natural farming by emphasizing “the integrity of nature and the purity of soil, water, and air” (136), an approach that stands as an alternative to modern agriculture (7). Li and Chen learned how to farm from scratch. Neither of them had experienced farming, nor did they have any relatives who were farmers. Their oldest daughter’s symptoms of atopic dermatitis made Dr. Li, a physician, put his belief in natural farming into practice. His “farm” was just a small vegetable garden at the beginning that was used solely for the couple to meet the family’s daily nutritional needs. As time went by, given the insistence on practicing natural farming, they gradually overcame many difficulties implementing irrigation systems and using agricultural machinery. They have also refused to compromise about using agrochemicals. Intending to provide safer food for children, the couple has rented more land and invited other farmers to move toward natural farming alongside them. Now they have transformed from farming amateurs to professional farmers with two hectares on which they grow rice, vegetables, coffee, tea, cacao trees, and other vegetables and fruits. Dr. Ron Weiss, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and founder of the Ethos Farm Project, purchased a 342-acre farm in Long Valley, New Jersey, in 2012. Like Dr. Li, who got involved with farming due to his daughter’s physical problems, Dr. Weiss fulfilled his early dream of becoming a farmer because of a family health crisis; his father was diagnosed with end-stage pancreatic cancer and given three months to live. His father’s cancer diagnosis gave Dr. Weiss second thoughts regarding Western medicine since “alternative medicine [for cancer treatment] was all the rage” at that time (Huberman 2019: 6). Like Dr. Li, who follows

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the philosophy of Japan’s Mokihi Okada in practicing natural farming, Dr. Weiss, influenced by Michio Kushi, a Japanese scholar promoting a macrobiotic diet in the United States, put his father on a whole-food, plant-based diet without chemicals and helped his father live more than eighteen months while his tumor shrank in half, even though the doctor said he had only one to three months to live. Building upon his undergraduate training in biology, Weiss dedicated himself to discovering the connection between food and health. Weiss’s interests in plants brought his attention to “the resilience of plants and their ability, given optimal circumstances, to fend off their own diseases.” However, his studies about “how the full power of plants, rather than extractions, could reverse and prevent illness” also brought “alternative and complementary cancer treatment” to the fore (Imatome-Yun 2016). Like Li, Weiss then decided to sell most of his assets and relocate his family to a working farm, building it from scratch while in his forties by creating “a new paradigm in medical care” (2016) in order to give his children a healthy lifestyle and also to fulfill his dream of being a farmer. Relationships among food, health, society, and agriculture teach valuable lessons for each physician-farmers and their families and are also a core concern in environmental humanities. In a 2020 “Open Letter” addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, many environmental humanities scholars pledged to devote themselves to exploring the “ ‘intra-actions’ of human life with environments of all kinds, and with more-than-human species” (“An Environmental Humanities Response” 2020). These scholars called for less meat consumption since “food” production in industrialized systems often causes brutal inequities for workers and animal cruelty. Many of these scholars agree that a more plant-based diet will not only boost our health, as Dr. Weiss suggests, but would also be beneficial for the planet with its current crisis of climate change (“An Environmental Humanities Response” 2020).2 The activities in which these farmer-physicians are involved illustrate a global concern about our planet and food systems that also has implications for Covid-19. Chen and her physician husband Li’s farming stories provide an alternative way to rethink and review our diets. From a foodie to a farmer, Chen and Li started to become concerned about how the food they ate impacted health and the environment and subsequently established the Tamsui Happiness Farm, which Chen’s book Slow and Natural Life ([2006] 2012) is based on. The small potatoes grown through the Shumei Natural Agriculture method hugely impressed Chen, the first social worker from Taiwan in Japan’s Shinji Shumeikai, and seeded the idea of being engaged with natural farming. Chen’s book describes how they adopted Shumei Nature Farming by following nature’s rhythm and applying preventive medicine to their non-agrochemical practices ([2006] 2012: 27). To Chen, being a natural farming practitioner implies several hidden identities; namely, they are people who love earth and land, who care about food and diet problems, who are parents devoted to their children, who are pushing the frontiers of eco-agriculture, who are fastidious cooks who care about good food, and who are farmers attempting to regain their dignity (24). In order to live lives of convenience, more and more people in the past century have become “wholly separate from that of raising and producing foods” (Vileisis 2008: 5). As shoppers, consumers, cooks, and eaters, people evolve into the “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” mode (5) of relating to the food they buy, eat, and cook. We are almost totally indifferent to where our food comes from and

2

It is important to note that there are arguments that justify the consideration of meat eating and ethics. See Rigby (2020).

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have little idea who cultivates it and what went into making it (3). Just as environmental humanists advocate for eating “ethically, ecologically, and locally sourced foods” (“An Environmental Humanities Response” 2020), Li and Chen also fully understand the associations between their daughter’s symptoms of atopic dermatitis and diets. Instead of increasing her intake of doctorprescribed antibiotics, they use the food they grow to feed their family and witness the positive correlation between diet and health. Chen, as the wife of a physician, wishes her husband’s working environment was not a hospital, where he faces many ill and suffering patients, but a farmer’s field where people are able to get healthy and safe fruits and vegetables because for her, the people who stand on the front line of maintaining public health should not be doctors but rather farmers who are also concerned about the land and the environment (Chen 2013). Like Li and Chen, Dr. Weiss, a primary care physician, also cares about diet and food concerning medical systems. While agricultural farms nowadays are sometimes full of the “odor of diesel fuel and unhealthy earth, soil drenched in ammonia, bromide, and unto other chemicals” (Miller 2013: 6), Weiss proposes the notion that food is medicine, which he prescribes to his patients on his farm. Nevertheless, unlike Li and Chen’s small family farm, which is the typical size of farms in Taiwan (Shen 1976: 2), Weiss’s 275-year-old Ethos Farm spans 342 acres in rural New Jersey. Weiss started his medical practice called Ethos Primary Care on his farm by envisioning “a different type of health care—one that reveals to people the root causes [of] their suffering and strives to remove them” (Imatome-Yun 2016). As a farm-based health care system, Ethos Primary Care aims at promoting the health benefits of diet by indicating that “plants are not just food but also powerful medicine” (Weiss 2020). Food understood as medicine or “living medicine,” as Mark Huberman calls it when interviewing Dr. Weiss, uses “whole plant foods to reverse and prevent chronic disease[s]‌” (2019: 5). What we eat, where our food comes from, and how our food grows, is packaged, and is transported says a lot more about what constitutes our body and well-being and the environment’s health. This is why Dr. Weiss’s “clinic” on the farm offers a way for people to see how their food is grown. Like many environmental humanists, Dr. Weiss emphasizes that the era of novel coronavirus gives people an opportunity to rethink their diet and lifestyle. Agriculture and medicine have a shared goal because both attempt to “sustain individuals and communities by supporting the workings of nature and intervening … in the cycle of birth, growth, death, and decay” (Miller 2013: 10). Farmers play a vital role in our everyday life and agricultural systems, while doctors are essential in the medical industry. Despite this, many people still have a bias against farmers, who are viewed as having a lower social status than physicians. However, for the physicians mentioned above, “becoming” a farmer was when, concerning food and diet, matters of concern replaced matters of status in their hearts. With his double identity, Dr. Weiss proclaims that being a doctor and engaging with farming fulfill his life. Farmers can be role models in their medical practice because they know the wisdom of maintaining the inner balance and health of the life system (Miller 2013: 16). Farmers originate from “an agrarian people—people who knew how to grow food and take care of the land” (Washington 2017: 38). The profession has developed out of symbiotic relationships and the love of land and Mother Earth (38). This love of the land contributes to farmers’ concern with and caring about the entangled relationships between humans and nonhumans and expands the community of care to “poor communities, indigenous communities, and communities marginalized by race or ethnicity [which] predominantly live in areas of greatest air pollution” (“An Environmental Humanities Response” 2020).

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ADDING CARE TO CONCERNS: AGROECOLOGICAL CARE AT TAMSUI HAPPINESS FARM AND ETHOS FARM “Concern” and “Care” share the same linguistic source, namely, the Latin word “cura, or ‘cure’ ” (Bellacasa 2017: 42). The two physician-farmers expand their care for the family and the earth to envision an alternative treatment to help cure human patients and worn-out soils. Bellacasa in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (2017) retraced the Latourian notion of “concern” by intensifying “an affective ethico-political concern such as caring” (18) through challenging the conventional notion of ethics, which focuses exclusively on moral obligations in human relationships. Following Latour, Bellacasa proposes enlisting the notion of “matters of care” as “a thinking pattern when engaging with science and technology” (18). Environmental humanists and doctors are speaking up about how we are demonstrating care for the planet, nonhuman species, and humans made vulnerable to disease through lousy food. Canadian emergency doctor Courtney Howard correctly points out that the Covid-19 pandemic is like “a giant wake-up call in terms of planetary health” because “a lack of care at the intersection of humans and the natural world” makes zoonotic diseases crossing species possible (quoted in Hartman et al. 2020). Instead of considering “care” as an exclusively human privilege, Bellacasa celebrates soil–human relationships connected to “ethical-political” questions about the care and more-than-human worlds. Li and Chen’s Tamsui Happiness Farm and Dr. Weiss’s Ethos Farm exemplify Puig de la Bellacasa’s theory about matters of care, soil communities, and soil time. Care of Soil as Ethical Doings: Li and Chen’s Tamsui Happiness Farm Li and Chen’s everyday practices on their farm exemplify the notion of “ethical doings” that Bellacasa proposes. Bellacasa prefers to use the word “doings” to “actions” because the former indicates a process by marking the ordinariness or “the uneventful connotation” of the ethical task and a long-term commitment to the task. In contrast, the latter signifies a particular moment of decision making (2017: 147). As Chen emphasizes in her book Slow and Natural Life, farming is marked by uneventful ordinariness, process, repetition, and is time-consuming. While running their farm, Li and Chen learn patiently to accept failure due to inexperience and wait for a better harvest next year (Chen 2013). In addition, they make time for soil, just as Bellacasa indicates in Matters of Care that “soil relations of care and soil ontologies” are intertwined with each other (2017: 170). Bellacasa also argues against the “productionism model” and the “utilitarian-care vision,” which exclusively enhance the market profits of crops (184). Soil is not a dead matter but a vital element to form a community. Soil is full of living entities that contribute to forming “multispecies communities,” and soil interacts and works with other elements, including air, water, microorganisms, and plants (Bellacasa 2017: 129). Likewise, Dr. Miller also recognizes the pivotal position that a soil ecosystem plays because it is where “soil, microbe, and plants” will exchange their nutrients, just like our intestines’ habitat (2013: 7). As a doctor who learns from farmers, Miller compares the health of the soil ecosystem to the health of our human intestines in that “the chemical makeup of soil has roughly the same ratio of nitrogen-to-carbon and a similar range for normal pH (6.0–7.5) as the human body” (7). In other words, like our biosystems, the soil relies on germs and fungi to provide “fats, amino acids, and carbohydrates,” which explains that every element such as minerals and vitamins that constitute our body comes from soil (8). For Miller, people are not only nourished by the soil—people are of the soil (8).

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In this light, reframing care so as to recognize ourselves as members in soil communities requires keen attentiveness via long-termed observation and deep consideration. Dr. Weiss claims that the “bedrock of science is the power of observation” (Huberman 2019: 6)3 and, like doctors, who must be good observers when practicing medicine, farmers who possess mindful attitudes regarding their farm and its processes (201) are able to recognize the value of observation—that care time is also a time for observing. Miller subscribes to the belief that farming needs keen observation since farmers have been “keen observers of Nature and respected [nature’s] principles” for ages (2013: 10). Practicing natural farming, Li and Chen take care of the soil community by observing each element’s condition and interaction with one another, even the so-called pests. Take Pomacea canaliculata, commonly known as golden apple snails, as an example. Seen as agricultural pests to rice since they gnaw on the roots of plants, causing them to die and wither, golden apple snails are eliminated utilizing herbicides in the rice fields by many farmers who adopt conventional agricultural methods. Li and Chen recognize that in this way people end up eating rice subjected to toxic pesticides. After observing the habits of the golden apple snails, Li and Chen found that when the water level in the rice field was low, the snails would hide in the soil and lie dormant. Therefore, they could just lower the water level after the seedlings were planted. When the leaves of the rice grow thicker, they could restore the water level. At that time, instead of eating the rice, the snails would switch their tastes and eat the nearby weeds so that farmers can save the energy they would have had to spend weeding. Becoming a keen observer through listening, watching, seeing “into the life of things” (quoted in Isenbarger 2017: 12), and deciphering the signs that the snails, the plants, even the weeds send to them, Li and Chen are able to utilize natural farming methods and harvest nontoxic rice, crops, and vegetables while simultaneously protecting and maintaining biodiversity on their farm. Li and Chen understand that any doings on the farm will affect humans and all members of the soil community. As Chen admits in her book Slow and Natural Life, she is shocked by the fact that many farmers are obsessed with using pesticides ([2006] 2012: 80). Many farmers regard weeds as enemies and use pesticides heavily. Through their faith in natural farming, Li and Chen insist on using no chemicals on their farm, not even fertilizers (74). Their ethical doings make them conscious of their doing-obligation. Li and Chen control weeds by hand to maintain the soil’s cleanliness and give agency to the soil by letting seeds and plants fulfill their potentiality. They do this because they believe all living beings, including weeds and worms, have reasons to live in this world, in nature. For them, the community of care not only covers human–human relationships but also to “intra-actions” of human and more-than-human species and environments (“An Environmental Humanities Response” 2020). Care as Ethos that Creates Obligations: Dr. Weiss’s Ethos Farm Obligation emerges within an ethical doing through a transformation of ethos (Bellacasa 2017: 147), an ethos connected to the notion of environmental stewardship and speculates on the debate between utilitarian and altruistic relationships (148). The notion of “mutual obligation,” in

However, Dr. Weiss expresses his rage about the indifferent attitudes that those doctors had toward what made his father’s tumor shrink. The doctors who receive Western medicine training tend to overlook alternative medication even if the latter is clinically effective for some disease and illness (Huberman 2019: 7). 3

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which “living-with” instead of “living-on or living-for” is practiced, is embedded in environmental stewardship, which concludes that humanity’s role is a participant in the flouring of the natural world (148). Therefore, this stewardship does not indicate that humans take over natural worlds (163), nor does it cultivate “power-over” world-making relationships, but instead, it expresses itself via “power-with” or “power-from-within” relationships (165). All of these “with” relationships evoke ecofeminist and environmental humanist Greta Gaard’s idea that the coronavirus serves as “a messenger, awakening humans to our material interbeing” (Gaard 2020). The virus strikes people with underlying conditions more severely, making them more vulnerable to Covid-19. These conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, are often caused by bad diet and monocultures of corn, soybean, and wheat used in industrial farms; the prevalence of bacterial, viral, and fungal resistance caused by an overdose of antibiotics and pesticides; nutrient-deficient food supply caused by overuse of soil; and the rapid growth of cancer, lung problems, and other chronic diseases caused by chemical by-products produced in “Big Farm and Big Pharma” (Miller 2013: 12). The obligation for people confronting the virus is to be engaged with “a mindfulness practice,” which encourages and affirms the individual awareness that we should step back from the activities of “deforestation, human oppressions and interspecies injustice” (Gaard 2020). Weiss’s farm is built based on promoting awareness and mindfulness. Dr. Weiss’s Ethos Farm targets healing wounded human bodies and lands by promoting a mindful attitude toward our food and diets. When asked in an interview about the name, Ethos Farm, Weiss explains, “ ‘Ethos’ first means a set of principles or a guiding philosophy that is maintained by a community, organization, or person” (Huberman 2019: 12), a doing-obligation that a community or an individual should take. For Weiss, the primary reason that they named their farm as the Ethos Farm is that the town where the farm was located had “purchased the development rights … to protect this beautiful and historic farmland from housing, strip malls, and other types of development.” They chose “Ethos” to honor this town (12). Bellacasa’s usage of ethos, signifying “a speculative exploration of ethical involvement” (2017: 127), provides an interpretation of the word “ethos” in Dr. Weiss’s Ethos Farm. The mandatory request that “we should care” will not work if “a transformation of ethos” does not happen (147). Ethos declares an ethical obligation and commitment. Weiss’s Ethos Farm, a preserved, 300-year-old farm, symbolizes an obligation to maintain health through its soil communities because it has the nation’s richest soil (“In Their Words” 2020). In 2014, Weiss established Ethos Primary Care based on the farm, and it was the first farm-based health system (Weiss 2020). With an ambition to restore a great food-growing tradition and to feed people healthy, nutrient-dense, chemical-free food (Weiss 2020), the farm practices “regenerative agriculture, restoring the land and creating quality soil with methods like cover crops, composting, and meadow restoration” (McCarthy 2017). Weiss’s farm is itself a soil community in Bellacasa’s sense, in that the soil on the farm is healthy, not only for “humans, but also for the endangered and threatened species that live on the farm’s vast acreage, as well as for those living downstream along the Raritan River, the headwaters [that] run through the property” (McCarthy 2017). In a word, Weiss’s Ethos Farm is committed to both individual members in the collective soil communities and the living-within relationships with other earthlings. Like Bellacasa, who was inspired by attending a two-week intensive training course on permaculture technologies, Li and Chen, and Weiss, respectively, have held educational events on their farms. Dr. Li’s Tamsui Happiness Farm, where plants have been taken care of as if they were Li and Chen’s children, has, since 2006, hosted many educational activities that focus on promoting

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natural farming. The activities include guided tours of their farm, a one-day farmer course, and a summer camp for children to acquire knowledge about nature and farming. The farm also provides services for people who volunteer to help to weed and harvesting crops, which attracts people not only from Taiwan but also from Japan who seek to learn how to care for their farms or gardens, and for people who come to buy their agricultural products such as rice, preserved fruits and vegetables, and jams and sauces. Through the educational activities that they design, more people learn about the essence of natural farming and reframing care to tend to other earthlings, which is following Li’s and Weiss’s hopes and intentions. Dr. Weiss likewise uses his Ethos Farm Project to dedicate himself to taking care of producers, consumers, and the earth. He aspires to teach more people about the importance of whole-plant diets and to enhance their health by establishing “Ethos Farm Days” in the belief that planting native warm-season grasses offers “a solution to climate change, and he also generates soil carbon sequestration data that could support the development of carbon markets” (Weiss 2020). In other words, both Li’s and Weiss’s farms have educational activities that promote natural farming practices and proliferate information through community sharing, educational teaching, and ecological activism, as well as through published work, such as Chen’s book, or via interviews where they discuss their ideals of natural farming. These activities aspire to create everyday ecological practices in relationships with nonhumans, soils, and the environment in naturecultures and technoscience.

CONCLUSION Given the anxiety regarding zoonotic diseases like Covid-19, it is likely that people will become increasingly willing to listen to Dr. Weiss, who shares his advice about food and health in an interview on Todays.com. Using his own experience as a primary care and urgent care physician to treat Covid-19 patients in New Jersey in 2020, Weiss claims that this is a transitional moment for people to consider the “medicine” lifestyle. As a physician-farmer engaged in organic and regenerative farming, Weiss advises his Covid-19 patients with chronic diseases to be more mindful of their lifestyle and diets (Weiss and Pawlowski 2020). Though two physical-farmers believe in agroecological practices on their farms, they do not opt for a human-centered position in their claim that food is medicine, nor do they preach an idealistic “return to nature.” Advocating for natural farming (Dr. Li and Chen) or organic farming (Dr. Weiss) does not speak to a desire to return to earlier practices but to “an urgent need for new kinds of farming, a truly new agriculture” and “a new beginning that grows out of the past, with an awareness of the mistakes that have been made in recent years” (Petrini 2007: 26–7). Likewise, Bellacasa also contends that the new forms of ethical engagement do not urge people to go “back to nature” but require people to “displace traditional understandings of the ethical” (2017: 22). Dr. Miller reminds us that learning from farmers is a way to learn how to “maintain balance and wellness within a living system” (2013: 9). For these doctors, farming defines their family, selfesteem, financial choices, self-image, priorities, and time (Martens 2017: 133). The choices people make every day about what to eat, where their food comes from, and how their food has been made “have powerful consequences for the health of individuals, communities, and the planet” (Jammet 163–4). The two physician-farmers reframe care through their ethical doings and their ethos, creating obligations; their farming builds life and creates relationships between the grower and the eater. Their voices and their views of the health of lands, farming, and environment evince

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community commitment achieved in the form of a community of purpose of the kind discussed by environmental humanists in “The New Normal” special Bifrost issue inspire a community of care.

REFERENCES Adamson, J. (2011), “Medicine Food: Critical Environmental Justice Studies, Native North American Literature, and the Movement for Food Sovereignty,” Environmental Justice, 4 (4): 213–21. Adamson, J., and S. Hartman (2020), “From Ecology to Syndemic: Accounting for the Synergy of Epidemics,” Bifrost Online, June 8. Available online: https://bifros​tonl​ine.org/joni-adam​son-and-ste​ven-hart​man/. Accessed November 21, 2020. “An Environmental Humanities Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Open Letter” (2020), Bifrost Online, June 8. Available online: https://bifros​tonl​ine.org/enviro​nmen​tal-hum​anit​ies-respo​nse-to-covid-19/. Accessed November 21, 2020. “AP Human Geography: Agriculture, Food Production, and Rural Land Use.” (n.d.). Available online: https://www.kapt​est.com/study/ap-human-geogra​phy/ap-human-geogra​phy-agri​cult​ure-food-pro​duct​ ion-and-rural-land-use/. Accessed November 21, 2020. Chen, H.-W ([2006] 2012), Slow and Natural Life, Taipei: Cite Publishing Ltd. Chen, C. (2013), “Forsake Industry and Engage in Farming Special Report (8): Creating Flourishing Economy at Happiness Farm,” People and History. Available online: https://www.new​smar​ket.com.tw/blog/34773/. Accessed November 21, 2020. Gaard, G. (2020), “The Coronavirus as Messenger,” Bifrost Online, June 8. Available online: https://bifros​tonl​ ine.org/greta-gaard/. Accessed December 21, 2020. Guo, L.-J. (2007), “Learning the Healing Way from Nature: Physician-Farmer Xu-ying Li,” Taiwan Panorama. Available online: https://www.tai​wan-panor​ama.com/Artic​les/Deta​ils?Guid=584d9​e6f-134c-4836-aedd-acaf2​ 58cd​3b4&CatId=7. Accessed May 21, 2020. Hartman, S., J. Adamson, G. Gaard, and S. Oppermann (2020), “Through the Portal of COVID-19: Visioning the Environmental Humanities as a Community of Purpose,” Bifrost Online, June 8. Available online: https:// bifros​tonl​ine.org/ste​ven-hart​man-joni-adam​son-greta-gaard-ser​pil-opperm​ann/. Accessed December 1, 2020. Huberman, M. (2019), “An Interview with Dr. Ron Weiss, M.D.,” Health Science, 5–13. Hurt, R. D. (2020), The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Imatome-Yun, N. (2016), “Meet the Physician-Farmer Who Grows the Plants He Prescribes to His Patients,” Forks Over Knives. Available online: https://www.fork​sove​rkni​ves.com/welln​ess/meet-physic​ian-far​mer-grows-pla​ nts-pre​scri​bes-patie​nts/. Accessed July 21, 2020. “In Their Words Ethos Farm’s Ron Weiss, MD” (2020), Open Connect Newsletter 168. Available online: https://www.organi​cpro​duce​netw​ork.com/arti​cle/1069/in-their-words-ethos-farms-ron-weiss-md. Accessed December 21, 2020. Isenbarger, J. (2017), “Introduction,” in M. Hodgkins (ed.), Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future, 11–13, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Jammet, N. (2017), “Nicolas Jammet,” in M. Hodgkins (ed.), Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future, 163–4, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Kingsolver, B. (2017), “Barbara Kingsolver,” in M. Hodgkins (ed.), Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future, 15–18, New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

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Latour, B. (2004), “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, 3 (2): 225–48. Lin, Z.-Z. (2014), “A Physician’s Farm: Xu-ying Li, Clean Food, Heal Both People and Soils,” United Daily News. Available online: https://hea​lth.udn.com/hea​lth/story/6006/344​101. Accessed December 21, 2020. Martens, M.-H. (2017), “Mary-Howell Martens,” in M. Hodgkins (ed.), Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future, 131–6, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. McCarthy, B. (2017), “Ethos Primary Care Produces Powerful Medicine,” New Jersey Monthly. Available online: https://njmont​hly.com/artic​les/hea​lth/ethos-prim​ary-care-power​ful-medic​ine/. Accessed December 21, 2020. Miller, D. (2013), Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us about Health and Healing, New York: William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. Petrini, C. (2007), , Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair, C. Furlan and J. Hunt (trans.), New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017), Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rigby, K. (2020), “Carnal Relations: Pathogens, Provender and Embodied Co-Presence,” Bifrost Online, June 8. Available online: http://bifros​tonl​ine.org/kate-rigby/. Accessed December 21, 2020. Sharma, D. (2019), “Reflections on the Green Revolution: What Is Revolutionary about the Green Revolution?,” Institute of Development Studies. Available online: https://www.ids.ac.uk/opini​ons/what-is-revolu​tion​ ary-about-the-green-rev​olut​ion/. Accessed December 21, 2020. Shen, Z. (1976), Taiwan’s Family Farm during Transitional Economic Growth, Ithaca, NY: Program in International Agriculture, Cornell University. Shiva, V. ([1991] 2002), The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London: Zed Books. Slovic, S. (2020), “COVID-World, COVID-Mind: Toward a New Consciousness,” Bifrost Online, June 8. Available online: https://bifros​tonl​ine.org/scott-slo​vic/. Vileisis, A. (2008), Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back, Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books. Washington, K. (2017), “Karen Washington,” in M. Hodgkins (ed.), Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future, 38–9, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Weiss, R. (2020), “Ethos Farm Project,” OpenIDEO. Available online: https://cha​llen​ges.openi​deo.com/challe​nge/ food-sys​tem-vis​ion-prize/open-sub​miss​ion/ethos-farm-proj​ect. Accessed December 21, 2020. Weiss, R., and A. Pawlowski (2020), “Doctor Shares the Health Advice He Gives to Every COVID-19 Patient.” Today, April 30. Available online: https://www.today.com/hea​lth/covid-19-diet-nutrit​ion-doc​tor-sha​res-adv​ ice-lower-coro​navi​rus-risk-t180​381. Accessed December 21, 2020. Xu, H.-L. (2006), “NATURE FARMING In Japan,” 1–168, Trivandrum, Kerala, India: Research Signpost. Available online: https://www.resea​rchg​ate.net/publ​icat​ion/275035​711_​NATU​RE_F​ARMI​NG_I​n_Ja​pan. Accessed December 21, 2020.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Poetry and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: Metabolic Pathways of Flesh NIKOLETA ZAMPAKI

The aim of this chapter is to analyze and examine Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of flesh of the world (: universal flesh) and chiasm that are adapted in Adam Dickinson’s sample of poems of the poetic collection entitled the Anatomic and Pinar Yoldas’ artistic project entitled the Ecosystem of Excess and propose a new reading of these works through a posthuman aesthetic perspective. Merleau-Ponty’s aforementioned concepts are the main axis in order to interpret nature and body by addressing an embodied and lived experience in space. Specifically, the concept of the flesh of the world is proposed here to be conceived as the question mark of the world’s being due to its constant, multi-voiced, and dynamic becoming. Directed by this concept, Dickinson’s “Metabolic Poetics” intersects the field of core competences by imaging other worlds and possibilities of existence. Based on the conception of possibilities, I have also conceived a 3D model-sculpture of Dickinson’s poem entitled “Vitamin D” and aim to enlighten more the kinship between human and more-than-human world, organic and inorganic materials, considering the notion of plasticity as the sublime of all life-forms. Moving from poetics to art, I will also examine the universal flesh’s plasticity in Yoldas’ aforementioned project in which the organic and inorganic life-forms are in a constant interplay by defining a new field of artistic practice, that of the Posthuman Bio-Art. To sum up, through a posthuman aesthetic perspective, the universal flesh remaps and renews our reality in which all the metabolic processes and transformations of human nature and body are in a symbiotic relationship in both bio- and techno-artistic spheres.

THE UNIVERSAL FLESH: A POSTHUMAN “PLASTIC AORTAS” The ecological and cultural implications of the age of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17–18) renew the epistemological terrain of Humanities. Through the prominent trends of the Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, and the Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

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this chapter aims to examine the kinship between the human and more-than-human world in poetry and art of the twenty-first century. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world is defined as the core of all elements and their substances, focusing mainly on the ontological spectrum of the world’s being (Abram 1997: 65–6). The universal flesh involves in all processes of nature and body (Merleau-Ponty 1983: 298–9). These processes are held in time and space constantly, and shape the multiple and voiced aspects of universal flesh which remap our embodiment and bodily awareness by enlightening the complex kinship between human and more-than-human world. In this sense, the universal flesh is the stylistics of all the chiasms (: interplays) in order to encapsulate, create, and renew the world’s being constantly. The universal flesh is correlated with the concept of plasticity, and according to Catherine Malabous’ account about neuroplasticity, it could be elaborated as a factor of identification, globalization, and so forth. (Malabou 2012: 5). It is obvious that the world of the more-thanhuman agencies can be plasticized, resulting to the perception of the universal flesh as a “plastic aortas” (Barthes 1957: 195). Actually, plasticity can be found as a term in both sciences and biology, perceived as a metaphor, for example, for the definition of a poem, seen as a “lived organism.” Moreover, plasticity generates any poem as a manifestation of the artistic expression through the perception of its literacy. We cannot adopt the term of representation here, but we shall introduce in our research the expression of the Being’s first articulation. The word “representation” naturally describes the binary of subject–object that shall be excluded in order to understand further the meaning of universal flesh and/within poetics and art. A poem or artwork could be the Being itself through the expression of other beings. Naturally, each poetic or artistic form includes all the tropes, and modalities as the universal flesh is constructed by various mediums of poetic or artistic articulations. In this way, a poem or artwork is a kind of the universal flesh’s sublime, which is an expression of Being; at the same time, the Being is the articulation of universal flesh. Plasticity unifies the metabolic processes of the universal flesh despite any incompatibilities with the human nature as it is already a metabolic agent enmeshed in the interplays of more-than-human systems. By implementing the ethical reasoning in metabolic poetics, we have to investigate the construction and experiment as well as the kind of agentive contexts based on plasticity. Actually, the universal flesh’s plasticity is important for the semantic regimentation of the organic and inorganic life-forms and mobilizes the empirical and axiomatic claims that are based on many normative assumptions about the nature of writing processes as metabolic ones. Therefore, the field of Metabolic Poetics depends on the ability to perceive similarity as a poetic medium (: mimesis). The results of the process of writing and reading tend to the narratives of Metabolic Poetics, which are both creative and experimental ones, as well as braid the factual to enhance the embodied awareness. Aiming to this enhancement, the poetic/artistic nature is very much identified with the body and existence as all the embodied agencies of human and more-thanhuman world are inseparable.

THE UNIVERSAL FLESH IN METABOLIC POETICS: A POSTHUMAN AESTHETIC PERSPECTIVE Dickinson’s ontological outlook, acquired in the human sphere, canalizes the way that we anthropomorphize systems, elaborating that universal flesh is pre-established, curtailed and

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contoured from the beginning of its approach. Here the universal flesh is the co-agent in the production of form, as its nature is more than the material one, and filtered directly by the subjective, lived, and embodied experience. The epigenetic becoming of universal flesh’s plasticity provides a new framework for the analysis of Metabolic Poetics. Metabolic Poetics is an experimental, innovative, and creative field, which sets the ground for a new literary genre of studying the life-forms of signification by offering new data about the interconnectedness between the biological and cultural writing, and exploring not only the ecological but also the posthuman processes of writing and thinking in the age of the Anthropocene. Moreover, Metabolic Poetics studies the dynamics, functionalities, and mechanics of organisms and environments, their interactions within endosemiotic environments, as well as the complex nature of any interplay between human and more-than-human world. According to Jesper Hoffmeyer’s account, the semiosphere is full of partial spheres including constant interplays that are based on variable contexts, raised from colors to senses (Hoffmeyer 2008: 5). By elaborating the previous statement, nature is the “biggest” body that is perceived as a central function of semiosis, including also the more-than-human world’s semiosis (Alaimo 2010: 2). In Dickinson’s Metabolic Poetics we regard a project that combines poetry imagining itself as science and science that imagines itself as poetry through the multiple layers of his embodied experience, mind, and senses. Specifically, in Dickinson’s poetic collection entitled the Anatomic, we examine the subjective body and its kinship with other life-forms inside and outside of it. Here the universal flesh could be the most vital stream of the human body (Leder 1990: 209–19). Dickinson’s aim is to express bodily the interplays between the human and more-than-human lifeforms by transcripting them poetically (in praxis). Embodiment is a feature of humans as a living and sentient body entails it in order to achieve selfawareness, which is central to the project of posthuman aesthetics. By looking through a configured set of metabolic processes, an actor could see his body and variable postures on it, and even correlate various visual looks with (Montero 2006: 234, 240). Adopting by a posthuman aesthetic perspective on the concept of the universal flesh could shed new insights on an interdisciplinary approach of bodily experience, methods, discourses, and performances of the aesthetic experience in praxis. Posthuman aesthetics is proposed here to overcome the conventional limits of traditional aesthetics by cultivating a bodily discipline involving both theoretical and practical aesthetic study cases and rejecting bodily study cases that only deal with the human body. The concept of nature’s body, a sentient and perceptive one, provides faculties through a better understanding of metabolic processes. In this way, posthuman aesthetics goes beyond the typical disciplinary limits of philosophy in order to achieve wider transformational improvements of ourselves and knowledge, by redirecting back to the core issues of perception, consciousness, and feeling, which are embodied in the root meaning of aesthetics. A posthuman aesthetic experience in the poetics can thus be understood through a better grasp of its ground in more empirical forms of perceptual experience that are also actively embodied. To effect such queries about the future of aesthetics, it also includes practical exercises of bodily artworks rather than a mere aesthetic discourse. The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and Posthuman Aesthetics are more the elaboration of our study case and means giving universal flesh to thought through bodily style and examples, expressing it through one’s manner of living and perception of the world around (more-than-human world).

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Venturing more into such phenomenological speculations, however, we meet the posthuman ones. I therefore sympathize with speculative posthumanism in order to stress the openness from ethics to aesthetics and what the posthuman aspect of universal flesh might actually be about, except transgressing the human embodied experience in a broad sense. For instance, in Dickinson’s poem entitled “Hormone” (Dickinson 2018: 22–4), the human body is crowded with a mix of petrochemicals and their subcategories, for example, lipophilic toxins, phthalates, organochlorine pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, parabens, bisphenol A, 31 heavy metals, and so forth, in which the poetic subject was tested. In the poem’s first lines, there is a reference about a partial endo-semiotic environment, which is the hydrosphere (: “Water stirred/with a spear”). It is perceived as a natural body where the poetic subject moves (: embodied experience within the natural world). The feeling of anxiety is obvious as the poetic subject seems to be in a ‘weird’ ontological situation of his embodied experience in space. The anthropomorphism of water and the process of digestion are accounts for the metabolic processes of human body. The process of digestion is understood in the context of eating, a metabolic process itself: is a form of commitment to the dignity, of letting it go. One part of you, as an act of survival, starts eating another part. This is a membranous decision. The poetic subject charts the body through metaphors by highlighting that both human body and society’s bodies are vital streams, lived systems of thinking and action. These systems are evolutionary ones in time and space due to the constant dynamic and presence of the universal flesh, which is a multi-voiced becoming and in progress constantly: in which the crowd, having mistaken its periphery, resembles its prey. It was unbearable to see the possum lying there. You asked me to drive over its head with the car. Hope is such a strange evolutionary adaptation. The subjective and embodied experience shaped by the universal flesh is still in progress and perceived through the “pressures,” as the result of all processes which are endorsed with past

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time and affect the subjective emotional world. The chiasm of “drinking glass/with an envelope” describes partial material elements that are perplexed into the hydrosphere. Dickinson’s poetic writing is centered on all life-forms that are symbionts under the universal flesh. The attunement of all life-forms (: more-than-human “voices”) speaks to subtle, affective modulations in the symbiosis between different bodies. This attunement is seen as a pre-conscious way through which the poetic subject finds himself tuned to the environment including strangeness and enchantment (Anderson et al. 2012: 213). Moreover, the attunement with the environment could be seen as a different aspect of the self and perceived as an achievement of bringing in contact the poetic subject with different aspects of the self as an embodied way of tracking effectiveness and emotions. We would argue that the diversity and heterogeneity of partial bodies with which the poetic subject is in dialogue generate “qualities, forces, relations and movements” (Stewart 2011: 445). For instance, the references of “bodies,” “trees,” and “flags” are a shift from the anthropocentric to a post-anthropocentric worldview that overcome the binaries between life-forms’ nature and bodies. Here the fermentations are generative metaphors, material practices of symbiotic cultures of energy and capital. In this sense, the aforementioned three words are cultures of microorganisms that are incorporated into other bodily agents: What selective pressures must have been its shepherd, what drinking glass with an envelope placed over the top carrying a spider outside? Against the occupations and desertions, against the bodies tied to trees and the flags partitioning. The concept of plasticity is perceived in terms of politics of our kinship with the world, not restricted only in the micro-spectrum layer. Specifically, the reference of “wind” is central as the universal flesh hosts within its wide area everything around humans, and brings to fore new knowledge about the generations through collaborations with inorganic life-forms, centered by the lived and embodied experience. The co-shaping of human and more-than-human world blurs, even blends, the boundaries between them by examining the environment as a posthuman testimony of a speculative present. The human temporalities are both contradicted and embodied in present as the “depictions of capital” are bounded with a metabolic process, that of “breathing”. The concept of capital is central and refers to all these process that shape it and format it, including the natural (wind) and urban ones (e.g., house, aquarium, refined sugars): the wind above them, against the accumulated wealth

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that acquires a house with an aquarium big enough to require its own diver, against the majuscule Idea of refined sugars and depictions of capital concentrating on its breathing. The subjective identity is shaped by variable chiasms and conveys the complexity of the constant interplays. Thus, the reference for a “monster,” which reflects our fears and anxieties, is followed by darkness and impending death. The poem’s last lines could be a statement for the tragic human condition in which the spatiality (: earth) affects rapidly the subjective psychology. As a result, the subject feels alone and thinks that the death is the only option to escape from any existential uncertainty or precarity of his time. Here, the death is not conceived as the biological end, but it is a eutopia of catharsis from all the existential trammels of human sphere. The intentional death is a proposal in order to transcend the human nature and feel the universal flesh’s circularity (: chiasm of life and death). A posthuman aesthetic perspective on human body remarks that the potential death (“the possum”, “and its adaptive capacity to convincingly die”) does not have to resort to a horror or gothic vision of fear, but draws the ideas of co-existence within its world: there is this hopeful monster. You breastfeed the survivor with coded plans for escape. The signal slips through undetected like the possum and its adaptive capacity to convincingly die. Another example is the poem entitled “Vitamin D” (Dickinson 2018: 120), which is a visual poem, full of consonants and vowels, as a distinctive experimental form of writing. According to Dickinson’s account, the mix of consonants and vowels are profound as “through this poem we can read a list of words in English in which the letter D occurs in every word four times. … This vitamer is the linguistic form of this fat-soluble secosteroid” (Dickinson 2018: 148). The perception of the world through embodied experience and senses is not restricted only in the humans or the world itself. Here the poetic subject envisages a greater access to the human being in order to chart the metabolic processes as well as the chiasm of both visible and invisible

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agencies that constructs the vitamin D. In the poem we can read many adjectives of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ semantics, which address the subjective embodied experience of enclosing vitamin D within and out of the body: “Vitamin D” I,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol addleheaded condiddled dadded daddled deadheaded dendrodendritic diddered diddled disbudded disgodded disindividualized dodded doddered dogsledded dunderheaded granddaddy lepidodendroid muddleheadedly skedaddled underbudded woodshedded. The writing of organic matter is central to the plasticity of language and its use. The 3D modelsculpture (Figure 14.1) is an artistic attempt of the inscription of Dickinson’s poem for the vitamin D as the 3D model-sculpture is shaped by the chiasms of text codes. Specifically, we interpret the lines of the poem “Vitamin D” in pairs with the sequence of the four blocks of DNA’s chain: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine. Following up the 3D model and proposing it as a new artistic expression of a “plastic” universal flesh, we will examine Yoldas’ project as a representative example of the intertwined materialsemiotic worlding and the ontological heterogeneity of the natural and cultural conjunctions, considering that one molecule or laboratory’s organic life can be represented as a hyper-object (Morton 2013: 10–15) that permeates biological and cultural metabolism of artistic tropes and science. The concept of a “plastic” universal flesh extends beyond anthropocentrism, by examining more the narrative of posthumanism, introducing potential scenarios of future life, compared to those envisioned through techno-centric means. Building on art, the plasticity of universal flesh involves in all kinships that are the outcome of processes.

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FIGURE 14.1  Adam Dickinson’s poem “Vitamin D” and its inscription as a 3D model-sculpture, c. 2019. Courtesy Nikoleta Zampaki.

THE UNIVERSAL FLESH IN BIO-ART: TOWARDS POSTHUMAN AESTHETICS The study of the more-than-human world in Bio-Art through a posthuman perspective refers that the “trans-individual element of nature” (Mikki 2021: 16) is ontologically entangled with the age of the Anthropocene. The return to nature is not based on the special spectrum of ego or the Cartesian subject, but there is a nonhuman element of the aesthetics of nature by exploring the futurity of humanism. In general, modern artworks expose the conditions through which materiality stresses the condition of being situated and uttering inside and in relationship with the interacting world. Yoldas’ artistic project named Ecosystem of Excess (2014) proves that the dynamics of an artifact (Malraux 1953: 13) can change the way of our thinking about the bio- and techno-spheres respectively. Yoldas merges the posthuman with the Anthropocene, stressing the acceleration of technological culture absorbing both the environment (Anthropocene) and the human body, blending symbiosis, ordered and negentropic tendencies. Her project is engaged with human and more-than-human

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bodies: living tissues, rebuilding organisms, bacteria, and so forth, and it is monumental to plastic waste on a global scale as her artworks are kinesthetic and vivid sculptures of the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, the project introduces pelagic insects, marine reptilia, fish, birds and organs in order to sense and metabolize plastics in a linear order and consider all forms of in-/organic life. All of her artworks are distinctive to their “anthropo-de-centrism” by offering life without mankind. Every bodily act accomplishes what the culture of a contemporary artistic project and its aesthetics name the installation, as our senses gather and interpret systems that are not apart from the world. Yoldas’ subject of the creative work is more than just the human being (Leopoldseder, Schöpf, and Stocker 2019: 247). A strong blurring boundary among art and biosciences leads to the creation of hybrid practices that can be found in Yoldas’ work. Here we have to explore the discipline of Posthuman Bio-Art which is a discipline that studies the forms and practices that involves living organisms and tissues, organs, bacteria, and so forth, and considers critically reflections on the ethics, methods, and practices of biology, medicine, and so forth (Dumitriu and Farsides 2017: 4). For instance, the artwork named “Stomaximus” is a digestive organ that metabolizes plastics. It entails many bacteria that break down variable types of plastics such as Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), Polyurethane (PU), Polystyrne (PS), and so forth, and at the same time it metabolizes them. Another artwork, named “PetroNephros,” is full of colors, textures, and chemicals. This artwork does a job filtering out these additives during the digestion of plastics, serving homeostatic functions to keep the organism free of disrupters, plastic-related carcinogens, and so forth. Furthermore, the “Plastic Balloon Turtle” is an artwork in which we can learn more about marine turtles that have been ingesting by toxic waste. Finally, the “Transchromatic Eggs” is a colored artwork that makes a contrast to the darkness of the sea environment, by addressing the importance of light in sea environments. Yoldas’ aforementioned artworks express a co-performance and interconnectedness as they are aligned with new and innovative artistic practices of interacting the disciplines of Environmental Humanities and Posthumanities. The medium of all these artworks is upgraded in the ecological sensibility grounded in the universal flesh’s plasticity in which body produces plastic artworks. Looking at Yoldas’ artistic pitfalls, we are close enough to the speculations of human future and the need for a new perspective that is oriented beyond the aesthetics and is yearning the inhuman, the animal life-forms, and so forth by maintaining the conditions of future. Considering the concept of universal flesh and its plasticity, our emphasis on aesthetic experience is worthwhile as it directs us toward the value and appreciation in art and life. By extending the embodied experience and stylistics of art, it seems useful to define more the discipline of posthuman aesthetics and go further into the current debates on aesthetics, somaesthetics, and eco-aesthetics. However, we have to rethink the affairs of art with the objects and how those objects function within embodied experience (Shusterman 2012: 176). Talking about posthuman aesthetic experience rather than art likewise helps address that there are posthuman aesthetic dimensions beyond the artistic realm. Yoldas’ project can be usefully deployed as a general term to designate the consequences of action and ideas in ways that may not be articulated in language. Combining the textualism and posthumanism with the notion of universal flesh our world and selves are contingent and we can reshape, express, and interpret them through new vocabularies. We can experience and create things that allow us to question the idea of posthuman aesthetics of universal flesh as a project by thinking through the body and nature while working on them. More precisely, we challenge posthuman aesthetics by assimilating it into traditional aesthetic theory. Posthuman

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aesthetics, which is studied in Yoldas’s project, is an interdisciplinary enterprise, radiating out of the concept of universal flesh and its plasticity: a constant dynamic core of Being that implies the essential union of body and nature. The study of body, perception, performance, and expression provides better forms of bodily awareness by engaging with science, biology, art, and other disciplines. Thus, in Yoldas’ project, the aim is not to provide philosophical definitions but to bring together and deploy many things we know or we can learn about embodied perception (: aesthesis) and action about entrenched bodily norms and practical bodily disciplines. In this sense, the offered knowledge can be used in practice to enrich our life and extend the human experience as we know and imagine it. Considering that posthuman aesthetics is a new field of research, a field that involves the philosophical, empirical, and critical study of the principles of bodily functioning in perception and cultural norms, practices, values, and institutions, it deals with the critique of practical study cases aimed at bodily awareness, performance, and anxiety for the nature’s future. Here, posthuman aesthetics could go beyond the remedy of diagnosis of any partial body-artwork by transforming bodily feelings, even acting out a “cultural expression” (Lippert-Rasmussen, Rosendahl Thomsen, and Wamberg 2011: 138). Through a cultural expression we can therefore reconstruct our ethics and attitudes by raising awareness for the precarities of our time, as Yoldas’ artworks are not subscribed neither to the fascination of technology nor to techno-phobia, but she manages to show that when the difference between what is natural and what is artificial is blurred, the values attached to them are also concrete.

CONCLUSIONS Dickinson and Yoldas’ perspectives are centered by the universal flesh, and address the mutual accord between the presence, absence, visibility, and invisibility that eventually challenge the consideration of a new ontology of the in-itself and the for-itself. This kind of ontology accommodates the subjects, objects, and tropes of existence that are attached to the universal flesh. The stories they weave, such as the poetic and artistic expressions of the universal flesh, are narratives to envision the future of both poetry and art in the age of Anthropocene. Dickinson and Yoldas’ works are not mere representations, but they ‘revolutionize’ the world according to the transformative power that is ascribed to the poetic/artistic object itself: an artistic object that is laden with revolutionary energy that deserves to be in a posthuman world where there is no need of art categories that are humans’ products and reflections. Both Dickinson and Yoldas explore the continuous chiasms of life-forms in order to access, even grasp the world’s being, as they adapt the physical agencies and at the same time overcome them. Their performative aggregate could be termed as a posthuman one that truly signifies a postevolutionary process, exploring this emerging posthuman performative dimension of boundaries. The lifeforms’ being is balanced between the vital becoming of themselves and the directive of universal flesh that operates the processes of both nature and body, separately and together. Besides, the metabolic pathways of flesh are not a discursive theory that define a non-discursive experience but the articulation and improvement of methods that serve as discursive practices that structure the ways we regard and treat our bodies around us. In this sense, posthuman aesthetics opens up new perspectives on the approach of the texts and artworks that value the body’s matter and elaborate an aesthetic of physicality in the latter.

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The fragmentations of the body and its interlacing with inorganic and partial bodies within the natural environments (human and more-than-human ones) are undermined through a dialectic of entropy and order. This dialectic is derived from the “apocalyptical imagination” (Wamberg and Rosendahl Thomsen 2017: 2) that can be found in both Dickinson and Yoldas who seek to explore new narratives of the future with a focus on the structure, function, and behavior of bodies around us, including our human body and its intersections with other bodies (human and nonhuman ones). This “apocalyptic imagination” is constructed on the symbiosis between humans with other species. The limitation of entropy requires a system that is capable of avoiding the deterioration of any organization and makes strong affinities with the possible environments by focusing mainly on their boundaries (Wilson 2020: 323). In conclusion, a posthuman imaginary is helpful to us to think about human and more-thanhuman bodies and provide us with new modes of interpreting our presence in today’s world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to my supervisor and professor Peggy Karpouzou for her fruitful comments and discussions on my current research.

REFERENCES Abram, D. (1997), The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, New York: Vintage. Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anderson, B., M. Kearnes, C. McFarlane, and D. Swanton (2012), “Materialism and the Politics of Assemblage,” Dialogues in Human Geography, 2 (2): 212–15. Barthes, R. (1957), Mythologies, trans. R. Howard and A. Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang. Crutzen, P. J., and E. F. Stoermer (2000), “The Anthropocene,” The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), Newsletter, 41: 17–18. Dickinson, A. (2018), Anatomic, Toronto: Coach House Books. Dumitriu, A., and B. Farsides, eds. (2017), Trust Me, I Am an Artist: Towards an Ethics of Art and Science Collaboration, London: Blurb. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008), Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, trans. J. Hoffmeyer and D. Favareau, Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Leder, D. (1990), “Flesh and Blood: A Proposed Supplement to Merleau – Ponty,” Human Studies, 13 (3): 209–19. Leopoldseder, H., C. Schöpf, and G. Stocker, eds. (2019), Out of the Box: The Midllife Crisis of the Digital Revolution – Ars Electronica, Berlin: Ars Electronica and Hatje Cantz. Lippert-Rasmussen, K., M. Rosendahl Thomsen, and J. Wamberg, eds. (2011), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Malabou, C. (2012), Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. C. Shread, Cambridge: Polity Press. Malraux, A. (1953), The Voices of Silence, trans. S. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1983), The Structure of Behavior, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Mikki, S. (2021), “Aesthetic Theory and the Philosophy of Nature,” Philosophies, 6 (56): 1–23.

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Montero, B. (2006), “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2): 231–42. Morton, T. (2013), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shusterman, R. (2012), Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, K. (2011), “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29 (3): 445–53. Wamberg, J., and M. Rosendahl Thomsen (2017), “The Posthuman in the Anthropocene: A Look through the Aesthetic Field,” European Review, 25 (1): 150–65. Wilson, A. (2020), “What Aesthetics Tells Us about Posthumans,” in M. Rosendahl Thomsen and J. Wamberg (eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, 319–31, London: Bloomsbury.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Health, Disease, and the Body in Ecofeminist Theory: Entangled Vulnerabilities SUSANNE LETTOW

Health and disease are central concerns of ecofeminism and have been conceptualized in ecofeminist theory in different ways since the late twentieth century. As Vandana Shiva stated in 1994, “women’s involvement in the environmental movement has started with their lives and with the severe threat to the health of their families” (Shiva 1994b: 2). Indeed, feminists have contributed significantly to bring “human health issues on the mainstream environmental movement agenda and to put environmental issues on the health map” (Seager 2003: 957). During the 1980s and 1990s, ecofeminists in the Global North “challenged the mostly male-led mainstream environmental movement on its bias on prioritizing wilderness, animal conservation and wildlife protection and its concomitant neglect of urban and social environmental issues, including, prominently, health issues” (958). In the Global South, in particular South Asia, debates focused on “the interlinkages of ecology, health and ‘(mal)development’ ” (958). In different global contexts, the body and distortions of the conditions of the possibility to adequately care for bodies, their health, and wellbeing thus emerged as central matters of concern in ecofeminist theory and activism. Indeed, societal nature relations are formed through embodied practices while, at the same time, modes of human existence and human bodies are fundamentally shaped through complex, historically and socially specific, interactions with nonhuman creatures, substances, materials, and artifacts. The vulnerability of human bodies is thus closely entangled with that of other living beings, so that “what we do to nature, we do to ourselves” (Shiva 1994b: 9). The critique of dualistic conceptualizations of nature and culture, body and mind, the human and the nonhuman, is therefore central to ecofeminist theory although theoretical understandings of the body vary within the field of ecofeminism as do the ecological problems, health issues, and political contexts that have been addressed and challenged since the 1980s. Certainly, the various approaches of ecofeminist theory that seek to reconceptualize the human body, its relation to the nonhuman world, and gendered relations of power and domination cannot be reduced to essentialist and

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holistic views—as a common critique has it.1 Moreover, they have much to contribute to the emerging field of the eco-medical humanities as well as to a critical theory of gender relations. In what follows, I will discuss three branches of ecofeminist theory that provide distinctive insights into the interrelations of medical and ecological knowledges. In the first part, I will discuss the ways in which ecofeminist theorists have challenged neo-Malthusian strategies which seek to solve environmental problems through population politics that first and foremost target women’s bodies. I explore how theorists such as Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, and others have successfully challenged populationist articulations of ecology and introduced perspectives of reproductive health into the field of global population politics. In addition, I discuss the current reemergence of neo-Malthusian perspectives in the context of the Anthropocene discourse and debates on climate change. In the second part, I reconstruct ecofeminist analyses that focus on environmental pollution and the circulation of anthropogenic toxic substances. These analyses highlight the fact that bodies are not isolated entities but situated in and affected by multiple intersecting relations of power and domination as well as material relations that transgress the boundaries of individual bodies. By building on approaches of authors such as Julie Sze, Nina Lykke, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Y. Chen, I show that vulnerability is highly stratified and that it correlates with the unequal exposure to the circulation of toxins and other forms of pollution and ecological risks. In addition, I discuss how ecofeminists and queer theorists have reconceptualized the human body by arguing that it does not end at the skin but that human bodies are closely entangled with and shaped through their interactions with the nonhuman world. These interactions and related forms of stratified vulnerability must be understood as material-semiotic, i.e., as material entanglements that are shaped and structured through politics of discourse and signification that work through images and imaginaries, knowledges and epistemologies of ignorance. In recent years, ecofeminist theory has increasingly drawn on multispecies theory that scrutinizes the modes of coexistence of humans and other species. In order to explore how multispecies health can be conceptualized in a way that takes the insights of ecofeminist analyses discussed in the previous parts of this chapter serious I will, in the third part, first discuss ecofeminist understandings of planetary health. The notion of planetary health emerged in the ecofeminist discourse of the 1980s and early 1990s with respect to the Gaia Theory formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis that I will therefore briefly discuss. In particular, I will scrutinize the analogy of the body and the—feminized—planet as well as the semantic extension of notions of health and disease. Second, I will discuss the emerging paradigm of One Health by focusing on perspectives from gender studies and political economy. I argue that these further developments of the One Health approach provide crucial insights on which an intersectional understanding of multispecies relationships can build. I conclude with a brief evaluation of the different notions of the body that shape the different branches of ecofeminist theory and discuss the question how they contribute to understanding the entangled vulnerabilities of humans and other living beings and of humans within and across global societies.

Seager who prefers the term “feminist environmentalism” nevertheless shows that the term “ecofeminism” has been used in a narrow and a broader way, designating or a specific set of positions or a heterogeneous field of activism and scholarship. My own use of the term is based on its wider meaning. 1

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CONTESTING NEO-MALTHUSIAN STRATEGIES: ECOLOGY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, AND BIOPOLITICS Environmental problems have been framed as problems of limited space inhabited by too many people since the early twentieth century,2 although the promotion of population politics as a means to solve ecological problems gained momentum only in the second half in the context of the Cold War. Books such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and the report of the Club of Rome, The Limits of Growth (1972), introduced the idea of overpopulation to a broader audience while institutions such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation developed anti-natalist programs that first and foremost targeted poor women in the Global South.3 The fact that these programs and respective procedures produced severe health risks and injuries was one central starting point for ecofeminist theory and activism during the 1980s. In particular, ecofeminist criticism focused on the intrusion into the bodily integrity through coerced sterilization, and the side effects of contraceptives that were distributed among women in the Global South without providing necessary information or paying attention to their living conditions that could increase the health risks attributed to these pharmaceuticals. Health activist Mira Shiva, for example, reported in 1994 with reference to medical studies carried out in Ghadhcharoli, a district of Maharashtra, India, “that 92 per cent of women were suffering from gynecological diseases, 52 per cent with symptoms including pain, discomfort, leucorrhoea, and dyspareunia (pain during sexual intercourse)” (Shiva 1994: 72). Although India was a prominent case, these problems were not restricted to this country. In Haiti, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) linked aid distribution to the participation in contraceptive incentive programs and the governments of Singapore and Indonesia “denied housing, tax and other benefits to parents who had more than two children. … In one particularly horrifying example, members of the Bangladesh army rounded up hundreds of people for forcible sterilization, and food aid from the World Food Program was denied to Bangladeshi flood victims who refused to be sterilized” (Sasser 2018: 35).4 The population control policies of the 1970s and 1980s, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva summarized, therefore “were a double tragedy: first, because they failed to understand and cater to women’s contraceptive needs; and second, because they marginalized and eclipsed all other health care work” (Mies and Shiva [1994] 2014: 290). The first World Population Conference took place in Geneva in 1927 and was designed to discuss “life in limited space” or life on earth (Bashford 2014: 2). These discussions built on ideas formulated by Malthus and Darwin in the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. 2

Famously, it was Malthus’ formulation of the human struggle for room and food that prompted natural historians to think about the behavior of organisms of all and any kinds, in limited spaces. Wallace’s and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was thus born, and it was this Malthusian-Darwinian idea that made its way first into German geopolitics and then into early-twentieth-century plant and animal ecology. It returned to human population studies, demography, and human ecology. (11) 3

Hartmann (2014: 762): In the heyday of population control, from the late 1960s to the end of the Cold War, reducing fertility in poor countries was a major component of US foreign policy, linked to the containment of communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as private population foundations and organizations were joined together in a powerful “population establishment.” Multilateral agencies, notably the World Bank and the U.N. Fund for Populations Activities (UNFPA), were also members of this establishment.

4

On the situation in Latin America, see Schultz (2006).

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In addition, Mies, Shiva, and other ecofeminists have repeatedly argued not only that the assumptions and arguments underlying international population politics are sexist, racist, and class-biased but also that they systematically misframe ecological problems insofar as they neglect and obscure their most important causes. “No account is taken,” Mies and Shiva put it, “of the exploitative and colonial world system, of the prevailing development paradigm or of the wasteful production and consumption pattern of the industrialized societies which are responsible for most of the environmental destruction” (278). Although the report of the United Nations Fund for Population Action (UNFPA) from 1990, to which they refer, admitted the globally unequal share in the causation of ecological problems, the authors of the report promoted neo-Malthusian strategies by articulating ecology in terms of limited space and a too high quantity of humans inhabiting it. Central elements of this articulation were Malthus’s notion of “natural fertility” and the idea of the “carrying capacity” of countries and regions that ecologist Aldo Leopold had introduced in 1941 by arguing that “every environment carries not only characteristic kinds of animals, but characteristic numbers of each” (quoted after Hartmann 2014: 768).5 From this point of view, humans primarily appear as natural burdens and as objects of political calculation. This quantification and the naturalization of human reproductive relations, however, are epistemological preconditions for the systematic neglect of the needs, desires, and perspectives of those subjugated to the populationist view. This view and the emergence of the very notion of the population cannot only be traced back to the eighteenth century.6 Malthusian and neo-Malthusian strategies seem to be a surprisingly stable element of modern state politics even if population politics have undergone significant change during the last centuries and decades. From the mid-1990s on, it seemed that neo-Malthusian population politics and respective articulations of ecological problems declined after the strategic compromise that had been reached at the Conference on Population and Development that took place in Cairo in 1994. Many feminist organizations then considered the conference as a success because, finally, the importance of reproductive rights and reproductive health had been officially acknowledged.7 However, in the present context of the debates on climate change and the Anthropocene, “the population ‘crisis’ returns” (Sasser 2018: 31). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, claims that “globally, economic and population growth continue to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion” (quoted from Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020: 317). This view correlates with proposals of “population engineering” that include measures such as “choice enhancement,” “preference adjustment,” “American ecologist William Vogt also used the term carrying capacity, draping it in world historic significance in his 1948 bestseller Road to Survival. Vogt painted an apocalyptic picture of population pressures outstripping food production and degrading the environment” (Hartmann 2014: 768). Mies and Shiva rejected Malthus’s concept of “natural fertility” and replaced it by an understanding that accounts for the various practices through which women and men have regulated the fertility throughout history. So instead of being construed as being determined through natural facts, reproduction and sexuality were addressed as modes of interaction involving the “capacity for relatedness to ourselves, to each other, and by implication the earth and its inhabitants” (Mies and Shiva [1994] 2014: 294). In a similar vein, they deconstructed the naturalization that the notion of “carrying capacity” implies. Mies and Shiva argued that the productivity of a certain region and possible limits to feed its population do not depend on the sheer amount of humans living in that region but on modes of production and consumption, and in particular on imperial forms of extractivism. “Most ecosystems in the Third World,” they argued, “do not merely carry local populations; the also carry the North’s demands for industrial raw material and consumption” (283). As a consequence, what could be considered as “a sustainable population size on the basis of local production, consumption and lifestyle patterns, becomes non-sustainable due to external resource exploitation” (283). 6 See Kreager (2018). 7 On the ambivalent politics of reproductive health in the wake of the Cairo Conference, cf. Schultz (2006). 5

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or “incentivization” for reducing the number of children and a “carbon tax” that new mothers should pay (320). As Jade S. Sasser shows, one of the main arguments of the proponents of such proposals is “that reducing childbearing is a more attractive climate change mitigation strategy than reducing resource consumption because it is easier, thus helping individuals avoid making unnecessary personal sacrifices” (2018: 45). The structural problem of neo-Malthusian strategies, however, still is that they mainly target women’s bodies and lives and make them responsible for the threats of ecological disaster while continuing on extractivist modes of production and consumption. Betsy Hartmann has explored this with respect to “population initiatives in Africa and how they frame contraception as a fix for social and environmental problems, including climate change” (2014: 761).8 African countries, she argues, are construed as “population and climate hotspots” (2014: 767) by organizations such as Population Action International or The African Institute for Development Policy even though the CO2 emissions of these countries are relatively low. Still and again, the promotion of contraceptives such as the three-month hormonal injectable Depo-Provera is presented as a means to solve ecological problems while side effects and health risks are downplayed or ignored.9 As these examples show, neo-Malthusian strategies remain a problem that ecofeminist theory needs to address. These strategies follow the trajectory of biopolitics that, from its inception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, functioned as stratified and racialized politics of reproduction and has worked on the two levels of disciplining individual bodies and of regulating the “body” of the population, as Michel Foucault put it. In Foucault’s view, sexuality is the “hinge” through which the disciplining of bodies and the regulation of populations are connected. However, when Foucault introduced the concept of biopolitics in the context of his analysis of the deployment of sexuality, he largely neglected the significance of reproduction and race even when analyzing the figure of the Malthusian couple. The disciplining and regulation of reproduction thus functions as “a hinge which is not thematized” (Deutscher 2012: 124)10 but which has, since the nineteenth century, systematically linked politics of sexuality, racism, and demography. Indeed, focusing on reproduction, helps to understand how biopolitics, since its inception, has functioned simultaneously on the level of the nation state and globally with regard to the world population.11 Biopolitics has always involved both selective pro- and anti-natalist strategies through which certain

These initiatives rely on neo-Malthusian narratives and are “fed by, and feed on fears of overpopulation” (Hartmann 2014: 761). Hartmann also discusses how they “relate to broader developments in US security policy” (761). 9 Hartmann (2014: 764): 8

Depo-Provera has long been the subject of considerable medical controversy. Its known side effects include prolonged and irregular bleeding, loss of bone density in young women, significant weight gain, depression, and loss of libido. There are clear racial disparities in its use, both in the US where it is mainly promoted to women of color, and globally where sub-Saharan Africa is a primary target. … For over a decade now, medical studies have provided compelling evidence that Depo-Provera may increase the risk of women and their partners becoming infected with HIV. Deutscher points out that the Malthusian couple is “one of the least discussed figures of Foucault’s History of Sexuality” (2012: 128). She therefore “reads back into HS1 the status of the woman and maternal reproductivity in relation to population and the overlap with the role of women” (128). 11 As Deutscher states, “Ann Stoler has been one of the few of Foucault’s readers to stress the role of reproduction in his account of racism, in its interconnection with the problematics of miscegenation, and the defence of peoples or nations from internal biological threats framed with languages such as degeneracy” (2012: 133). On the emergence of the idea of the world population in the context of the race discourse of the late eighteenth century and its relation to contemporary attempts to conceptualize reproduction, see Lettow (2015). 10

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persons and populations are encouraged to reproduce by all means while others are disencouraged or even prevented from having children. The “intersection of biopolitics and thanatopolitics” (119), that is, the fact that biopolitics does not only involve practices of “letting die,” as Foucault put it, but also strategies that deliberately put certain bodies at risk seems obvious in the case of the promotion of neo-Malthusian solutions to ecological problems. From the perspective of ecofeminist theory, the “power-knowledge nexus” that Foucault understood as a central mode through which biopolitics operates therefore needs to be scrutinized with regard to the intersection of ecological knowledges and medical knowledges about reproductive health. Such knowledges namely can be designed to foreclose or to challenge the “thanatopolitical” or “necropolitical”12 implications of eco- and biopolitics that are stratified along the lines of gender, race, and class on a global scale.

POLITICIZING THE HEALTH EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION AND TOXIC SUBSTANCES: STRATIFIED VULNERABILITY, TRANSCORPOREALITY, AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF IGNORANCE The stratified vulnerability of human bodies and related politics of knowledge have been also challenged from ecofeminists and environmental justice activists who have politicized the health effects of environmental pollution and of toxic substances. Epidemic diseases such as asthma and cancer, or the health risks of “estrogen mimicking” associated with bisphenol A, a carbon-based synthetic compound used for the production of plastics, as well as rare and relatively new illnesses such as Sick Building Syndrome or Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) have been on the agenda now for decades. As Seager states, “around the world, public awareness of the impact of environmental deterioration on human health” (2003: 958) was first raised in the wake of “hyperevents” (958) such as the accidents in the chemical factories of Seveso (1976) and Bhopal (1984), and the nuclear disasters at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). However, “the broader trend toward making a sustained connection between health and environmental movements was forged around more mundane and modest health issues that disproportionately affected women and that women were the first to ‘notice’ ” (958). These were and are diseases such as asthma or cancer, and activists and theorists have rendered visible intersectional power relations that structure the causes, the effects, and also the strategies through which theses illnesses and diseases are confronted—or not. In her analysis of asthma politics in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s, Julie Sze shows in a paradigmatic way how “the landscape of urban inequity” (2004: 181) leads to particularly high rates of childhood asthma among children of color. These children live disproportionally often in metropolitan areas that are characterized through “an excess concentration of noxious facilities and a lack of environmental benefits such as open space” (181). The politicization of childhood asthma therefore started by challenging individualizing and gendered interpretations of the disease. “Historically,” Sze argues, “mothers of asthmatics were thought to be ambivalent, overprotecting, and rejecting toward their children” (178), and even if “this notion of maternal causation has been largely discarded, asthma management remains gendered” (178) in a way that builds on the While Roberto Esposito and Giogio Agamben use the term thanatopolitics in order to highlight the fact that biopolitics has always involved active legitimizations of killing and violence, Achille Mbembe has introduced the term necropolitics by focusing on colonial and postcolonial settings. 12

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responsibilization of women. In addition, asthma politics have highlighted the role of outdoor air pollution and scrutinized the impact of indoor chemical environments, including the effects of poor housing. These were also struggles over knowledge and knowledge production insofar as they challenged medical theories of causation that did not address these aspects along with respective politics of individualization, responsibilization, discipline, and control. Indeed, “epistemologies of ignorance”13 that structure dominant medical knowledges have been challenged through ecofeminist environmental justice approaches with regard to various diseases. Nina Lykke has explored how epistemologies of ignorance are part of what she calls “Anthropocene necropolitics” with regard to different forms of cancer. While cancer research that focuses on forms of cancer that are common in Western countries “is a big, prestigious academic, political, and commercial business in the Western world” (Lykke 2019: 117), cancers such as liver cancer, which predominantly occur in Africa and Asia, are systematically neglected as objects of research. This also holds for the development of treatments and strategies of prevention. The “war on cancer,” declared by US president Richard Nixon in 1971, Lykke reports, in fact included a shift in “interest of leading Western cancer research centres … away from virus- and infection generated cancers and from broader environmental questions about epidemiology” (119) favoring research based on molecular biology and genetics. This shift in perspective also impacted and continues to impact on the research on breast cancer that hits women all over the world. While genetics and individual lifestyle choices are widely discussed in public, aspects of environmental causation are systematically downplayed. The current global cancer epidemics, Lykke concludes, should, however, be understood as an expression of Anthropocene necropolitics in the sense that the increasing worldwide occurrence of the disease should be critically understood as an effect of human activity in terms of planetary scale necropower, profiled through postcolonial capitalist conditions and environmental pollution” (123). As these examples show, the vulnerability of human bodies is highly stratified within and across global societies, and it correlates with the unequal exposure to toxic substances, pollution and other forms of ecological damage. With regard to theoretical understandings of the body, ecofeminist and queer analyses of environmental pollution have shown that the human body is not defined by its skin but is porous and transcorporeal. Michelle Murphy has introduced the notion “chemical regimes of living” in order to grasp the fact that bodies are modified through the substances, materials, and living beings they interact with. These modifications that are structured through regimes of production, consumption, and everyday life, however, are not confined to the impact of chemicals. “Not only are we experiencing new forms of chemical embodiment that molecularly tie us to local and transnational economies,” Murphy states, but so too processed food, hormonally altered meat, and pesticide-dependent crops become the material sustenance of humanity’s molecular recomposition. We are further altered by the pharmaceuticals imbibed at record-profit-rates, which are then excreted half metabolized back

Nancy Tuana (2006) differentiates between different types of ignorance and not-knowing, including those that are produced by devaluing certain knowledges and perspectives or the structural non-intelligibility of phenomena that results from relations of power in which the knowing subjects are situated. 13

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into the sewer to flow back to local bodies of water, and then again redispersed to the populace en masse through the tap. (2008: 696) In Murphy’s perspective, the very distinction between the body and the environment becomes obsolete because the body is constituted through its interrelations with its “environments.” Murphy therefore suggests not to focus on bodies but to scrutinize “the history of this entangled and enfolded political economy of molecular relations” (701) that shapes individual and collective modes of existence. The body, in her view, materializes in and through the substances and materials it interacts with, and certainly cannot be understood as a distinctive entity separated from the nonhuman world in which it exists. In a similar vein, Stacy Alaimo has introduced the concept of transcorporeality, arguing that “trans indicates movement across different sites” so that the concept “opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (2010: 2). Alaimo discusses the example of Environmental Illness or MCS as this illness is also called. People diagnosed with MCS react to all kinds of chemical substances in ways that exceed normal standards, so that through the lens of this illness the constitutive relation between the normal and the pathological can be revealed. Indeed, as Alaimo puts it, MCS requires us to rethink “notions of safety and normalcy” as this illness helps us “to envision the invisible movement of xenobiotic substances across human bodies and more-than-human nature” (124). Not only those who live with the respective diagnosis but all human bodies, she concludes, “are permeable accumulating the various toxins that disseminate from innumerable sources” (135). Although MCS cannot be understood “within the framework of environmental justice” (116) in the same way as asthma or the various kinds of cancer,14 scholars from gender and queer studies have highlighted the fact that processes of genderization, sexualization, and racialization structure the public understanding of this illness. Mel Y. Chen, who also gives a first-person account of MCS, has reconstructed “how vulnerability, safety, immunity, threat, and toxicity itself are sexually and racially instantiated” by focusing on debates on “lead content in Chinese-manufactured toys exported to the United States” (2011: 265). She first shows how a “generalized narrative” (267) about a threat coming from China and invading US territory converged with larger geopolitical concerns and discourses. Second, Chen shows how the image of the “iconic White boy” (271) replaced the understanding that rates of lead poisoning are particularly high in Black children due to environmental factors (269) in the public debate, and third, she argues that notions of straight sexuality and homophobia fueled the scandalization of “estrogen mimicking.” Toxic substances and human bodies, it follows, are thus not only materially entangled but these entanglements are also shaped and structured through discourses and images. These discourses and images, moreover, correlate with epistemologies of ignorance discussed above. To stay with the example given by Chen: in this case, a structural ignorance about certain health risks is first produced through the fact that the dangers of the current “chemical regime of living” are articulated as an external threat against which US society should protect itself. As a consequence, ignorance is instantiated through the fact that “home-made” environmental factors of lead poisoning are evacuated from the discussion. Second, the workers who produce these toys and people living in the surroundings of

MCS “departs from standard environmental justice models of the unequal distribution of risk,” as Alaimo states, but “economic factors do affect access to information, diagnosis, treatment, employment, and housing” (2010: 118). 14

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respective factories do not enter the picture. The knowledge about health hazards caused by lead is thus channeled and constrained through a racialized and gendered discourse. The analysis of politics of discourse, including the production of knowledges and images, is thus a crucial terrain on which ecofeminist theory and the environmental and medical humanities should further converge.

CONCEIVING MULTISPECIES HEALTH: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON GAIA, PLANETARY HEALTH, AND ONE HEALTH Within the so-called nonhuman turn in the humanities, multispecies perspectives have gained prominence during the last two decades. Donna Haraway, for example, has explained concisely how the notion of the human body changes once the interrelations with other species that shape it are taken into account. “I love the fact,” she states, that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. (Haraway 2008: 4) Others, of course, do, and the coronavirus that circulates in and through human bodies worldwide is certainly the clearest example at present for the devastating effects of human–nonhuman interactions, and it reveals the constitutive vulnerability of the human body that follows from its multispecies character. Indeed, as Haraway summarizes, “I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates” (4) whose dynamics and developments, one can add, depends not only on the specific body they form part of but also on societal nature relations that regulate interactions of humans with the nonhuman world in specific ways. As the case of zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19, AIDS/HIV, or Ebola makes clear, the “contact zones” (4) between humans and nonhuman living beings do not exist beyond human history but are shaped and coproduced through human practices that, for example, destroy animal and plant habitats and that contribute to the emergence of new forms of contact.15 In this sense, the vulnerability of human bodies is closely entangled with the well-being of other living beings. With regard to the understandings of health and disease, this includes a profound change in perspective that also transcends the notion of transcorporeality and requires a semantic extension of these notions. Such extended notions of health and disease have been articulated in ecofeminist theory since the 1980s, albeit in different ways and sometimes with troubling implications. This in particular holds for the idea of planetary health as introduced by James Lovelock in connection with the Gaia Theory that he formulated together with Lynn Margulis. Gaia Theory has resurfaced in present debates on climate change and the Anthropocene through the writings of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. However, it was also widely adopted by US-American ecofeminists in the 1980s. In this context, the ideas of “healing the planet,” or of the “wounds” of the “sweet earth from which we draw life and death” (Plant 1989: 4), proliferated and were often combined with calling on the goddess Gaia or the Earth as female super-being. As Riane

For a more detailed account of these diseases see, e.g., McMillen (2016).

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Eisler stated with regard to Lovelock, ecofeminists were fascinated by his theory because they understood it as a revaluation of ancient matriarchy. In Eisler’s view, it was “a scientific update of the belief system of Goddess-worshipping in prehistoric societies” that conceived of the world as “great Mother” (Eisler 1990: 26). In line with Lovelock’s idea of planetary health, ecofeminists argued that “the earth itself (is/SL) a vulnerable being, a vitally entangled creature, needy, damaged already, and dependent on human protection from further human assault” (Dinnerstein 1989: 194). Humans were framed as “an ecological cancer … in the body of the earth” (195) while patriarchy was articulated as “normal psychopathology that makes us so deadly a danger” (195). This transposition of the notions of health and disease to the earth itself and the uncritical reference to the difference between the normal and the pathological, however, largely neglected the intersectional constellations that shape the causes and effects of ecological destruction and health hazards, and tacitly introduced an attitude of submissiveness vis-à-vis the great subject of earth. Indeed, Lovelock’s idea of planetary health was far from unproblematic, as Jennifer Thomson argues. His analogy between the planet and the human body led him to conceive of humans as pathogens that have a destructive effect on the earth, and this idea converged with neoMalthusian strategies of solving ecological problems through a reduction of the so-called overpopulation. The idea of Gaia “as a self-regulating homoestatic system tied health to a carefully policed boundary between normalty and pathology” (Thomson 2019: 107) that was disturbed and threatened by an excess of humans inhabiting the Earth. Inverting the arguments of Rachel Carson, Lovelock pointed out that, in his view, indeed “a silent spring bereft of bird song with the birds victims of DDT and other pesticides” (quoted after Thomson 2019: 108) was about to come. However, Lovelock mused, this “will not be a consequence of their direct poisoning by the pesticides but because the saving of human lives by those agents will have left no room, no habitat, on Earth for the birds” (108). The health of humans and the “health” of the planet here appear to contradict one another, or even be antagonistic goals. Lovelock’s comparison of humans to pathogenic microorganisms or to cancer and his articulation of global warming as Gaia’s “fever” that framed the planet as a patient needing a cure, made very clear how he sought to set priorities. As Thomson argues, his position did not only built on Cold War population discourse and politics but also introduced an understanding of environmental politics as technocratic management by invoking the need of a planet’s “doctor.” According to Thomson, Lovelock’s idea of planetary health was deeply influenced by his work for NASA and multinational oil corporations, in particular Shell Oil.16 In any case, the framing “of humans as both pathogen and doctor,” she concludes, “reveals an attitude to power, expertise, and political action that cannot produce a livable future for all humans, much less all species” but “leads in the direction of authoritarianism (the first through specicide, the other through enlightened management) and delegitimized popular protest” (128). A different perspective on multispecies health, however, is connected to the One Health approach that was mainly developed in the wake of the H5N1 influenza outbreaks in 2006 and has since

Lovelock worked for both during the 1960s. “Gaia research continued to be supported by Shell and NASA, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Hewlett-Packard, and the British Ministry of Defense, Lovelock’s principal sources of funding over his subsequent five decades as an independent scientist” (Thomson 2019: 116–17). 16

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been adopted by several supranational institutions, including the World Health Organization.17 This approach focuses on multispecies health, that is, the understanding that the health of humans and animals are closely entangled with each other and depend upon complex interrelations with the habitats and environments they live in. In particular, zoonotic diseases, where pathogens jump from animals to humans, have been widely researched and discussed from the perspective of One Health. “Ecological changes brought upon landscapes by human intervention,” Robert Wallace and colleagus state, “selected for spillovers of cholera from algae, malaria from birds, and HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, malaria, and yellow fever from wild primates” (2015: 69). In contrast to notions on planetary health as they have been formulated with reference to Gaia Theory, such analyses are neither based on the analogies between the human body and the planet that introduce a holistic hierarchical view of life on earth, nor do they evoke mythologized notions of femininity, be it with feminist or nonfeminist intentions. Analyses conducted within the framework of One Health focus on specific socio-ecological constellations of human–nonhuman interrelations that are sensitive to the power relations that shape them. In particular, proponents of Structural One Health and of women’s and gender studies have argued that a sound understanding of the “interdependence of the health of humans, domestic and free ranging animals, and their shared environments (including naturally occurring vegetation and cultivated crops)” (Friedson-Ridenour et al. 2019: 308) requires that relations of power, domination, and extractivism are taken into account. “Sex and gender,” Friedson-Ridenour and colleagues argue, do not only “create important differences in susceptibility, exposure, and outcomes to infectious disease” (310) so that women are “particularly vulnerable” in many respects (310). Moreover “the human-animal-environment interface,” they conclude, is “intimately connected to equality and empowerment for women,” so that “a gender and one health approach can work synergistically toward the health and well-being of all” (313). The critical analyses of the impact of gender relations on certain socio-ecological constellations and societal nature relations broadly conceived, however, need to be further developed from an intersectional perspective that integrates analyses of socioeconomic inequalities, or class relations, geopolitical hierarchies and processes of racialization. With regard to the first point, the perspective of Structural One Health is helpful. While One Health “acknowledges the functional ecologies humans, livestock and wildlife share,” most research in this field, Wallace and colleagues argue, is based upon a too narrow understanding of the “geography of causality” (2015: 70). In particular, it tends to ignore the broader global economic shifts and readjustments of capitalist accumulation strategies that impact on local dynamics of production and on “landscape changes driving health threats” (71). By arguing for an integrated analysis of “modes of causality” (72), the authors introduce a multilayered approach. Such an approach takes into account mechanisms “directly connected to disease dynamics (such as pathogen transmission, dietary habits of individuals etc.)” (71) and helps to understand “how disease vulnerabilities emerge out of structural processes” (71). While the focus of Wallace and colleagues on global capitalism and in particular its agrobusiness sector does not take gender relations into account, it introduces an important perspective on multispecies health that should be further developed by intersectional approaches. So even if contemporary debates on One Health have not yet received much attention within the field of ecofeminism, they provide new insights The complications associated with the surprising spillover of highly pathogenic influenza (H5N1) (“bird flu”) from poultry to humans galvanized international health agencies to gather scientists across disciplines to address influenza and other emergent diseases” (Wallace et al. 2015: 68). 17

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into the relations of ecological, medical, social, and economic dimensions on a global scale without collapsing into totalizing notions of the earth or the planet. On the other hand, ecofeminist analyses of the material-semiotic articulations of toxins, pathogens and diseases, of intersectionality and epistemologies of ignorance, and of the merging of gendered and racialized bio- and necropolitics have much to contribute to the further development of the theoretical implications of One Health or Structural One Health.

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have shown that the body, health, and disease have been conceptualized in different ways in the field of ecofeminism since the 1980s. The different theoretical and political perspectives that I have explored certainly relate to the situatedness of ecofeminist analyses and debates and thus to the different political and ecological problems and contexts toward which they speak. However, despite all differences, I think that the approaches that I have discussed are not incompatible but each provide critical insights for the emerging field of medical environmental humanities. In particular, they highlight different dimensions and aspects of gender relations. These can range from the biopolitics of reproduction and the ways in which gendered bodies are targeted through neo-Malthusian articulations of ecology, to structural insights into the logics of intersectionality that put into question narrow understandings of sex and gender, to reconceptualizations of the human body in terms of transcorporeality and multispecies encounters. As my short sketch of ecofeminist theorizations of the body, health, and disease shows the vulnerability of human bodies is not just part of the conditio humana but entangled with the specific relations of power, domination, and extractivism in which humans live as well as with the specific forms of interaction with nonhuman creatures, substances, and materials. As Tuija Pulkkinen has argued with regard to Judith Butler who also departs from a purely existential understanding, vulnerability is always shaped through social norms and infrastructures.18 As the different ecofeminist approaches have revealed stratified vulnerability, transcorporeality, and multispecies encounters are always mediated through and entangled with politics of discourse and signification that impact on the materializations of bodies, health, and disease. It is with respect to the study of these intersections that the medical environmental humanities and gender studies converge.

REFERENCES Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bashford, A. (2014), Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth, New York: Columbia University Press.

Vulnerability has become, during the last decade, a term that is frequently used in feminist theory, although in different ways. Pulkkinen compares Butler’s understanding of vulnerability to that of Adriana Cavarero. While Cavarero sticks to an existentialist understanding, Butler introduces a much more critical view. Although, she states, “ ‘vulnerability’ can be affirmed as an existential condition, since we are all subject to accidents, illness, and attack that can expunge our lives quite quickly, it is also a socially induced condition, which accounts for the disproportionate exposure to suffering, especially among those broadly called precariat for whom access to shelter, food and medical care is often drastically limited” (quoted after Pulkkinen 2020: 15). 18

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Chen, M. Y. (2011), “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17 (2–3): 265–86. Dinnerstein, D. (1989), “Survival on Earth: The Meaning of Feminism,” in J. Plant (ed.), Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, 192–200, Philadelphia, PA: New Society. Deutscher, P. (2012), “Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume I: Re-reading its Reproduction,” Theory, Culture & Society, 29 (1): 119–37. Ehrlich, P. (1968), The Population Bomb, New York: Ballantine Books. Eisler, R. (1990), “The Gaia Tradition and the Partnership Future: An Ecofeminist Manifesto,” in I. Diamond and G. Feman Orenstein (eds.), Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, 23–34, Los Angeles: Sierra Club Books. Foucault, M. (1980), History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Random House. Friedson-Ridenour, S., T. V. Dutcher, C. Calderon, L. D. Brown, and C. W. Olsen (2019), “Gender Analysis for One Health: Theoretical Perspectives and Recommendations for Practice,” EcoHealth, 16: 306–16. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartmann, B. (2014), “Converging on Disaster: Climate Security and the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa,” Geopolitics, 19: 757–83. Kreager, P. (2018), “The Emergence of Population,” in N. Hopwood, R. Flemming, L. Kassel (eds.), Reproduction. Antiquity to the Present Day, 253–66, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lykke, N. (2019), “Making Live and Letting Die: Cancerous Bodies between Anthropocene Necropolitics and Chthulucene Kinship,” Environmental Humanities, 11 (1): 108–36. Lettow, S. (2015), “Population, Race and Gender: On the Genealogy of the Modern Politics of Reproduction,” Distinktion Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 16 (3): 267–82. McMillen, C. W. (2016), Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meadows, D. L., D. H. Meadows, J. Randers, and W. W. Behrens III (1972), The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books. Mies, M., and V. Shiva ([1994] 2014), Ecofeminism, London: Zed Books. Murphy, M. (2008), “Chemical Regimes of Living,” Environmental History, 13 (4): 695–703. Ojeda, D., J. S. Sasser, E. Lunstrum (2020), “Malthus‘ Spectre and the Anthropocene,“ Gender, Place and Culture 27 (3): 313–32. Plant, J. (1989), “Toward a New World. An Introduction,” in Judith Plant (ed.), Healing the Wounds. The Promise of Ecofeminism, 1–4, Philadelphia, Santa Cruz: New Society. Pulkkinen, T. (2020), “Vulnerability and the Human in Judith Butler’s and Adriana Cavareros’s Feminist Thought – A Politics of Philosophy Point of View,” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 23 (2): 151–64. Sasser, J. (2018), On Infertile Ground. Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change, New York: New York University Press. Schultz, S. (2006), Hegemonie, Gouvernementalität, Biomacht: Reproduktive Risiken und die Transformation internationaler Bevölkerungspolitik, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Seager, J. (2003), “Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming of Age of Ecofeminism,” Signs, 28 (3): 945–72. Shiva, M. (1994a), “Environmental Degradation and Subversion of Health,” in V. Shiva (ed.), Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development, 60–77, London: Earthscan. Shiva, V. (1994b), “Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections,” in V. Shiva (ed.), Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development, 1–9, London: Earthscan.

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Sze, J. (2004), “Gender, Asthma Politics and Urban Environmental Justice Activism,” in R. Stein (ed.), New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, Activism, 177–90, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Thomson, J. (2019), The Wild and the Toxic. American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tuana, N. (2006), “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance,” Hypatia, 21 (3): 1–19. Wallace, R. G., L. Bergmann, R. Kock, M. Gilbert, L. Hogerwerf, R. Wallace, and M. Holmberg (2015), “The Dawn of Structural One Health: A New Science Tracking Disease Emergence along Circuits of Capital,” Social Science & Medicine, 129: 68–77.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A Gut Feeling: The Emergence of Human Microbiota Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon JORGE MARCONE

This chapter is more of a story. It is a story of a human microbiota conservation project to which I have been invited to contribute from the humanities. Conservation of the microbiota poses difficult challenges to navigate for all disciplines involved, and the humanities will not have it easy. The conservation of the human microbiota in the Peruvian Amazon, as in other parts of the planet, is an initiative that will end up considerably involving indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact (PIACI, in Spanish). Obviously, there is a danger that this conservation initiative may end up being a new occasion of colonization. But it is also true that the conservation of the human microbiota is an opportunity to increase the empowerment and social-ecological resilience of these peoples. For this, the conservation of the human microbiota will have to review the contributions to the conservation of the macrobiota, which have emerged from the environmental humanities, and the studies of interculturality and bioculturality. In any case, regardless of how these challenges are resolved, it is a story that highlights the recent approaches of certain environmental and health sciences to the humanities. In human microbiota research, we are living, as announced by a pioneer in this field, the Norwegian researcher Tore Midtvet, when opening the Global Microbiome Network-First Latin American Symposium, “the end of the beginning.”

SEEDS OF TIME On April 22, 2019, the screening of the documentary Seeds of Time (2014) took place at my university, Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This film, directed by Sandy McLeod, chronicles Cary Fowler’s crusade to create the Global Seed Vault in Svarbald (Norway), in the Arctic Circle. The Seed Vault is a response to the impact of climate change and industrial agriculture on the loss of seed diversity across the globe. The documentary also pays attention to the conservation of 1,500 varieties of seeds in the Andes of Peru by indigenous peasant communities. In fact, Cary Fowler and Sandy McLeod came to Rutgers University for this event thanks to the intervention of

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the Permanent Mission of Peru to the United Nations. The Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS) was happy to host and engage its students and teachers in this event. My initial role in this event was to facilitate contact between the Permanent Mission of Peru to the United Nations and SEBS. I deliberately did not channel the visit of Fowler, McLeod, and Seeds of Time through either of the two departments to which I belong at the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS): the Program in Comparative Literature or the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Although opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration are many and frequent at SAS, humanities’ exchanges with SEBS colleagues and students at Rutgers are less so given the institutional organization and geographic distribution of the various units in New Brunswick. Collaborations between SEBS and SAS require an extra effort on the part of the stakeholders. The Seeds of Time screening was one more opportunity to do this. For me, furthermore, facilitating this event was a way of reciprocating to SEBS’s Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences for inviting me to serve on a panel, two years earlier, to speak with Kim Stanley Robinson, a noted cli-sci novelist, about his most recent novel: New York 2140. I was very grateful to Bob Kopp, director of the Institute, who had taken a calculated risk in inviting me since we neither know each other personally nor do I do research on American science fiction regularly. In fact, the experience was so positive that we repeated it again in 2020, during the pandemic, with regard to the publication of Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. For this very reason, I have to acknowledge my disappointment when the final setup of the panel that SEBS organized for discussion after the screening of the McLeod documentary was decided. My expectation was to be part of that panel and focus on aspects of the documentary itself. To my surprise, not only had I been left out of that panel, but the same thing also had happened even with the two SEBS colleagues specializing in film and environmental communication, who had been part of the organizing committee of the event. However, it seemed wiser at the time not to challenge my SEBS colleague’s decision, and even less to stir up a confrontation between the humanities and the sciences. I am sure that many readers know from their own experience that interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary collaborations depend on facilitating contacts through which people can know and trust each other. It is therefore essential that these conversations and collaborations are successful. In any case, during the Q&A, the audience inevitably showed their interest in the film itself, in its shooting and production process, and in its impact on the cause of preservation of the diversity of seeds. The interest in the film and its own history, in an audience composed of researchers, professors, and students in environmental sciences, was not a moment of distraction from the underlying serious issues at stake. I have learned over time, both at Rutgers and throughout Latin America, that for researchers and students of sustainability and resilience, the issue of communicating with the public and decision-makers is a responsibility that they embrace as part of their training and profession. In public-facing disciplines or fields of study, there is a demand for new narratives and rhetoric to awaken in audiences a culture of transition that would deal with the many large and small environmental problems. The apocalyptic and melancholic stories, and the dramatic communication of scientific information, have not produced the expected results to provoke and even accelerate the necessary transitions. It is no longer even a debate with the deniers, or the persuasion of the pessimists. What is in competition are stories with contradictory proposals on the “window of opportunity” that environmental crises and conflicts offer. From social-ecological resilience discourse to “disaster capitalism” development, the controversy over ecological transitions

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is already installed in politics. Its stakeholders are many and vocal, and transitions will most likely be the result of synergy between these actors. Catalyzing perspectives and collaborations between academic disciplines and other forms of knowledge will result in increasing the speed and acceptance of a response to social-ecological disturbances.

THE MICROBIOTA VAULT That same evening, at the end of the Seeds of Time screening and the panel that followed, I was recruited by two Rutgers colleagues, Gloria Domínguez-Bello (Professor of Biochemistry and Microbiology) and Martin J. Blaser (Professor of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine) to join a new project. They are both among the founders of the Microbiota Vault Initiative (MVI) (https://www.micr​obio​tava​ult.org/). What is the microbiota? We are immersed in ecosystems of different scale, larger and smaller than the body, visible or invisible. We evolved from and evolved with microbes in soil, water, and plant roots. We are guests in ecosystems, but also guests of ecosystems. Our bodies and minds live within ecologies with which we interact, but we also host ecologies with which we interact as well. Our bodies host thousands of evolving microbial societies (Blaser 2014; Global Microbiome Network-First Latin American Symposium 2021; Shnayerson and Plotkin 2002; Yatsunenko et al. 2012; Yong 2018): between ten and one hundred trillion, according to different calculations. These microbial societies include bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, protozoa, and so forth. There are thousands of these societies in our bodies, all competing with one another, negotiating with their host, evolving, and changing. These microbes are not human cells (they number about thirty trillion). They come from the colon that is colonized during childbirth by bacteria from the maternal fecal and vaginal microbiota and by breast milk. The human microbiota is different from the soil microbiota, although part of the latter enters our bodies, and part of our microbiota reaches out into the environment. With knowledge of the human microbiota, our perspectives on the relationship between humans and nonhumans have been broadened and reached a new dimension. The human microbiota, especially in industrialized countries and in urban contexts, is frequently in a state of dysbiosis. “It is disease, recast as an ecological problem” (Yong 2018: 111). Dysbiosis is the disturbance that jostles the microbiota and changes proportion of species, the genes activated by these species, and the chemicals they produced. As a consequence, dysbiosis alters the communication of this community with its human host. Dysbiosis unbalances the immune system and allows for inflammation or infection (Yong 2018: 110–11). In the twenty-first century, we are witnessing an increase in epidemics of noncontagious and chronic diseases. Although in the current times of Covid-19 it seems foolhardy to say so, we are witnessing a decrease in infectious diseases but an increase in immunological diseases. Allergies, asthma, and other autoimmune diseases are associated with the loss of diversity in the human microbiota. So are obesity and type-1 diabetes. Paradoxically, malnutrition, too. Among other impacts of the loss of microbiota in the gastrointestinal system, we can include intestinal inflammation, certain varieties of cancer, brain development issues, and even neurological disorders such as autism. Microbial diversity is globally threatened by urbanization, “Westernization,” and environmental change proceeding at an unprecedented pace. Certain features of life in Western industrialized and urban societies contribute powerfully to the loss of the human microbiota. For example, diets with little fiber and other nutrients, little breastfeeding, the abuse of antibiotics that indiscriminately

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attack the microbiota, the high rate of cesarean deliveries, and the restriction of the circulation of microbes due to domestic practices of excessive environmental hygiene. Other factors already disturbing ecosystems around us, and therefore our bodies and minds, will further disrupt the ecosystems within us. The process of change in planetary ecosystems that we are becoming familiar with calling it Anthropocene is also a Microbiocene. What scientists tell us is a tale of accelerated extinction. Some species are disappearing altogether and the migration rate of microbiotic species has increased. The worry is that we are now changing our microbiomes at an accelerated pace, disrupting age-old contracts in matters of generations (Yong 2018: 132). Will we reach a tipping point? It is not clear if the diversity of the microbiome would bounce back with a diet high in fiber and a better use of antibiotics (Yong 2018: 125). The MVI was founded in 2019 as a nonprofit organization with the aim of safeguarding microbial diversity by supporting collection efforts and creating an institution for safe preservation. Its main objective is the future creation of a global security repository of local collections that, ideally, will multiply rapidly in the world. Indeed, another goal of the MVI is to interact closely with local collections and research efforts all over the world. Acting on behalf of the local working collections, the MVI would provide safe backup storage and a framework for data services and collaboration. Therefore, it empowers the research of the local working collections, helps set protocols and standards, preserves the biodiversity of microbiota, and allows future restoration of health. As in the Global Seed Vault at Svarbald, in the MVI only the depositors can withdraw samples from the vault. The rights belong to the depositing entities. The MVI is supported by nonprofit institutions and universities active in the field of the human gut microbiome, such as the Swiss Gebert Rüf Foundation and the Seerave Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal), Rutgers University (USA), Kiel University (Germany), the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (Canada), the Bengt E. Gustafsson Symposium Foundation (affiliated to the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden) and the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine (USA).

GLOMINE-PERU The Global Microbiome Network (GloMiNe) is the scientific network being developed for fostering research on local working collections. The GloMiNe-First Latin American Symposium took place on January 15–17, 2021. The GloMiNe-Peru symposium was the first of a series of workshops that will help establish a global microbiome network. The original idea was to run the symposium from Peru and thus get going a local microbiota collection and bank. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, however, the symposium took place fully online. Following the lessons from this event, in January 2022 took place the GloMiNe First African Symposium. The Latin American symposium brought together local Peruvian and international scientists that lead the fields of microbiology, anthropology, public health, and bioinformatics. The symposium also brought in legal scholars, scholars in indigenous studies, researchers in the environmental humanities, and officials from the Peruvian government in the areas of environment, public health, and culture. The symposium functioned as a state of the art in human microbiota research: the relationship with diseases in specific communities, the need for their conservation, recollection and conservation technologies of fecal samples, methods for restoring microbiotic diversity in the human body, and the problem of a balanced use of antibiotics in situations of humanitarian emergency. Microbiota

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research and policy is definitively drawing significant attention. About 1,300 participants from 26 countries registered for the event. Day 1, devoted to “The Humam Microbiome,” saw a steady attendance of approximately 650 participants. The GloMiNe-Peru team, specifically, is made up of a group of young researchers: Pablo Tsukayama, Gabriela Salmón-Mulanovich, Deborah Delgado-Pugley, and Luis Felipe TorresEspinoza. Pablo Tsukayama is Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Principal Investigator of the Microbial Genomics Laboratory at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) in Lima. He obtained his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. Gabriela Salmon-Mulanovich holds a PhD from the Department of International Health, Epidemiology and Global Disease Control from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research focuses on infectious diseases for evidence-based public policies. Deborah Delgado-Pugley is Professor of Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). She has a PhD in International Development (Catholic University of Louvain) and Sociology (EHESS Paris School of Social Sciences Studies). Her research focuses on environmental and climate policies at the international and territorial level, and on their impact on indigenous movements, human rights, natural resource management, forestry development, and gender. Luis Felipe Torres-Espinoza holds a Magister in Latin American Studies from the University of Newcastle (UK) and is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology from the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). He is dedicated to research in the field of indigenous ethnology and public policies related to indigenous peoples in isolation and initial contact in the Amazon. Day 2 of the symposium, entitled “Culture, Ecology and Ethics,” was in fact devoted to the social, political, legal, and cultural challenges that the collecting of samples and the establishment of local banks may have to face. All the presentations shared at least three common assumptions. One of these assumptions is the need for researchers to be clear about the ethical norms and laws that regulate their research with human subjects. The second assumption, and consistent with the first, is that the collecting and research on the microbiota of a given community should be a transdisciplinary effort. That is, in the conceptualization of the project, its design, its evaluation, and the dissemination of the research’s findings, the project must involve and respond to the actors benefited or harmed by the project. Finally, the third assumption is that the beliefs, values, and practices that determine the lifestyles of communities are important factors for the conservation and restoration of microbiota. The conservation of human microbiota that will be carried by GloMiNe-Peru will require the participation of indigenous communities of the Amazon, especially indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact (PIACI, in Spanish). Throughout the Amazon, there are sixty-six groups identified under this category, of which twenty are in Peru. Isolation is the response of these peoples to the history of colonization and not the result of having been on the fringes of this history. That history was a history of devastating infectious disease epidemics. The communication and interaction of researchers and state officials with these peoples happens through the mediation of neighboring villages. Most studies of the human microbiota have focused on Westernized people with lifestyle practices that decrease microbial survival and transmission, or on traditional societies that are currently in transition to Westernization. The evidence indicates so far that PIACI harbor a microbiome with the highest diversity of bacteria and genetic functions (Clemente et al. 2015). Despite their isolation, and no known exposure to antibiotics, they harbor bacteria that carry

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functional antibiotic resistance (AR) genes. These results suggest that Westernization significantly affects human microbiome diversity and that functional AR genes appear to be a feature of the human microbiome even in the absence of exposure to commercial antibiotics. These findings emphasize the need for extensive characterization of the function of the microbiome in remote non-Westernized populations before globalization of modern practices affects potentially beneficial bacteria harbored in the human body.

TOOLS AND PRACTICES FOR AVOIDING COLONIZATION Participating in this First Latin American Symposium was a relief. Until then I had been seduced by the ambition of the project, by faith and trust in the synergy of different knowledges, and for open and uninhibited cooperation. The symposium showed that this research community is aware of the need for a top-down initiative, but it also is aware of its responsibilities for inclusion. The fieldwork presentations from the younger biologists stressed the importance of respecting Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge (ILK) or Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK). With the same emphasis, these researchers insisted on the practice of prior consultation with communities and on the strict respect for privacy standards. More than a few research projects followed the communitybased or action-oriented research methodology. That is, the research is in line with the needs, strategies, and concerns of the communities themselves. And these communities are represented by their own leaders and authorized by their own institutions. However, in spite of the good practices mentioned above, the danger of colonialism will always loom over research on the human microbiota of Amazonian PIACI communities. Would the restoration of human microbiota in Westernized and urban societies come with a high price for these indigenous communities, as has happened in the past? Are we not opening a Pandora’s Box whose unanticipated consequences will end up affecting those who are most disadvantaged? Despite its virtual mode of delivery, the symposium had served to create community or cooperation among researchers with a common field of study that requires multiple perspectives and a clear sense of purpose. The symposium had also made things clear regarding the present state of the research and the Microbiota Vault. The vast majority of researchers preferred not to recruit the support of pharmaceutical companies and to work independently. The symposium itself had begun to achieve one of MVI’s goals: the training of local researchers and their students. Likewise, these conservation projects, if carried out in cooperation with the native communities, will add to the visibility and empowerment of indigenous peoples. It can be suspected, not without reason, that the priority of human microbiota research is the restoration of its diversity in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. It can also be feared, therefore, that this purpose unleashes abuses against the populations whose microbiota diversity we want to conserve for this restoration. Nevertheless, it is also truth that the narrative of the microbiota research calls for saving PIACI from WEIRD diets and overuse of antibiotics. For even greater risk, these diets and medical practices cause conditions for which the PIACI will not have easy access to medical care. On the other hand, the microbiota banks of the PIACIs will offer us the opportunity to study whether they are in a situation of dysbiosis or not. The progressive involvement of other indigenous and nonindigenous actors will be decisive to neutralize these risks and even to turn the collection and research of microbiota into an opportunity to strengthen the social-ecological resilience of the communities. According to the specialists at

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the symposium, social-ecological research adds to the empowerment of indigenous peoples and other rural communities. In the case of Peru, this kind of research strengthens the impact of other tools such as (1) Article 2.22 of the 1993 Constitution: the right to a healthy environment; (2) the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169 and the Peruvian law of 2011 that rules on the prior consultation with indigenous communities mandated before carrying any project of economic development or of environmental protection; (3) the new national laws on climate change; and (4) the territorial control that indigenous communities have over 17 percent of the Amazon rainforest, in addition to the National Protected Areas already established by the Peruvian state. The laws in Peru on conservation and the international agreements that it has signed ought to make the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of the Environment, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs guarantors that these communities will not be deceived. However, there are gray areas to be resolved. While research is regulated according to strict norms and international standards, the legislation that would cover the conservation and research of the human microbiota at PIACI is unclear. There is uncertainty about which international conventions would apply in this case: those protecting the diversity of the environmental macrobiota, or regulations on the use of samples and human genetic information (although the human microbiota is not human, it is true that research will have access to genetic material)?

ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES UNDER TEST The call to the humanities from human microbiota research is consistent with other formulations of what the environmental humanities are, or can be, already familiar with in the last decade. The environmental humanities is a good umbrella term for acknowledging a long tradition of conversations about nature and culture that have taken place in philosophy, education, history, literary ecocriticism, cultural geography, cultural anthropology, and political ecology. The most important challenge may be the following: “How are human identities and responsibilities to be articulated when we understand ourselves to be members of multispecies communities that emerge through the entanglements of agential beings?” (Rose et al. 2012: 3). However, as a contemporary project, the environmental humanities adds to the criticism of the dominant discourses and stories the expectation of producing knowledge of strategic value for the solution of environmental problems (Nye et al. 2013: 5–6). This is what Joni Adamson has well formulated as humanities of the environment (HofE) and humanities for the environment (HforE). This call to contribute to synergy recognizes the insufficiency of approaches that rely almost exclusively on science, economics, and politics (Sörlin 2012: 788). However, it also requires clear writing, effective communication, and a level of detail appropriate to the objectives (Nye et al. 2013: 8). What customs, preferences, moral and spiritual values, identities, memories, ideas of wellbeing, epistemologies, ontologies, wisdoms, aesthetics, and so forth also explain environmental change or transitions to deal with it? What are the texts or media in which all of the above originate and are transmitted? (Sörlin 2012: 788). The MVI understands that the visibility of the humanities is important to the future of the field of human microbiota studies. Professor Gloria Domínguez-Bello and I introduced ourselves as co-organizers of the January 2021 GloMiNe-Peru event for strategic reasons. In fact, days after the symposium, we both had a follow-up meeting with two vice ministers of the Ministry of the

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Environment of Peru, convened by them, with the purpose of completing their introduction to the subject and putting themselves at the service of the needs that GloMiNe-Peru could have.

THE EXPECTATION OF INTERCULTURALITY In Latin America, the expectations mentioned above for the environmental humanities more often than not enter into dialogue with another expectation, especially if they are involved in a conservation and resilience issue that affects indigenous peoples. The philosophy and practices of interculturality are expectations that most likely humanities and social sciences would like to see in human microbiota research. An intercultural approach supposedly would guarantee that the conservation and sustainability of the experts do not end up becoming new scenarios of colonization. However, how would the collection of the microbiota be carried out with good intercultural practices? A definition of interculturality is the following: “Thinking between and with indigenous epistemological perspectives and Western epistemological perspectives in spaces for the encounter of thoughts; this would be a way of articulating the logic of different rationalities” (Walsh 2007: 31). What interculturalism is possible with the PIACIs? When participating in the decision-making process, what will the indigenous individuals and communities in PIACI who will provide the samples have to say about all this? How does one explain the Western vision of the microbiota to the PIACI to facilitate intercultural participation? How do indigenous oral traditions or stories in other verbal or nonverbal media narrate the elements and interactions that belong to our holistic vision of microbiota? In what ways would Western researchers on microbiota rethink this subject out of these intercultural experiences? Practicing interculturality in the harvesting and research of human microbiota among Amazonian PIACI has challenges different from those in the conservation of macrobiota, either because of the very conditions of isolation that set limits to the epistemological dialogue or because the peculiar properties of the microbiota itself and of the processes in which it is involved.

BIODIVERSITY AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY Interculturality in research and conservation of the human microbiota is a challenge but also an opportunity full of original possibilities. Meanwhile, a sure path for a contribution from the humanities to human microbiota research is the framework of the relationships between biodiversity and cultural diversity. Today, the coevolution of the macro- and microbiota with cultural diversity is an accepted assumption even in Latin American environmental thought (Lagunas-Vázques et al. 2017). Languages, and other forms of nonverbal communication, for example, are part of the actions through which communities and/or their individuals interact with the territory or nonhuman beings. The repertoires and archives of texts and performances in which these languages reproduce and change are also tools of this interaction. It is not a novelty, in the era of the Anthropocene, to affirm that the macrobiota is in danger of extinction. According to the Living Planet Index, 21 percent of mammals, 13 percent of birds, 15 percent of reptiles, and 30 percent of amphibians are under threat of extinction (Loh and Harmon 2014). The factors against this biodiversity are also known (Lagunas-Vázquez et al. 2017): loss and destruction of habitat, direct overexploitation of species by hunting and fishing,

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competition or predation by invasive alien species, climate change, and, finally, pollution. The factors that decrease the diversity of the human microbiota coincide with the factors that operate against linguistic diversity (Lagunas-Vázquez et al. 2017): migration, urbanization, globalization, and political nationalization (Loh and Harmon 2014). From the above, it follows that the conservation of the diversity of the microbiota passes through bilingual intercultural educational policies. In this policy, stories where practices, beliefs, and values associated with eating are given preferential treatment. What to eat? How to prepare the food? What is the connection between food and the social-ecological reproduction of the community? What else is done when harvesting animals and plants from the forest or the gardens? What else is happening when preparing and consuming food? To close this chapter, I want to draw your attention to a representative example of intercultural bilingual education (IBE). This is the type of publication that surely has an impact already on transitioning back to sustainable and resilient uses of the territory among indigenous communities. In any case, it would be interesting to study closely similar interventions, give them visibility among other publics, link them to microbiota conservation, and contribute to improving them if necessary. It is the book by María Cristina Mogollón Pérez titled La alimentación tradicional de los pueblos indígenas: Una expresión de la riqueza cultural y bienestar social (The Traditional Diet of Indigenous Peoples. An Expression of Cultural Wealth and Social Well-Being) (2014). This publication occurred thanks to the sponsorship of AIDESEP and FORMABIAP. The AIDESEP, or Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle, is the most politically powerful association of indigenous organizations in the Amazon. The FORMABIAP, or Training Program for Bilingual Teachers of the Peruvian Amazon, is sponsored by AIDESEP, among other indigenous organizations. FORMABIAP is located on the outskirts of Iquitos, Peru, and was founded in 1988 as an international collaborative project. The methodology of Mogollón Pérez’s book consists of the following: (1) Mogollón Pérez appears in the role of editor and coordinator; (2) the book brings together the testimonies or stories of twenty-four indigenous teachers, mainly from the Kichwa, Kukama-Kukamiria, and Tikuna groups; (3) thanks to these collaborators, the book narrates the social aspects of foods and their origin; (4) the book also includes a list by ethnic groups of the vegetable and animal foods that these groups consume most frequently; and, finally, (5) the book offers a significant number of recipes. This publication is intended for IBE teachers and their communities. And perhaps even for the students of FORMABIAP who are required to return to their communities of origin to learn from their elders. The general framework and goal of the publication is that of fostering wellbeing according to what such concepts could become in each culture. But it also seeks to promote identity (ethnic and Pan-Amazonian). Altogether, the ultimate goal of intercultural bilingual and ecological education is to close historical wounds perpetrated by colonization on the self-esteem of the communities, their health care, their food sovereignty, and the exercise of their territorial rights.

CONCLUSION Human microbiota conservation efforts are currently at a very early stage among indigenous peoples in the world, not only in the Amazon. For the environmental humanities, this is time to begin asking the relevant questions, but it is also a unique opportunity for engaging in collaborative

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projects with researchers in other disciplines willing and able to work together. Eventually, the environmental humanities would be crucial for finding a way to serve the indigenous communities involved and for gathering public support toward microbiota conservation. So far, the research and activism on human microbiota conservation is a plural research conceived from above that is applied downwards, but the environmental humanities can play a role in balancing this energy over the next few years.

REFERENCES Blaser, M. J. (2014), Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, New York: Henry Holt. Clemente, J. C., E. C. Pehrsson, M. J. Blaser, K. Sandhu, Z. Gao, B. Wang, M. Magris, G. Hidalgo, M. Contreras, Ó. Noya-Alarcón, O. Lander, J. McDonald, M. Cox, J. Walter, P. L. Oh, J. F. Ruiz, S. Rodriguez, N. Shen, S. J. Song, J. Metcalf, R. Knight, G. Dantas, and M. G. Dominguez-Bello (2015), “The Microbiome of Uncontacted Amerindians,” Science Advances, April 7, 1(3): 12 pages. Available online: https://advan​ces.sci​ence​mag.org/ cont​ent/1/3/e1500​183. Accessed July 30, 2020. Global Microbiome Network-First Latin American Symposium (2021), Conference recording. Available online: https://www.micr​obio​tava​ult.org/event/glo​bal-mic​robi​ome-netw​ork-first-latin-ameri​can-sympos​ium/. Accessed February 14, 2021. Lagunas-Vázques, M., M. Bobadilla, L. F. Beltrán-Morales, and A. Ortega Rubio (2017), “Bases antropológicas y sociológicas para la conservación en áreas naturales protegidas latinoamericanas con un enfoque pluricultural e intercultural,” in I. C. Espitia-Moreno, V. J. Arriola Padilla, and A. Ortega Rubio (eds.), Gestión, manejo y conservación de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, 51–76, Michoacán, Mexico: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás Hidalgo. Available online: https://www.resea​rchg​ate.net/publ​icat​ion/325139159_Bases_ Antropologicas_y_Sociologicas_para_la_Conservacion_en_Areas_Naturales_Protegidas_Latinoamericanas_ con_un_enfoque_Pl​uric​ultu​ral_​e_In​terc​ultu​ral. Accessed June 23, 2020. Loh, J., and D. Harmon (2014), Biocultural Diversity: Threatened Species, Endangered Languages, The Netherlands: WWF Netherlands, Zeist. Available online: https://www.resea​rchg​ate.net/publ​icat​ ion/291352235_Biocultural_Diversity_threatened_s​peci​es_e​ndan​gere​d_la​ngua​ges. Accessed August 12, 2020. Mogollón Pérez, M. C. (2014), La alimentación tradicional de los pueblos indígenas: Una expresión de la riqueza cultural y bienestar social, Iquitos, Peru: AIDESEP and FORMABIAP. Nye, D., L. Rugg, J. Fleming, and R. Emmett (2013), The Emergence of the Environmental Humanities, Stockholm: MISTRA, The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. Available online: http:// web.colby.edu/sense​ofpl​ace/files/2013/07/MIS​TRA-FINA​LREP​ORT-15May2​013-copy1.pdf. Accessed June 22, 2020. Rose, D. B., T. van Dooren, M. Chrulew, S. Cooke, M. Kearnes, and E. O’Gorman (2012), “Thinking through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities,” Environmental Humanities, 1 (1): 1–5. Shnayerson, M., and M. J. Plotkin (2002), The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria, Boston: Little, Brown. Sörlin, S. (2012), “Environmental Humanities: Why Should Biologists Interested in the Environment Take the Humanities Seriously?,” BioScience, 62 (9): 788–9. Walsh, C. (2007), “Interculturalidad colonialidad y educación,” Revista Educación y Pedagogía, 29 (48): 25–35. Yatsunenko, T., F. E. Rey, M. J. Manary, I. Trehan, M. G. Dominguez-Bello, M. Contreras, M. Magris, G. Hidalgo, R. N. Baldassano, A. P. Anokhin, A. C. Heath, B. Warner, J. Reeder, J. Kuczynski, J. G. Caporaso,

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C. A. Lozupone, C. Lauber, J. C. Clemente, D. Knights, R. Knight, and J. I. Gordon (2012), “Human Gut Microbiome Viewed across Age and Geography,” Nature, 486 (2012): 222–7. Available online: https://www. nat​ure.com/artic​les/natu​re11​053. Accessed July 30, 2020. Yong, E. (2018), I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life, New York: Ecco.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Performing Damaged Land-/Bodyscape in the Niger Delta: Transcorporeal Explorations of Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood HENRY OBI AJUMEZE

When Shell can pump out $30 billion worth of oil and the trade-off for locals is disease, dispossession, military occupation, and an end to self-sustaining fishing and agriculture, the process seems more redolent of late nineteenth-century colonial buccaneering than it does of twenty-first century international economics. Nixon (2011: 119) The Niger Delta is a key site of extractive violence. The operation of oil is subject to fierce contestation between the multinational oil corporations and Niger Delta youth groups who resorted to armed struggle against petro-capitalism. These conflicts highlight “the slick alliance” between the Nigerian state and the oil corporations—especially considering ways in which the Nigerian military apparatus is mobilized on behalf of the oil companies—revealing a vast duplicitous politics that reinforces the marginalization of the oil-producing communities in the larger frame of the country’s democratic evolution. To be sure, the youth groups have worked not only to confront the plundering of the region, which translates into direct destruction of people and environment, but also against state-sponsored militarization of the sites of oil production. In this light, the enterprise of extraction inscribes within its sphere of operation a nightmarish regime of terror inflicted on the Niger Delta communities. Thus, as I shall further suggest, the Niger Delta represents what

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Moss and Dyck would call “corporeal space” (1999: 372)—in which the body and environment are not only bound up together as ontological and biological categories but are also simultaneously exposed to the same form of extractive chaos. In so doing, I recognize the necropolitical regimes of oil capitalism as instruments of “resource curse,” which generally frames the apocalyptic realities that extractivism has wrought in the Niger Delta—in the sorts of ecological ruins and toxicities that have marked the region’s oil experience. To be sure, the production of petroleum in the Niger Delta is generative of predatory practices— such as oil spillage, gas flaring, pipeline explosions, and other forms of poisonous chemical substances that flow in the delta waters—that instantiate a ruinous future for the indigenous communities. The journalist Kia Mistilis has noted that “more than 1.5 million tons of oil, equivalent to one ExxonValdez disaster every year for 50 years, have spilled into the delta” (2009) and which continues apace in enabling the production of increasingly “bare life”—to borrow Giorgio Agamben’s popular phrase. In his words: “Constant gas flaring releases toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, causing cancer, birth defects, respiratory diseases and acid rain so toxic it corrodes metal roofs” (1999: 2). In this light, to read the Niger Delta in terms of “oil encounter” is to consider, if imaginatively, the struggle of actual human population grappling with totalizing regimes of dispossession. It is to consider people and environment bound up in an apocalyptic system, human bodies denuded by the rapacious industries of oil. As in the context of Rachel Carson’s “death by indirection” (1992: 6), I argue that Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood (2002) allows us to explore the Niger Delta as a tenebrous figuration of poisoned landscapes and rivers, which in turn damage the human and nonhuman species that inhabit the region, rendering these bodies toxic by the particulates of extractivism. In 1964, Carson argued extensively in Silent Spring about the industrial production of dangerous and deadly chemicals that over the years have become stored in the planetary system. She warns, “They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth” (1992: 11). Interestingly, Carson’s caution appears to envision a much more insistent form of capitalist-industrial regime, because the fossil-fuel era announces such global force that Frederick Buell describes as “the exuberance of oil.” In fact, Buell has rightly observed that the history of oil is marked by a discursive fusion of exuberance and catastrophe. As he notes, “oil presents society with a large portfolio of dread problems: rapid global warming that threatens lives, lifestyles, and ecosystem” (2012: 274). Thus, the extraction of fossil fuel is ostensibly synonymous with wanton ecological pollution— especially in the global south. In Nigeria, oil accounts for over 75 percent of the annual revenue, and the entire production is drilled from the oil fields of the Niger Delta. Indeed, about 93.1 million metric tons of crude oil is extracted annually as the country at a time became the seventh largest producer of crude oil in the world—as well as reputed to be one of the most polluted places on earth. Hosting a collection of transnational oil corporations, this reputation is directly connected to the extractive activities of oil firms. Accordingly, extractive politics in the last six decades in the Niger Delta subjectivizes the environment and people of the region as objects of exploitation and relentless ecocide. As Bassey remarks, these corporations extract “crude oil in the most crude manner possible” (cited in Ike and Douglas 2001: 5), operating under conditions that have been adjudged as grossly antithetical to acceptable global standards— what is aptly described as “double standards.” It is for this reason that several communities in the Niger Delta decry the activities of oil firms through various environmental justice practices.

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The Urhobo communities in the region have produced a document that foregrounds the effects of oil extraction on environmental health, a glimpse of the realities created and perpetuated by petro-pollution. According to the paper, analyses of soils and waters in post-spill studies of some Urhobo sites show increased levels of chromium, mercury, copper, cobalt, cadmium, nickel, vanadium and lead. … There is abundant evidence that the disease patterns of the Urhobo population has changed from the traditional malaria and pneumonia to diseases of the Respiratory Tract, Central Nervous System (Brain and Spinal Cord), Blood System with the result that Urhobo people now suffer from CANCER of the various organs of the body. (2014: 7) In an effort to depart from a humoral imaginary delimited by ways in which the human bodies are permeated and afflicted through toxic particulates lodged in the damaged landscapes, in what follows, I engage with the “transcorporeality” model as conceptualized by Stacy Alaimo. Or, alternatively, look at the exhausted bodies in the Niger Delta in the framework of what Karen Barad terms “intra-action” (2007: 230)—a means of imagining ways in which the body is constituted and denuded in the region. There is need to alert us, as Alaimo has done, about “the interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and nonhuman natures.” By paying attention to the transcorporeal capacity of the human body, it becomes possible to understand the inseparability of human and the environment—what Alaimo describes as “thinking across bodies” (2010: 2). In doing so lies the recognition that the environment is “fleshy,” or not “bloodless,” as Joy Williams (2002: 5) puts it—thus possessing conditions for sustenance to humans ; so, too, its inherent susceptibility to forge fusion of bodies. This recognition is important as it fosters ethical and political positions about contemporary environmental realities. Against environmental health formulations reliant on biological bodies in toxic environments, and one rife with the necessity of building natural and cultural interconnections on the interface between human body and the physical environment, is the possibility of intimacy that makes environmental illness inevitable for those who are exposed to insidious physical environments. As Alaimo puts it, environmental illness opens up a “potent possibility for rethinking both the boundaries of human bodies and the territory of health” (2009: 12). In Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood, the reader is confronted with a sort of “damaged” landscape—a neoliberal entanglement of several predatory oil corporations—where the Niger Delta is rendered as a site of industrial “scramble.” The poems variously take materials from the activities of these companies—especially Shell BP, which is the first company that struck oil in the region, hence mostly cast as the major polluter of the region—to offer an apocalyptic portrait of oil’s inflection in the delta. They make connections between extractivism and its toxic effect on the oil-producing communities, drawing on such materials as pipelines, rigs, oil-well heads, and other infrastructures of extraction. These materials are often imagined as reminders of crude oil production, as too rusted, degraded, and toxic. In invoking these materials, Bassey creates modes of intra-action with the environment in which they are installed and implicated, broadly observing that the environment is an actant that expresses itself in and responds to the toxins deposited through extractive activities. In the poem “The United Niger Delta Oil Co,” the poet portrays a kind of imperial mapping of Nigeria’s resource landscapes—a postmodern Britton wood par excellence—where different transnational oil corporations are united in the interest of sharing the huge oil deposits in the delta:

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And so it was that Shell, Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, NNPC, Elf, Chevron, Agip, State oil and similar entities agreed That the most desired entity of all The United Delta Oil Company incorporated Opened its claws and rigs and climbed broad platforms Shared and divide the land and the sea Took the entire coasts of our country Loving best the heart beating in her waist: the delta They re-christened their property The savage land of the uncontacted The savage land of the blind The savage land of the powerless saboteurs. (2002: 22) So how might one understand the coastal regions of the Niger Delta—its potential to produce crude oil—as “the heart beating in her waists”? How does the landscape of oil function as a human body—a corporeal means for telling stories not bound by time and space, but permeating other bodily subjectivities? And finally, how might we read poems like Bassey’s “We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood” as a model for thinking about transcorporeality? The literary scholar Harry Garuba has noted that to capture the land, “it first had to be explored and mapped, literally and figuratively” (2002: 87). Thus, territorial containment serves “to circumscribe the natural mobility of the body” (2002: 88). within the spheres of territorial control. In this light, mapping offers a model on which land and body are aligned on the subject side of the Cartesian divide, both synthesized for the cartographies of imperial subjection. Thus, mapping the body and land into a conception of subjectivity is the underlying logic of imperial control, and this is even more so with the case of oil capitalism. In this sense, imperial capitalism is founded on the logic of inseparability of body and environment, a transcorporeal configuration that defined colonial subject formation. Consequently, to read transcorporeality is to participate in the colonial history that is framed on the strategies of imperialism that have marked spaces like the Niger Delta for generations. Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood is grounded in the exploration of environment/body subjectivities that continues in the era of oil, a means of thinking through historical transformations wherein crude extraction imposes a new category of resource exploitation that translates to ruin and devastation. Born in 1958 in the Niger Delta, Bassey is one of Africa’s conscientious environmental justice advocates. In interviews and essays, Bassey argues that multinational oil corporations operating in the Niger Delta are implicated in the longue durée of ecocide occurring in the region since the discovery of crude oil in huge commercial quantities. He chaired Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) between 2008 and 2012, and served as the executive director of Environmental Rights Action group (ERA)—which are organizations networked in the global south (Nigeria) to defend the human ecosystem against invidious effects of oil extraction. In 2009, Time magazine awarded him the 2010 Right Livelihood Award (also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”). Indeed, Bassey’s environmental activism has earned him numerous recognitions including Member of the Federal Republic (MFR) in 2014, which is the highest national honor in Nigeria. Nonetheless, Bassey’s environmental activism locates itself within a persistent poetic tradition that traces its genealogy to oral influence, and through which environmental justice activism can assume an exhibitionist

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figuration, in order to make clear a worldly network of advocacy. He argues that “the path of crude oil development has indeed been strewn with skeletons and soaked in human blood across the world,” and engages with poetry as an important mechanism for resistance. He writes, “In a context of injustice and ruinous communities, poetry is inescapably revolutionary. It demands of the poet to take sides with the oppressed and help all to make sense of the just pathways to a preferred future” (Bassey 2002: 2). In this sense, Bassey’s poetry suffices as “exhibition material” and is rendered as an integral strategy for environmental advocacies across the world. Philip Aghoghovwia writes about Bassey’s poetry as one that bears witness to oil’s tragic history in the Niger Delta through the poetic imagination of socio-environmental destruction. He notes further, Bassey walks a thin line between commitment to poetry and commitment to environmental activism … in bringing into the public sphere issues of social and environmental justice … He poetically draws attention to corporate lawlessness and environmental crimes inflicted on local landscapes that bear fossil fuel for the oil extraction industry. His account of these spaces of environmental scrubland in the oil industry is vivid and concrete, for he has travelled throughout these parts to see first-hand how the oil extraction industry and other big businesses have destroyed local landscapes. (2014: 62) The volume We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood offers a glimpse of oil’s tragic history in the Niger Delta, whereby the body and environment interact in the trajectory of devastation and pollution that extractivism makes possible. That is, the work aligns with Aghoghovwia’s assertion that “the cost of petroleum around the world has continued to be subsidized by the poor who inhabit in their bodies the pollution caused by oil exploration” (61). Of course, Bassey’s other poetry collections—such as Patriots and Cockroaches (1992) and I Will Not Dance to Your Beat (2011)—represent significant milestones in his poetics of ecological advocacy. However, We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood draws distinctively from a novel exploration of liquidity that galvanizes oil and blood in projecting the notion of tragic flows and dissolution. Patricia Yaeger writes, “The metaphors defining contemporary world systems can be thrillingly fluid” (2010: 523). Thus, in a work that evidences the fundaments of corporeality, aqueous imagination appears to recognize the fact that our body is made mostly of water, “our blood a tide of oceanic ions” (524). This recognition is important because it offers the basis for the interaction of flow forms that may not support the environmental well-being of the human population, thus instrumental to the processes of destruction. It is in the eponymous poem, “We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood,” that we see intimations of liquid entanglement: oil and blood imagined in a flowscape wherein the sites of oil production are projected into bodies of population slaughtered by the security apparatus of the Nigerian state: “They may kill all/But the blood will speak/They may gain all/But the soil will RISE/We may die/And yet stay alive/Placed on the slap/Slaughtered by the day” (2002: 15). In historicizing how the Nigerian military decimates the delta bodies in order to silence their resistance, this poem offers a glimpse of intra-action between extractivism—in which the soil is devastated by Shell Petroleum and militarization—wherein the body is “slaughtered by the day.” The poem appears to suggest that there is no difference between the soil and human body, and between extraction and human slaughter: “Things are real/When found in dreams/We see their Shells/Behind military shields” (2002: 17). In other words, the poem juxtaposes oil and blood to demonstrate the allencompassing pervasion of oil capitalism.

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The poem “When the Earth Bleeds” appears to join issues with the phantasmagoric quality of oil—against its “reality check”—in relation to the experience of “living oil” (à la LeMenager 2014), a means of interrogating the ontology of oil: “I hear that oil/Makes things move/In reality check/Oil makes life stop” (2002: 16). In this light, the poet takes oil’s reality beyond its illusory mythos, particularly in the sense of oil’s encounter with life, an encounter that culminates in the impersonation of the earth—through bodily assumption. That is, it takes investing the earth with human existential and bodily status to come to terms with the precarity that oil implicates. Interestingly, the polish writer Kapuscinski has famously asserted, “Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. … The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth” (1982: 35). The poem ostensibly complicates this assertion, figuring the typical dystopian situation of indigenous communities who inhabit oil-ravaged landscapes. In fact, the story of oil in the Niger Delta demonstrates the tragic consequences of violent dispossession and death, as the poem designates: “The oil only flows/When the earth bleeds …/A thousand explosions in the belly of the earth/Bleeding rigs, bursting pipes” (2002: 20). Such portrayal of the earth as a fractured, broken human is synthetical in nature—aligned with, among other things, the justification that the fusion of earth and human serves the purpose of resistance. In the penultimate stanza, the poet charges rhetorically, “What shall we do?/What must be do?/Do we just sit?/Wail and mope?/Arise people, rise/Let’s unite/With our fists/Let’s bandage the earth.” In Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self, Alaimo has argued that “sociopolitical forces generate landscapes that infiltrate human bodies” (2010: 28), demonstrating the material interconnection between biological bodies and land, especially the bodies of people rooted in these spaces. In this sense, the body and land share mutual history; they are bound ontologically and hence cannot be considered separate spheres in history and politics. Put simply, the human bodies become the sites on which the history of landscapes are mirrored, reinforced, and performed, a corporeal reflection of politics and power that is both multiple—in the Foucauldian sense—and transformable. In the poem “Gas Flares,” Bassey portrays the earth as the human body, imbued with the biological capacity to fart and belch toxic gases into the atmosphere: The earth gassed Dynamite rocked the storehouse Of life The earth gassed A fart delayed Belching dragons attack Leaping tongues lick Roofs, farm Now the sky is ablaze Where will the people go? Flee the flames Dive into the creek Fly! The last tortoise is gone Escape the raging flames

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Now the sea is ablaze Where will the people go? Popping A million explosions A shower of soot On open raw nerves Oil’s not well That starts a well Now the earth is ablaze Where will the people go? (2002: 48) Such is the deleterious effect of poisonous gas expulsion into the atmosphere, and for which the poet invites the earth/body as sites of enunciation. This transformation into the corporeal realm serves to demonstrate the body’s implication in, and conjunction with, the physical surroundings of the polluted region. Indeed, the body is not an unrelated presence in the poisoned landscape; rather, it, too, is poisoned through the landscape’s toxification. This explains what Jane Bennet has described as “social bodies”—that is, “in the sense that each is, by its very nature as a body, continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies” (2010: 21). The interplay between— and conjunction of—body and environment is most evident when Bassey explores the scatological metaphor of farting and belching. These significations of gaseous flares highlight the porosity of the human body as circuits of corporeal connections. African writers have persisted in deploying scatological imaginaries as a viable means of articulating the postcolonial condition—what Achile Mbembe terms “the aesthetics of vulgarity” (1992: 5)—serving to cultivate a kind of metaphor for massive corruption in the postcolony. However, Bassey’s referents appear to underplay the severity of the environmental plunder, making a case for some kind of aesthetic crises in the representational abstraction of the hazardous effects of gas flaring in the Niger Delta. Moreover, as Susan Sontag has noted, “illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric” (1977: 3). In this light, Bassey’s work tends toward a diagnostic iteration of “the spasms of pain” inflicted on the indigenes of the Niger Delta by “exhaust pipes of death,” a reference to the network of oil pipelines in the Niger Delta that are implicated in poisonous gas flares and life-consuming spillages. In other words, rather than vulgarizing ruin and pollution, the poet resists the impulse of metaphor by tracing the material instruments of death in the region. This is evident in the poem “Ocean March”: This pile of dirt Heaps of death from The exhaust pipes of death Can’t I refuse The poison And douse the flares from the nozzles of evil This cocktail of an air I’m forced to breathe Whose duty it is to mix And to fix This death sentence

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In our homes? In the midst we are in the python’s grasp Swept off our feet Our hopes silted Memories of life once lived Floats back to us As we face the spasms of pain. (20) The suggestion of connections across bodily spaces—especially those infected by petro-toxics—turns fossil fuel into what Buell describes as “agent of chemical and social metamorphosis” (2012: 289). Consequently, bodily connections conscript environmental health as the basis of transcorporeal poetics, serving the cautionary function of registering the collective ruin of bodies in damaged environments. Bassey’s poem “Did You?” continues with the diagnostic project that imaginatively captures oil’s implication in environmental illness. The poem aptly associates environmental toxins with modes of diseases in the Niger Delta, invoking aspects of continuities between the land and the body in strictly apocalyptic terms. This coupling of land and body—“linked by pain”—can be understood in the context of bodily landscapes traumatized by extractive capitalism. The poem calls out Engen Petronas, one of the multinational oil companies in the region, for poisoning the airs, thus destroying human lungs, and heating up the atmosphere “with the oven of death”: These waves … this breeze Sucked into your lungs From whence cometh they? Are you the breath of life? Or the wheeze of death From the deadly oven Of Engen Petronas Submerged in the rising tide I break into a run On dreamland’s shores Unhooked, freed from corporate quicksand In this no-logo-land Floating, rejecting the pipes of death As we show teeth without smiles South South North South South North Linked by pain. (2002: 18) The poem “Facial Marks (Post-Petrol Era)” allies the struggle to erase the curse and scar of petroleum—“Environmental scars/traced by seismic lines”—and appeals to the futurity of the Niger Delta worldlife in the post-petroleum era. It proposes a world without oil, rid of the curses that oil imposes on the region. The “resource curse” as formulated by the geographer Michael Watts, and theorized extensively by environmentalists interested in tracing the absence of infrastructural

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development and the low-quality of life that exists in a region hugely blessed with enormous oil wealth, is a common trope in the narrativization of oil politics in the Niger Delta. The phrase is characterized by what Rob Nixon describes as the doubling “notions of fortune and misfortune”— often spectacularly complementary—besieged by “evil forces that alienate people from the very elements that have sustained them, environmentally and culturally, as all that seemed solid melts into liquid tailings, oil spills and plumes of toxic air” (2011: 69). In this sense, the notion of “resource curse” foregrounds the Niger Delta condition of a distinctly structural deprivation that translates to chaotic environmental health conditions. The fourth stanza of the poem highlights the prominent, apocalyptic figure of pipelines that pollute not only the land but also the existential possibilities of the Deltas: Come together valiant souls Drive off evil serpents from our land Sacred that is our earth Link those hands across the seas Let’s block these ducts with our Collective fists These pipes of dreams Of dollars and sorrows and tears These ducts burrow into our hearts These pipes dry our lands These pipes drain our soul: These pipes steal our dreams. (2002: 54/55) It is in the second stanza that the emphasis on “pipes” traces a more extensive transcorporeal suggestion: “Oil pipes/Blood veins/Pipes of Conflict/Ducts of death/Pipes of blood.” This is, as in the eponymous poem “We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood,” a “sympoesis” (125) of oil and blood—to use Donna Harraway’s term (2016: 125)—showing how each body of aqueous force can operate indistinctly. That is, oil can serve in human veins, and blood as well can serve in oil pipelines, demonstrating a transcorporeal condition that persistently feed into conflicts and death in the region. The import of these lines is that the bodies of the liquid subject are not necessarily shaped by their circuits of natural operation but operates within zones of permeable bodies. In other words, the human veins and the petroleum pipelines are flowscapes of conflict and death, each possessing what Alaimo terms “permeable corporealities” (2010: 114) such that it breaks down the bodily boundaries. In fact, along with damaging and polluting the physical environment, the poem traces the pipes through existential bodies of human soul and dreams, a means of thinking about pollution in material and ontological terms.

CONCLUSION The inherent question of the relation between health and environment finds form in the ecological pollutions of the Niger Delta wrought by rapacious extractive practices of oil firms. Because crude oil is the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, indigenes of the oil-producing communities are exposed to poisonous chemicals and particulates that result from vast extractive activities. This exposure to harmful and unhealthy consequences of oil production underwrites a form of transcorporeal thinking

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that implicates the inseparable entanglement of human body with their physical surroundings. In this sense, the ruination of the oil landscapes speaks to the porosity of the human bodies, each subject to the imbrications of precarious environmental illnesses and diseases that register what Carson accurately describe as “death by indirection.” Thus, the reading of “transcorporeality” (2010: 114) may seem too metaphoric; so, too, other bodily imaginaries in postcolonial literature. But such references draw upon the materiality of bodily nature that clearly under-represent the scale of the ecohuman destruction in the Niger Delta. The experience of environmental illness among oil-bearing communities—as the case of Urhobo community illustrates—designates the real life of people and environment bound up in the apocalyptic import of extractivism. Hence, transcorporeality suffices as a praxis of diagnosis, articulating the intimation of human bonding with nature, as well as announcing the inherent precarity of life in poisoned environments.

REFERENCES Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovern Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Aghoghovwia, P. (2014), “The Poetics and Politics of Transnational Petro- Environmentalism in Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood,” English in Africa, 41 (2): 59–77. Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, S. (2009), “MCS Matters: Material Agency in the Science and Practices of Environmental Illness,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 21 (9): 9–27. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bassey, N. (1992), Patriots and Cockroaches, Ibadan: Kraft Books. Bassey, N. (2002), “Power of Poetry for Global Transformation,” in We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood, Ibadan: Kraft Books. Bassey, N. (2011), I Will Not Dance to Your Beat, Ibadan: Kraft Books. Bennet, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Buell, F. (2012), “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance,” Journal of American Studies, 46 (2): 273–93. Carson, R. (1992), Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Furman, A. (2018), “Yellow-Crowned Night Heron,” Flyway, May 15. Available online: https://flyway​jour​nal. org/non-fict​ion/yel​low-crow​ned-night-heron-and​rew-fur​man/. Accessed March 9, 2022. Garuba, H. (2002), “Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies in African Narrative,” Alternation, 9 (1): 87–116. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ike, O., and O. Douglas (2001), Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. Kia, M. (2009), “The Niger Delta Crisis,” Counterpunch, July 17. Available online: https://www.count​erpu​nch. org/2009/07/17/the-niger-delta-cri​sis/. Accessed March 23, 2021. LeMenager, S. (2014), Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, A. (1992), “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” Public Culture, 4 (2): 1–30.

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Moss, P., and I. Dyck (1999), “Body, Corporeal Space, and Legitimating Chronic Illness: Women Diagnosed with M. E.,” Antipode, 31: 372–97. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sontag, S. (1977), Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphor, New York: Doubleday. Urhobo Oil Mineral Communities (2014), “Urhobo Communities,” Ministerial Committee Visit, Petroleum Training Institute (PTI), January 28. Williams, J. (2002), Ill Nature, New York: Vintage. Yaeger, P. (2010), “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA, 125 (3): 523–45.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Scapegoating in Times of Pan-Epidemic: Mimesis, Identity Crisis, and the Buddhist Phármakon CHIA-JU CHANG

INTRODUCTION Covid-19 demands a reassessment of humanity itself in times of crisis like the one we find ourselves in now.1 Evoking sources as diverse as Extinction Rebellion, Bruno Latour, and the UN environment chief Inger Andersen, David Chandler points out that “the lesson of the global response to the Coronavirus is that humanity itself is the problem” (Chandler 2020). This chapter shares the consensus that “humans are the problem” and zooms in on a particular aspect of humanity’s malady: the unconscious mimetic impulse triggered by a threatened sense of the intrusion of the Other. The heartfelt threat gives rise to a sense of identity crisis and consequent scapegoating violence. The anxiety about the Other contributes significantly to the prevalent social pathology revealed by the pan-epidemic. The chapter examines the widespread “mimetic pathology” (Lawtoo 2013: 3–4), the intensification of certain contagious behaviors, wherein everyone begins to imitate one another, either in competing for the same object of desire or finding the same target to condemn. I begin with an examination of mimetic pathology and provide a brief overview of an outbreak of contagious and destructive mimetic behaviors during Covid-19, particularly the practice of stigmatizing Asians, especially the Chinese. Such a cultural/geopoliticization of disease evokes negative stereotypes of China and the

I would like to thank my colleague Kurt Spellmeyer for reading early drafts and providing insightful comments. Please note that the discussion in this chapter reflects what is currently known of Covid-19 and how it has affected the world up until now. Even in the time of writing and editing this paper, significant changes have happened: multiple vaccines have come out, and the pandemic has spread to places that were previously mostly untouched. Certainly there will be further significant changes while this chapter is being published. We can only hope that they will be changes for the better. 1

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Chinese, as exemplified in the “Sick Man of Asia” trope promoted in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal (Mead 2020). The repeated historical pattern is an ongoing colonialist project, which is a historical mimetic process in the construction of identity in the West: the idealization of the self and disparaging of the Other within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In unpacking the hidden unconscious force underlying our identity formation, I turn to the French literary critic and anthropologist René Girard’s theory on mimesis (including mimetic desire/ triangle and scapegoat mechanism). However, to solve the tenacious problem of scapegoating and mimetic violence, I depart from Girard and post-Girardian mimetic solutions. I contend that, first of all, Girardian demystification of an ancient sacralized scapegoat mechanism has yet to address the problem of desacralization in the modern world. Second, alternative, positive mimetic models such as constructive competition or sympathy may or may not guarantee the desired outcome, as the dualism (the mimetic subject and model) that lies at the center of mimesis remains unchallenged. This chapter calls for a shift to a non-mimetic model and shows that Buddhism tackles the problem of mimesis differently from the mimeticists. Not only does the Buddhist non-dualistic ontology dismantle the mimetic hypothesis of the skin-bound self and self-other dualism, but it also addresses the problem of disenchantment resulting from the colonial process in the West and now globally. Here I turn to Buddhist concepts such as “emptiness” (Sanskrit: śūnyatā), “no-self ” (Skt: anattā), “dependent origination” (Skt: pratītyasamutpāda), samādhi (a Sanskrit term evoking the Greek notion of ekstasis, referring to the ecstatic mental state where a sense of alienation resulting from the subject/object split is overcome), and kōan meditation training as prescriptions that help see through the illusory nature of mimetic constructions. Such a non-rational realization of “emptiness” (i.e., the absence of a sense of an individuated self) advocates for the interdependent and intermingling nature of all things and serves as the basis of the affect and action of compassion. Hence, this Buddhist conception of “emptiness” is the medicine we need now. This chapter demonstrates that traditional humanistic methodology and non-Western cultural traditions and practices are still relevant, if not more so than in the past, to help broaden our conventional understanding of public health and well-being in the era of the Anthropocene. It maintains that, given the complexity of the crisis, which is multiscalar, multidimensional and multicultural, scientific knowledge and technological solutions should not be the only tool for addressing crisis, including not only pan-epidemic but also climate change. Environmental and medical humanities will fare better if conventional humanist scholarship and traditional cultures are placed in partnership with science, to provide insights, diagnostics, and solutions in tackling different issues that science is unable to grapple with.

COVID’S PHÁRMAKON: MIMETIC SCAPEGOATING AS PANDEMIC ILLNESS In mid-December 2019, a cluster of unknown cases of respiratory infections was detected in Wuhan, a metropolis of eleven million people and the hub of auto-industry and hi-tech manufacturing in China. A month or two later, Covid-19 quickly spread to other countries, first in Asia, Europe, and the United States, and then to the rest of the world. The World Health Organization named the coronavirus disease Covid-19 and, on March 11, 2020, it classified the outbreak as a pandemic. The International Virus Classification Committee named its virus “SARS-CoV-2” (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2), which is a new type of coronavirus that comes from a family

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of viruses that gave rise to MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Infection), and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). As of mid-May 2020, more than 200 countries and regions had confirmed cases, approximately 4.5 million people had been infected, and 300,000 died. And by mid-July 2021, the death toll rose to 4.1 million people. The transmission of Covid-19 is more than a biological transmission. What spreads through the community is not just the virus but also the reproduction and circulation of certain ideas and memes, transmitting from one individual or community to another, as seen in outbreaks of irrational attitudes, speech, actions, affects, beliefs, and ideologies. People burned cellphone towers and angrily coughed on strangers. There were conspiracy theories accusing Bill Gates of using the upcoming vaccine to implant tracking chips, even believing that those chips were magnetic and making keys stick to their bodies. George Soros, a frequent target of the anti-Semitic right, was accused of being part owner of a lab in Wuhan, China, where Covid-19 was supposedly developed. One marked characteristic of these memes or behaviors is their infectiousness. Among them, the most prevalent and dangerous one is scapegoating: blaming the ethnic Other for the outbreak of the disease and prompting hate crimes or speech against them. As the pandemic spread to the West, racism and xenophobia rose, and hate speech and crimes toward the intra- and extracommunal cultural Other intensified. Chinese and Chinese or Asian Americans in the United States have become the targets of a “coronaphobia” and “coronavirus bullying” (Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor 2020: 4). In New York City, an acidic fluid was poured on Asian women. In Midland, Texas, a man attacked an Asian American family with a knife at a Sam’s Club, even stabbing a two-year-old and six-year-old child. According to the data collected by L1ght (2010), teen chat rooms, and gaming platforms experienced a 900 percent increase in hate speech on Twitter directed towards China and the Chinese, a 200 percent increase in traffic to hate sites and specific posts against Asians, and a 70 percent increase in hate between kids and teens during online chats. The Jewish community and women are not immune, either, from the fallout of the scapegoating frenzy. In New Rochelle, New York, the Orthodox Jewish community was blamed for the spread of the coronavirus. From all this, it becomes clear that a pandemic is by no means a mere biological or medical event, nor is it culturally and politically neutral. Pathologizing certain people, places, and cultures can serve as yet another convenient excuse for ecofascist activism, as described in the ASLE letter on Covid-19, “ecofascism exploits fantasies of a purified land to assert white supremacy and purge the nation of ‘unclean’ people.”2 Such “fantasies of a purified land to assert white supremacy and purge the nation of ‘unclean’ people” are exactly the effects of mimetic rivalry, where one’s own identity is under threat. Not only humans are scapegoated, nonhuman animals (e.g., pangolins and bats) and even microbes also become a phármakon (an ancient Greek term denoting the meaning of “poisonous cure”). In a perpetual attempt to find scapegoats, Trump, after relentlessly calling the pandemic “the China flu” or “Kung Flu,” shifted from nation-pathologizing to revamping himself as another kind of wartime president, leading his people to fight the “invisible enemy”: the virus. Politicians are not alone in this. In the mainstream media’s daily representation of the icon of the coronavirus, the enlarged ball with bright red spikes of glycoprotein is imagined as a superkiller and humanity’s ASLE stands for Association for the Study of Literature and Environment; it is a professional organization that promotes scholarship and the arts in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism. See “ASLE Statement on Covid-19” (2020). 2

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no. 1 enemy. It has even morphed into a memetic image of terror, photoshopped onto the faces of our enemies or accompanied by ominous music in news reports, rather than a biological force we have to learn to coexist with. Given that more than four million people have died from the pandemic, it is tempting to blame the coronavirus microbe—a virus that simply follows its own biological process of reproduction—as a “supervillain” and “a devil everyone should fight.” In this instance, we imagine coronavirus as the wicked Mother Nature, who is out there to get us, instead of recognizing that the emergence of pandemic has to do with industrialization and effects of economic globalization, which destroy the environment in the global South.

PATTERN OF HISTORY: THE DUAL MECHANISM OF SELF/OTHER IDENTITY FORMATION While the popular imagination focuses on questions of whom or what to blame, what is often forgotten by contemporaries is that finding a party to blame is a repetition of historical precedents and is central to identity politics. Historically, plague has been employed to mark one’s cultural identity and class in relation to the Other. The example of tuberculosis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offers an insight of self/other identity formation: a dual process of internalization (e.g., idealizing the relationship between disease and self) and externalization (e.g., pathologizing the relationship between disease and other). As one of the oldest and deadliest communicable disease in the world, tuberculosis (TB) was romanticized in the West. Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” (1978) sheds light on the way in which the disease was internalized by the Romantics in the eighteenth century as a way to cope with unwholesomeness. TB was coopted into the formation of Romantic identity as a kind of fashion that marked a certain class associated with aristocratic status and artistic creativity. The yearning for initiation into the “Cult of TB” was found in women who whitened their skin to imitate a consumptive appearance, for example. Sontag writes, “Keats and Shelley may have suffered atrociously from the disease. But Shelley consoled Keats that ‘this consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done’ ” (10). Lord Byron even longed to die of TB so as to represent an interestingly tragic figure. In the Romantic imagination of plague, ignorance played a role that shaped fantasies about the disease. Everyone now knows that TB is transmitted through the air. The salons where Chopin played while suffering from TB would have been hot spots of infection, and Chopin himself a walking, coughing advertisement connecting TB to artistic brilliance. Behind the glorification of the disease is a profound anxiety concerning one’s own self-image, identity, and mortality. In order to do away with the shame and inferiority associated with the kind of impending illness and death usually attributed to the lower classes or “unclean” foreigners, the Romantics reconstructed the disease by turning into it a mimetic object of desire. As a coping mechanism vis-à-vis impending threat, the Romantics sublimated the disease and thus denied the shameful feeling about death. Here we see how a cultural in-group reconstructs a biological event like the plague to transform it from a signifier of unwholesomeness to a sign of aristocratic superiority. While TB was romanticized, cholera, a less lethal disease, was associated with the Chinese as in the image of the “Sick Man of Asia.” Robert Peckham provides an account of the way in which diseases such as cholera were “Asianized” by Western observers to frame the origin of the disease in Asia (Peckham 2016: 7). In the Western imagination, Asia has long been regarded as a source

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of contagion: Black Death, Asiatic Cholera, smallpox, and, recently, avian influenza. And Chinese identity in Western medical discourse during the nineteenth century was “linked to pestilence with the country imagined as the ‘cradle of smallpox’ and the homeland of plague” (7). From the nineteenth century, images of smallpox patients produced in China to illustrate the diagnosis and treatment of the disease and circulated in Europe were taken as illustrative of China’s backward character. This perception of pan-epidemic in the East was associated with ugliness and unwholesomeness, and its association with backwardness and inferiority persists to the present time. In the context of Covid-19 in the West (or the global North), shameful feelings about and subsequent denial of the pandemic derive from the Ideology of Progress. In the mind of wealthy countries in the global North, plague-driven death is deemed unnatural and only takes place in poverty-driven, backward, unhygienic countries or places. As we see now, the global North is repeating the same historical pattern of the “burden of the West,” where it conceives itself as the victim of pandemics imported from the outside. The outbreak of the pandemic contributes to the humiliation of those who think their wealth, social status, and political power can insulate them from the peril of poverty and compels them to place the blame for the pandemic on others. It is interesting to note that the death toll is what divides the developed nations from the rest of the world but not in the expected way. The fact that European countries and the United States became the hardest hit areas not only shocked non-Western countries’ imagined view of the advanced West but also shocked the West itself. Covid-19 removes the aura of the West in the mimetic hierarchy as the superior, model-to-be-emulated for the rest of the world, given that it was hit as hard or worse than developing countries. And reminiscent of the Romantics rehabilitation of TB, Sontag’s theory of shame helps us understand why developed countries such as the United States did not take immediate preventive measures within the first six weeks of the outbreak. Western countries needed to maintain the illusion of well-being fashioned by their modernist ideology of progress and techno-capitalist consumerism. From this brief historical account discussed here, we can see that the blaming of China has been part of a skewed historical pattern. And as Peckham has already warned, such “dormant historical associations may be easily reactivated and inserted into contemporary context” (2016: 7). And he is right. In Covid-19, we see Trump’s populist demagogic instigation of “the Chinese Virus” or “Kung Flu,” linking germaphobia with Sinophobia. His rhetoric is not only a political diversion, because, on a deeper level, he reinforces a historical Western imagination of China as the “Sick Man of Asia” or the “original home of the plague” (Heinrich 2008; Peckham 2016). The blaming of China is part of an ongoing “geopolitical asymmetry” in which “the origins of infection are tracked to the global South and East, and the expertise to combat this incipient menace is deemed to reside in the North and West” (Peckham 2016: 7). Xenophobia triggered by the pandemic is also not new, given a long history of a deep-seated racism (here anti-Chinese American in particular) in the United States. Fear of disease becomes a powerful weapon against the ethnic other. The coronavirus is a convenient, displaced outlet to unleash the mimetic unconscious of a community. To conclude, the dual process of internalization and externalization as a mechanism of identity formation persists in the present time. Whenever the disease originates in the West, there is a tendency to downplay its danger or not give it wide coverage in Western mainstream media, but when it originates in non-Western countries, it immediately becomes labeled as a threat to the West. The elevating/absolving of the self and pathologizing/blaming of the other are two sides of the same coin. They are both denial mechanisms to shun liability and to cover for one’s own complicity.

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DESIRE, IDENTITY, AND VIOLENCE: RENÉ GIRARD’S MIMETIC RIVALRY, SCAPEGOAT MECHANISM, AND MIMETICISTS’ SOLUTIONS The widespread psychosocial coping mechanism deserves a revisit of René Girard’s mimetic theory. Observing a prevalent phenomenon of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating found in ancient rituals, mythologies, and the Gospels, Girard posits that human nature or desire is mimetic and acquisitive: “Man [sic] is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his [or her] mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires” (Girard 1988: 122). Here the mimetic triangle refers to a structure of rivalry that consists of three elements: a mimetic subject, the mediated model, and the object of desire possessed by the model. Like a child (the mimetic subject) who wants a toy (the object of desire) that another child (the mediated model) possesses, and this desire leads to a rivalrous tension between the two. Interpersonal or communal violence can be said to be the result of mimetic rivalry in competing for the same object of desire. The rivalry erases differences between the subject and the model and it leads to a state of chaotic undifferentiation. And the state of chaotic undifferentiation or sameness triggers an identity crisis. As mimetic beings, we desire what others desire, and that produces collective identity because our common desires make us “the same” but at the same time our competitive desire for uniqueness conflicts with our need for a collective identity and belonging. When Covid-19 strikes, we don’t want to believe we could get sick or that we need to wear masks because that would mean we are no different from others, as it erases our special standing in the universe. Such an erasure of differentiation of one’s own identity is, in fact, our ultimate fear. For example, Evangelical Christians in the United States believe that they are favored by God, and that favor will protect them from the disease. This is why these Christians were certain that they wouldn’t get sick and wouldn’t have to shelter in place like everybody else and refused to wear masks. The impulse to feel special and be distinguished from others lies at the heart of identity formation. Such a psychological need for uniqueness, as seen in the belief that one is part of God’s chosen, is so strong that people are willing to risk their lives for it. As Covid-19 continues to unfold, it accelerates the disintegration of social unity, and it provides an opportunity for politicians like Donald Trump to take advantage of the fear of indifferentiation to energize a dwindling conservative base. Trump might not believe in God, but he was able to employ mimetic rivalry and scapegoat mechanisms to advance his own interests. That we are fundamentally no different from or more special than others creates an identity crisis. Because we want to perceive ourselves as special and superior (as is often heard in the rhetoric of political party, nationalism, ethnocentrism, or human exceptionalism), if our sense of unique standing is threatened, an explanation must be offered. To sustain the myth of preeminence, we activate the unconscious scapegoat mechanism by designating a subaltern third party as the recipient of the blame in order to safeguard our imagined unique identity. In this sense, the scapegoat mechanism is the toxic remedy that cures the community, but that very cure produces a new poison: we are all united and equal in our exclusion of the scapegoat! And such a mechanism of violence management must proceed unconsciously. So here we arrive at a hidden truism about Covid ethno-/xenophobia: we think we are the prettiest snowflake but in fact we are just different configurations of water! The realization of our ordinariness and parity with the Other is the concealed motivation for scapegoat mechanism.

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How does one end mimetic violence and scapegoat mechanisms? For Girard, the answer lies in unveiling the surreptitious mechanism to expose the innocent status of the scapegoat and emulate the life of Christ as an exemplar of a positive mimetic model. As expounded by Girard, Christianity tries to end scapegoating by showing the innocence of the scapegoat (Jesus is the ultimate scapegoat). However, the revelation doesn’t end the rivalry; it creates a new problem. This is because in ancient times the collective act of violence (i.e., sacrificing the victim) fulfilled a function of social cohesion that was legitimized through sacralized ritual institutions. Demystification breaks the sacred spell surrounding the mechanism, leaving people in a desacralized and disenchanted world where humans’ mimetic impulses keep them competitors in the absence of divine intervention. In a way, Girardian demystification leaves us in a position of stasis, and not of the state of ekstasis that defines the sacred. While exposing innocence of the victim, Girard does so by desacralizing the world, leaving us with a profound sense of existential alienation. And this demystification is in sync with Enlightenment ideology, which is marked by a rationalist epistemology that risks justifying the desacralization of nature. The same rationalist epistemology also winds up justifying capitalist exploitation. As we can see, the scapegoat mechanism didn’t vanish despite their demystification in the Gospels and the institution of rational law in secular societies. In today’s social-media driven culture, where people can find their own private echo chambers, Facebook and YouTube’s algorithms feed audience hunger for “intense” content and viewpoints. As a result, mimetic rivalry, violence, and scapegoating have exploded into the open more than ever, even to the point where QAnon conspiracy theorists are getting elected to Congress. This is contrary to Girard’s assertion that “the individuals do everything they can to conceal their scapegoating from themselves, and as a general rule they succeed. Today as in the past, to have a scapegoat is to believe one doesn’t have any” (Girard 2001: 157). Again and again, we see politicians and political pundits consciously use scapegoating as a political tactic to maximize their advantage, and civilians hypocritically deploy the same mechanism to deal with their need to have a unique identity. For Girard and post-Girardian mimeticists, the solution for mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism is that of substitution, that is, to stop an unjust practice by way of emulating Jesus Christ’s self-sacrificing love for humanity. Here Girard provides a positive model of mimesis for community building that replaces the old mimetic one predicated on rivalry. At the present moment of Covid 19, other positive mimetic models are also proposed, including healthy, lifeaffirming, and collaborative forms of mimetic communications such as altruism, sympathy, and good will (Keohane 2021; Lawtoo 2013: 147, 295). While it is true that these positive mimetic models are comforting in the moment of crisis, as we see in acts of solidarity such as volunteerism and community singing to boost the morale, they do not solve the root problem. Whether or not human mimesis is an “ontological openness to the Other” (Gallese 2009), rechanneling our mimetic energy, well intended as it may be, risks drawing us back to the dark hole of mimetic rivalry. One example of this is seen in the “Black Lives Matter” movement. This movement originally derived from an effort to rechannel mimetic bigotry in hopes to rectify racial injustice in the United States. If your life matters, then it stands to reason that Black lives matter, too. As the movement unfolded, however, it was challenged by right-wing activists, who mirrored the racial justice protestors by labeling their own movement as “blue lives matter” (pro police) or “all lives matter,” as if to indicate that they were the true racially “woke” group. Eventually these two

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opposing activist groups fell prey to mimetic rivalry and morphed into an undifferentiated state of doubling—this time over the moral high ground. The other example is vaccine nationalism from countries competing to be the first to produce a Covid-19 vaccine. While the upsides are obvious, there are risks as well. Vaccine competition may wind up not benefiting global humanity, leaving poor nations behind, as the noble urge to help people can become a mimetic battle for adulation, an ego-driven desire to be viewed as the superior country in terms of technology, wealth, and even beneficence. From these examples, one can see that well-intended mimetic solutions can easily descend back into rivalry and chaos, and turn the mimetic ideal of moral high ground into just another object of mimetic desire. From here we see a fallacy, that is, a rationalist conviction that the “mimetic unconscious” can be channeled (or sublimated à la the Romantics) in a desired direction. These substitution or sublimation tactics still adhere to a rationalist school of thinking that is predicated on the conviction that one is capable of changing one’s own behavior through cognitive unwiring of unconscious patterns. As has already been challenged by what French philosopher Paul Ricœur calls the “school of suspicion” (1970: 28) pioneered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, Robert Geal further elaborates that “the human subject, if it is conceptuali[z]‌ed as operating according to the logic of the school of suspicion, is not in control of its own consciousness” (2021: 21). Here, rationalist thinking may wind up becoming the stark defender or a disguise of our worst unconscious impulses. Moreover, they can easily be (and have already been) exploited by neoliberal capitalists: everybody buys their own newest edition of the iPhone. No need to fight for it! According to capitalist logic, granting everyone the object of mimetic desire may seem like a perfect solution to de-escalate mimetic violence; however, it will exact heavy tolls on planetary resources. The capitalist solution winds up perpetuating the very problem it seeks to solve, by whipping up more mimetic desire and competition. Not only is human mimetic subjectivity unchallenged, on the contrary, the mimetic desire becomes completely unbound and unleashed to prey on human’s hardwired tendency for social identification in order to profit. Given the wide extent of mimetic rivalry is itself like an infectious disease, it is worthwhile considering its biological or neurological roots. Humanists such as Girard has already posited that the root of mimesis lies in the unconscious realm and that mimetic desire is a basis of identity construction (2017: 43, 61). Some ethnologists have also begun to believe that mimesis and mimetic violence may be a shared trait across species. In describing the mimetic scapegoating process in a community of macaque monkeys, primatologist Frans de Waal writes that “every society has its scapegoats, but the most extreme cases I have known concerned newly established groups of macaques. These monkeys have strict hierarchies, and while the higher ups were working out their rank position, a process that tends to get nasty, nothing was easier for them than to turn en masse against a poor bottom-ranker” (2006: 167). De Waal links the primate behavior to that of humans and asserts that the practice of scapegoating seems to be a fundamental part of human personality, and something that animals also do, that it may be an evolved trait. Such a biological foundation for scapegoat violence is also supported by psychologists and other scientists. JeanMichel Oughourlian, for example, shows that our mirror neuron system has been shown to escalate the impact of rivalry through the other two brain systems (Cowdell 2013: 30). Here, scientists provide a plausible explanation as to why such a hardwired behavior fails to vanish with the advent of Enlightenment project of scientific rationalization.

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BUDDHIST PHÁRMAKON: THE NON-MIMETIC INTERVENTION To solve mimetic violence against the cultural Other, one needs to come to terms with the very divisive structure of mimesis. One also needs to tackle the problem of the desacralization in current secular societies. A radical ontological and epistemological intervention helps deconstruct this deep-ingrained mimetic dualism. Here the Buddhist phármakon serves as a non-mimetic (or nondualistic) alternative. The historical Buddha Shakyamuni’s teaching of “emptiness” (Skt: śūnyatā) and “no-self ” (Skt: anattā) can be viewed as a remedy that dissolves the mimetic violence in desacralized modernity. As mentioned before, the rationalist Girardian school of mimetic demystification of scapegoat mechanism leaves us in a position of stasis (a stagnant spiritual state that does not change or transform our consciousness), rather than the state of ekstasis (an ancient Greek term for “ecstasy,” which means “to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere”). Here ekstasis denotes not only consciousness beyond the self but also a sense of unification of self and other, resulting from a fluidity of consciousness changing from a state of personal consciousness to one that experiences the self as an emergent property of a self-organizing system. Here ekstasis provides a venue to define sacrality beyond Girard’s conception of the mimetic self, wherein violence is integrally embedded. The Buddhist non-dualistic ontology, which derives from ekstatic/ecstatic experience, denies a sense of a separate individual existence and self–other divide. From the perspective of ekstasis, such a dualism is an onto-epistemological illusion. Here the Buddhist intervention offers a radical break from this mimetic structure, be it conceptualized as a bipartite “subject-model” or a tripartite “subject/model/object.” This explains why in the Buddhist tradition, violence is not to be “managed” (as in the Girardian scapegoat mechanism) but totally prohibited, as seen in the precept ahimsa (nonviolence), that is, not taking or harming any lives. Ken Jones notes that the Buddhist model calls for a freedom from the “mimetic” binary, be it a good or bad one. Warning of the danger of weighted “black and white” polarization in social conflicts, he writes, “We distinguish people and issues into polarities which we then evaluate as good or evil, for us or against us. Even working for a just cause all too easily leads to antithetical social bonding, the shaping of a group’s identity by defining itself in opposition to another group that is rejected” (Jones 1989: 130). This echoes what has been discussed above, that is, well-intentioned people or mimetic solutions can descend back into rivalry and violence. In the repertoire of kōan (Chinese: gong’an) literature, the theme of mimetic rivalry is often used as a “hook”—an invitation to memetic rivalry—to help people to see through such a false view.3 For example, a famous kōan entitled “Nansen Kills a Cat” (Chinese: Nanquan zhan mao) is a story about monks from two Zen halls quarrelling over a cat. Upon seeing this, Master Nansen (Chinese: Nanquan) held up the cat and said, “You monks! If one of you can say a word, I will spare the cat. If you can’t say anything, I will put it to the sword.” No one offered an answer, so Nansen had no choice but to kill it. In the evening, when his disciple Joshu (Chinese: Zhaozhou) returned, Nansen told him what had happened. Joshu thereupon took off his sandals, put them on his head and walked out of the room. Nansen said, “If you had been there, I could have spared the cat” (Sekida 1995: 58–60).

Kōan (Chinese: gong’an) or “public case” is a literary genre commonly used in the Rinzai (Chinese: Linji) school of Zen during meditation practice. It is methodological device employed to elicit awakening experiences and to gauge spiritual insight in practice. 3

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Keep in mind that these Zen kōans are fictional pedagogical devices to become enlightened to one’s own non-dualistic nature. Here the story presents an all too familiar scenario that is common in all human societies: a group of people are trapped in a mimetic triangle where the cat represents an object of desire. Hence, symbolically, “to kill the cat” destroys the mimetic competition as it removes or “liberates” the cat as an object of desire (something that is separate from us and something that can be possessed by way of force). Such a mimetic desire is the source of suffering (Sanskrit: duḥkha) and violence. This narrative, however, does not stay at this deconstructive stage, which leaves us to a state of a spiritual stagnation (stasis). The second half of the mimetic narrative departs from the ordinary, dualistic consciousness and demands the practitioners to move beyond their self-enclosed, personal consciousness. What it means is to get out of one’s narrow sense of the self to gain first-hand knowledge of one’s own non-dualistic, cosmic consciousness that connects all of us, human and nonhuman. Back to the example of the snowflake mentioned above, to get beyond our skin-bound sense of self or tribalist identity is to realize that while no one snowflake is exactly the same as another on a molecular level, due to the temperature and humidity at which it is formed, fundamentally, they are all made of the same element: water. Heuristic devices, such as kōan training, serve as psycho-spiritual-somatic program that enable us “to stand outside oneself ” to experience an altered state of consciousness or samādhi where a sense of separation between the subject and object disappears. As a paradoxical phármakon, the non-dualistic experience of ekstasis may seem, on the surface, to threaten to kill or devalue all interpersonal relations. But it actually makes compassion possible by freeing us from mimetic rivalry. Different from a mimetic model such as sympathy, which arises from identification with others, a Buddhist model, which is based on compassion (Sanskrit: karuṇā; the Latin root means “co-suffering”), arises when we understand that the suffering other is always more than my image of her, him, or it. Ironically, the experience of ecstatic emptiness enables us to put our own identity at risk, whereas our identity is not put at risk by sympathy. In the sympathy model, one sustains, if not reinforces, a sense of dualistic selfhood, hence the problem is not solved on the ontological level. Sympathy may even allow us to continue our mimetic rivalry by seeing the other as inferior to us and in need of our help, granting us a morally superior position, whereas compassion (“co-suffering”) means that we recognize our vulnerability and that we need help, too. Helping others is, in a way, helping ourselves, and we can only help ourselves by helping others. Different from the mimetic model of healing and ethics, such as sympathy, the central Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda) provides an alternative that emphasizes the absolute equality of all things. As stated in Samyuktagama Sūtra, “that being, this comes to be; from the arising of that, this arises” (Yang and Tamney 2011: 180), it explicates that in the phenomenal realm all existence is conditioned or arises in dependence upon other phenomena. This teaching of mutual causality, the radical non-dualistic and non-reductive holism is further developed into an elaborate eco-cosmological thinking, as exemplified in the Avatamsaka Sūtra (Cleary 1993). Gary Snyder calls the “jewel-net-interpenetration-ecological-system-emptiness-consciousness” (1995: 189). The teaching about co-constitution of all things and absolute equality within a larger web of life breaks the archaic impulse to blame others and, by doing so, recontextualizes social and environmental questions, placing them within the Buddhist praxis of overcoming the illusion of an “isolated individuality,” as expounded in the Diamond Sūtra (Pine 2002). It is true that Buddhism is not exempt from mimetic violence. The idealization of Buddhism as “peaceful” would be yet another identity politics of the West, which fails to recognize the

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multiethnic and multireligious complication of regions such as Southeast Asian countries and the complicity of historical Western colonialism. For example, monks in Myanmar have urged violence in oppressing Rohingya. They are doing so by abrogating their teachings and replicating an us-against-them mimetic triangle. The act does not reflect the teaching but is a repudiation of the teaching. While it should be noted that religion was used as an operative aspect of Burmese identity under British colonial rule (Arnold and Turner 2018), this legacy does not grant an excuse or justification for ethnic cleansing and violence. On the other hand, unlike religions where violence is a persistent and necessary feature of the fundamental dualistic ideology and value system—good against evil, God against the Devil, savagery against civilization, and so on—there is nothing in the Pali sūtra that justifies violence as a result of such dualist ontology. Buddhist phármakon is a bitter pill to swallow; it entails the realization of the absolute equality of things and the emptiness of their fixed “intrinsic nature.” There is no such a thing as the “Buddhist DNA” ensuring that the Buddhists are naturally less aggressive than others. Wearing a Buddhist robe does not warrant immunity from mimetic greed and violence. If this were so, then there would be no need to practice. The main ingredient in this Buddhist prescription lies in the transformation of consciousness, which provides a chance to break the endless samsara of mimetic violence, only to become exacerbated in times of crisis.

CONCLUSION This chapter demonstrates the value of humanist disciplines and traditional spiritual practices that can help serve as diagnostic and healing tools. Our mimetic responses to the pan-epidemic crisis will not go away with technological advancement. Liberating oneself from the grip of psychosocial and historical unconscious is hard work, and the healing is by no means associated only with Buddhism. Whether it is called Buddhism or something else, on this recovery path, we need a new sense of gestalt to realize that there is no individuated subject separated from this global or planetary togetherness. This solidarity can arrive at another understanding of the phrase “we are all in this together,” as it also recognizes the inconvenient truth in the pandemic landscape: we are part of the problem. We need therapy to transform our toxic consciousness, including our unwitting ignorance, biases, denial, and complicity. If there is any silver lining of the Covid crisis, it will be to “wake up to the other shore of suffering,” as urged in The Heart Sūtra (Pine 2005), which points to awakening ourselves to non-mimetic nature.

REFERENCES Arnold, D., and A. Turner (2018), “Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?,” New York Times, March 5. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/2018/03/05/opin​ion/buddhi​sts-viole​nce-tolera​nce.html. Accessed October 7, 2020. “ASLE Statement on Covid-19” (2020), ASLE, April 23. Available online: https://www.asle.org/stay-infor​med/ asle-news/asle-statem​ent-on-covid-19/. Accessed July 15, 2021. Chandler, D. (2020), “The Coronavirus: Biopolitics and the Rise of ‘Anthropocene Authoritarianism’,” Russia in Global Affairs, June 4. Available online: https://eng.global​affa​irs.ru/artic​les/coro​navi​rus-autho​rita​rian​ism/. Accessed June 15, 2020. Cleary, T. (1993), The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sūtra, Boulder, CO: Shambhala.

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Cowdell, S. (2013), René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. de Waal, F. (2006), Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are, New York: Riverhead Books. Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (2020), “Coronaphobia: States’ Policies Guide People’s Behavior towards Infected People.” Available online: https:// euromedmonitor.org/en/article/3476/Report. Accessed July 19, 2021. Gallese, V. (2009), “The Two Sides of Mimesis: Girard’s Mimetic Theory, Embodied Simulation and Social Identification,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16 (4): 2–24. Geal, R. (2021), Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis: Surviving the Environmental Apocalypse in Cinema, London: Routledge. Girard, R. (1988), “Generative Scapegoating,” in Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly (ed.), Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, 122, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Girard, R. (2001), I See Satan Fall like Lightening, New York: Orbis Books. Girard, R. (2017), Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Heinrich, L. N. (2008), The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jones, K. (1989), The Social Face of Buddhism: An Approach to Political and Social Activism, London: Wisdom. Keohane, K. (2021), “Good Models and Positive Mimesis: Hopeful Grounds and Horizons for Economy & Society after COVID-19,” HECAT: Disruptive Technologies Supporting Labour Market Decision Making, May 6. Available online: http://hecat.eu/2021/05/06/good-mod​els-and-posit​ive-mime​sis-hope​ful-grou​nds-andhoriz​ons-for-econ​omy-soci​ety-after-covid-19/. Accessed June 15, 2020. Lawtoo, N. (2013), Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconsciousness, Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press. Lefebure, L. D. (1996), “Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 3: 121–40. L1ght.com (2010), “Rising Levels of Hate Speech & Online Toxicity during This Time of Crisis.” Available online: https://l1ght.com/Toxicit​y_du​ring​_cor​onav​irus​_Rep​ort-L1ght.pdf. Accessed May 29, 2021. Mead, W. R. (2020), “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” Wall Street Journal, February 2. Available online: https:// www.wsj.com/artic​les/china-is-the-real-sick-man-of-asia-1158​0773​677. Accessed July 29, 2021. Peckham, R. (2016), Epidemics in Modern Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pine, R. (2002), The Diamond Sūtra: The Perfection of Wisdom, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. Pine, R. (2005), The Heart Sūtra, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. Ricœur, P. (1970), Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sekida, K. (1995), Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records, Boston, MA: Shambhala. Snyder, G. (1995), A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. Sontag, S. (1978). “Illness as Metaphor,” New Yorker Review, January 26. Available online: https://www.nybo​oks. com/artic​les/1978/01/26/illn​ess-as-metap​hor/. Accessed May 30, 2021. Yang, F., and J. Tamney (2011), Confucianism and Spiritual Traditions in Modern China and Beyond, Leiden: Brill.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Fighting the Spread of Diseases with Words: From Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947) to Tony Hillerman’s The First Eagle (1998) FRANÇOISE BESSON

INTRODUCTION. HUMAN BODIES AND THE BODY OF NATURE: CONNECTIONS The health crisis affecting the whole world with the spread of Covid-19 made us aware that the planet is a unique body. So we can question ourselves about our way of considering the relationship between our physical bodies and the environment. Writers have always used the soft power of words to fight the flaws of society. But could we go further and see the spreading of words as a healing method, even a way of helping medical research? Starting from Albert Camus’s novel, La Peste, in which the author gives a realistic description of the spreading of the plague in the Algerian city of Oran, from the point of view of a physician trying to save people in the city cut off from the rest of the world, I would like to show first how literary texts hold out a mirror to us, indicating how human and nonhuman bodies, the social body and the body of the planet, are closely connected. When the body of the planet or of its nonhuman inhabitants is affected, the human body is ill. And the reverse is true: when the planet is healed, its inhabitants are healed. If Albert Camus gives an allegorical vision of the plague through a realistic description of the rapid spreading of the disease (Institut Pasteur n.d.), Tony Hillerman, in his detective novels situated on the Navajo Reservation in the United States, shows the connection between nonhuman and human bodies infected by diseases and the body of nature contaminated by pollution. The rats infected in Camus’s novel and the prairie dogs infected in Hillerman’s The First Eagle foreshadow the pangolin killed in a Chinese forest, which some suppose to have triggered the coronavirus

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pandemic that began in 2019.1 Showing the damage on the Navajo land, Hillerman, through a detective story, interweaves ecological denunciation, a painting of Navajo and Hopi cultures, and a realistic depiction of the spreading of viruses. Mingling literary codes, philosophy, Native American history, botany, geology, and landscape paintings evoking connections with the human body, Hillerman shows that Native Americans answer the modern industrial system based on opposition and destruction, with the Native American system based on balance and connection.2 These two fictional texts show that when the balance is broken in the body of nature, all bodies pay the consequences. And conversely, they show the way to recovery when balance is found again thanks to a new awareness of connections. Medicine already uses some of this ancestral knowledge, and philosophical and literary texts may help medical research, a partnership that might develop systematically and that is perhaps written in filigree in fictional stories. If some American universities use literature in the training of future physicians, it is perhaps a sign showing that medicine and humanities can work together. The association of the human body and the body of nature, which appears in Jeff Chapman Crane’s sculpture, “The Agony of Gaia,” where the naked body of a woman sculpted in the landscape reveals the rape of the body of nature, also appears in Hillerman’s novel The First Eagle, suggesting the connection between a contamination of the land and the contamination of human bodies. The novel opens on a man’s corpse followed by a description metaphorically associating it with a Navajo landscape: From the viewpoint of Shirley Ahkeah, sitting at her desk in the Intensive Care Unit nursing station of the Northern Arizona Medical Center in Flagstaff, the white shape formed by the corpse of Mr. Nez reminded her of Sleeping Ute Mountain as seen from her aunt’s Hogan near Teec Nos Pos. Nez’s feet, only a couple of yards from her eyes, pushed the sheet up to form the mountain’s peak. Perspective caused the rest of the sheet to slope away in humps and ridges, as the mountain seemed to do under its winter snow when she was a child. (1998: 1) The association of the dead human body with a peculiar landscape may suggest a common origin of the disease. Moreover, the comparison sends the reader back to an Indian legend linked with the Sleeping Ute Mountain, which is said to look like a Ute chief lying on his back.3 This corpse becomes the reflection of a mythical landscape, suggesting that what is done to the individual body

This was one of the first hypotheses. Nothing is certain about the origin of the virus. But if the initial hypothesis of the pangolin has sometimes been denied, the attention has been drawn on the destruction of protected species that could provoke diseases through a chain of events. About the hypothesis of the bat, Etienne Decroly—research supervisor at the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), at the laboratory of Architecture and function of biological macromolecules (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université), and a member of the French Society of virology—explained that 1

so far, there has never been any direct transmission of bats to humans responsible for an epidemic, and such a transmission was regarded as scarcely plausible … and that an intermediate host, an animal, is necessary to make the transition. That animal was the civet (a small carnivore) in the case of SARS-CoV-1, and the dromedary in the case of MERS-CoV, to quote two coronaviruses recently transmitted from bats to humans. (An interview with Etienne Decroly, “Sur l’origine Sars CoV-2, ‘on tente d’expliquer les zones d’ombre’,” Reporterre, November 24, 2020. Available online: https://rep​ orte​rre.net/Sur-l-orig​ine-Sars-Cov2-on-tente-d-expliq​uer-les-zones-d-ombre [accessed March 26, 2021]; my translation) 2 3

his may also remind readers of Taoism and Chinese medicine. T Legends and Children’s Stories of the Ute Tribe: www.utemountainute.com/legends.htm (accessed June 3, 2013).

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is done to the whole landscape and vice versa. The first warning dwells on the connection shown between landscape and human body. And warnings may also appear in an allegory.

THE SPREADING OF A VIRUS IN ALBERT CAMUS’S LA PESTE (THE PLAGUE): WARNING Albert Camus’s novel, La Peste, is particularly significant at a time of pandemic. It may be interpreted in many ways, and it has often been seen as a political allegory in which the plague might designate Nazism or any political dictatorship. Yet the story speaks about a disease, about infected rats first and then humans through a rapid spreading of the contamination. This first realistic level concerning human health cannot be forgotten, and the last paragraph of the novel, even if it is politically and philosophically symbolic, also has a realistic medical dimension: Ecoutant, en effet, les cris d’allégresse qui montaient de la ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée. Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles, le linge, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse. ([1947] 2020: 355)4 The end of the novel is anything but a happy ending since, even if the city enjoys the end of the plague and lets its joy burst forth, the text reminds the reader that any plague (political or sanitary) is never definitively destroyed. This matches twenty-first-century reality: during the Covid-19 pandemic, a TV report mentioned an island in Norway, on which a man, who died of the Spanish Influenza in 1918, had been buried in a graveyard covered with a thick layer of ice. With the global warming and the melting of ice, the virus of the Spanish Influenza that killed fifty million people all over the world, dormant while it is under the ice, may become active if the temperature increases. That worldwide disease had started in the United States and the indigenous populations were particularly infected, the indigenous population from Alaska being decimated. So the arrival of a new worldwide virus, Covid-19, aroused difficult memories: The spectre of a new epidemic triggers painful memories for Native Americans and others who heard first hand about the 1918 influenza pandemic. After all, according to the CDC, an estimated 500 million people or more than a quarter of the world’s population, became infected with the virus. An estimated 50 million worldwide died, with about 675,000 deaths in the United States. The 1918 influenza was highly contagious with a 2.5 percent mortality rate. (Estimates indicate the Covid-19 virus has a 2.3 percent mortality rate, although that figure may change as researchers learn more about how many people were infected). (Estus 2020) 4

My translation: Listening, indeed, to the shouts of joy rising from the city, Rieux [the doctor and narrator] remembered that joy was always threatened. For he knew what this merry crowd did not know and that you can read in books, that the plague bacillus never dies and never disappears, that it can stay dormant for dozens of years in furniture, linen, that it patiently waits in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and paperwork, and that perhaps the day would come when, for humans’ misfortune and teaching, the plague would wake its rats and send them die in a happy city.

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The numbers here appear as the cold translation of the annihilation of a population by a disease spreading all over the earth. Camus’s novel depicts the plague in one city and shows what humans can learn from the most terrible misfortune. This novel sets a scene where what is emphasized from the start is the absence of nature: Comment faire imaginer, par exemple, une ville sans pigeons, sans arbres et sans jardins, où l’on ne rencontre ni battements d’ailes ni froissements de feuilles, un lieu neutre pour tout dire? Le changement des saisons ne s’y lit que dans le ciel. Le printemps s’annonce seulement par la qualité de l’air ou par les corbeilles de fleurs que des petits vendeurs ramènent des banlieues: c’est un printemps qu’on vend sur les marchés. Pendant l’été, le soleil incendie les maisons trop sèches et couvre les murs d’une cendre grise : on ne peut plus vivre que dans l’ombre des volets clos. En automne, c’est au contraire un déluge de boue. Les beaux jours viennent seulement en hiver. ([1947] 2020: 11–12)5 Why does the narrator insist on absent nature, which is present only on marketplaces, which is part of an economic system or brings about sufferings due to the climate (heat, drought, “floods of mud”)? Nature sold on marketplaces in the Algerian city makes us think about the pangolins killed and sold at wet markets in China. In Camus’s novel, the link is not direct, but the absence of living nature (birds, trees, and gardens) seems to bring to the surface of the text, symbolically, dead nature, dead animals; a dead rat is the first sign of the plague. The contamination of animals preceding humans also occurs in Hillerman’s The First Eagle.

SPREADING DISEASES IN HUMAN BODIES BY CONTAMINATING THE BODY OF NATURE. HILLERMAN’S NOVELS REFLECT REALITY: UNAWARENESS The Navajo Reservation that is the setting of Hillerman’s novels reveals the relationship between the contamination of the environment and of humans. The First Eagle is located in an area that was affected by various kinds of pollution provoking several diseases in the population. “Black Mesa,” alluded to several times in this novel and in others, is the place where a coalmine polluted Navajo and Hopi drinking water.6 The Black Mesa coalmine, situated within the Navajo and Hopi reservations, used water from the Black Mesa N. aquifer, which was the only drinking source for the Navajo and Hopi populations. The mine was exploited by Peabody Western Coal Company. The populations were asked to move off as their land was destroyed. Articles and reports mention the mortal diseases due to the pollution by nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and mercury poisoning. The Center for Biological Diversity wrote in 2009: “Peabody’s pumping has

5

My translation: How could we make people imagine, for example, a town without any pigeons, without any trees and without any gardens, where you meet neither flutters of wings nor rustle of leaves, a neutral place, in fact? Season changes can be read only in the sky. Spring is announced only by the air quality or the flower baskets that small sellers bring from suburbs: it is a spring that is sold on marketplaces. During summer, the sun burns the too dry houses and covers the walls with a grey ash: you can only live in the shadow of closed shutters. In autumn, on the contrary, it is a flood of mud. Fine days only come in winter.

6

Another version of this analysis appears in Besson (2019: 88–111).

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depleted wells and decreased surface flows in area springs and creeks upon which residents and wildlife depend. Despite evidence of continuing aquifer deterioration, the Office of Surface Mining and Peabody are seeking to continue extracting 1,236 acre-feet of groundwater from the Navajo Aquifer for mining operations throughout the permit period ending 2025.”7 In the novel, a character’s lung cancer reminds readers that uranium mining in the Navajo reservation from the 1940s to the 1960s caused many cancers and still has impacts on the population nowadays: Hundreds of abandoned mines have not been cleaned up and the land is dotted with contaminated tailings. These mines were left with no warning of the health hazards. Within this area, the Navajo peoples have suffered from high cancer rates and respiratory problems. Cancer rates among Navajo teenagers living near mine tailings are 17 times the national average. It was in the 1970s, that Navajo uranium miners and their families began to see the effects of the mine. (Smith 2007: 8–9) Nakai’s symptoms in The First Eagle reveal his “lung cancer” (1998: 257), which may be due to the pollution of the area, “north end of the Chuska Mountains” (253). The pollution by uranium on the Navajo Reservation also appears in People of Darkness (2009). The starting point of the plot is the search for a box and an explosion at an oil well that occurred years before. As the novel progresses, the reader guesses that there is a link between the uranium found below the oil well, the box containing some black stones, and the death of several men who had participated in the exploitation of oil thirty years before and who all died of cancer. The end reveals that the stones collected by a geologist were “pitchblende,” another name for uraninite, and that this mineral is “the hottest kind of uranium deposit” (289). The connection between cancers and the exploitation of uranium, between plague and the pollution of the environment, has not always been openly revealed. Scientists’ research, journalists’ inquiries, and literary works have changed the data and, together, brought about awareness. In The First Eagle, the reader can guess the link between pollution and the plague. Scientists have put forward the hypothesis that the environment might be a factor causing Yersinia pestis infections: “Factors other than microbial genetics, such as environment, vector dynamics and host susceptibility, should be at the forefront of epidemiological discussions regarding emerging Y. pestis infections” (Stenseth et al. 2008). The connection between a highly contagious disease and environmental pollution first appears in the contagion of nonhuman animals: rats in Camus’s La Peste, prairie dogs in Hillerman’s The First Eagle. The pollution of the land affecting the Navajo Reservation illustrates the link between habitat alteration and prairie dogs’ disease, inferring the plague. A study reads: Our research focuses on the combined effects of habitat alteration and wildlife community structure on the risk of disease outbreaks in the black-tailed prairie dog, a species of conservation concern. … Predicting disease outbreaks in this system involves consideration of multiple population stressors. … Blood diseases like the plague spread through contact between black-tailed prairie

Center for Biological Diversity, “Pollution Permit for Peabody’s Black Mesa Coal Mine Withdrawn by EPA Following Appeal by Tribal and Conservation Groups,” December 3, 2009. Available online: https://www.biol​ogic​aldi​vers​ity.org/news/ pre​ss_r​elea​ses/2009/black-mesa-12-03-2009.html (accessed September 6, 2020). 7

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dogs and the many alternate mammalian hosts that occur in the same habitat. Therefore, our research addresses effects of landscape structure and land use on the dynamics of black-tailed prairie dogs and on the dynamics of the alternate host community.8 Scientists have demonstrated that the bacteria causing the plague can only develop in places where misery and an unhealthy atmosphere prevail—as in the hypothesis of the pangolin killed and displayed in bad conditions. In this hypothesis, a double human unawareness is supposed to have triggered the 2019 pandemic: first the killing of an individual from a protected species and then the bad hygiene conditions on the marketplace. In Hillerman’s novel, if the prairie dogs, which are central to the story, were infected, it may be because their environment was unhealthy due to the introduction of elements—waste or anything brought about by human transformations—that changed their way of life and their biotope. As we said, the story takes place not far from Black Mesa and alludes to the transformation of the landscape, due to human constructions generating a land of “desolation”: The years that had passed since he’d accessed Short Mountain hadn’t changed it much—certainly not for the better. The parking area in front was still hard-packed clay, too dry and dense to encourage weeds. The old GMC truck he’d parked next to years ago still rested wheel-less on blocks, slowly rusting away. The 1968 Chevy pickup parked in the shade of a juniper at the corner of the sheep pens looked like the one McGinnis had always driven, and a faded sign nailed to the hay barn still proclaimed THIS STORE FOR SALE, INQUIRE WITHIN. But today the benches on the shady porch were empty, with drifts of trash under them. The windows looked even dustier than Leaphorn remembered. In fact the trading-post looked deserted, and the gusty breeze chasing tumbleweeds and dust past the porch added to the sense of desolation. (Hillerman 1998: 62–3) In this landscape painting, in which the intertexts of the valley of ashes in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the ghost villages covered with wind-blown dust in westerns mingle, the narrator opposes two worlds: this new world of desolation characterized by emptiness and absence, an absence echoing the absence of natural life in Oran at the beginning of Camus’s novel. In Hillerman’s text, the sense of desolation is highlighted by the dust and the rusting car; even in this landscape transformed by the car civilization, the very object causing the change is empty and useless. This landscape of desolation is opposed to the only elements of life present here: the juniper and the “sheep pens” evoking life as it was before, traditional life where man was living in union with the vegetal and animal land. The landscape reveals two conceptions of the land and of man’s relationship to it, as appearing in the dialogue between the detective Leaphorn and Louisa, the ethnologist accompanying him in his inquiry: He waved at the ruined hogan, its door missing, its roof fallen, its north wall tumbled. Beyond it stood the remains of a brush arbor, a sheep pen formed of stacked stones, two stone pylons that once would have supported timbers on which water storage barrels had rested. “Sad,” he said. “Some people would call it picturesque.” (187) EPA, “Habitat Alteration and Disease Effects on Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs,” United States Environmental Protection Agency. Available online: https://cfpub.epa.gov/nce​r_ab​stra​cts/index.cfm/fus​eact​ion/disp​lay.abs​trac​tDet​ail/abst​ract​_id/2176/rep​ort/F (accessed May 24, 2018). 8

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The modern ruins reveal different points of view. Where Native people see ruined memory and traditions, Louisa’s answer reminds Leaphorn of the perception of tourists seeing picturesqueness there, literally something deserving to be painted, like the romantic ruins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The gliding from a real landscape to its aesthetic perception, its transformation into a picture, changes it into something detached from reality: people’s poverty or diseases. Moreover, with the allusion to “water storage barrels [that] had rested,” the description suggests that those barrels may still contain some water, but a stagnant, unhealthy water allowing the development of bacteria and diseases. This landscape speaking about Navajo life tells many stories in the blanks of its missing elements or of its hollow elements (the door “missing,” the roof “fallen,” the north wall “tumbled,” and the barrel or the pit dug by young people looking for treasures). The landscape full of holes evoking time passing, and also misery, tells the story of the area. It shows the telescoping of a world speaking about traditions and a world speaking about an illusory quest for fortune only bringing emptiness and disease. The devastation of the land, the human and nonhuman diseases and the criminal plot interweave and reflect one another to denounce the damage done on Navajo reservations by the exploitation of uranium mines. The reader cannot fail to remember reports, TV programs, and papers about the numerous breathing troubles that the Navajo population suffered after the setting up of plants or the exploitation of uranium mines. Using the language of fairy tales, Arnold Carrie’s article “Once Upon a Mine: The Legacy of Uranium on the Navajo Nation” in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, illustrated by photographs by Joshua Lott, shows waste outside a uranium mine on the Navajo Reservation. Naseem Rakha, a geologist, journalist, and writer, says, To see this land is to see the indifference of America, its callous, self-serving, greed-infected side. The side that treats people like cogs in a machine, and treats machines as if it were gods. In the Navajo situation, the machine was the cold-war’s military industrial complex. We needed uranium for bombs, and we, the US Government, “were willing to do anything to get it,” according to LA Times Reporter Judy Pasternak in her important work Yellow Dirt. (Rakha, “A Killing Wind”) She reminds the reader that “the Environmental Protection Agency has evaluated 683 abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation.” Carrie writes that “the EPA has mapped 521 abandoned uranium mines on the reservation, ranging from small holes dug by a single prospector into the side of a mesa to large commercial mining operations,” adding that “this map indicates the 521 sites mapped by the EPA, but there are estimated to be hundreds more” (2014: A47). The diseases appearing on the Navajo Reservation after the exploitation of uranium on their land and the fact that the mines had been abandoned concern a special spot on the map of the world. At first sight, it is a local tragedy concerning only the Navajo population. But it is not. It is a global tragedy showing such unaware behaviors contaminating a land and spreading diseases to a whole population. As Scott Slovic said in a 2020 lecture, while speaking about Bhopal disaster in 1984 (as seen by Pramod K. Nayar in his book Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny), “such industrial disaster is more widespread than it seems” (Slovic 2020). Bhopal’s disaster was not confined in Bhopal but revealed the unaware behavior of industrial companies across the world. Let’s mention two among many examples: the explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, on August 4, 2020, and the one in Toulouse, France, on September 21, 2001, both due to the fact that a dangerous product—ammonium nitrate polluting so many lands in the world as a part of

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dangerous fertilizers—was stored in bad conditions. An oil company in one case, political power in the other, showed the same unaware behaviors. Those apparently local disasters provoking so many deaths, injuries, blind people, intoxication, could have been avoided if those in charge of the products had been aware. They might serve as a tragic warning of what may happen everywhere on the planet. Yet the first disasters due to that product happened in the United States and in England at the beginning of the twentieth century (in Gibbstown, New Jersey, USA, on January 14, 1916, and a little later in Faversham, United Kingdom, on April 2, 1916); but all the deaths and injuries and diseases caused by those accidents were no lessons and exactly the same causes provoked the same effects in Beirut in August 2020. Nothing has changed since the first explosions. Industrial accidents or pandemics reveal the global dimension of apparent locality. Perhaps starting from a marketplace in Wuhan, the current pandemic affects the whole planet. As Slovic says, “the current public health pandemic crisis is not confined to a single city or region on the planet but is shared across continents and nations” (2020). Such disasters being quite avoidable, the role of writers, warning about the links between unawareness and disasters, is fundamental. Some writers, even when they can express their ideas through realistic modes, choose imagination as if it had more weight than reality. If the journalist Carrie uses the language of fairy tales to denounce the contamination of the Navajo land by uranium mines—“Once Upon a Mine”—it is to draw the reader’s attention thanks to the pun and the discrepancy between the language of fairy tales and the fatal pollution of the Navajo land: the reader may be more attracted to the strange association than to a realistic title. The Navajo land is also highly polluted by the emission of nitrogen oxide due to the Four Corners Power Plant, which opened in 1963, and the San Juan Generating Station. Studies demonstrate that the pollution in the area was “ten times worse than the city of Los Angeles.”9 Sandra Steingraber, in her book, Living Downstream, showed the close link between cancer and the pollution of environment; and Native American writers, like Leslie Marmon Silko, denounced the poisonous wastelands left by abandoned uranium mines in Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead: In [Almanac of The Dead]—as in her first novel, Ceremony—Silko alludes to the history of uranium mining and the widespread, indiscriminate effects of that industry, in ways that move beyond oppositional rhetoric and unite non-indigenous and indigenous cultures in their concern for ecological sustainability. (Waterman, Pilditch, and Martin 2011: 40) Silko dealt with the theme of land contamination in several books, as Slovic has written: “The themes of ominous contamination and destruction and the hope for re-purification, evident in Almanac and earlier in Ceremony, emerge in the meditation on water, too” (Slovic 2012: 116), a meditation appearing in Sacred Water. Her depiction of the contamination of the land goes together with the observation of the nonhuman world and of a double recovery through the revival of animal life and her spiritual experience. Toads are the living sign of the change in the land. “For a long time, I had a great many Sonoran red-spotted toads around the rain water pool behind my house. … Hundreds of toads used to sing all night in a magnificent chorus with complex harmonies” (Silko 1993: 63). This beautiful evocation of the chorus of toads is soon replaced by a silence provoked by the contamination of the land. As Slovic says, quoting the passage: “Two pages later, she expands Kimberley Smith, “Climate Change on the Navajo Nation Lands”, Darwin, Australia, International Expert Group Meeting On Indigenous Peoples And Climate Change, 2008. 9

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her explanation from one scene of destruction to the broader destructive implications of industrial technological disaster” (Slovic 2012: 117). She describes the new silence of the land and links it with Chernobyl: “The night-long choirs of multitudes of toads ceased. The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster occurred not long afterward and may also have affected the toad population” (Silko 1993: 66). By mentioning Chernobyl, she shows the connection between all contaminations, each contamination being a part of the contamination of the whole earth. The toads ceasing to sing near her little pool speak in their silence about the world silenced by pollution and disasters caused by technology like nuclear industry. “And no birds sing,” as Keats said, which was to be taken up by Rachel Carson and others to denounce pollution. Silko described her book as “a soothing, healing antidote to the relentless horror loose in this world” (1993: 26). This is the power of words. This note of hope existing in Silko’s healing books can also be found in Tony Hillerman’s People of Darkness. At the end, detective Chee wants to find the beauty of the landscape again; he wants a ceremony of purification to get rid of all the violence due to greed and to the contamination of the Navajo landscape by greed linked with the discovery of uranium: But he knew the cause and the cure. Changing Woman had taught them about it when she formed the first clans of the Dine from her own skin. The strange ways of strange people hurt the spirit, turned the Navajo away from beauty. Returning to beauty required a cure. … Then there would be another eight days for the songs and the poetry and the sand paintings to re-create the past and restore the spirit. … The arrangements would take weeks—picking the site, spreading the word, getting the proper singer, arranging the food. But when it was over, he would go again with beauty around him. (2009: 304–5) “Spreading the word,” writes Hillerman. The author, too, also spreads words to introduce the society’s problems and to speak about the wounds inflicted on the land and its inhabitants. The holes made in the ground to find oil and then uranium brought holes in men’s bones and bodies. Land and men are linked by this destruction, but recovery can appear through Navajo myths and spirituality. The detective finds the reasons of violence, but once the mystery is solved, the detective story shifts to a spiritual dimension. The Navajo detective, who is first a Navajo who defends his land, needs to shift from “the white fur stained with blood” to the “blue and white purity” of the sky and snow (304). The last violent scene, with the murderer dying on the skin of a polar bear, is symbolical: the dying human predator’s blood contaminates the dead predator’s skin symbolizing wild nature crushed and killed. Arctic nature appearing out of place in a Navajo interior symbolizes the violence done to nature and men, and summarized by the detective genre in which the chain of killings might also reflect the chain of killings due to greed linked with the planet’s resources. The Navajo reservation is a microcosm and the white bear’s skin stained with the blood of the murderer becomes an ecological allegory. And the eponymous people of Darkness whose symbol is the mole appearing in the amulets made of the highly radioactive black stone that gives those who bear it a cancer, reveal a dark connection: the mineral world, the animal world and the human world are linked through a half-symbolical half-real evocation of the underground: a place of darkness because it is the place where uranium has been found, darkness because of its radioactive power and because of men’s greed. The resolution of Leaphorn and Chee’s inquiries is for the Navajo detectives a way of recovering balance in the Navajo land. In Canada, novelist Rudy Wiebe also alludes to the contamination of Native populations by radium. In Playing Dead, he mentions the

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discovery of radium on the banks of Great Bear Lake in 1930. Whereas the Canadian government had published texts indicating the dangers of an exposure to radioactive particles, the lore was carried by Sahtu Dene, who were not warned of the danger. Writers disclose hidden secrets, often linked with wounds inflicted to the earth and its inhabitants. To denounce contaminations of lands generating human diseases, they spread words to make people aware of facts that are often unknown from the general public and, thus, they try to prevent the repetition of such contaminations.

SPREADING WORDS TO STOP THE SPREADING OF DISEASES: HOPE? Texts spread words and warn readers. Albert Camus’s realistic allegory of the plague apparently vanishing after many sufferings and deaths, appears as a warning concerning all dormant viruses, real ones and political ones, threatening mankind and the planet. The novel framed by a description of Oran emphasizing the absence of nature, and a scene of joy in the same city after people think they are ridden of the bacillus, whereas the narrator warns us about the fact that a virus is never dead, suggests to us to always be prepared. “Be Prepared for the worst,” Slovic writes in Going Away to Think (2008: 36). The first step toward a possible change in our ways of thinking is to realize that our ways of living are a threat for the other, a threat for the world. The second step may be to accept the fact that we do not know everything and not reject what we do not know, like the various kinds of medical treatments still practiced by Native people in America, Africa, or China, which, in our Western societies, often generate skepticism or mere rejection. Alternative Medicines Literature may help us to realize that Western medicine and traditional medicine, including Chinese medicine, phytotherapy, and homeopathy, are not opposed but complementary. Most of those disciplines are older than Western medicine and are its basis. Rejecting them is like removing the first stones of a building to keep only its upper part; the building would collapse. Literature, because it is far from passionate debates about medical problems, far from the economic motivations of powerful laboratories, may help to introduce information without any passion, and lead readers to question themselves about literary words, which may lead them to see the world and its healing resources differently, no longer as a system of oppositions between different forms of medicines presented as the right one and the alternative ones that you must distrust. The use of the word “parallèle” in French to designate all forms of non-allopathic medicines, reveals a problem. From the start the vocabulary used places these medical practices on a parallel space, suggesting that these types of medicine and the established allopathic one cannot meet since they are parallel. Words matter more than we think. The established power, by choosing words surfing on fear and distrust, asserting the power of specialists’ knowledge as opposed to the ignorance of patients, leads the general public to distrust their own thought. We cannot adopt something we do not know. This is true and wise for the general public; this is also true for medical professions. Logically, they should not reject practices and techniques about which they know nothing or little about. Those who study them, including more and more allopathic physicians, chemists, and veterinaries, use them in addition to allopathic medicines.

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Texts to Learn about the Healing Way of Plants The healing power of plants has long been known all around the world. One of the oldest medicines, aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid, made from the bark of the willow, was already used in the Antiquity and Hippocrates already gave his patients a tea made with willow bark to heal pains and fever (Connelly 2014). This is true for many of the medicines made from plants. Sometimes physicians rapidly realize the benefits of some products from nature, like honey, first used in our western medicine by American surgeons who knew about its antibiotic and healing qualities (Lee, Sinno, and Khachemoune 2011). Oral tradition may help to remind us of the necessity of connections between all forms of medicine. But even when patients assert the good results of treatments using homeopathy or phytotherapy treatments or of vibratory aromatherapy (using Chinese medicine and essential oils),10 many physicians smile and refuse to test them. This is why texts may help, perhaps not to convince those who want to stay on parallel roads, but they may help people, including physicians, to question themselves. The healing role of some plants is often more easily accepted than some other alternative medicines, perhaps because plants are used in allopathic treatments, like yew tree11 or periwinkle (Peplov 2018) inserted into some treatments against cancers; some researchers even study the virtues of plants with some Native American tribes. In Hillerman’s novels, Jim Chee, one of the two detectives, wants to become a traditional healer. He thus associates the healing of the human body and the healing of society as a detective. Plants interested Hillerman. James Peshlakai, a Navajo medicine man and storyteller, said that he had met Hillerman on the Navajo Reservation and told him about plants (Poling 2015). And plants appear in his novels. In The First Eagle, we can find “Mormon tea, snake weed, yucca and durable sage” (Hillerman 1998: 19), and “junipers” (239). In The Dark Wind, the characters see in the landscape: “rabbit brush” (Hillerman 1982: 1), “spruce” (11), and the narrator says that Painted Desert has this name because of plants: “It takes its name from the seams of coal exposed in its towering cliffs, but its colors are the grays and greens of sage, rabbit brush, juniper, cactus, grama and bunch grass, and the dark green of creosote brush, mesquite, piñon and (in the few places where springs flow), pine and spruce” (137–8). He also mentions “sunflowers, tumbleweeds and desert asters” (183). Lists of plants tell about their importance. Among these lists of flowers, purple sage is used by the Hopi to heal epilepsy (Moerman [1998] 2010: 510); rabbit brush is used by the Navajo in infusions “of plant tops used as a wash for chickenpox and measles eruptions” (159). The Hopi apply “poultice of heated twigs … to bruise or sprain for swelling,” and a “decoction of plant [is] taken for indigestion” and there are more medical uses (290). The Navajo rather use it for ceremonial items (290). These are only a few examples of the medical virtues or ceremonial use of some of the plants mentioned in Hillerman’s works, as they are used by the Navajo and Hopi, who are central to his novels. Mentioning them in the landscape is both a way of showing his interest in plants, giving a true vision of the landscape and suggesting their importance in the Navajo and Hopi cultures. The fact that an important character like Chee is interested in studying botany also suggests the link between healing the society by finding those who destroy it and healing and purifying it with plants.

S ee Aromtao (n.d.). “ Yew Trees Helping to Fight Cancer.” Available online: https://www.nation​altr​ust.org.uk/featu​res/yew-trees-help​ ing-to-fight-can​cer (accessed October 29, 2020). 10 11

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A plant often recurs in Native American literature or literature situated in Native American areas: peyote. The peyote has been used for religious ceremonies for more than three thousand years and it is also a healing plant. It is used in a ceremony in Hillerman’s People of Darkness as in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Tosamah, the “priest of the sun,” defines it as the “vegetable representation of the sun” (Momaday 1968: 109). Tosamah defines the virtues of peyote and its precise characteristics and says that it “contains nine narcotic alkaloids of the isoquinoline series, some of them strychnine-like in physiological action, the rest morphine-like” (109). Daniel E. Moerman, in Native American Ethnobotany, writes that the peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is used by Comanche “in ceremonies as narcotic,” by Delaware, it is “used for tuberculosis,” for Kiowa it is “Analgesic and Antirheumatic,” and a “decoction of plants [is] taken for colds.” It is also a “Dermatological Aid” and “poultice of plants [is] applied for cuts” (Moerman [1998] 2010: 319). Moerman makes the list of all the medical uses of peyote for several Native American peoples. So the mention of plants in novels is not ornamental. Vegetal references participate of a vision of the world where everything is connected. They show another way, which is not based on separation but on union and harmony between the physical and the spiritual. Literature as a Help to Medical Practice Reading about fiction in which plants have a healing role does not mean that readers will be less skeptical at once. But they can question themselves about the possible association of several forms of medicines, as some physicians already do. What is necessary is probably first a change in the general public and medical professionals’ ways of thinking. And this starts when they study medicine. Some hope may come from new ideas in the field of education, as when medicine and humanities work together: this opens new ways of thinking. In her article, “L’apport de la littérature classique à la pratique médicale,” Marie-Christine Noailles-Pizzolato speaks about “literature as a vehicle of medical education” (2015: 5). She mentions Robert Coles, a well-known contemporary psychiatrist and writer, [for whom] what is interesting in literature classes for medical students, dwells less on any cultural varnish or recreational outlet, than on ethical questioning. And this is precisely where medicine and literature meet, for physicians and writers have to immerse themselves in the daily unfolding which, in every individual, makes up the life and oneness of human nature. (5)12 Physicians may be experts in their disciplines and have perfect medical knowledge and technical skills; if they ignore the humane dimension, the psychological link with their patient, they may fail as healers and even add stress, while they apply the right medical treatment, just because they don’t know how to listen to their patients. Literature may give them keys to communicate with their patient, to have an insight into his/her psychology and not only know his/her body and pathology. And Noailles-Pizzolato adds, My translation:

12

Pour Robert Coles, psychiatre écrivain contemporain de renom, l’intérêt des cours de littérature pour les étudiants en médecine réside moins dans l’aspect culturel, le vernis ou encore l’évasion, que dans la réflexion éthique. Et c’est en cela que médecine et littérature se rejoignent car médecins et écrivains se doivent d’être plongés dans le quotidien de ce qui fait la vie et l’unicité de la nature humaine dans chaque individu.

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In his essay entitled The Practice, American poet and physician William Carlos Williams gets absorbed in his patient as if in a reading that leads him to forget himself to become that other character, not of paper but of flesh and bones. As a literary man, he is interested in the communication with his patient. Now that communication proves to be rather evasive and inarticulate on the surface. (6)13 The association between literature and medicine may help physicians to heal patients, which the mere technical knowledge cannot always do. The building up of a connection between the physician and the patient may open the patient to his/her own body and to find in himself/ herself resources that the medical treatment alone cannot reveal. The physician’s sense of communication may recreate the connections between the patient’s body and mind. Such classes of literature for medical students are not only dreams. They exist. Such a class of literature for medical students is described in an article by Calman, Downie, Duthie, and Sweeney, “Literature and Medicine: A Short Course for Medical Students.”14 Creating such classes systematically in all medical schools in the whole world might make a difference. This would reinforce or recreate trust between patients and physicians, which would lead patients to think positively about their way to healing. And some researchers have noted how positive thinking reinforces immune defense.15

CONCLUSION: WORKING TOGETHER If a virus spreads for more than two years all over the planet and if our usual systems seem powerless in front of such a pandemic, perhaps this suggests that we should change something in our ways of behaving and healing our bodies. Scientists all over the world try to find a vaccine. What the humanities suggest is that there is not one protection against any kind of serious disease caused by any form of contamination: bodies contaminated by a virus or lands contaminated by pollution. The protection is multiple: it is medical in its treatment of the disease and in the research of protections against it; it is political and economic in the decisions made by governments to decide to change the model or to go on; it is individual insofar as any change must begin in oneself, in the awareness of a system of connections linking us with the earth and with all its elements, which can either poison us or save us. Every individual, including statesmen, industrialists, and physicians, all of whom are individual beings before being professionals, can learn another way. And literary and philosophical texts can throw a new light on their decisions or research. Instead of seeing the disciplines as separated, they might weave them together, as a tree weaves its roots and branches with the earth, water, and air.

My translation:

13

Dans son essai intitulé The Practice, le médecin poète américain William Carlos Williams s’absorbe dans son patient comme dans une lecture qui le fait s’oublier lui-même pour devenir cet autre personnage, non de papier mais de chair et d’os. En tant que littéraire, c’est à la communication avec son patient qu’il s’intéresse. Or celle-ci s’avère en surface assez fuyante et inarticulée. ttps://pub​med.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3173​153/ (accessed October 29, 2020). h An interesting scientific study asks questions about the subject: Segerstrom (2005), Goode (2003), and Santé Magazine (2015). 14 15

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REFERENCES Besson, F. (2019), Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Calman, K. C., R. S. Downie, M. Duthie, B. Sweeney (1988), “Literature and Medicine: A Short Course for Medical Students,” Medical Education, 22 (4): 265–9. Camus, A. ([1947] 2020), La Peste, Gallimard: Coll. Folio. Carrie, A. (2014), “Once Upon a Mine: The Legacy of Uranium on the Navajo Nation,” Environmental Health Perspectives, 122 (2): A44–A49. Hillerman, T. (1982), The Dark Wind. New York: Harper and Row. Hillerman, T. (1998), The First Eagle, New York: Harper. Hillerman, T. (2009), People of Darkness. New York: Harper. Lee, D. S., S. Sinno, and A. Khachemoune (2011), “Honey and Wound Healing,” American Journal of Clinical Dermatology, 12 (3): 181–90. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51029110_Honey_and_ Wound_Healing Moerman, D. E. ([1998] 2010), Native American Ethnobotany, Portland, OR: Timber Press. Momaday, N. S. (1968), House Made of Dawn, New York: Harper and Row. Nayar, P. K. (2017), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Noailles-Pizzolato, M.-C. (2015), “L’apport de la littérature classique à la pratique médicale,” Ethique et Santé, 13 (1): 5–12. Silko, L. M. (1993), Sacred Water, Tucson, AZ: Flood Plain. Slovic, S., and G. Hart, ed. (2004), Literature and the Environment, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Slovic, S. (2008), Going Away to Think, Reno: University of Nevada Press. Stenseth, N. C., B. B. Atshabar, M. Begon, S. R. Belmain, E. Bertherat, E. Carniel, K. L. Gage, H. Leirs, and L. Rahalison (2008), “Plague: Past, Present, and Future,” Plos Med. 5 (1): e3. Waterman, J., J. Pilditch, and F. Martin (2011), “Then They Grow Away from Earth: An Eco-Critical Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and James George’s Ocean Roads,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, 30 (1): 39–56.

Online Resources Aromtao (n.d.), “Energie, information, vivant.” Available online: https://www.arom​tao.fr/ener​gie-info​rmat​ionviv​ant-ave​yron​_fr.html. Accessed November 3, 2020. Connelly, D. (2014), “A History of Aspirin,” Clinical Pharmacist, September 26. Available online: https://www. pha​rmac​euti​cal-jour​nal.com/news-and-analy​sis/infog​raph​ics/a-hist​ory-of-aspi​rin/20066​661.arti​cle?firstP​ ass=false. Accessed September 10, 2020. Estus, J. (2020), “A Lethal Epidemic That ‘Decimated’ and ‘Annihilated’ Indigenous People,” Indian Country Today, February 26. Available online: https://ind​ianc​ount​ryto​day.com/news/a-let​hal-epide​mic-that-decima​ ted-and-anni​hila​ted-ind​igen​ous-peo​ple-S0N​6A0m​iSU-njrN​O8qD​mGA. Accessed September 6, 2020. Goode, E. (2003), “Power of Positive Thinking May Have a Health Benefit, Study Says,” New York Times, September 2. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/2003/09/02/hea​lth/power-of-posit​ive-think​ ing-may-have-a-hea​lth-bene​fit-study-says.html. Institut Pasteur (n.d.), “Virulence du bacille de la peste: un ‘virus’ en cause.” Available online: https://www.past​ eur.fr/fr/virule​nce-du-baci​lle-peste-virus-cause. Accessed November 3, 2020.

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Institut Pasteur (n.d.), “Peste.” Available online: https://www.past​eur.fr/fr/cen​tre-medi​cal/fic​hes-malad​ies/peste. Accessed November 3, 2020. Peplov, M. (2018), “Periwinkle Gives Up Its Cancer-Busting Secrets,” c&en (Chemical and Engineering News), 96 (19). Available online: https://cen.acs.org/bio​logi​cal-chemis​try/natu​ral-produ​cts/Per​iwin​kle-gives-can​cer-bust​ ing-secr​ets/96/i19. Poling, C. C. (2015), “Tony Hillerman: An Open Book,” New Mexico Magazine, September 15. Available online:  https://www.newmex​ i co.org/nmm​ a gaz​ i ne/artic ​ l es/post/tony-hiller ​ m an-an-open-book-93374/. Accessed October 29, 2020. Rakha, N. (2013), “A Killing Wind—Uranium on the Navajo Nation,” February 19. Available online: http://www. grandc​anyo​nwri​ter.com/2013/02/a-kill​ing-wind-uran​ium-on-nav​ajo-nat​ion.html. Accessed March 17, 2022. Santé Magazine (2015), “Quand la pensée positive aide à rester en bonne santé,” March 23. Available online: https:// www.santem​agaz​ine.fr/act​uali​tes/quand-la-pen​see-posit​ive-aide-a-res​ter-en-bonne-sante-192​523. Segerstrom, C. (2005), “Optimism and Immunity: Do Positive Thoughts Always Lead to Positive Effects?,” Brain Behav Immun, 19 (3): 195–200. Available online: https://pub​med.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15797​306/. Slovic, S. (2020), “Planetary Crisis and the Humanities: Prospects in Theory and Paraxis,” webinar organized by the Department of English, Aliah University, August, 29. Available online: https://www.yout​ube.com/ watch?v=QJelV​Xtse​9Yor​gani​zed. Accessed September 5, 2020. Smith, K. (2007), “Pollution of the Navajo Nation Lands,” Black Mesa Waters Coalition, Arizona: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, August 27–9. “Yew Trees Helping to Fight Cancer.” Available online: https://www.nation​altr​ust.org.uk/featu​res/yew-trees-help​ ing-to-fight-can​cer. Accessed October 29, 2020.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

From the Clinical to the Ecocultural: Literature, Health, and Ethnoecomedicine ANIMESH ROY

Richly Chekhovian in both style and perception, as well as poignantly Shavian in its playful experimentation with ideas, Agantuk (The Stranger 1991),1 the last film made by the acclaimed Indian director Satyajit Ray, not only exposes the dubiousness between modern “civilization” and “barbarism” but also enjoys the distinction of being one of the few films in Indian as well as in world cinema that forcefully makes a case for recognition of the corpus of medicinal knowledge extant among the indigenous communities that is intimately related to their biotic and abiotic environments, and elaborates on how the epistemologies and pharmacopeia of such medicinal knowledge of disease, health, and hygiene are substantially different from that of modern Western medicine. The central argument of this deeply moralistic tale, broadly structured as a conflict of ideas, explores how Manmohan Mitra, an anthropologist by training, who has worked among the indigenous communities across India, North America, and South America to understand their social, cultural, and scientific lives, comes across their endemic knowledge of everyday disease, health, and medicine, which provides not only an alternative to one’s general understanding of the categories of health, disease, and illness but also access to a unique epistemology based on ecophilosophical principles that proves to be more sustainable, co-constitutive, and connected to the larger humanecological interactions. Refuting the qualities of normativity, and hegemonic corporeal control of modern Western medicine as epitomized by Prithwish Sengupta—a modern, liberal, city-bred man, trained in Western education who champions modern Western medicine and perjures indigenous life, their ecology, and culture—Mitra recounts how a member of the indigenous community had cured him of his sickness with the vast knowledge of more than five hundred medicinal plants.

Agantuk was a Franco-Indian production based on Ray’s short story “Atithi,” which was published in his own children’s magazine Sandesh in 1981. Agantuk along with two of his earlier two films, Ganashatru (1990) and Shakha Proshakha (1990), constitute a trilogy of their own and serve as social commentaries in a highly polarized world. 1

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The vilification and subsequent marginalization of indigenous people whom people like Mr. Sengupta contemptuously regard as “junglee” (uncivilized) hearkens back to the colonial British rule’s fear of the bow-and-arrow resistance shown by the indigenous communities to protect their jungles from massive colonial commercial timber extraction. Mitra’s arguments of colonial exoticization of the indigenous communities, ignoring and often suppressing indigenous knowledge, anticipates Amartya Sen’s arguments in his influential work, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity (2006). Sen draws attention to how Western scholarship regarding the estimation of Indian culture (and to add here, of non-European culture or cultures of the global South in general) was either “exoticist,” “magisterial,” or “curatorial” (2006: 141). Mitra’s voicing for the medicinal values of the indigenous communities could open up questions of representation and representability, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). In her book The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990), Spivak articulates the problem of “speaking in the name of ”: “It is not a solution, the idea of the disenfranchised speaking for themselves, or the radical critics speaking for them; this question of representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem” (63). Spivak prescribes a vigilant “persistent critique” to avoid “constructing the Other simply as an object of knowledge, leaving out the real Others because of the ones who are getting access into public places due to these waves of benevolence and so on” (63). Although Mitra could be charged of logo-centric assumptions, and as Spivak claims of the “epistemic violence” (1988: 24), it however allows the much-needed space within the jealous pages of elitist historiography to speak for a distinct body of knowledge corpus of ecomedicinal values that got marginalized and have since almost passed into oblivion. By looking at some of the sociocultural constructions of the categories of body/physicality, mind/emotion, and abstract theories of disease, treatment, and healing as well as their representation in literary texts through an ecocritical lens, this chapter would like to explore how in contrast to modern Western medicine, which is primarily concerned with the various biochemical interplays at the organic and somatic level, indigenous medicine or ethnomedicine is much more ecocultural, being intimately interconnected with the complex ecological processes of the earth and its biotic as well as abiotic elements, so much so that the nomenclature “ethnoecomedicine” is a better descriptor for the complex gestalts that it straddles. My coining and usage of the term “ethnoecomedicine” is aimed toward a more comprehensive understanding of the sum total of those human knowledge on health, disease, and medicine—both cognitive and skill based, clinical or nonclinical, and their inseparable relationship with not only the ecological resources but also the complex ecological processes, the perception, classification, and its management within the members of an indigenous community who acquire this knowledge from their immediate environment. Mitra’s endorsement of the ethnomedicinal values, or what I have defined more appropriately as ethnoecomedicinal values, among the indigenous communities can be understood as an attempt to read against the more popular Western narratives of medicine and health—narratives whose precarious subjectivity has occluded all other discourses on body/physicality, mind/emotion, disease, health, and hygiene. However, it is important to note that this chapter does not argue for a repudiation of the postEnlightenment tradition of European logic and knowledge. So, to speak of ethnoecomedicine is not to subvert the efficacy of modern Western medicine or to disregard its contribution and impact on human life and health. Rather, it tries to exhume those indigenous knowledge forms of human health, disease, and medicine, and their correlation with the ecological coordinates that sharply contrast with the dualism inherent in modern Western medicine, and thereby to unsettle

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the presumed centrality of modern Western medicine, its empiricism and pharmacopoeia as the sole purveyor for healing, disregarding all other forms of knowledge and practice. By doing so, this chapter attempts to locate alternative epistemologies of body/physicality, mind/emotion, and disease that embrace ecological principles, thereby arriving at a holistic understanding of disease and health that takes into account the ecocultural dimensions. Though traditional medical practice is often loosely referred to as ethnomedicine, it should not be confused with traditional medicine. A. L Barsh notes that the term “traditional” might create an impression of a sense of repetition of a fixed knowledge corpus that is transmitted from generation to generation or some sort of random and unscientific accumulation of facts (as quoted in Iwu 2002: 1). This is hardly the case in ethnoecomedicine, for such ecopsychosocial practices are the result of a continuous process of careful observation and scrutiny by the diviners, seers, healers, or village doctors of a generation who then perform the task of collating objective study with subjective knowledge as well as with the medicocultural practices of the community that has been transmitted through teachers and neighbors. Such ethnoecomedicinal values and practices are not something that many believe to be static and redundant; on the contrary, such a body of knowledge is much dynamic, continuously evolving through experimentation and exchange of new knowledge. Even though not as a distinct medicinal philosophy, the idea of physique or health as something that can be cured by imbibing a potion has long featured in literature (both oral and written) either through the characters of the witches (who were mostly natural healers or wise women), the midwives, or the doctors. But what was precisely lacking was the sincere attempt to look into the ecological paradigm of such issues. In Europe, from the sixteenth century, a time that overlaps with the beginning of the scientific revolution and which saw the organized burning of the witches, the character of the natural healers or wise women was gradually supplanted in literature with that of the doctors involved in scientific experimentation. This marked a shift, in turn, both in matters of epistemology and pharmacopeia of body/physique, and medicine from not only the ecological toward a more “scientific” interest and a gradual interest in technology but also an epistemic change in the conception of the human body from the physical to the metaphysical, from the human to cyborg. From Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus in Dr. Faustus published toward the end of the sixteenth century, and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606) through Dr. Charles Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Dr. Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), Dr. Andrew Manson in A. J Cronin’s The Citadel (1937), to Dr. Bernard Rieux in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), literature reflects how modern Western medicine has increasingly moved not only toward the compartmentalization of knowledge but also toward an outright ignorance and rejection of those various knowledge systems that do not align with its methodologies. Not only in the metropolis, but also in the colonies, such as India, modern Western medicine was pushed as the sole agency for treating diseases and healing, ignoring indigenous traditions as outrightly superficial and irrational. Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Saptapadi (1949) and Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay’s Agnishwar (1959), both written in Bangla, not only celebrate the native subaltern’s journey from the margin to a city, the center of postcolonial modernity, but also depicts how the central characters trained in modern Western medicine reject their own cultural traditions and moorings as superstitious and embrace modern Western medicine. Amitav Ghosh in his novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) tries to critique the historicism of modern Western medicine and attempts to deconstruct the presumed centrality inherent within it that

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renders invisible native and indigenous medicinal knowledges and their imbrication in ecology. By presenting an alternative history of malaria research, The Calcutta Chromosome shows how folk healing systems practiced by subalterns who were intimately connected with ecology were very much prominent within India even after colonial attempts to popularize and promote modern Western medicine. The tendency toward hegemonic corporeal control in modern Western medicine is intimately connected to the desire for human control of nature in Western thought. The roots of this can be traced back to Western philosophy, especially in Rene Descartes’s vision of the natural world that separated matter from mind and applied a mechanistic framework to the operation of the human body as well as the greater earth body. In modern Western medicine, a physician is trained to think of “stewardship” of the human body, something that parallels human stewardship of the earth and which reflects the larger relationship of modern Western health care with that of ecology. Though well intentioned, for such a concept of stewardship in modern Western medicine is inspired from the belief of ethical obligation of physicians to assume individual responsibility for making health care available to the needy and rooted in the duties of beneficence and charity, it is, however, based on an attitude of physical and corporeal control and dominance that parallels the desire of humans to control nature and earth. Michel Foucault, while explaining the epistemology of ill health and disease in modern Western medicine in his book The Birth of the Clinic (1973), argues how there has been a diagonal shift among medicine practitioners since the late eighteenth century (though arguably it began much earlier). Healing traditions in the past attributed the cause of disease to an imbalance within the body, which was reflected in the environment and vice versa since the human body was considered to be a single interconnected whole that was related to the larger cosmos. However, medical practitioners since the eighteenth century thought of diseases as localized and dependent on the gaze of the physician—the clinical gaze—and in turn ignored the social determinants of disease and health—the social gaze. Influenced by Foucault’s works, historians have drawn attention to how during colonial times, modern Western medicine literally served as the tools of the empire through a disciplinary authority and power over the body of the colonized. David Arnold argues about the ways modern Western medicine was used to construct the colonized body as the site of colonial authority, legitimacy, and control, and how the history of modern Western medicine in the past two hundred years has been a history of “growing intervention and a quest for the monopolistic rights over the body,” which can be seen in the increasing professionalization and exclusion of folk medicine and in the often symbiotic relationship between medicine and the modern state (1993: 09). Arnold argues that the practice of indigenous medicine in India was devalued, as this was “irrational” and “unscientific” to the Western minds (1993: 03). Moreover, the geography, ecology, and climate of the Orient was projected as filthy, filled with dirt, dross, and disease, thereby linking diseases not only with the people but also their ecology. Such skewed notions about native/indigenous body/physicality and ecology becomes evident in the approach of the colonial British in dealing with malaria, which attained an epidemic proportion particularly in India and Africa in the nineteenth century. Malaria in India was caused primarily as a result of the disruption of the ecological cycles and choking of the natural drainage systems due to the construction of railway lines and road networks. However, the article “The Malaria Expedition in West Africa” published in the journal Science, volume XI, issue 262, reported how the British medical doctor Ronald Ross in his lecture “The Recent Medical Expedition to West Africa” ignored the terragouging activities that served as a catalyst for the disease and choses to discuss how “the success of Imperialism would depend largely upon the success of the microscope”

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(36). Much earlier than Ronald Ross, the nineteenth century British politician Thomas Macaulay’s incredibly influential 1835 memo “Minutes on Education” denounced medicinal values written in Indian languages as “barren of useful knowledge,” “fruitful of monstrous superstitions,” and contained “false history, false astronomy, false medicine” (7). The linguistic biasness inherent in Macaulay’s official transcript is reflective of how linguistic and scientific imperialism went hand in hand in cultural colonialism, which was instrumental to the erosion and marginalization of an indigenous system of health practice and the depredation of their ecology. Much earlier than Macaulay, Carolus Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae (1795) proposed a taxonomic classification of plant species. Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, though understood as a scientific method of classification capable of dealing with the huge floral profusion, in fact retold the story of elite Western botany to the exclusion of other indigenous botanical and medicinal histories. The Linnaean system stripped the plants from their indigenous cultural moorings and other vital information such as medicinal values, biogeographical classifications, and cultural valence toward an “onomastic imperialism” developing in the eighteenth century (Schiebinger 2007: 206), which Jamaica Kincaid alludes to in her book My Garden (1998). This reconfiguration of various indigenous botanical life-forms of the planet through the common language of Latin has been compared by Vandana Shiva to the process of patenting life-forms and indigenous knowledge by giant transnational corporations that produce only a “monoculture of knowledge” (1999: 5) and which ensured the slow but gradual monoculture of modern Western medicine. Since modern Western medicine is grounded in the Cartesian dualism of the conceptual separation of the physical and the mental, it does not take into account practices involving healing and wellness and as a result has entirely reshaped the ways humans understand ecology, disease, and healing. Ethnoecomedicine is a holistic system of medicinal knowledge that believes in the healing powers of Nature and regards the ecosystem as a complex whole, with humans being simply a part of the ecosystem. Thus, instead of exoticizing, romanticizing, or demeaning the indigenous medical knowledge system, it is essential to look back, retrieve, and argue in favor of these ancient forms of knowledge relating to disease, health, and hygiene that have generally been hailed as the mother of all sciences. Even recent studies in medicine, particularly by Foucault, have also argued how “body,” “health,” “disease,” “illness,” and “medicines” are more of sociocultural than clinical categories. It is crucial, therefore, to enquire and define how categories of health and medicine are appreciated in a particular sociocultural context and how ecology and its relationship with humans inform the construction of the categories of health, disease, and medicine. Contrary to the monolithic ideas prevalent in modern Western medicine, human perception of health and disease are much broader, plural, and heterogeneous, encompassing etiologic concepts that may not be either physiologic or align with the principles of modern Western medicine. Since the trajectories of evolution of various cultures are different, every culture has its own system of medicine and pharmacopeia. Social constructionism holds that individuals, groups, or communities produce their own conceptions and meanings of reality. Since knowledge is also a product of social dynamics, knowledge in general, and medicinal knowledge in particular, is bound to be varied and generally differ from each other. Thus, while all indigenous communities use herbal medicines that they obtain from nature around them, different communities use different parts of the same plant to treat a particular disease, and different communities often specialize in treating a specific disease. Moreover, despite indigenous medicine being community and culture specific, they have certain areas of overlap that are common to all.

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One of the basic epistemological principles in ethnoecomedicine, something that differentiates it from modern Western medicine, is its problematic relationship with the concept of modernity. Modernity is particularly a Western concept and it presumes knowledge to be essentially empirical while rejecting all other forms of knowledge that are not. In indigenous medicine, though empiricism is not outrightly rejected, it is far from being the foundational principle. Most indigenous remedies rely primarily on practical everyday knowledge that is transmitted from one generation to the next through various ritualistic oral traditions, without bothering about any theoretical documentation. Such overt reliance on practical usage in indigenous medicine, ignoring theoretical formulations, has often confused Western medicine practitioners who found them to be more rhetorical and mythical than theoretical and empirical. Referring to the malaria research in early-nineteenthcentury Bengal, William Twining argues how “the natives of this country generally use remedies in any disease from practical knowledge of their efficacy, without much reasoning; therefore I would not reject any of their therapeutical expedients as despicable, without an enquiry into their, and an experimental modus operandi, and an experimental investigation of their utility” (as quoted in Arnold 1993: 51). The tradition of healing practiced by the indigenous communities are not derivatives of any Western medicinal culture, and as Foucault argues, they are neither “the historical prototype” of Western knowledge nor “their practical products” (1989: 183). Nagugi wa Thiong’o in his novel Wizard of the Crow (2007) critiques this hegemonistic tendency of Western medicine by giving agency to the practitioners of indigenous African medicine. Depicting a conflict of the philosophies of body/physicality and disease between modern Western medicine and African indigenous traditions, Thiong’o’s novel portrays how Dr. Furyk, the Western physician who fails to cure the Ruler of his disease, is dismissive of Kamiti’s achievements as a diviner, seer, and herbalist of indigenous African medicine despite Kamiti’s success in helping the Ruler regain his lost health. Instead, he regards him as a witch doctor and sees Kamiti’s success more as a struggle between “science and sorcery … as one between darkness and light” (Thiong’o 2007: 2–3). Kamiti treats the Ruler both with his knowledge of herbology as well as divination to eliminate the repressed thoughts from the Ruler’s mind that were plaguing him inwardly, thereby causing the disease. In The Calcutta Chromosome, Amitav Ghosh critiques this unitary and partisan concept of modernity and empiricism of Western science, and also the inability of Western medicine to accept and recognize other worldviews. Ghosh’s novel in fact not only questions the presumed normativity of modern Western medicine but also hails the nonempirical nature and the oral tradition of knowledge in indigenous medicines that the West generally ignores or is oblivious of. In ethnoecomedicine, the barriers between various generic disciplines of knowledge are transcended, rejecting the Western reliance on the compartmentalization of knowledge. Such generic transcendence reminds one of the Foucauldian doubt on the distinction and classification of discourses. In his book The Archaeology of Knowledge (1989), Foucault critiques the validity of any classification of discourses, since any generic distinction between discourses such as science, religion, and literature is questionable (22). While in Western thinking science and religion are generally considered to be in contradiction to each other, in indigenous medicine they inform and reinform each other. Indigenous medicines rely on an understanding of the disease, the classification of diseases, personalized medicines, the complex mixture of different herbal ingredients, the system-biology approach, an understanding of a huge botanical profusion to treat disease, as well a deep grasp of religion and the supernatural. This is in contrast to the reductionist approach in modern Western medicine that uses the single-target, single-compound paradigm.

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Such a holistic approach in ethnoecomedicine through the multi-target effect of herbs is the fundamental basis for their use. While Western medicine believes disease to be objective, universal, and unchanging, indigenous medicine or ethnoecomedicine relies on the cultural meaning of the disease and its ecocultural construction. Indigenous medicine sees health as a complex balance between the different parts of the body, between the individual and the ecology, and also between the individual and the cosmos. Disease can be interpreted as dis-ease, a warning signal from the living voice of Gaia to seek alternative life styles in which health is a natural by-product of equilibrium and balance between the individual body, the environment, and the larger cosmos. Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1994) draws attention to the rituals and ceremonies of indigenous African cosmology that honor the sacred relationship that knits people with the land, vegetation, and animals. According to the indigenous worldview, the honoring of this sacred relationship between humans, their ecology, as well as the cosmos is of great importance since their collective consciousness contains the unified belief that the interconnectivity and balance between the human and ecology, the natural and the supernatural, are essential for individual, communal, and ecological health. As Achebe points out, “the land of the living was not far removed from the domains of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them … A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors” (1994: 122). In a similar vein, Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water (2010) depicts the ecosocial construction of health and shows how indigenous African cosmology, which is characterized by an integrated unity and network of connections between the individual, community, ecology, and the souls of the ancestors, gets disrupted due to a severe oil pollution brought about by transnational oil companies that erodes their belief system, ecology, as well as health. Habila describes how the indigenous community is spiritually connected to their “ancestral land … where their fathers and fathers’ father were buried” (39) and how they “believe in spirits, good and bad. The bad ones are the ones who have sinned against mother earth and can’t find rest in her womb. They roam the earth, restless, looking for redemption” (116). Practitioners of indigenous medicine have a rich knowledge of various botanical species and the medicinal values of different plants, which they have been practicing ever since their earliest social and cultural groupings. With time, such empirical knowledge in botany and pharmacological techniques and methods have crystallized into a distinct system of medical practice. The writings of Mahasweta Devi contains passing references of how the indigenous communities possess herbal remedies for various ailments and how such a system of ecomedicinal knowledge has sustained for centuries. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes how Okonkwo cures his daughter Ezinma with the leaves that he gathers for medicine. In the indigenous community, the medicine man is usually an accomplished botanist with an in-depth knowledge of various plants, their morphology, their chemical nature, and their effects on human health. The indigenous people have their own way of classifying plants and the medicine-man categorizes plants based on both their good and bad qualities. The indigenous communities extract their medicines from their immediate ecology; so there are various sociocultural belief systems that regulate and control their use of nature and which help to maintain the balance and preserve the ecosystem. The most essential plants that are vital for the maintenance of indigenous communities’ everyday health and hygiene are preserved through their belief system and are transmitted through their culture by giving the plants a totemic status. They avoid cutting or looping the whole tree for their use, avoid using all the fruits of a tree, and do not cut a flowering or fruiting tree. Such daily care for plants and animals through everyday

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sociocultural practices help to ensure not only the availability of the herbal medicines but also the maintenance of the balance of the ecosystem. As opposed to modern Western medicine, science and religion are intimately associated in ethnoecomedicine, and the knowledge of medicinal herbs goes hand in hand with knowledge of the spiritual or the supernatural. The medicocultural methodologies of healing in ethnoecomedicine function in two ways—the personalistic or spiritual system, where healing is linked to the supernatural elements and balancing of the energy between the individual, the natural environment, and the cosmos; and the naturalistic system, where illness is explained through impersonal, systemic ways. The success of the healer, who is an accomplished botanist with expertise in the indigenous utilization of botanical diversity, lies not only in the number of efficacious herbs he knows but also in his ability to cure the patient and by extension the community by obeying the laws of nature. In the indigenous belief system, disease is not entirely a natural phenomenon since supernatural forces also play a key role in creating maladies in the body. Hence, indigenous communities pray to supernatural agencies for the gift of good health. The song “Oh my beloved one” is sung by the Adi community in India to regain the lost health of an individual of the community due to “ill luck,” and it depicts the relationship between disease, health, and religion. The song is generally sung in Miri Agom with a Ridin creeper,2 a plant believed to have medicinal values, and fastened to the neck of the singer to appease the spirit of the person suffering from bad health and to lure him back to his body to cure him: “I tie Ridin creeper/To fasten your soul to your body” (as quoted in Devy n.d.). Members of the Adi community believe that the spirit of good health of a person leaves him/her when it receives a shock, or the balance between the individual, the community, and ecology is disrupted. Village doctors or healers practicing ethnoecomedicine believe that unless the disequilibrium in the person’s innermost being is addressed, the pharmacological herbs, though beneficial in curing physical disease, seldom heal the patient in totality and the patient survives merely as a physical being with a diminished self. Since disease is caused due to the spell of supernatural agencies, generous offerings are made to placate the spirits and prevent them from affecting individual health as well as the health of the community. The song “This we offer to you” is sung by the Kondh community to describe how offerings are made to satiate the spirit of the dead, so that they do not bother or harm the people who are alive. The Kondhs believe that they are so attached to their home that their soul doesn’t want to leave even after their death. Though such souls are harmless, they may turn violent and harm those who are alive. Hence, generous offerings are made to the spirit. The song describes how the living member should remain unharmed and prosper so that they could “offer to you/We can,/Because we are still alive.” In lieu of such returns, the soul must “go away/Whichever way you came” and not to “inflict pain” after their ”departure” (as quoted in Devy n.d.). Thiong’o’s novel Wizard of the Crow describes how when the doctor of modern Western medicine fails to treat the Ruler suffering from psychological shock, Kamiti, who is both a diviner and herbalist, restores his health through divination. Kamiti administers a miraculous herbal medicine to cure the rich businessman Tajirika suffering from “white ache” (Thiong’o 2007: 276) and emphasizes that respect for ecology and humility are the core principles of African indigenous medicine: “Nature is the source of all cures. But we have to be humble and The Adi tribe has two major languages used for different purposes, Adi Agom and Miri Agom. While Adi Agom is the language for everyday conversation, Miri Agom is a highly rhythmical language generally used for chanting verses during rituals. 2

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willing to learn from it” (267). While Kamiti treats his patient through divination and herbology, he distributes to his patients copies of “Seven Herbs of Grass” in which he has laid down the principles of healthy living: Take care of the body, for it is the temple of the soul Watch ye what you eat and drink all the time Greed makes death greedy for life Cigarettes arrest life; alcohol holds the mind prisoner Life is a common stream from which plant, animal, and humans draw The good comes from balance Don’t abandon yours for a mirage. (275) The recurrence and proliferation of epidemic diseases and its correlation to climate change has forced humans to reconsider with urgency a more comprehensive understanding of the ecological dimensions of the categories of health and hygiene. While medical humanities is interested in the cultural, philosophical, or literary interpretation of these categories, an ecocritical revisioning of the categories of body, disease, health, as well as medical humanities would serve to challenge contemporary normative conceptualizations of these categories and of health care, and thereby allow for a polyphony of many different voices. Resorting to an ecocritical reading of texts that reflect the theme of indigenous medicine—texts both written and oral, that are generally regarded to be of some significance in medical humanities—this chapter has attempted to allow some space to arrive at a hybridized and interlinked understanding of both the ecological and medical perspectives as they are represented in literature. The growing awareness that the fate of planetary human health and the health of the biosphere is inseparably intertwined reminds one of the sheer futility to conceptualize as well as compartmentalize human health as distinct from ecological health. Rather, if one goes by what Timothy Morton in his book The Ecological Thought (2010) calls “the ecological thought,” one realizes that there are rarely any areas of health or humanities that are untouched from ecological implications (1). This makes such an ecocritically informed study of medical humanities all the more pertinent and timely.

REFERENCES Achebe, C. (1994), Things Fall Apart, New York: Anchor. Arnold, D. (1993), Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and the Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, London: University of California Press. Devy, G. N. (n.d.), “Tribal Verse,” Web. Available online: www.ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/keww134.pdf. Accessed April 11, 2021. Foucault, M. (1989), The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge. Iwu, M. M. (2002), “Introduction: Therapeutic Agents from Ethnomedicine,” in M. M. Iwu and J. C. Wootton (eds.), Ethnomedicine and Drug Discovery, 1–22, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Kincaid, J. (1999), My Garden, 122, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Macaulay, T. B. (1835), “Minutes on Education,” Columbia.edu, February 2. Available online: http://www.colum​ bia.edu/itc/mea​lac/pritch​ett/00g​ener​alli​nks/macau​lay/txt_mi​nute​_edu​cati​on_1​835.html (accessed March 10, 2019). Morton, T. (2010), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Ross, R. (1900), “The Malaria Expedition in West Africa,” Science, XI.262: 36–7 (January 5, 1900). https://www. science.org/doi/10.1126/science.11.262.36 (accessed March 10, 2019). Schiebinger, L. (2007), Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sen, A. (2006), The Argumentative Indian: Writings on India History, Culture, and Identity, New Delhi: Penguin India. Shiva, V. (1999), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Boston: South End Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988), “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–313, London: Macmillan. Spivak, G. C. (1990), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. S. Harasym, New York: Routledge. Thiong’o’, Nagugi wa (2007), Wizard of the Crow, New York: Anchor.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Ayurvedic Vision on Health and Environment RAGHUL V. RAJAN

“Ayuranena vetti iti Ayurvedah- ayu means life, vetti means science or knowledge. The science of life or knowledge of life is known as Ayurveda” (Vidyanath 2013: 3). It is the age-old alternative healing system of the Indian subcontinent that theorizes health and environment. Believed to be of divine origin, it is traced back to the fourth prime Veda, the Atharvaveda. Caraka’s Caraka Samhitha, Sushrutha’s Sushrutha Samhitha and Vagbhata’s Astangahridaya are the brihaththrayi (the great trio) of Ayurveda. Kayachikitsa (treatment of body) is the prime concern of Caraka Samhitha. While Sushrutha Samhitha primarily deals with surgery, Astangahridaya elaborates on the eight branches of Ayurveda namely kayachikitsa (treatment of body), balachikitsa (pediatrics), grihachikitsa (psychiatry), shalakya tantra (ENT), shalyatantra (surgery), damstra chikitsa (toxicology), rasayana chikitsa (rejuvenation therapy), and vajikarana chikitsa (aphrodisiac therapy). This chapter can serve as a primer to the relevance of Ayurveda in the medico-environmental humanities. It examines the central precepts of Ayurveda stipulated in the great trio collectively and its affinities with the medico-environmental humanities. The place of Ayurveda in fact is in the area of intersection of environmental humanities and medical humanities, for its goal is the mutual welfare of humans and Nature. Further, in the Indian knowledge system, watertight compartmentalization of humanities and sciences is rare. Shastra (the Sanskrit term for science) connotes science, dharma, rituals, a code of living, and much more. For ancient Indians, knowledge regardless of its branch is meant for the betterment of living and happiness. Ayurveda is an upaveda (complementary knowledge) to the Atharvaveda. It is a medical practice and lifestyle with a definite philosophy to follow upon. “This upaveda/branch dealt with the healing aspects of spirituality and life as a whole; it praises ecology (earth, sun, moon, water, etc.), advised on political, social, economic, health, and all other areas of life. In short, it shows how to remain within one’s spirit and live in harmony with nature” (Tirtha 2007: 3). Here the key Ayurvedic concerns (which are interrelated) are narrated in the light of the medico-environmental humanities.

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NATURE (PRAKRITI) Nature in Ayurveda is termed Prakriti. Etymologically it signifies the natural/usual/inherent way. It is synonymous with the macrocosm; the charaajaraprapanja constituted by all living and nonliving entities. “At its broadest nature is the sum total of the structures, substances and causal powers that are the universe” (Clark 2011: 6). Its antonym is vikriti meaning mischievous/disorder/deviation. The panchamahabhutas, the five prime elements of the Universe namely the Earth (prithvi), the Fire (agni/tejas), the Water (jal/ap), the Air (vayu) and the Ether (aakash) constitute Prakriti. They are ubiquitous in the whole matter of the Cosmos. The Western notion of Nature in its entirety is not related to Prakriti. On the other hand, Ayurveda holds Nature as the matrix of whole life, for everything is made up of the panchamahabhutas. It is called the panchamahabhuta siddhanta, which is the basic theoretical framework of Ayurveda. There begins the kinship of Ayurveda with medico-environmental humanities. The origin, growth, sustenance, and death of humans are embedded in Nature’s lap. “This nature is not nature-as-resource but rather nature-as matrix. It is a nature that operates not only outside and inside our bodies (from global climate to the micro-biome) but also through our bodies, including our embodied minds” (Moore 2015: 173). Human beings are perceived as purusha/pindanda (microcosm) who shall live in harmony with prakriti/brahmanda (macrocosm) for a salubrious life. Ayurveda inherits the purusha-prakriti concept from Samkhya philosophy. Purusha is the microcosmic replica of the macrocosmic universe (prakriti). Humans are not the managers/guardians of Prakriti; rather they are fellow citizens because the “rationalist hyperseparation of human identity from nature” (Plumwood 2002: 9) is absent. Ayurveda denies the separation of human culture from Nature and the anthropocentric dictum of human domination over it. C. P. Snow’s two cultural dynamics of the West are irrelevant here. Ayurveda is the knowledge of life with no room for binaries like science/humanities and nature/ culture and the subsequent conflict between them. The sense of community in Ayurveda evolves from the famous vasudaivakudumbakam ideology (all the inhabitants of the earth (vasuda) are your family). Ayurveda acknowledges “humans as members of earth’s Community of life” (Taylor 2011: 101). The veneration of the rivers, plants, animals, mountains, and the whole Nature is customary of it. Ayurveda discards the separation instead prescribes empathy with the “nonhuman.” Vagbhatta says, “Ātmavat satatam paśyedapi kīṭapipīlikām—Even the insects and ants should be treated (with compassion and kindness (just as one’s own self)” (Murthy 2001: 27). In fact, the environment has no boundaries and the whole living beings share the same “resources” of Nature. Ayurveda acknowledges the “biospheric connectedness” (Heise 2008: 62) of human beings with Nature through the panchamahabhutas and thus, it is an “eco cosmopolitan approach” (62). Like environmental humanities it advises that “the world needs to be understood neither through Cartesian dualism nor as isolated fragments nor as interchangeable parts but as a vast ensemble” (Emmett and Nye 2017: 64).

HUMAN BEING (PURUSHA) Body (Deha/shariram) As customary of a medical system, Ayurveda underscored the prime importance of the human/the entity to be taken care of. Ayurvedic perception of an individual is unique. Human being (purusha/ shariram) is neither a network of organs nor groups of cells, rather a triune of body (deha), mind

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(manas), and soul (atman). This three-dimensional address of human beings makes Ayurveda a holistic medical practice. Human body is conceived in Ayurveda as Panchabuthatmakam deham, which means the body is constituted by the panchamahabhutas. “The homology between the constituent elements of the universe and those of the smaller universe within the body is the basis of the pancabhûta doctrine” (Valiathan 2006: 22). The changes in Prakriti will be in Purusha. This “trans-corporeality denies the human subject the sovereign, central position” (Alaimo 2010: 16) rather renders an identification with Prakriti. The panchamahabhuta siddhanta reminds us of the exhortation of Oppermann and Iovino that “we are trans-corporeal subjects, undeniably embroiled in the Earth’s biophysical processes along with other species” (2017: 5). On the creation of human body, Caraka says, Those derived from akasa are sound, the auditory organ, lightness, minuteness, distinction. Touch, the tactile organ, roughness, impulsion, shaping of dhatus and physical activities are derived from vayu. Those derived from tejas are vision, the visual organ, light, digestion and heat; those derived from ap are taste, the gustatory organ, coldness, softness, unction and moistening; those derived from prithvi are smell, olfactory organ, heaviness, stability and mass. Thus, the person is equal to the universe. Whatever formed entities are found in the universe, they are also found in the person and vice versa. (Sharma 2014: 430) The tridosha siddhanta evolved from the panchamahabhuta siddhanta is Ayurveda’s second fundamental principle. Tridoshas, namely vata, pitta and kapha, determine the nature and type of one’s body and mind. Unlike the body humors in Hippocratic medicine, they are the variant combinations of the panchamahabhutas. Agni and jal constitutes pitta, jal and prithvi combine to form kapha and akasa, and vayu joins to form vata. Sushrutha calls them the envoys of anila (the wind), surya (the sun), and soma (the moon). Their equilibrium in the human body creates and sustains ojas (strength) and the seven dhatus of body: plasma (rasa), blood (rakta), muscle (mamsa), fat (medas), bone (asthi), marrow (majja), and sperm/ovum (sukla). Tridoshas are dependent and influenced by Prakriti. For instance, arid regions (jangala) will promote vata, cold climate enhances the kapha dosha, and hot winds can aggravate the pitta. In a normal (sadharana) landscape, the tridoshas are in equilibrium. Acharyas, the Ayurvedic preceptors, uphold that the flow of energy in an ecosystem happens in the human body also. The body is termed as a network of srota: “srotamayam hi sheeram.” The channels like respiratory organs and endocrine system are collectively called srotas. Harold Fromm opines that environment “runs right through us in endless waves, and if we were to watch ourselves via some ideal microscopic time-lapse video, we would see water, air, food, microbes, toxins entering our bodies as we shed, excrete, and exhale our processed materials back out” (2009: 95). Acharyas conceived this thought centuries before. Francis Zimmermann demonstrated that “the body is described not as a more or less sealed container (the way we are prone to see it), but rather as a landscape, an open field with all processes flowing visibly, at or near the surface” (Trawick 1992: 48). The body is perceived as an epitome of the Universe with the same matter and flow of energy. Sushrutha calls the human body a harmony (samanvaya) of the pancha mahabhutas. “These five Mahabhutas are cosmic elements which create, nurture and sustain all forms of life, and after death or decay they absorb what was created earlier: thus, they play an important role in preserving and sustaining the environment” (Dwivedi 2001: 38). The macrocosm is the extension

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of the microcosm. They exist as two but they are related eternally. Mutual coexistence makes them responsible for the changes in one will reflect in the other. For instance, the exposure to hot climate will violate the pitta and one has to consume pitta reducing foods like yogurt to maintain the equilibrium of the tridoshas. The aggravated pitta can be pacified by cool showers, moon bath, and resting in lush gardens with watery fountains. Nature pacifies the imbalance and this healing is triggered and sustained by Ayurvedic lifestyle and treatment. Mind (Manas) In Ayurveda, the mind is not the totality of brain functions. It is another aspect of purusha. Deha and Manas are interrelated inextricably. Health (swasthya) implies a healthy deha and manas. The mental problems will reflect in the body as illness. Thus, the treatment modality of Ayurveda becomes psychosomatic (dehamanasa). Based on the predominance of a guna (quality), manas is classified into three, namely sattwic (generous and the best one), rajasic (virulent and quarrelsome), and tamasic (cowardly and treacherous). Interestingly, Ayurveda perceives these trigunas apropos of the panchamahabhutas. The sattvic is related to akasa, agni and jal, rajasic to vayu, and tamasic to prithvi. Ayurveda acknowledges the vitality of manas in the constitution and treatment of beings. Soul (atman) Human body is conceived as the kshetra (temple/field) of atman, the living soul/self. In Ayurvedic perception, human embryos are formed through the union of sperm, ovum, and the atman. The extension of one’s self to the whole universe is the philosophy of panchamahabhuta siddhanta. In Caraka-Samhitha one reads, “Seeing the entire universe in the Self and vice versa gives rise to true knowledge” (Sharma 2014: 441), that is, self-realization. Atman is not the ego of a modern citizen in the anthropocene, but a self which is indifferent from the Universal Self. It is an “environmental identity” (Ustler 2013: 139). Love and compassion toward fellow beings is the natural outcome of this psycho-philosophy. This is linked to the deep ecological ruminations of Arne Naess. “Selfrealization, on Naess’s scheme, involved a wide identification with nature” (Brennan and Lo 2014: 94). The shrinking of self to one’s own body and its corollary social problems resolves in this perception of self.

AYURVEDIC LIFESTYLE (JEEVITHASHAILI) “Ayurveda is not only the ancient Indian science of preventative health and healing but also a philosophy of living” (Tiwari 1995: 8). For a healthy life, Ayurveda instructs living according to the diurnal and seasonal rhythms of Nature. Ayurvedic lifestyle comprises three aspects: dinacharya (daily routine), ritucharya (seasonal routine), and sadvritta (virtuous code of conduct). Living in tandem with the environment is its basic principle. Plus, the principle of abstemiousness termed mithathva shall be practiced in food, sleep, words and thoughts. On lifestyle, Caraka instructs, “Proper use of actions and food preparations contrary to the properties of place, time and the self, avoidance of excessive, perverted and negative use of time, intellect and sense objects, nonsuppression of impelled urges and avoidance of over-exertion. This is, in nut shell, the code of conduct for the healthy in order to maintain the equilibrium” (Sharma 2014: 447).

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Dinacharya prescribes humans to wake, work, and sleep according to the sun and moon. Wake up early in the morning (a time called brahmamuhurta roughly between 4:00 a.m. and 6: 00 a.m. in India) when all living beings except nocturnal ones are awake. Then drinking eight mouthfuls of pure drinking water at room temperature is advised to maintain the tridosha balance. Afterward there shall be cleaning of the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, and excretion of body waste. At sunrise it is ideal to perform yoga exercises like surya namaskar. Ayurveda holds that exercise shall be moderate (mitha vyayama), adept to the body type, strength, and occupation of an individual. After the sweat following exercise has evaporated, there shall be body massage using the oil suitable for a person’s body type and age. Bathing before the shadow of a man becomes twelve and a half inches (i.e., around 9:00 a.m.) is mandatory for all except those who are suffering from chronic illness. No shampoos and soaps are advised. Natural products like powder of mung bean or gram flour shall be used to clean the body and the sap of plant leaves like hibiscus can be used for washing hair. The pollution by soaps and shampoo as well as their plastic containers is not recommended. For a calm and focused mind, bathing shall be followed by meditation. Food, the actual medicine (aharam hi aushadam) for a healthy life shall be taken in moderate quantity at regular intervals of time. Eating wholesome food according to region (desa), season (ritu), and body type (deha prakriti) will entail health and happiness. By dusk, after having a light supper, sleeping shall be like the birds and animals. People have to thrive on the seasonal food available in their locality. In the globalized world of food colonialism, this Ayurvedic precept is quite relevant. Ritucharya means lifestyle according to the season (ritu). Depending on the season the digestive fire in the stomach called jadaaraagni will be changing. In cold and rainy season, spicy foods can be taken due to high jadaaraagni and the body needs more energy. In summer, cool drinks like buttermilk and fruit juices are advised to escape from the aridness of the climate. Ayurveda advises to drink water at room temperature so that the equilibrium of temperature in the body and the environment with which it interacts will be maintained. Seasonal foods are the best food for any living being. In spring, fruits in trees and plants are abundant. In the rainy season, leafy vegetables are the ideal food. The brihaththrayi stipulates in detail the food for each ritu appropriate for particular body types. The pollution and waste created by the processing of contemporary foodstuff and its transportation can be avoided if people adopt the ritucharya suitable to their place of living. Professor M. S. Valiathan finds: The Âyurvedic definition of health implied equanimity and cheerfulness (prasannata), which spring from a composite state of equilibrium (sâmya). The equilibrium was called for among the constituents of the body (dhâtus, dosas and agnis); between the constituents and the causative agents (hetu/nidâna) which always lurk within; and between the body and the surroundings (rtu). (2006: 21) Variation in the seasons will reflect in the tridoshas. There will be preponderance of each of the tridoshas according to the season because of the relation of microcosm and macrocosm. This necessitates a ritucharya. Sadvritta (the virtuous code of conduct) shall be on three levels: the level of body, the level of mind, and the level of words. At body level, Ayurveda proposes compassion to all sentient beings and modest living with the available resources. At the level of mind, the individual shall think positive things and refrain from hazardous emotions. At the level of words, the individual shall be smithabhashi (speaking with happiness) and mitabhasi (speaking with modesty). Ethics forms

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the chief component of sadvritta. It is a live conduct to be followed throughout life called dharma toward oneself and Nature. Caraka says: In the living beings, non-violence is the best among the life-promoting factors, prowess is the best among the strength-promoting ones, learning is the best among the bulk-promoting ones, control on sense organs is the best among the happiness- promoting ones, knowledge of reality is the best among the pleasure-promoting ones and celibacy is the best among the paths-Thus hold the Ayurvedists. (Sharma 2014: 238) Ayurveda proposes a green ideology of living. It is a salubrious lifestyle for an individual’s body, mind, and self. Human agency is construed as a participating unit in the cosmic process of birth and death. The return to the web of life as a participant in it is one of its chief motives. In the guise of the progress of modern living, humans move away from Nature from where they evolved and it leads to illness. Ayurvedic lifestyle offers the panacea of sustainable living according to one’s region and its seasons.

ILLNESS (ROGA) “Ayurveda possesses a highly abstract metatheoretical framework for explaining diseases, similar in form to theories in the social sciences and psychoanalysis” (Obeyesekere 1992: 162–3) because its approach is psychosomatic. Ayurveda speaks on illness, not disease, for “disease can be reduced to biochemistry, while illness involves a biography, a reflective consciousness, multiple relationships, and institutions” (Frank 2014: paragraph 9). Illness (roga) has two locations: the rogi and his/her habitat. The pollution of habitat causes roga in all its dwellers. Other than pollution, an individual becomes a rogi due to the imbalance of tridoshas, pathogens (krimis), and mental problems. The diet improper to season and deha/manasa type, violation of sadvritta, deliberate repression, as well as excess of the vegas (flows in the srotas, namely urine, feces, sweat, and sexual urge) and variation of seasons undermine the balance of the tridoshas and eventually illness occurs. Pathogen attack happens due to the loss of immunity, the inherent connection with Prakriti. Acharyas conceive ragaathikal, namely kama (lust), krodha (anger), moha (temptation), mada (pride), lobha (greed), and matsarya (jealousy) as the eternal enemies of human health present throughout the body. Their outburst will trigger the imbalance. Ayurveda defines immunity (prathirodha sheshi) apropos roga. It is not an interval between two infections. More than a protection from diseases, it is the balance of tridoshas realized through living according to Nature. Neither the normalcy detected by gadgets nor the absence of symptoms rather the equilibrium of the tridoshas constitutes health in Ayurveda. Health and immunity are therefore not seen as different from each other in Ayurveda.

AYURVEDIC THERAPEUTICS (CHIKITSA) Ayurvedic treatment envisages a holistic health of a human being up to one hundred years. No treatment is same for two persons due to the variance in their dehamanasaprakriti (body–mind nature). The therapeutic approach is purely psychosomatic and spiritual also. The psychosomatic approach of chikitsa is called Deha-manasa sampradaya. Medication is a gradual process. It focuses on causes rather than symptoms of illness. A capsule for vitamin deficiency and a tablet for back pain is not the method of chikitsa. Purification of the body through evacuative therapies and enhancing the

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bala (immunity) is the Ayurvedic way of treatment. Swasthyaraksha, the preventive and protective mode of enhancing immunity using lifestyle practices and vikaraprashamana, where drugs, treatment and surgery is prescribed are the two methods of chikitsa. Thus, therapeutically it is preventive and curative at once. Prasavaraksha (pregnancy care) and sukhachikitsa (wellness treatment) are best examples of Swasthyaraksha. Specific aushadas and lifestyles are prescribed in pravasaraksha for the healthy life of pregnant women and children. Sukhachikitsa is performed for humans and animals particularly in the rainy season for purifying and rejuvenating their body once in a year. Medication is an upadhi (way) for resurrecting the tridosha balance. Jeevithashaili is the eternal solution for a healthy living. Medicines are only secondary in this regard. Swabhovoparama (recession by nature) is a precept by Caraka. “Áyurveda relies totally on nature to heal, while Áyurvedic therapies only help in the healing process” (Tirtha 2007: 39). More than a medical practice, Ayurveda is swasthya dharma (mode of healthy living). Sodhana (evacuative therapies) and samana (rejuvenating therapy) are the two modes of Ayurvedic treatment. The former is meant for the purification of the body and the latter for regaining and sustaining the balance of the tridoshas. The toxins accumulated in the body called ama are removed by imparting sodhana. Like a pollutant-free environment, the body shall be free of toxins. The sodhana therapies meant for natural detoxification are five in number and are collectively called panchakarmas namely vamana (vomiting), vasthi (decoction enema), virechana (excretion), nasya (nasal drops administration), and anuvasana (medicated oil induced enema). For instance, by using a natural decoction in ghee, namely dadimathy ghrutham (made from pomegranate), enema is imposed in virechanam. The rejuvenating medicines chyawanprash and rasayanas are immunity boosting medicines of samana. Goal setting in life can alleviate many mental issues. Atmagyan (knowledge of thyself; which is obviously the Universal Self) is the life goal advocated by Ayurveda. Sadvritta enables one to avoid raagadhikal, the impediment to atmagyan. Spiritual concern in Ayurvedic treatment is meant through prescribing yoga and meditation. Indeed, yoga can be called the sister science of Ayurveda. Purusha always seeks reunion with Prakriti to become complete. The health of both ensures holistic life and so chikitsa endeavours for the welfare of both. Samhithas (treatises) mentions Yagnas (fire sacrifice) for this. As medicines to beings, they will regain the lost equilibrium of the elements in the Universe. The general belief of rain after the athirathra yagna is a testimony to this. Thus, Ayurveda becomes a “translocal knowledge” (Nash 2006: 9). Chikitsa stipulates a medical quartet called Chatushpad (meaning four legs) consisting of medicine, medical practitioner, medical attendant, and patient. The great trio formulates the qualities of the quartet. They are like the legs of a quadruped and any deformity leads to disability.

CHATUSHPAD Medicine (Aushada) Ayurvedic medicines called aushadas are neither biomedicines nor drugs in modern parlance. They are the remedies to revert the equilibrium of the tridoshas. Ayurveda identifies the medicinal qualities of the plant and animal products available in the Indian subcontinent. As the subhashita (Sanskrit sayings) says, “naasti moolamoushadaham” (there are no roots that are not medicines). Aushadas are in the form of kashayas (watery), aristas (fermented), choorna (powdered), ghrutham (ghee based), gulika (tablet), bhashma (herbs incinerated ash), and leha (jam). They

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are extracted from plants and animals that are endemic to a region with minimal destruction to them. Plants shall be growing in the soil free of ants, holes, cracks, and termite mounds. Animal products shall be from animals not pregnant, very young, healthy, and calm. Milk shall be from the best native breed like the lactating kapila cow. Only one teat’s milk is meant for its owner and the rest for the calf. The minimum harm of the nonhuman is meant throughout the practice of Ayurvedic pharmacology. Utensils used are mainly earthenware; in exceptional circumstances, iron, copper, or bronze vessels are used. The traditional Indian reverence for the nonhuman is visible in Ayurvedic preparation of medicines. The chyawanprash, an immunity and strength boosting health supplement is made from Indian gooseberry (amalaka). Only the flesh of its ripened seeds is used and the seeds are left. Ayurveda is an ecologically sustainable medical practice. Aushadas shall be taken by the patient in auspicious time prescribed by the practitioner. Vagbhata meticulously prescribed aushadas devoid of compassion as soulless and the compassion comes from the other two parts of the quartet, practitioner and attendant. Acharyas insist they shall be blessed by the swasti mantra meant for the patient’s well-being. Chanting of mantras like aushadhi sukta is prescribed to improve the potency of medicines. The mantras enable the patient to concentrate on chikitsa and entails mental peace. Aushadas are natural matter spiritually energized by the mantras and thus they are more than mere medicines to cure a disease. Medical Practitioner (Vaidya) An Ayurvedic practitioner is traditionally known as vaidya. Vedayathi ithi vaidyah meaning “one who intimates illness” is a vaidya. Vaidya shall be well versed in the art and technique of healing. He/she shall have anubhava parinjanam (knowledge through experience), dehashudhi (cleanliness in body), and manashudhi (cleanliness in mind). In the words of Vagbhata, “The physician must be efficient, having learnt the science in all its meanings (implications) from a preceptor, must have witnessed the therapies (gained practical experience) and pure/clean (in body, mind and speech)” (Murthy 2001: 15). According to Sushrutha, he/she shall be dexterous in surgery and its instruments, intelligent, and a morally upright individual. Vaidya acquires knowledge in a tripartite manner: through grandhoktham (textual knowledge), apthopadesha (guru’s advice), and anubhava parinjanam. Vaidya shall have education and experience and ethics, “the three Es of medical humanities” (Whitehead and Woods 2016: 3). To become a vaidya, one shall master all samhithas (treatises) under the guidance of a guru. Centuries before Acharyas emphasized mandatory knowledge in liberal education for medical aspirants. Caraka instructs a medical aspirant shall learn sahitya (literature), alamkarasastra (poetics), vyakarana (grammar), yukthi (logic), darsana (philosophy), jyothisastra (astronomy), jyotisha (astrology), ganitha sastra (mathematics), and samanyakala (general arts). Sushrutha finds the knowledge in varied shastras (knowledge systems) makes vaidya an insightful healer. According to William Osler, the renowned Canadian physician and medical educational visionary, the gentleman physician shall be trained in liberal arts. Professor Alan Bleakley points out that the “empathy decline and moral erosion” (2015: 5) in present-day medical graduates is due to the dearth of liberal education. Learning outcomes in current medical pedagogy like professional outlook, communication skills, team work, and person-centered care are underscored in the brihathtrayi. Ayurvedic practice is a sadhana (a spiritual commitment) and it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Ethics is a mandatory element in vaidya’s life and practice. “The physician, by dint of bestowing

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health, happiness and longevity, becomes also the donor of virtue, wealth, enjoyment and both the human worlds here and life after” (Sharma 2014: 113). Along with sadvritta, vaidya practices athuravritta (serving the needful as a vow). Acharyas condemn the greed of eliciting money from the poor and desolate. Chikitsa is vaidya’s sevana (service) for rogi’s better life where monetary benefits are always secondary. According to Caraka, “those, who in disguise of physicians look for the patients like bird catchers spreading nets for the bird in the forest and are turned out of the knowledge of scripture, practice, therapeutic measures, time and dose, should be abstained from because they are moving on the earth as the messengers of death in search of their livelihood” (Sharma 2014: 236). Perhaps, this is the earliest statement on medical ethics in the world. Vaidya leads the chatushpad and shall endeavor to enhance the worthiness of rogi. Effective communication between vaidya and rogi is mandatory for chikitsa’s positive outcome. There shall be a remarkable sensitivity towards the rogi. A proper niche, peaceful mind, compassionate attendant, and aushadas shall be arranged for it. Caraka insists that vaidya shall have maitri (friendship) toward the patient, karuna (compassion) toward his/her plight, mudita (joy) in treatment, and upeksha (resignation) toward incurable illness. These qualities are collectively called yogic vrittis. Through chikitsa, vaidya facilitates rogi to regain the lost connection between purusha and Prakriti, the two poles of Ayurvedic treatment and sustain it for a holistic life. “In short, to be completely effective, the essence of the practitioner must be able to touch the Soul of the client” (Tirtha 2007: 337). As in medical humanities, the emphasis is on human values in doctor–patient relationships. Medical Attendant (Upasthata) The medical attendants include nurses, experts in cooking and preparation of medicines, and helpers to lift patients. They are collectively called Upasthata. They shall be virtuous in conduct, caring, skillful, and clean in body and mind. According to Caraka, Upasthata is one “who is coolheaded and pleasant in his demeanour, does not speak ill of any body, is strong and attentive to the requirements of the sick, and strictly and indefatigably follows the instructions of the physician” (Sharma 2014: 306–7). Vagbhata emphasizes, “The attendent (nurse) should be attached (affectionate, faithful to the patient), clean (in body, mind and speech), efficient in work and intelligent” (Murthy 2001: 15). Upasthata shall work hand in hand with vaidya for the well-being of rogi. He/she has to practice sadvritta and athuravritta. Patient (Rogi) Ayurveda exhorts to perceive a patient as an individual having a unique prakriti. The Sanskrit term for a patient is rogi, which encompasses body type, mental stature, and sociocultural persona of a human being. Sushrutha holds that the rogi shall believe in the vaidya and chikitsa. Rogi’s will power to overcome the illness is the determining factor in the success of a chikitsa. Personal hygiene like clean clothes and cutting of nails and hair shall be the traits of a rogi, and he/she shall presume the goals of his/her life. Patient plus person constitutes a rogi. In his introduction to the English translation of Caraka-Samhitha, P. V. Sharma intimates his readers, in Ayurveda: Man is not a machine and as such can’t be operated equally with a uniform law. Every person has got his own individuality and normal variations. This forms his constitution which distinguishes him from other individuals. This is termed as “Prakrti.” Every regimen or therapy has to be

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applied keeping in view the constitution of the concerned person and his suitability (satmya). (2014: xxiii) Thus, chikista of one rogi is different from another rogi of the same illness. For instance, triphala choornam (a powdered mixture of the seeds of Phyllanthus emblica, Terminalia bellirica, and Terminalia chebula) is an aushada for proper bowel movements. Based on the nature of the illness, its intensity, and the rogi, it is given in three varied combinations either as alone or with other herbs: as triphala choornam, thriphalathi choornam, or valiyathriphalathi choornam. The changes in the ingredients are noted in the names though the core component is triphala. Sometimes there will be anupana (bioenhancer) like honey and milk to accelerate the potency of an aushada. It changes according to aushada and rogi. Ayurveda in the permutations and combinations of medicines and treatment underscores the uniqueness of a human being. “Meanwhile, health care is now acknowledged as a collaborative enterprise” (Cole, Carlin, and Carson 2015: 38) of all health professionals. Ayurvedic health care is a collective venture of the chatushpad in an auspicious clinical ambience performed in the mode of rogi’s personalized experience. Person-specific aushadas, diet called padhya (meaning the suitable), and karmas (therapies) are executed. The dehamanasasampradya makes Ayurveda a person-centered health care of integrative medicine. Swami Sadashiva Tirtha calls chikitsa a “personalized healing” (Tirtha 2007: 14), for it acknowledges the variance in the range of psychosomatic and spiritual attributes of a rogi. Healing is realized through resurrecting the purusha’s lost connection with Prakriti for their building blocks are the same. It is a natural healing alias, a healing by/ through Nature. The modality of Ayurvedic treatment is compatible with medico environmental humanities.

AYURVEDIC DIAGNOSIS (ROGANIRANYA) Diagnosis in Ayurveda (termed as roganiranya) is not far behind modern medicine’s diagnosis except for the dearth of sophisticated diagnostic techniques and equipment. Roganiranya is in a twin-fold manner: rogapariksha, the examination of illness, and rogipariksha, the examination of rogi. In rogapariksha, vaidya executes darsana (look), sparsna (touch), prasna (problem), panchendriya pariksha (analysis of the five senses), and ashtavidha pariksha (examination of pulse [nadi], urine [mutra], feces [mala], tongue [jihva], sound [sabda], touch [sparsa], eyesight [drik], and structure [aakriti]) in a rogi. Vaidya shall employ five means of diagnosis known as the pancha nidana. They are nidana (etiology), purvarupa (prodrome), rupa (symptoms), upasaya (therapeutic suitability), and samprapti (pathogenesis) of a roga. Rogapariksha shall be done in tandem with rogipariksha. There vaidya examines a rogi’s prakriti (nature), vikriti (deviant behavior), saara (quality), samhana (compactness), pramana (physical structure), vyayamasakthi (strength), satmya (adaptability), sattwa (identity), vayaha (age), and jadaraagni (digestive fire). Rogi’s temperament, habits, genetic traits, and will power to overcome the illness are all essential details to be collected from persons in close relation to the rogi. On the testimony about a rogi, Caraka says, Authority is the statement of the apta (credible persons). Aptas are those who possess knowledge devoid of any doubt, indirect and partial acquisition, attachment and aversion. The statement of persons endowed with such merits is testimony; on the contrary, the faulty or otherwise

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statement of a drunkard, insane, fool and attached person does not come under testimony. (Sharma 2014: 325) The rogi’s sociocultural sphere is part and parcel of dehamanasasampradaya. The mental type and strength determine rogi’s response to chikitsa. For instance, one may feel severe pain in an illness while others may feel it as mild, despite they have the same illness at a time. Based on the rogi’s traits, vaidya makes an interpretive venture on the roga using the theoretical framework of Acharyas. Hence, roganiranya is a personalized mode of diagnosis.

CLINICAL ENVIRONMENT An effective healing clinical environment can make a significant contribution. Acharyas recommended a serene natural ambience with liberal arts for the healing locale. “There should also be experts lores and also companions who know the desires, are favorites and are acquainted with place and time” (Sharma 2014: 105). Ayurveda promotes music therapy because the pranava or omkara constitutes the panchamahabhutas and music has the form of omkara. Hence, the lost equilibrium with the macrocosm can be resuscitated by hearing the classical Indian ragas. Hearing them will inspire the sattvic bhava in one’s mind. Caraka says at the place of treatment, “Birds and animals like common quail, grey partridge, hare, black buck, antelope, black tailed deer, red deer and wild sheep should also be there. A milch cow with good temper, free from disease and having a calf alive along with all the necessary arrangements for her such as fodder, shelter and water-should be there” (105). He pointed out the products from these animals can be extracted with minimal harm to them for medicinal purposes and their presence will enhance the rogi’s mindset. It is a prototype of ecopsychology, “which holds that humans need to rediscover their ties to the natural world in order to experience full mental health” (Clayton and Opotow 2003: 18).

AYURVEDA FOR FLORA AND FAUNA Ayurveda is not limited to human beings alone. The constituents of all beings in the Prakriti are the same panchamahabhutas. Thus, Vrikshayurveda is formulated for treating plants and Pasuayurveda for animals. They are ecologically oriented Indian health care for plants and animals. Vrikshayurveda (Ayurveda for trees) is exclusively meant for the uplift of the flora. Despite certain sections of Agnipurana and Brihatsamhitha, it is Surapala who compiled a fully fledged treatise on treating plants in ancient India. It provides a systematic classification of soils, plants, their germination, propagation, and treatment. A care of a tree in its whole lifespan is covered by Vrikshayurveda. Horticultural/agricultural practices through natural ways and products like kunapa jal and pancha gavya make Vrikshayurveda an ecologically sustainable practice. Kunapa jal, a mixture of the meat of dead animals/birds like horses, fish, and parrots boiled in an iron pot with certain herbs is processed for better plant growth. It is to be noted the animals and birds shall be dead in a natural way. Panchagavya, a mixture of five products from cow viz cow urine, cow dung, milk, curd, and ghee is one of the best organic fertilizers. Vrikshayurveda prescribes aushadas for the treatment of the flora according to the kapha/vata/pitta prakriti. It is a compilation of the traditional organic farming techniques of India.

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Pasuayurveda is the extension of Ayurveda for animals. It is the ancient Indian veterinary science. It is subdivided into ashwa ayurveda (for horses), gaja ayurveda (for elephants), and gau ayurveda (for cows). Shalihotra’s Shalihotra Samhitha is the best veterinary treatise from ancient India. Salihotra was an expert in Ashwa Ayurveda. Palakaypam of Sage Palakapya and its extract Maathaga Leela by Thirumangalath Neelakantan are the texts of gaja ayurveda. In it, annual sukha chikitsa is prescribed for elephants like human beings for detoxifying their body and promoting healthy life. The medicines are aushadas and treatment includes diet pattern and panchakarma.

CONCLUSION Ayurveda’s philosophy is of human embeddings in the Universe. The philosophical aspect of Ayurveda is indebted to the Samkhya yoga and the goal of attaining liberation from Yoga Sutras. Tiwari calls Ayurveda “the ancient wisdom of God, man and nature” (Tirtha 2007: 4). Environmental humanities advise to come out from the malefic construct of nature/culture dualism to reduce ecological disasters. “At the root of all ecological crises, in other words, lie the divisive epistemologies that create an illusory sense of an ontological dissociation between the human and the nonhuman realms” (Oppermann and Iovino 2017: 4). Ayurveda does not hold that epistemology. Its perception on Nature is extended beyond sympathy or empathy to an assimilation. Humans are replicas of the Universe and no distinction exists between them because Tat tvam asi (meaning it is you, whom you perceive or experience). Vagbhata reminds us, “Consider as ourselves even insects and ants. A compassionate attitude towards all the living beings is the hallmark of a civilized man” (Vidyanath 2013: 3). Ayurveda is the upshot of the ancient Indian outlook towards life. It is a living cultural practice called ayur samskriti. In Ayurveda, philosophy, culture, religion, myth, rituals, and medical science of ancient India meet. It never succumbs to the parochial view of anthropocentrism. Its perceptions on body, medicine, clinical care, and lifestyle are purely ecocentric. Ayurveda posed a unique cognition of mankind and Nature. It is the oldest health care system evolved from the observation of the Acharyas on humans and Nature. Devoid of the “modern/ rational knowledge” that turns away from Nature, Ayurveda is providing natural cure and care for all sentient beings. It advocates Natural healing in its philosophy and implies and endeavors to realize it in therapeutics. Living according to Ayurvedic premises enhances the cognition and appreciation of Nature as our own part of life. Its code of conduct for a healthy living constructs a symbiotic relationship between living beings and nonliving entities. Thus, a healthy society can be sustained. Ayurveda is a mega narrative on health care through Nature. It is the medical practice with a feasible “human-environment nexus” (Emmett and Nye 2017: 8). It promulgates the alignment of humans with Nature as the panacea for all maladies. Providing a holistic living through ecocentric health care is the vision of Ayurveda. Industrial manipulation of health care and pharmaceuticals cannot understand the vision of Ayurveda. Ayurveda is meant for the well-being of humanity and Nature. The twentieth century witnessed the fallacy of adopting allopathic medicine as a yardstick of alternative medicines. Subsequently, modern Ayurvedic practice tends to be more disease specific; aushadas become mere drugs and vaidya becomes an ordinary medical practitioner. In the guise of modernity, there is a rejection of Ayurveda as a credible medical system. Nevertheless, in recent decades there is a resuscitation of Classical Ayurveda, which can promulgate what Plumwood called an “environmental culture” (2002: 3). The basic premises of Ayurvedic life and treatment shall be

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proliferated in the whole world for it is an “ecologically restorative and socially just action” (Emmett and Nye 2017: 165) in therapeutics and human living in the biosphere. Medico-environmental humanists can create many wonders in the welfare of humans and Nature in such ventures. Ayurveda exhorts to live your life with Nature and any illness you seek the care and cure of Nature. From the vantage point of the medico-environmental humanities, Ayurveda cannot be marginalized into an alternative medicine; rather, it is the most relevant medical practice with an ecocentric living style and cure for a sustainable and holistic life. I would like to conclude the chapter with the shanti mantra meant for the health, perfection, and happiness of the whole universe. Om Shantih shantih shantih

REFERENCES Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Bleakley, A. (2015), Medical Humanities and Medical Education: How the Medical Humanities Can Shape Better Doctors, Oxon: Routledge. Brennan, A., and Y. S. Lo (2014), Understanding Environmental Philosophy, Oxon: Routledge. Clark, T. (2011), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clayton, S., and Opotow, S. (2003), “Introduction: Identity and the Natural Environment,” in S. Clayton and S. Opotow (eds.), Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature, 1–24, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cole, T., N. S. Carlin, and R. A. Carson (2015), Medical Humanities: An Introduction, New York: Cambridge University Press. Dwivedi, O. P. (2003), “Classical India,” in D. Jamieson (ed.), A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, 37–51, Massachusetts: Blackwell. Emmett, R. S., and D. E. Nye (2017), The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frank, A. W. (2014), “Being a Good Story: The Humanities as Therapeutic Practice,” in T. Jones, D. Wear, and L. D. Friedman (eds.), Health Humanities Reader, 13–25, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fromm, H. (2009), The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Heise, U. K. (2008), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, J. W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London: Verso. Murthy, S. (2001), Vägbhata’s Astänga Hrdayam, Varanasi: Krishnadas Academy. Nash, L. L. (2006), Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press. Obeyesekere, G. (1992), “Science, Experimentation, and Clinical Practice in Ayurveda,” in C. Leslie and A. Young (eds.), Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, 160-76, Berkeley: University of California Press. Oppermann, S., and S. Iovino (2017), “Introduction: The Environmental Humanities and the Challenges of the Anthropocene,” in S. Oppermann and S. Iovino (eds.), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, 1–21, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Plumwood, V. (2002), Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, London: Routledge.

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Sharma, P. V. (2014), Caraka-Samhita: Text with English Translation, vol. 1, Varanasi: Chaukhambhaorientalia. Shunya, A. (2017), Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom, Boulder: Sounds True. Taylor, P. (2011), Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, 25th Anniversary ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tirtha, S. S. (2007), The Ayurveda Encyclopedia: Natural Secrets to Healing, Prevention & Longevity, Bayville: Ayurveda Holistic Center Press. Tiwari, M. (1995), Ayurveda: A Life of Balance, Delhi: Motilal. Trawick, M. (1992), “Death and Nurturance in Indian Systems of Healing,” in C. Leslie and A. Young (eds.), Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, 129–59, Berkeley: University of California Press. Utsler, D. (2013), “Environmental Hermeneutics and Environmental/Eco-Psychology: Explorations in Environmental Identity,” in F. Clingerman, B. Treanor, M. Drenthen, and D. Utsler. (eds.), Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, 123–40, New York: Fordham University Press. Valiathan, M. S. (2006), Towards Ayurvedic Biology, Bangalore: Indian Academy of Sciences. Vidyanath, R. (2013), Illustrated Astanga Hrdaya Sutra-Sthana: Text with English Translation, Varanasi: Chaukhamba Surbharati Prakashan. Whitehead, A., and A. Woods (2016), “Introduction,” in A. Whitehead and A. Woods (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, 1–31, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Health and Hygiene Discourses in the Early Twentieth Century: The Making of a Modern Odia Body ANIMESH MOHAPATRA AND JYOTIRMAYA TRIPATHY

In the early 1980s, coastal Odisha (situated in the eastern part of India) was rocked by the arrival of a mysterious epidemic that no medic had heard of or any medical science book had listed. Known as “disco disease,” its major victims were young men with symptoms varying from unremitting fever and fatigue to loss of virility. In a couple of months, it sent shock waves through the region and many boys stopped going to school to escape the contagion. Since allopathic doctors knew nothing about the virus, people started turning to herbalists and exorcists to allay the panic. The former (called kabirajs) began prescribing solutions made of conch shell powder (to be taken with water) and the latter (known as gunias) advised people to tie the dry stem of a thorny local weed (kanta leutia) as an amulet. The so-called disease soon disappeared from everyday discussion and was dismissed as the figment of someone’s fertile imagination. With the benefit of hindsight, we may argue that the disease nomenclature was inspired by the title of the 1982 Bollywood blockbuster Disco Dancer starring Mithun Chakraborty that brought the term “disco” into the realm of everyday discourse. Moreover, cashing in on the rumor concerning the disease an Odia music album titled “Orissa in Disco Fever” was released in 1984. The term “disco” began to be used as an adjective, often pejoratively, for anything that was bizarre, alien and superficially smart. The semiotic potential of the so-called epidemic assumes special relevance here. In this context, attention should be focused upon the dramatic contrast between the foreignness of the disease and its indigenous cures. This alerts us to the entanglement of indigeneity, local ecology, body, health, modernity, and medicine, and the ways in which they relate to the overlapping associations of being, belonging, cultural authenticity, and identity. However, the terms mentioned above are not stable carriers of meaning; our aim is to highlight the negotiations and conflicts between indigeneity and foreignness, the organic and the imposed. The “disco disease” provides an entry point for a

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larger discussion on issues concerning health and hygiene that confronted the people of Odisha in the early decades of the twentieth century. This discussion draws its energy from numerous books and booklets made easily available through printing technologies in Odisha, the availability of such books elsewhere in India, and the rising awareness of the body’s role in nation-building. This consciousness to a large extent was also the outcome of discoveries relating to the human body and innovations in the field of health care. The integration of Odia health consciousness with developments in other parts of the country and beyond created an environment that recognized the sameness and difference of Odia health and body. If the impulse of sameness brought the Odia body to the project of nation building or made it a culturally neutral entity that saw no difference between the global and the local, the impulse of Odia distinctiveness was intended to serve as a marker of authenticity and local environment. Adopting a Foucauldian approach, scholars studying modern medicine and its implications on the body of the colonized have focused primarily on the ways in which the native population could be disciplined (see Arnold 1993; Pati and Nanda 2009). Such an approach continues to remain seductive in scholarly circles and emphasizes the transmission of modernity from England to India. Another approach consists in locating alternative medicine in the broad framework of nationalism (Bashford 2004; Berger 2013), which tends to limit the agency of the people using such medicines. Outside of these one-dimensional approaches, there is also a body of work highlighting Ayurveda’s diversity (Wujastyk and Smith 2008) and the vernacularization of modern medicine (Mukharji 2009a). That said, in the nationalist framework, it has been blithely assumed that resistance to colonial medicine can only be staged through indigenous cures. This chapter seeks to interrogate that assumption by drawing upon select popular health and hygiene texts published in Odisha in the early decades of the twentieth century. These texts promoted an understanding of the human anatomy that display a distinct awareness of global ideas around health and their conversation with nationalist/ethnic experiences. Later, an attempt is made to create a template for an understanding of Odia body that is hybrid and beyond moderntraditional or Western-Odia binary. The first section explores the evolution of a discourse that brought Ayurveda and other local practices to converse with Western medicine and a simultaneous suspicion and acknowledgement of the latter. The second section focuses on an increasingly visible double consciousness that no longer placed Odia body outside the purview of Western medicine but in an interconnected web that recognized the possibility of ethnic difference in discussion with global sameness.

HEALTH AND ITS MODERNITY This section attempts to identify the awareness of a physiological modernity and Odia distinctness that drew sustenance from global/Western ideas of body, health, and hygiene even as it contested them; it has no intent to impose a structure on the shifting and evolving notions of body in the Odia public sphere. The period before Independence provides numerous instances of such engagements around the body with multiple registers that tell us of the existence of a society in discussion and debate with itself and not fixated on a Western-Odia binary. The very fact that Odias were aware of hygiene and health meant that modernity did exist in different geographies outside the West though it may not have used the vocabulary of modernity. Here, David Arnold’s (1993) insights that saw modern notions relating to the body and health as disruptive and soaked

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in colonial enterprise are both enabling and limiting. We should not overemphasize the role of medicine in the consolidation of empire; there are many other sites for disciplining the colonized. Moreover, one should not confine the understanding of the body, hygiene, and medicine to the West. Like Arnold (1993), Alison Bashford begins with the premise that hygiene was a colonial enterprise and a means of control (2004: 1). This is problematic because the Odia texts under discussion here exhibit an awareness that is not strictly colonial even though we see a recognition of cleanliness as an antidote to disease. Though public health regulated the circulation of people, it was not necessarily always an externally imposed mechanism. Gyan Prakash recognizes that “the beginnings of science’s cultural authority in India lie in the ‘civilizing mission’ introduced by the British in the early nineteenth century” (1999: 3) and yet “to dominate in order to liberate was a profoundly contradictory enterprise” (5). Similarly, for Frederick Smith and Dagmar Wujastyk, modern Ayurveda was a “reaction to the introduction and patronage of a new medical system by the British colonialists” (2008: 8). Banbehari Patnaik is a key figure representing this new consciousness that traversed the global and was often promoted by British officials. His Ama Deha (Our Body) (1940) marks a significant departure from scripture-dependent books on health care and makes a compelling case for a novel notion of human anatomy that is avowedly Western. Not surprisingly, the book was commissioned by the colonial government and bore the following English subtitle on its cover page: “A Book on Human Anatomy and Physiology.” Whether the commissioning of the book by the government meant a colonial design is anybody’s guess, but the printing of the author’s qualification (B.Sc., M. B., D. P. H., D. T. M. & H., etc.) on the cover page was certainly intended to create a sense of professional competence that sought to validate a different understanding of the body. In the book, we come across an attempt to standardize the knowledge of the human body, and at the same time a vernacularization of the expert knowledge of the doctor. Patnaik makes liberal use of English vocabulary both in Roman and Odia scripts. On most occasions, however, Odia equivalents are used as in the case of phusphus for lungs (60–2) or tantu for tissue (5). More than this traversing of linguistic worlds, the author created a new visual order with lots of pictorial illustrations that was eye-catching no doubt, but more importantly provided a gateway to observe the human body in purely physiological terms with entrails, veins, sinews, and tissues. Though Radhashyam Das had already done something similar in terms of pictorial representation of human body (1932: 7 and 13), Patnaik’s Ama Deha stands out in its sustained investment in skeletal visuality that took the reader deeper into the intricacies of human anatomy. Even as Patnaik created a perfect organism of parts making the whole, the foregrounding of parts to describe their functions created an idea of a machine where parts were important but also replaceable and manageable. The body visualized by Patnaik was not the seat of a soul but a well-oiled machine that is knowable, tamable, and optimizable. It is akin to a mega factory where all machines are integrated toward a desired result that optimizes efficiency. Like a house with doors and windows, the human body has a mouth, nose, anus, and so forth that help the body ingest (food, air, water) and release (waste) (1940: 2). Lungs are then compared to a big fire engine and the head is likened to the signaling unit of a train station (2–3). The figures without any natural background also created the image of an atomistic and alienated body that is autonomous though isolated. The ingenuity of such comparisons must have been quite troubling at a time when scientific temper had not struck deep roots. Patnaik goes on to claim that there are so many tiny parts in this body-machine that it would require multiple Mahabharatas to describe their functions; moreover,

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there are even tinier parts of which even many experts are not aware (4). The acknowledgment of the limitations of experts points toward a qualified acceptance of the efficacy of Western science. Projit Bihari Mukharji’s Nationalizing the Body demonstrates how a fast-changing society was becoming modern and developing an awareness of the body beyond the Western-Indian binary. He analyses the process of the provincialization and domestication of Western medicine in the form of daktars who showed sympathy for their fellow countrymen even before a sense of nationalism had emerged (2009a: 22) and also borrowed from indigenous curative practices. This was a peculiar development in the early twentieth century when expert knowledge had not yet acquired the intimidating aura of specialization and ordinary people could still hope to learn about other domains of human knowledge. This led to the making of a new colonial subject who could not only receive such knowledge, but also produce it. The fact that it is disseminated by an Odia rather than an Englishman establishes the possibility of simultaneous assimilation and subversion of modern knowledge. In Lakhminarayana Panda’s Byayam Siksha Padhhati (Theory of Physical Education) (1932), we come across another scientific account of body and health. Panda was a physical training instructor in the Govt. Training School and had undergone scientific training. It may be noted here that physical training was not always connected to national body politic as a site of resistance, but was seen as a site of self-fulfillment. Panda identified various types of strength—mental, physical, and spiritual—and advised that physical exercise would help develop those strengths which in turn are directed at the development of society (1932: 1–2). He asserted that exercises based on scientific principles, knowledge of physiology and health science were beneficial (2), but these need not exclude traditional forms of exercise. Like many other texts published in this period, body here is represented as a hybrid space. Panda observed that physical education and training would lead to happiness, self-respect, self-sacrifice, as well as loyalty and patriotism (5). However, he also argued that “modern civilization with its obsession with luxury has led to our mental development but has blinded us to the need for physical well-being” (8). He wanted Western facilities for children to be replicated for children in India if they proved beneficial. Therefore, he asserted that there was no point in dismissing them in the name of protecting the Indian system (10). Panda’s stance goes against the grain of postcolonial resistance to the West. As Shamshad Khan observes, “the zeal for conformity to biomedicine and the Western system of knowledge remained more pronounced and emphatic, while the elements of defiance were weak and, at times, even apologetic” (2006: 2787). Banbehari Patnaik’s book titled Bisuchika: A Treatise on Cholera (1929) was written more than a decade before his Ama Deha and was dedicated to the British official A. H. Mee and his wife with “deep gratitude and reverence” (ii). The dedication implies the consent of the colonial authorities in propagating the ideas in the book. In the preface, Patnaik labels cholera, smallpox, and malaria as killer diseases and avers that Indian medicine has effective curative measures to deal with them but the absence of hygienic practices renders such measures inefficacious. But what is significant here is the legitimation of Indian medicine by Western science so that the latter can modify Indian medicine (1929: 1). This is a facet of postcolonial experience that took Ayurveda not just as a set of practices rooted in ancient knowledge but as possessing the capacity for adopting itself to the changing needs of the modern world. Ayurveda absorbed elements of modernity as it became imbricated in the political discourses of the time as well as discussions concerning public health. The book reveals a consciousness of the national body rooted in tradition while not being hostile to foreign knowledge systems. Patnaik’s solution for the problem of the absence of doctors in rural

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areas consists in exposing Indian baidyas to Western medical practices (2). Kanagarathinam traces the way medical practitioners of Western medicine responded to a report by the Committee of Indigenous Medicine to the Madras Government. Their response asked the Government to keep the interest of the Indian people in mind and plant modern science in the country by the agency of scientists trained in Western methods instead of promoting antiquated indigenous systems. It is “due to the marginalisation, practitioners of indigenous medicines were very keen to find out ways to modernise their medicines” (Kanagarathinam 2006: 183). This is a hybrid universe that encompassed both the worlds or at least made strategic use of one system of medicine, which led to a conversation rather than conflict between the two systems. Rachel Berger in her study of Ayurveda in North India cautions us against the tendency to treat this system of medicine as pristine and untouched by outside forces. This has led many to see Ayurveda as autonomous of the trappings of other systems of medicine, particularly allopathic biomedicine (Berger 2013: 1). This reading isolates Ayurveda from larger historical processes overlooking the fact that Ayurveda was invoked in the early twentieth century as a carrier of Indian authenticity against a tendency to see biomedicine as a hegemonic force. The Odia texts under discussion show a clear awareness of that negotiation between what is imported and what is indigenous. Patnaik is aware of the challenges in promoting Western ideas about the body when he recognizes the absence of Odia terms for scientific names for various body parts. However, he succeeds in coining Odia equivalents in some cases. We can notice the transformation of indigenous medicine leading to “a complicated mode of mimesis, in which the techniques and technologies of allopathic medicine … provided guidelines for the transformation of local health contexts” (Berger 2013: 9). Patnaik (1929) was conscious of the pioneering role he was playing, for he mentioned that his was the first ever attempt to sell Western medicine by using Odia terminologies. In the foreword, Sri Krushna Mohapatra cautioned the reader against treating cholera as a curse from a goddess (Patnaik 1929: vii–ix). Arnold refers to the deification of diseases such as smallpox in Bengal, Odisha, and Assam, which was seen as goddess or mother or Basanta Chandi or Goddess Sitala (Arnold 1993: 121). Patnaik maintained that cholera cannot be cured without proper treatment (alluding to Western medicine) and also reiterated colonial representation of Rath Yatra, which always witnessed the death of hundreds of pilgrims. Arnold also refers to W. W. Hunter who believed that Rath Yatra was a magazine of mortality that left thousands dead on the pilgrim road (Arnold 1993: 188). Hunter was apprehensive about the dens of Jagannath from which diseases would percolate to France and England thereby imperiling “lives far more valuable than their own” (189). In such colonial discourses, pilgrim centers and monasteries in Puri were seen as breeders of diseases and that “the lower classes of Uriyas are a dirty race and have no ideas of cleanliness and sanitation” (Pati and Nanda 2009: 115). The period before Independence also witnessed the boom in the publication of booklets on health, various cures, medication, and vaccination, showing a trend of health practice that resonated with common people. Madhuri Sharma shows us how “colonial context saw the emergence of the print media that disseminated new kinds of information about health, hygiene and medicine to an eagerly receptive public. In fact, advertisements were a particularly active agency that created a consumer for medical products and services across a variety of medical systems” (M. Sharma 2009: 213). Berger too sees the popularity of Ayurveda against the backdrop of the rise of an urban middle class (2008: 101). Unlike proper scientific books or even regular full-length books that demanded serious attention and investment, not to mention some basic knowledge of the subject,

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booklets were for non-serious and common readers. But that is only part of the story; they also indicate the shaping of a new culture where ordinary people could spend small sums of money on buying books on health science, which they read alongside religious and literary texts. S. Nayak’s booklet Basanta Roga Pratikara (1929) also featured an English subtitle “A Treatise on Smallpox Showing its Causes, Prevention and Treatment” and was praised by colonial authorities; it was approved to be purchased by school libraries. On the cover page, Nayak is introduced as the author of many more books on treatment of malaria, cholera, and so forth, thereby establishing his authority. It is clear that these government-approved books were based on scientific knowledge and were meant for wide dissemination among people. Nayak’s booklet was presented through the question-answer format and provided basic symptoms of the disease and its impact on the health of people. He proposed collective endeavor to fight the disease and formation of teams comprising educated people to curb its spread (1929: 2). The book then introduced the figure of the doctor who emphasized the need for vaccination and its whole-hearted acceptance by the people and praised the colonial government for providing vaccination for free. The doctor also informed the readers of the availability of two types of vaccines, one from England and another locally made (to be used in mofussil areas) which was not as foolproof as the former. It may be mentioned here that the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 had led to enhanced spending on public health and establishment of many medical laboratories in the wake of plague. Pilgrim centers such as Haridwar and Puri were seen as hubs from where cholera disseminated within India and afflicted the world (Harrison and Pati 2009: 3). One can see medicalization of colonial power at work in this instance, which was bent on protecting people from epidemics. Olautha Pratikar (1927) or Cholera: Its Symptoms, Cause, Prevention and Treatment by the same author was published with the aim of reaching readers in primary schools and villages, thus making health care a social and communitarian practice. The book had also been approved by Bihar-Odisha Government to be given to students as prize. Though the lure of sale and royalty as well as institutional endorsement cannot be ruled out, the fact that many authors took upon themselves to write such booklets (not all were driven by sales) reveals a new investment on the body for its own sake, and more importantly for society and nation. To reduce it to colonial governmentality in the Foucauldian fashion will be simplistic as it imagines the colonized as gullible. Given that the books were written by nonexperts, it was not professionalization of body but its nationalization, though not in an anticolonial sense. Maybe it was bureaucratization with a difference, because the authors were mostly Odia-speaking. Nayak was from Balasore and was a settlement officer. The book reiterated colonial knowledge of Rath Yatra being the hotspot for all diseases due to the absence of clean water and hygiene (Nayak 1927: 1–2) and went on to fondly refer to the colonial government doing its best to save lives (2). He suggested the formation of disease prevention committees in each village; elsewhere (6) he urged people to join hands so that the she-demon of cholera could be defeated. This is in sharp contrast to the disease’s representation as goddess by local people. Equally significant is presenting people as warriors fighting the spread of the disease as much as its victims. This multilayered text also shows us social codes getting undermined when we see a Brahman (bearer of religious and scriptural knowledge) seeking advice from a doctor (possessor of secular knowledge). The doctor appears as one who is conscious of his superiority and is condescending when he refers to death of people in hordes (4). The book abounds in references to developments taking place in the wider world and creates a consciousness of the global.

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Malaria by Gopalchandra Pattanayak (1943) indicates the author’s awareness of the World War and how the world was going through a difficult time in terms of social and political changes. Malaria compounded that difficulty and thus arose the need for its treatment through natural and chemical medicines. Though a trained doctor, he refers to a locally prepared medicine by a kabiraj and explains how malaria retarded the country’s progress towards prosperity as it affected people’s health and diminished their contribution to economy (Pattanayak 1943: 2). Here one detects traces of nationalist consciousness which is not overtly anticolonial in character. It may be mentioned here that the Indian Medical (Bogus Degree) Bill was passed in 1915 to prevent unqualified persons from using titles implying qualifications in Western medical science. The fine for laying false claim to being a Western medical practitioner amounted to five hundred rupees (Berger 2008: 103). Mukharji in his work has shown how “ ‘indigenous drugs’ appeared in the nationalist discourse officially in 1894 when owing to the efforts of Watt and Dey the Indian National Congress included the extended investigation and use of indigenous drugs in [the list of] its demands” (Mukharji 2009b: 206). Patnaik prescribed basic techniques like use of mosquito net, covering the body with clothes, rubbing it with special oil, and suggested several simple and homely remedies that border on herbalism and an awareness of local ecology. He cited examples from Italy, Spain, and Russia even while recommending local solutions in the process blending the local with the global. The author also mentioned Malaria Commission of the League of Nations (Pattanayak 1943: 32) and International Health Organization as well as Nehru’s contribution to planning (45). On the book’s back cover there is an advertisement of Pyrex, a malaria-prevention solution based on quinine that is endorsed by a sadhu singing and playing the ektara, again implying non-duality of Odia experience vis-à-vis bio-medicine (Figure 22.1). The same awareness of the link between health with national prosperity is evident in Pattanayak’s Jatiya Khadya (National Food) (1944). The author, a trained doctor in modern medicine, wrote the book with the hope of persuading people to discuss food and nutrition. The book was read and discussed at the Angul Sahitya Samaj (Literature Society of Angul) meeting that informs the reader of the existence of a vibrant society that knew the virtues of health as a national and public good (Pattanayak 1944: v) (Figure 22.2). In this context, Prakash’s observation on how science “traversed a vast arena, encompassing fields from literature to religion, economy to philosophy, and categories from elite to popular” (1999: 7) assumes relevance. The author refers to the five-year plans and to the development of Russia through socialism and lauds Nehru’s internationalism and focus on planning (Pattanayak 1944: 2) before embarking upon a discussion of food, its production and properties, and offering readers advice on fertilizers, manure, yielding varieties, types of crops, and so forth. The generous use of English scientific words also implies the absence of matching Odia vocabulary as well as the need for learning English terms as a gateway to a scientific consciousness. M. V. Apparao’s book Malaria Patha (1948) begins with the distribution of malaria in India with a map of British India that acts as the entry point for malaria as a national question. That is followed by endorsements from the Governor of Odisha, Provincial Malaria Officer, and health officers to enhance the much needed institutional and scientific sanction. There is clear nationalist dimension to his engagement when he discusses how malaria is causing death in Bharat bhumi (Apparao 1948: i). Like other authors writing on illnesses in this period, Apparao used places elsewhere in the world (Italy, Algeria, Panama) as reference points. He does not claim to be a malaria expert but describes himself as someone who is a promoter of public health. This brings to our attention the fact that some nonexperts were

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FIGURE 22.1  Advertisement for Pyrex in Gopalchandra Pattanayak’s Malaria (1943).

writing about health and body at a time when experts were engaged in knowledge production. This makes it clear that health had emerged as a talking point among the general public and was no longer confined to the domain of experts. The author states that the knowledge concerning the connection between mosquitoes and malaria is not new and that ancient Indian surgeon Shusruta had identified this. If Ayurveda was seen to be a carrier of modernity in the hands of Hindu seers and sages, biomedicine is seen to be complementary to Ayurveda. Receptivity of tradition and the absorptive Odia body made competing knowledge systems find a common site to transform themselves. In addition, the Odia texts reveal a peculiar consciousness; instead of talking about Ayurveda and its contemporaneity, these also promoted a scientific understanding of health that is typically Western and yet not divorced from Odia/Indian tradition.

MODERNITY AND ITS SPILLAGE As physiological modernity was becoming part of everyday discourse, it had to constantly negotiate with forces of Odia tradition and cultural difference that sought to destabilize the singularity of Western biomedicinal modernity. Such contestation of Western reason was not always engineered

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FIGURE 22.2  Front cover of Gopalchandra Pattanayak’s Jatiya Khadya (1944).

through a straightforward opposition (which to some extent it was), but in more complex ways that relativized and vernacularized modernity. If certain articulations of this discourse legitimated themselves by referring to Western science, some others appropriated and coopted Western vocabulary to consolidate Indian tradition. The rising impulse of nationalism as well as its local expressions in Odia language led to a climate where indigeneity and body were projected as sites of difference and authenticity. This resulted in a publication of a substantial number of books, pamphlets and other texts that made Ayurveda a matter of growing public interest and a force

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in the marketplace. Berger identifies the sources of this popularity in language literacy and new modes of consumption in the following manner: “The nature of Ayurvedic discourse moved rapidly beyond the contours of the tradition as defined by its ancient texts, and instead was taken up with contemporary concerns about modernity” (2013: 4). As far as the texts referred to in the chapter are concerned, there was a double vision that reveals a fascinating part of Odia cultural history unveiling multiple ways of belonging. It did not completely do away with modern and Western models; rather, it worked around them in a way that did not see Indian values as West’s others. Such a cultural meaning-making vis-à-vis nationalism, as Prakash citing Partha Chatterjee’s formulation argues, consisted of an inner autonomous sphere (the spiritual and cultural domain), which was always immune to colonial control (1999: 202). India’s anticolonial nationalism combined with the need for colonial modernity was aimed at creating an Odia vernacular modernity; it had to articulate the aspirations of a cultural community in a language that is both modern and traditional. More than any abstract sense of rationalisation of society or a singular narrative of history, Odia postcolonial modernity is a material and physiological imaginary that sought to move beyond the modern/tradition binary. We may say that Odia modernity was Janus-faced—created in the image of the West, but ineluctably different (Prakash 1999: 234). Odia texts highlighted the clean habits of Indian sadhus and sages, something which was often associated with modernity. Given that Odia people as one body maintained that continuity from the ancient times, physiological modernity was not as disruptive as it may appear. This Odia body was often dovetailed into the national body while not strictly opposed to absorbing foreign ideas. Thus, the national body was projected as a site of difference, “a way of imagining and embodying integrity and … homogeneity or purity of the self, the community, and especially in the early to mid-twentieth century, the nation” (Bashford 2004: 4). Even as Patnaik (in Ama Deha) was describing the function of body parts and established an analogy between the body and the machine, he showed his progressive side. He dispelled the myth of the “intact hymen” as essential proof of virginity by pointing out various reasons that can lead to the rupture of this membranous tissue (1940: 115). By delinking the hymen from morality, Patnaik helped challenge the patriarchal culture of suspicion of women. This candid discussion of the functions of the generative organs and the pleasure principle involved in their stimulus made Patnaik a man who was ahead of his times. However, toward the end, his scientific account of the body and anatomy sought to find justification in God’s grand design whose leela (divine play) defies human comprehension. Legitimation of modernity through religious metaphors in turn lends legitimacy to religion. We have to understand the in-betweenness of the author’s message to seek validation in both science and religion, Western modernity and Indian tradition. In Patnaik (1940), one recognizes the translatability of ideas associated with modernity can only be through the master code of religion. Patnaik’s Bisuchika (1929) identified cholera as the most infectious disease that left a trail of death and is equated with Kala [terrible devastation]. Its deadly power became manifest in places where treatment was not available and where people were ignorant of basic hygiene (Patnaik 1929: 1). Patnaik asserted that ignorance lied at the root of loss of lives caused by cholera. The author informed the reader that the disease was mentioned in ancient medical treatises written by Charaka (Indian physician of c. second century BCE) and Shusruta (Indian surgeon of c. sixth century BCE). He also referred to the incidence of this disease in countries like China and Iran, thereby linking it with specific geographies and delinking it from divine providence (2). This should not lead us

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to believe that he ruled out the operation of divine providence altogether for he also expressed gratitude to the Almighty for protecting people through the immune system (5). Describing people as ignorant, the author tried to shape a new type of subjectivity based on reason and science. In referring to Koch and Rogers, Patnaik made an effort to link the health of Odisha not just to that of India, but also to a broader global context where Asian diseases were cured through Western science. In the same breath, he reiterated in the concluding section of the book that life and death were but aspects of the eternal leela of God: “Recovery from an ailment depends entirely on God’s will. The cycle of life and death will continue forever. We are mere mortals and are utterly helpless before the power of the Almighty” (118). Even as scientific books on health and hygiene got mediated by cultural values and were legitimated by the latter, there was no dearth of nonscientific texts leading the discourse in the opposite direction. The latter took recourse to everyday practices as prescribed in shastras (ancient treatises) and by conventions. Failure to recognize their role in shaping and fashioning an Odia hygienic imaginary would limit our understanding of the health discourse. For example, Gobind Rath’s booklet Achara Siksha (Book of Everyday Practices) (1910) prescribed ways of conducting oneself throughout the day and on specific occasions. Though written in Odia, the booklet comprised mostly translations of Sanskrit verses collected from various sources. While making “unscientific” claims about ways of brushing teeth (Rath 1910: 1–2) or eating food (5–9), it also had sections that emphasized hygiene and cleanliness. Texts such as these were founded on indigenous value systems and displayed an awareness of hygiene beyond the western discourse on health. This implies the existence of the knowledge concerning health and hygiene long before the West came to promote it; one could call it a form of ancient modernity that was anticipated in Vedic times. Similarly, Brajabandhu Tripathy Sharma’s voluminous book Dravya Guna Kalpadruma (Attributes of Materials) (1926) featured on its cover an image of Dhanvanatri, the celestial physician. Though baidyas practiced this ancient medicinal knowledge, in the early twentieth century it started getting systematized as a scientific body of knowledge and was professionalized. That makes Berger propose that Ayurveda was neither helpless against a marauding biomedicine nor was it a stable carrier of the authentic Indian-ness (2013: 4). Shyamsundar Gantayat’s Bala Tantra O Bala Raksha Chikitsa (A Book on Children’s Health) (1929) is presented as translations of older Sanskrit texts. The book clearly situated Odisha in the sacred geography of India and its medicinal traditions. It begins with an invocation to Dhanvantari and each page of the book carries original Sanskrit verses drawn from multiple sources followed by their Odia translation. It goes on to pay homage to other gods and gurus, thereby placing the text as the inheritor of their wisdom. The book reiterated the customary belief that illnesses were caused by the curse or displeasure of a goddess. Treatments suggested included mostly prayers to the goddess and animal sacrifice rather than any medical cure. The author drew upon tantric texts and prescribed rituals involving offering of meat. Some prescriptions resemble tutka tutki (herbalism) and also elements of jhad phunk (exorcism). Arnold refers to an instance where science and faith are integrated: “O’Malley, describing variolation in Orissa at the turn of the century, explained how the inoculator began with “a solemn offering” to Goddess Sitala and performed puja to the goddess” (Arnold 1993: 133). The doctor figure in S. Nayak’s Basanta Roga Pratikara (1929), in spite of his training in biomedicine, does not peremptorily dismiss indigenous cures and prescribes cleaning of the smallpox wounds with water in which neem leaves are boiled (11) or making the patient lie on a

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bed of neem leaves (12). Therefore, the image of the doctor presented here is of someone who finds space for indigenous methods of treatment followed by people for generations, one who is aware of local plants and their medicinal attributes. When prodded by Hari babu to speak on Ayurvedic practitioners or deshiya kabirajs, the doctor concedes, saying, “Benefits also accrue from indigenous medicines prescribed by kabirajs. Areas where doctors trained in modern scientific methods are not available, patients may take recourse to indigenous medicines for these have been found effective by reputed kabirajs” (13). There are instances of people prescribing indigenous cures even when they had received no formal training in Ayurveda but had acquired some knowledge from their ancestors. In Bibidha Bisha Chikitsa (2014), Nilamani Bidyaratna prescribes various healing potions by drawing upon local practices and Sanskrit texts for neutralizing the effects of poison, which were undoubtedly used but most were not based on any proven scientific tests. The popularity of scientific books obviously did not completely erase the culture of scriptural guidance. The coevality of such contradictory expressions was typical of Odia experience that knew the merits of hygiene but did not see it as negating Odia culture. Although the imaginaries of scriptural and scientific texts conflicted with each other at one level, in everyday practices of Odisha they both got mixed up and mediated each other. Scientification and Westernization of everyday vocabulary in terms of health can be considered as only one of the facets of early-twentieth-century Odisha. However, this was complicated by experiential knowledge of health as well as transmission of such knowledge over generations. Baidyanath Sharma’s Anubhuti Chikitsa (Remedies Based on My Experience as a Baidya) (1934) is an authoritative manual for both practicing baidyas and general public. The author came from a family of illustrious baidyas and benefited from the knowledge of indigenous medicine received from his ancestors (1). It may be noted here that baidyas (also called kabirajs) studied texts on Ayurveda but supplemented these with knowledge of local herbs and plants. The author was a practicing kabiraj and held the title of Baidya Bhushana and perhaps ran a medicine store (1). The book begins with a declaration that the Ayurvedic system of medicine has been benefiting humans since time immemorial (1). Thus, the author proudly locates himself in this narrative of continuity and expresses his indebtedness to his ancestors for bequeathing the knowledge of Ayurveda upon him. He adds that he has supplemented this knowledge through the experience he had acquired over twenty-five years. In the first part, the book describes various common diseases, and the second part elaborates on the subject of preparation of healing potions. After describing a disease, the author refers to potions prescribed by various classical texts on medicine (2). Sharma’s book ran into multiple editions, which indicates its popularity. Taking pride in one’s ancestry often gets combined with the desire to get one’s work endorsed by people in positions of authority. This practice is continued in Swasthya Bijnana O Niti Bara (Daily Dozen or Twelve Exercises) by Radhashyam Das (1932). In his Foreword, IES S. C. Tripathi calls the book “an up-to-date treatise on health culture in” Odisha (Das 1932: i), hopes that it will be of “immense help to people,” and “recommend[s]‌this book to the young people” (ii). In the preface, Das informs the readers that scientific studies of health in Odia are conspicuous by their absence (x). Unlike some other texts discussed in this chapter, Ama Deha (1940), for example, that constructed an acultural body divorced from the ecosystem in which it is embedded, Das clearly creates a bioregional body that is rooted in its environment. He mentions how his exercise regimen has become popular in Bengal, Bihar, and Madras. This popularity is attributed to his intimate understanding of “our climate, customs, rites and food habit” (x). Interestingly, this book

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is supposed to have found favor with people outside the region he focusses upon. While describing the body in “universally-accepted” physiological terms as a machine, Das, at the same time, tends to emphasize the distinctiveness of the Odia body. In his foreword to Padma Charan Patnaik’s Odiara Khadya O Swasthya (Food Habits of Odias and Their Health) (1944), Godabarish Mishra (former Finance and Education Minister, Govt. of Odisha) makes the following observation on the credentials of the author: “I know that the author is an expert neither on food nor on health and I hope the author will not contradict me when I say this. However, when one finishes reading this book one is utterly convinced that it is written by a genuine expert” (P. C. Patnaik 1944: i). He also commends the author for explaining everything with the authority of a scientist with evidence from scriptures (i). Later he laments educated people losing respect for various customs and rites in their attempt to eradicate superstitions (i). Texts like these demonstrate how a counter-scientific impulse also appropriated science. Neglect and rejection of salutary traditional practices are held responsible for the deterioration of Odia health. In the same breath, the author lauds spice-less and half-boiled food habits of Westerners that has proved conducive to good health. P. C. Patnaik adds that in his effort to find out about inexpensive and wholesome food, he consulted books written in English and applied the recommendations on himself. This indicates that the author was receptive to Western ideas of health and was not very particular (rigid) about the cultural specificity of Odia body. He goes on to add that recent Western ideas about health are not far removed from those implicit in indigenous fasting rituals (1). P. C. Patnaik lays heavy emphasis on the scientificity of traditional Odia culinary practices. He refers to the practice of not peeling vegetables at the Jagannath Temple to claim that people were aware of the health benefits of vegetable peels in which Western scientists have recently found the presence of protein (17). Similarly, while pointing out the virtues of butter, he refers to Lord Krishna’s playful mischief. While talking about the presence of vitamin B in rice husk and its use in worshipping Lakshmi, he proudly claims that what Western scientists came to discover only thirty years back was known to Odias at least three thousand years ago (41). He suggests ways of regaining lost glory through the adoption of scientific food habits that were prevalent earlier. Interestingly, the author also takes care to approvingly cite opinions of Lord Linlithgow and Winston Churchill regarding the importance of consumption of milk (181) and reverentially celebrates Queen Victoria as Mahalakshmi of Britain (225). Therefore, in Patnaik’s view, it is not modernity that poses a threat to Odia culture but the vulgar versions of it that can be dealt with through traditional Odia practices. Such an attempt has recently been made by Baba Ramdev, who ingeniously invokes tradition and organicity as a marketing strategy while promoting his products (Tripathy 2019: 418). Madhuri Sharma recognizes the connection between organic products and a sense of cultural nationalism: “The incorporation of Sanskrit words like sanjeevan-tattava was designed to instil a sense of superiority, in consumers of a product manufactured by a ‘superior’ race” (2009: 216). If the body was the site of colonial intervention, it was also a site of both national/local resistance for both the educated and the unlettered. Arnold alludes to this resistance when he explains why Brahmans were employed as inoculators in the nineteenth century (Arnold 1993: 128). Though invocation of colonialism and layering it with medicine and science has its merits, scholars like Arnold tended to overlook indigenous scientific traditions which were seen as conducive to living a good life. There was a contrarian impulse at work which led many to see vaccines as anti-swaraj and against the idea of Ram Rajya, echoing Gandhi (Khan 2006: 2792). For Gandhi, doctors

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and hospitals symbolized civilizational decay and they ignored the importance of the soul (2793). Kanagarathinam also observes that in the early decades of the twentieth century, Western science and medicine were challenged by intelligentsia: “Indians accepted British laws without much fuss, but not their medicine … The discourse between western and indigenous medicines was not mediated only by the political economy but also by race, culture, nationalism, religious feelings and other factors” (2006: 184). Even within India, there was tension between different systems of knowledge; in another context medicinal systems could create a distinctive ethnic body as in the case of Sidhhas in Tamil Nadu. As Weiss has shown, Siddha baidyas feared that their practices would be appropriated by Ayurveda in the name of a unified India; they, therefore, emphasized the singularity of the Siddha tradition of medicine (2008: 77). Ramakrishna Mahapatra’s Swasthya Bijnana (The Science of Health Care) (1930) calls attention to the marketability of health care in the early twentieth century. It deals with topics such as healthy diet, clothing and bedding, ideal accommodation, diseases and their prevention, treatments for various accidents, and addiction to intoxicants. The author discusses the benefits of clean and fresh air as well as adequate sunlight access to which renders wandering sadhus fit and energetic (Mahapatra 1930: 13). He also strongly recommends the avoidance of alcohol and other intoxicants for a sane and meaningful life. He sees drinking alcohol as part of Western lifestyle and argues this is why Western-educated Indians imagine consuming alcohol as an essential to being educated (53). He cites from Hindu scriptures that prohibit drinking alcohol even as he makes use of the opinions of Western doctors to warn against its evil influence (59). Radhashyam Das refers to Indian sages and how they perfected breathing techniques that serve as a bulwark against TB (1932: 36). While talking about the virtues of vegetarianism, he argues Westerners suffer from various joint problems due to their nonvegetarian habit (58) and advises readers to remember God while going to bed (66). Toward the end, he avers that no other system of exercise is as good as the Indian one as it ensures the harmony of physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of human life (71).

CONCLUSION Colonization of India involved a major intervention in the field of health care and introduced modern methods of combating diseases based on new scientific discoveries. In some instances, the colonized resisted these health practices as they saw it as alien and invasive, and as a threat to long-established and cherished values and traditions. It is customary to approach colonial health interventions and native responses to these in terms of a rather simplistic and static tradition/ modernity binary. However, a reading of a range of Odia texts on health care published in the first half of the twentieth century reveals multilayered and energetic negotiations between the two supposedly antagonistic knowledge systems that were themselves not monolithic. While acknowledging the advantages of Western modes of keeping a body healthy, the authors of these books and booklets did not jettison prescriptions based on indigenous knowledge systems. The body, in these texts, is simultaneously presented as a machine and a seat of divinity. The ecosystem in which the Odia body is intimately located is never lost sight of while absorbing lessons about human anatomy offered by Western physiological sciences. It may be emphasized that the texts discussed in this chapter are not chronologically arranged for they are not to be viewed as evolutionary. They embody interlocking and conflicting approaches to body and hygiene, in which one should not look for an understanding of the same in linear terms. Instead, an attempt has been made to dovetail

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texts written decades apart from each other. These reveal a vibrant and open society that knew how to experience and understand body in different ways.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We acknowledge our indebtedness to Jatindra Kumar Nayak for his valuable comments. We have benefited from the rich archival resources available in the website https://odia​bibh​aba.in, which is hosted by Srujanika.

REFERENCES Apparao, M. V. (1948), Malaria Patha, trans. Surya Narayan Acharya, Berhampur: Sarada Press. Arnold, D. (1993), Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bashford, A. (2004), Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berger, R. (2008), “Ayurveda and the Making of the Urban Middle class in North India, 1900–1945,” in D. Wujastyk and F. M. Smith (eds.), Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms, 101–15, Albany: State University of New York Press. Berger, R. (2013), Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900–1955, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bidyaratna, N. (1914), Bibidha Bisha Chikitsa, Cuttack: Arunodoy Press. Das, R. (1932), Swasthya Bijnana O Niti Bara, other details not known. Gantayat, S. (1929), Bala Tantra O Bala Raksha Chikitsha, Berhampur: Asha Press. Harrison, M., and B. Pati. (2009), “Social History of Health and Medicine: Colonial India,” in B. Pati and M. Harrison (eds.), The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India, 1–14, London: Routledge. Kanagarathinam, D. V. (2006), “Indigenous and Western Medicines in Colonial South India: Nature of Discourses and Impact,” Indian Journal of History of Science, 53 (2): 182–204. Khan, S. (2006), “Systems of Medicine and Nationalist Discourse in India,” Social Science and Medicine, 62: 2786–97. Mahapatra, R. (1930), Swasthya Bijnana, Berhampore: The Students’ Store. Mukharji, P. B. (2009a), Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, London: Anthem Press. Mukharji, P. B. (2009b), “Pharmacology, ‘Indigenous Knowledge’, Nationalism: A Few Words from the Epitaph of Subaltern Science,” in B. Pati and M. Harrison (eds.), The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India, 195–212, London: Routledge. Nayak, S. (1927), Olautha Pratikar, Balasore: Primary Education Committee. Nayak, S. (1929), Basanta Roga Pratikar, Balasore: Primary Education Committee. Panda, L. N. (1932), Byayam Siksha Padhhati, Berhampur: Sarada Press. Pati, B., and C. P. Nanda (2009), “The Leprosy Patient and Society: Colonial Orissa, 1870s–1940s,” in B. Pati and M. Harrison (eds.), The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India, 113–28, London: Routledge. Patnaik, B. (1929), Bisuchika: A Treatise on Cholera, Cuttack: Utkal Sahitya Press. Patnaik, B. (1940), Ama Deha, Cuttack: Utkal Sahitya Press. Patnaik, P. C. (1944), Odiara Khadya O Swasthya, other details not known.

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Pattanayak, G. (1943), Malaria, Cuttack: Saraswata Press. Pattanayak, G. (1944), Jatiya Khadya, Cuttack: Saraswata Press. Prakash, G. (1999), Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rath, G. (1910), Achara Siksha, Cuttack: Mukur Press. Sharma, B. (1934), Anubhuti Chikitsa, Berhampur: Sharada Press. Sharma, B. T. (1979), Dravyaguna Kalpadruma, Bhanja Nagar: Jibanabandhu Oushadhalaya. Sharma, M. (2009), “Creating a Consumer: Exploring Medical Advertisements in Colonial India,” in B. Pati and M. Harrison (eds.), The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India, 213–28, London: Routledge. Smith, F. M., and D. Wujastyk (2008), “Introduction,” in D. Wujastyk and F. M. Smith (eds.), Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms, 1–28, Albany: State University of New York Press. Tripathy, J. (2019), “Consuming Indigeneity: Baba Ramdev, Patanjali Ayurveda and the Swadeshi Project of Development,” Journal of Developing Societies, 35 (3): 412–30. Weiss, R. S. (2008), “Divorcing Ayurveda: Siddha Medicine and the Quest for Uniqueness,” in D. Wujastyk and F. M. Smith (eds.), Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms, 77–99, Albany: State University of New York Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

(Un)sustainable Ecology: Modern and Indigenous Approaches to Health Care in Amazônia MARCOS COLÓN

Throughout my recent journeys into the Amazon, one question has captured my attention: What has been done to direct our attention to and help preserve and understand indigenous people during the process of caring for and healing each individual and community? I have observed that the vulnerability of recently contacted indigenous peoples is integrated with their natural environment, legal territory, and health. This vulnerability manifests itself through inconsistent medical care, the reduction of territory, and threats to their culture and way of life. Recent governmental actions in Brazil have directly affected the relationship between health and indigenous land, leaving worrisome questions regarding the future of indigenous communities. The Brazilian State’s long-standing efforts to silence and marginalize indigenous voices have been sharpened by the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, it is necessary to plead for reparations for the lives lost and to blunt neoliberal predatory practices suffered by indigenous peoples, the forest, and its nonhuman inhabitants. In my travels and dialogue with Dr. Erik Jennings Simões1 (MD), I have found that it is necessary to have medical practices that are not predetermined but which are adapted to the needs of the individual, with the community, and with the ecology of the planet. In March 2018, when we flew together over the Zo’é’s Indigenous Land, Dr. Jennings

Dr. Jennings is currently a consultant to the Ministry of Health for health matters involving isolated indigenous peoples of recent contact. In addition, he coordinates the medical residency program in neurosurgery at the State University of Pará. He was the founder of the first public service of neurosurgery in the interior of the Brazilian Amazon. For over twenty years, has been operated on patients with specific neurological diseases contracted in the forest, such as intracranial hematoma caused by snake bite, head trauma by falling hedgehog nuts, and accidents involving encounters with trees and wildlife. He was appointed health coordinator of the Zo’é people, an indigenous, recently contacted tribe of the Amazon rain forest. He divides his time between the neurological service of the municipal hospital of the city of Santarém and a small hospital in the middle of the forest, under his direction, where he cares for the indigenous Zo’é people. To travel from the city to the Zo’é land, he became a private pilot fifteen years ago, often using his own single-engine airplane. He is an environmental activist and defender of the rights and culture of indigenous peoples. 1

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clarified that one of his main goals for the Zo’é people was to bring health care to the forest and not to bring indigenous people to the city, as is common practice with other indigenous communities in Brazil. This became what we now call the Zo’é Healthcare Model (ZHM). This chapter addresses the health of indigenous people of the Amazon region of Brazil based on my interactions with the recently contacted Zo’é indigenous people in the West of Pará State, Brazil. In this chapter, I will address the relationships and dynamics of medical actions for recently contacted indigenous populations in the Amazon region of Brazil. My focus will be on the threats to these communities’ ways of life and death, their concepts of diseases, how they treat the body and spirit, and how they integrate nature into their relationships with health and diseases. The concept of “culturality” I propose in this chapter does not separate knowledge from culture and the natural environment. On the contrary, my concept, which develops from the worldview of the Zo’é community, suggests a deeply integrated ecological experience of life, intelligence, and culture.

THE AMAZONIA UNSEEN I left Tallahassee, Florida, on March 12, 2020, for a research trip to Iquitos, Peru. When I left, coronavirus was already making headlines around the world, but I decided to go, cautiously. My goal was to finish the documentary that I am making with several local poets about environmental issues in the Amazon. However, a turn of events forced me into situations that provided me with a clearer picture of a bigger challenge that we currently face as a species. On Sunday, March 15, at around 8:00 p.m., the now former president of Peru, Martin Vizcarra, declared a state of emergency and closed all borders. He gave tourists less than twenty-four hours to leave the country. Many foreigners were unable to find a way out and were stranded, without the slightest idea of when they may be given permission to leave. On Monday, March 16, I tried to catch a flight to the small Peruvian town of Caballococha, in order to continue my journey onward from there to Tabatinga, Brazil. Due to poor weather, the flight was canceled. I decided to stay in Iquitos and, using my Brazilian passport, contacted the Brazilian Consulate to negotiate my departure with the local authorities. I was to embark on a cargo boat headed for the town of Tabatinga, situated near Brazil’s common border with Colombia and Peru. We spent four days traveling through the lower Amazon River. The boat (a private initiative) was loaded with four tons of food supplies tha were to be distributed to villages along the way. We stopped in the small communities of Pebas, Nuevo Pebas, Cochiquinas, Alto Monte, San Isidro, San Pablo, Caballococha, and Santa Rosa. The Bora, Huitoto, Tikuna, and other ethnic groups inhabit these riverine communities. I witnessed an Amazon that had previously been invisible to me, and not only seeing but what I call “slow seeing” (Colón 2020: 287). I could not help but notice, during all of these stops, how these Amazonian villages had changed and how these changes were affecting their livelihoods, culture, way of life, and interactions. The riparian communities had become almost entirely dependent on supplies arriving via cargo boats. The boats provide everything, from rice, beans, flour, eggs, water, soft drinks, and all kinds of fruits and vegetables to building materials, tiles, furniture, and clothes. These river-dwelling Portuguese or Spanish speakers are a marginalized indigenous and nonindigenous, traditional people, of mixed (indigenous Amazonian/European/African) descent. Each cargo boat is greeted by the riverine communities as an abundant supply of everything that the forest can no longer provide to them. One of the captains said to me, “I’ve been doing this for

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30 years and these villages aren’t what they used to be. Now you see the river, but that’s it; there aren’t any fish.” He continued, “People here don’t like farming anymore; they are increasingly dependent on the cargo boat.” As Tregidgo, Barlow, Pompeu and Parry explain in “Tough Fishing and Severe Seasonal Food Insecurity in Amazonian Flooded Forests,” the food seasonality affects the food security of riparian communities living in and around seasonally inundated floodplain forests, which according to the authors indicate that food security can be determined by socioeconomic factors (Tregidgo et al. 2020: 469). Seasonality changes the demographic profile of the local population, causing migration away from settlements. Moreover, the situation of refugees, from both Venezuela and Haiti, and of displaced populations from various parts of the Amazon, is aggravated by Covid-19 (Randell 2017: 548–73). Changes in the way of life of traditional populations have made them dependent on goods from the big cities, which arrive in weekly shipments to communities via the river, meaning that the imposition of controls on that movement could become catastrophic. Market relations in the deep Amazon, a region with little external influence, explain the dependence on external goods. These relations restrict riverine communities’ traditional hunting, gathering, and production activities to family agriculture for the benefit of agronomists. As Shanna Hanbury (2020) puts it, “cashpoor riverine households in the Brazilian Amazon—once able to live sustainably from hunting and fishing—are going hungry as they struggle to catch enough fish to feed their families during the high water season that runs yearly from roughly April to September.” Riverine communities of the upper Amazon depend on access to supply boats because they are unable to produce their own food. Moreover, they do not have access to land ownership or the means for productive agriculture and therefore do not use paper money. Only the most isolated Indian fishing communities are able to maintain their subsistence way of life. The practice of gathering food has also been affected by controls on land use. Hanbury points to the fact that hunger is intensifying due to many interacting factors: as Covid-19 assails the Amazon, Jair Bolsonaro’s government shreds the once effective social welfare programs and cheerleads forest destruction, and climate change-driven extreme floods and droughts are on the upswing (Hanbury 2020). In the face of the current coronavirus pandemic, traditional Amazonian populations demand special attention. It is well known that there are seasonal shortages of regional staples from the land. Products like eggs, turtles, watermelons, and beach beans do better when the waters recede. International migration of political refugees and those fleeing catastrophes alter traditional riverine relations with the introduction of other nutritional needs and eating habits. As Hanbury alerts us, due to an insufficient quantity of fish during the flood season, many riverine families are forced to make a tough choice: travel by boat to nearby cities to restock food supplies, putting their lives at risk from the Covid-19 pandemic that has already claimed more than 7,500 lives in the nine states comprising Legal Amazonia, or face hunger at home (Hanbury 2020). The displacement of landless peoples from the South and Southwest to the Amazon reinforces this change: these populations do not know how to plant and harvest crops in the forest unless it has previously been cleared and burned. Arriving in Brazil, I witnessed a genocide in progress against the indigenous communities. As Menton, Milanez, Souza and Cruz describe, “the indigenous movement has decried this ‘politics of extermination’—or, genocide,” explaining that it is essential to highlight that in addition to mass killings, the term “genocide” also applies to cases where we see a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at “the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups and thus

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both physical and cultural destruction, and attacks on indigenous territories, can be genocidal” (2020: 138). In the case of Brazil, the indigenous peoples also “face ‘genocide by omission’ or ‘genocide by attrition’,” when a group is stripped of its human rights and faces “deprivation of conditions essential for maintaining health, thereby producing mass death” (Fein 1997: 10). In the subsequent months, I became fully aware that without access to proper health care, the forest and its peoples, various indigenous ethnicities already brutally traumatized by the territorial invasions by criminals who profit from their destruction, are once again facing the risk of genocide. As Felipe Milanez reminds us, “the coronavirus pandemic has come during a campaign that had already begun to open indigenous territories to conquest for extractive economies, such as agribusiness and mining, by passing different bills to weaken legal protection of indigenous lands” (2020: 3). It is obvious to me that violent incursions into indigenous territories, entailing massive and perhaps enduring disruptions of the delicate network of biological, ecological, economic, and cultural relations, human and nonhuman, may result in the annihilation of the peoples of the forest and riparian communities. It is not rhetoric, or an exaggeration, to name what the indigenous movement has been calling a “politics of extermination”: a genocide, adds Milanez, to conclude that “as previous experience demonstrates: virus, bacteria and bacilli have been mobilized to open new lands” (2020: 2). And Darcy Ribeiro reminds us of “The Weapons of Conquest”: appetites and ideas that were more efficient equipment for action on nature, bacilli, and viruses, especially viruses (Milanez 2020: 2; Ribeiro 1970: 272). The increasingly flagrant disregard for the health of the Amazonian population exemplifies the spurious relations between the federal government and the North of Brazil, which is the most affected part of the country, relatively speaking. Aparecida Vilaça states, What is clear to all is that the federal government, in all areas—health, education, territories—is aligned to effect this genocidal policy with indigenous people, to silence the voice of indigenous peoples, so that they will not have strength to continue the resistance that they have achieved throughout our history. They want to end our stories, our memories, with our elders. (Vilaça 2020: 12) To make the situation worse, there is also the problem of underreporting the state and degree of vulnerability of local indigenous communities facing the coronavirus. The Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), which keeps a count independently of the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health (SESAI), states that up to January 20, a total of 927 deaths from Covid-19 and 46,190 confirmed cases of the disease have been recorded among native peoples in the region. SESAI officially records 530 deaths and 40,458 infections for the same period. The disturbingly scarce amount of information that arrives from other indigenous villages in the Amazon indicates that medical treatment of the indigenous communities is close to collapse. The spread of contagion ravaging rural communities has led to the spread of Covid-19 to the Javari Valley, despite the warnings of indigenous leaders. It is the region with the highest density of isolated communities on the planet, with more than two thousand square kilometers and over six thousand inhabitants, most of whom live in voluntary isolation. As the author of The Unconquered mentioned, citing Sydney Possuelo, a Brazilian Indian rights activist, “the government’s failure to provide Brazil’s Indians with adequate health care was a source of never-ending outrage. To begin with, there were the massive die-offs that inevitably followed exposure to the white man’s pathogens. That was the most important reason for Possuelo no-contact policy” (Wallace 2011: 130). And

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Vilaça later complemented, “their isolation is complex and varied, ranging from successful cases of entire peoples who have opted for self-isolation and live today in legally protected territories, to small remnants of people brutally injured by whites, either [directly] by weapons or [indirectly] by diseases brought by them” (Vilaça 2020: 11). Efforts on the part of the COIAB to protect indigenous communities and advocate for their rights, as well as various grassroots indigenous organizations, such as the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), scientific institutions like the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, and Brazilian universities, are not enough. It is also necessary to formulate guidelines for an indigenous health care policy that reclassifies the material conditions of the health districts and their relations with the health care agencies of the states, municipalities, and the federal government. All levels of government should be engaged in the protection of indigenous lives, as well as those of health care personnel treating these populations. What I predicted and later confirmed is the urgent need to rethink indigenous health care practices so as to consider the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts of the forest people. They are on the frontline, and, by being “invaded and unprotected, indigenous people also suffer the consequences of the dismantling of the Brazilian public health system, which has hit indigenous health directly” (Vilaça 2020: 19). I would argue that it is important for modern medicine to focus on community, rather than individual, health care. Some guidelines to be considered include direct health care policies and centers for the resolution of health problems within indigenous territories themselves as in the ZHM. Nevertheless, the challenge to be confronted still is the search for medical assistance in urban centers, especially for those recently contacted. When this happens, indigenous people share the same physical space with white people and receive the same level of medical attention, though the ethnic and cultural idiosyncrasies of each community are not taken into account. The ZHM, as we will demonstrate, shows us the importance of maintaining physical and human structure in the indigenous area itself, providing health care in their own territory, even if this involves the need for complex medical procedures. What can the ZHM teach us? What is the importance of the ZHM in times of Covid-19 for the Amazon and its indigenous peoples?

THE ZO’É PEOPLE The Zo’é people live in the area between the Cuminapanema and Erepecuru rivers, located in the northwest of the Brazilian state of Pará, in the Amazon region.2 This Tupi-Guarani-speaking group first came into contact with outsiders in the mid-1980s. The area was officially recognized as the Zo’é Indigenous Territory in 2009 and covers 668.5 thousand hectares according to the government’s Indian affairs department, FUNAI. The territory is also known as the Cuminapanema Ethno-Environmental Front, created in 2011 (Ordinance Nº 1816/PRES/, December 30, 2011) (Figure 23.1).

Located in the municipality of Óbidos, in the Lower Amazon mesoregion, bordering the Republic of Suriname and the municipality of Almeirim to the north, the municipalities of Santarém and Juruti to the south, the municipality of Alenquer to the east, and the municipality of Oriximiná to the west. The territory lies between where the West Paru or Cuminã River meets the left bank of the Urucuriana River and tributaries of the right bank of the Cuminapanema River. 2

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FIGURE 23.1  Zo’é Indigenous Land Map, c. 2021, Marcos Colón.

Currently the Zo’é population is 318 individuals (November 2020), made up predominantly of young people distributed in fourteen permanent villages and about fifty temporary villages, according to data from SESAI of the Ministry of Health of Brazil. A 2020 census carried out by the team of Dr. Erik Jennings Simões has the following age group and gender breakdown of the Zo’é population (Figure 23.2): The Zo’é live by hunting, fishing, gathering, and use the slash-and-burn method of agriculture (coivara) to clear the land and fertilize it with ashes. Zo’é’s favourite game meats are primates and wild pigs, which are smoked and roasted on a wooden grill called “moquém” and then boiled. They also collect honey, nuts, and fruits. In the fields, they plant different types of tuber, such as manioc (Manihot esculenta), sweet potatoes (Ipomoea potatoes) and yams (Dioscorea sp.). They also plant papaya, bananas, cotton, and annatto. They are seminomadic and hunt with bows and arrows. Most Zo’é do not wear clothing, speak their own language (some young people speak Portuguese), and have a salt and sugar-free diet. The word “Zo’é” means “we.” The Zo’é language belongs to subbranch VIII of the TupiGuarani linguistic family, and they use this term to distinguish themselves from the kirahis, the nonindigenous (Bindá 2001: 4). The Zo’é is considered to be a recently contacted group, despite the fact that FUNAI has been aware of its existence since the early 1970s, when it surveyed the isolated groups on the route of the planned federal Northern Perimeter Highway (BR-210),

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The Zo'é Census

50-54 years (10) 55-59 3% years (2) 60 years + (19) 45-49 years (12) 1% 6% 4% 40-44 years (16) 5% 0-4 years (58) 18%

35-39 years (20) 6%

5-9 years (31) 10%

30-34 years (13) 4%

10-14 years (41) 13%

25-29 years (19) 6%

20-24 years (44) 14%

15-19 years (31) 10%

FIGURE 23.2  Zo’é Census, c. 2021, Marcos Colón (based on information provided by Dr. Erik L Jennings Simões, coordinator of the Zo’é Team).

designed to promote economic development in the Brazilian Amazon. Construction started during the country’s military dictatorship (1964–85) but remains unfinished, with asphalted stretches only in the states of Roraima and Amapá. According to the 2014 report by the National Truth Commission (CNV), this policy and others are neither sporadic nor accidental but flow directly from strategic considerations by the Brazilian State. Four large construction projects in the Amazon region, undertaken during the military period, caused an enormous number of deaths among the indigenous people. The CNV report estimates that at least 8,350 indigenous people were killed during the period investigated as a direct result of the actions or omissions of government agents. The real number is likely to be much higher as the CNV estimate only includes cases documented in the report. The CNV was created by Act 12.528 in 2011 to investigate crimes such as deaths and disappearances committed by state agents during the military dictatorship and to preserve historical memory (Weichert 2014: 120). In the case of the Zo’é, the first attempts to contact this ethnic group were made in 1985 by Christian missionaries from the New Tribes Mission (NTM), an evangelical entity created in the United States and officially founded in Brazil in 1953 (Silva 2016: 43). Definitive contact with the group took place in the second half of the decade. In 1987, the missionaries established the “Esperança” base on Zo’é territory and took control of relations between the Zo’é and the outside world until FUNAI took over in 1991. It was only in the 1990s that FUNAI stepped in to guarantee the protection of the Zo’é people, including against external contacts, which are very harmful to the Zo’é. It is evident that during the period of harassment, many Zo’é died because of their vulnerability to the diseases imported by foreign individuals. The anthropologist Dominique Gallois exposed this in the article “The Indians in the New Tribes of Brazil Mission,” published in 1995. The article included excerpts

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from missionary letters and newsletters and maintained that anthropologists have an ethical duty to defend indigenous cultures and carefully analyse interaction. It criticized the introduction of Christianity, the destruction of native culture, and the transmission of diseases brought in by these missions. In October 1991, the missionaries were expelled from the territory in one of the first actions by indigenous peoples expert Possuelo, who founded and led FUNAI’s Isolated Indians Department, CGIIRC (Milanez 2015: 233).

THE ZO’É HEALTHCARE MODEL Zo’é accounts of the first contacts with kirahis say there were many deaths from malaria, flu, and diarrhoea, as narrated by Possuelo in “Memórias Sertanistas”: The first time I went to the Esperança base, I was welcomed by the missionaries, they were kind. But I could see there was a health emergency. The health situation was very bad. They were weak, because they had little food. It was so bad that I came back right away. The Indians had the flu, but at that time it was not an epidemic. There were many cases of snake bites, especially from surucucu. There were cases of diarrhoea and a lot of malaria. (Milanez 2015: 233) Created and led by Possuelo, the CGIIRC invested in services for the Cuminapanema EthnoEnvironmental Front and, for the first time in the history of Brazilian indigenous health care, made it possible for a group to benefit from “prompt” delivery of health care procedures “within the indigenous territory.” As of 1991, Possuelo, now president of FUNAI, made the first attempts to implement a recent contact policy aimed at guaranteeing the physical and psychological protection of the Zo’é and other peoples. In addition to seeking to demarcate the territory of the ethnic groups, the agency aimed to improve health care for indigenous peoples. Possuelo states, “When I became FUNAI president, I wondered what I should do.” He says he decided to “prioritize land and health,” and concludes, “Health and land were the key issues: we demarcated as much land as possible, but I couldn’t do much about healthcare” (Milanez 2015: 236). In 1999, the National Health Foundation (FUNASA), an agency of the Ministry of Health, became responsible for Zo’é health care, in association with the Unified Health System (SUS). It aimed to establish and implement prevention, health care, and health promotion services for indigenous people. Diseases common among Zo’é people were also recorded in this period, although there was still no attention given to epidemiological surveillance—comprising stages from notification to investigation. In 2005, several renowned professionals from different medical specialties were already providing their health care expertise on a voluntary basis for the Zo’é indigenous people, including performing highly complex surgeries on Indigenous Territory with complete success. An action plan was also devised to consolidate Zo’é health care policy; preserve the physical, psychological, and cultural integrity of these people; and ensure everything from treatment to epidemiological investigation, including prevention. From 2003 to 2010, the Santarem and Óbidos do Pará municipalities were responsible for the financial administration and management of the health team working in the Zo’é territory. It was only in 2010, with the creation of SESAI, part of the Ministry of Health, that the federal government took total responsibility for indigenous health, working through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and outsourcing human resources to implement the new government’s programme. One strategy

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was the creation of multidisciplinary indigenous health teams, consisting of a doctor, a dentist, two nurses, and two nursing technicians. With official support for the presence of a specialized team in the area, the Zo’é Health Program developed an appropriate method and plan to meet the specific needs of recently contacted groups. It was also very important in this context that professionals with knowledge of the Zo’é language and culture remained in the team. These people had a decade’s experience of working with the Zo’é and were highly respected by the indigenous people. According to João Lobato, head of the Cuminapanema Protection Front, a health care programme was consolidated between 1996 and 2011, guided by a concern to develop exemplary health services for the Zo’é people. The plan developed into what became known as the ZHM in 2003, with the arrival of Dr. Jennings in the region. At the time, he was the only neurosurgeon for 950,000 people. Today, after more than twenty years, the proportion is one per 300,000 inhabitants. The recommended average is one specialist per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Atlas: country resources for neurological disorders. Jennings narrates his arrival in the Zo’é Indigenous Territory in “Fallen tree and Lost Leaves” from his book, Paradô: Stories by a Neurosurgeon from the Amazon. This is my translation: Kusi, a Zo’é Indian, was in her small hut. It was night and the wood burning under her hammock warmed her and her two children, Apan and Namihit. Zo’é territory is more than three hundred meters above sea level. The forest is dense and at night the cold is intense. They do not have clothes or blankets to protect them. Fire protects them from both animals and the cold, and should be kept lit day and night. A storm formed and the noises of the rainforest mingled with the sound of falling water on the thatched roof. Thunder echoed in the bushes. Kusi’s little pet monkey sought shelter on her hammock. Apan and Namihit fed the fire. Suddenly, the noise of a big splintering tree was heard.

FIGURE 23.3  Dr. Jennings explaining digital X-ray results in the small hospital inside of the Zo’é territory. Photo: Zo’é Team.

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The sound of the crackly tree joined that of branches of other small trees taken by the larger one, all falling towards Kusi’s hut. Within seconds, Apan was dead and Kusi seriously injured. The giant tree fell right on them. Namihit escaped unhurt and could do nothing for his brother. He took care of his mother, who now had a large wound on her head. As soon as the storm ceased, other Indians from nearby longhouses came together to help the wounded Indian. They placed Kusi on a hammock and headed to the post of Funai. Others went into the forest to dig Apan’s grave. The next day, area administrator João Lobato called me to evaluate Kusi. We took a single-engine plane and after an hour of flying over lakes, rivers and dense forest, we reached Zo’é territory. She had a severe dent in her skull. The scalp had been cut and some head bones crushed on the right side. She was alive, but only because a small branch of the giant tree hit her. There was not much we could do out here. We needed to remove Kusi to the city and operate on her skull. A CT scan should be done. João and the Zo’é held a meeting, a Paradô, and made the decision to take the sick woman to the city. We boarded the 206 Cessna. Kusi lay in the back beside her son Namihit. Neither had been in a city. They’d lived in the forest and had never seen a car, a street, or entered a supermarket. They did not speak a word of Portuguese and their customs were completely different from the white city. Removing a Zo’é, even for medical treatment in order to save his or her life, is not simple. As we approached take-off, many Indians looked into the small aircraft and imagined how painful and difficult the trip would be. What would Kusi face? Would she come back alive? What would she eat? The looks were full of doubts and expectations. Before landing in Santarem, we put a dress on Kusi and dressed Namihit. We put shoes on his feet and he began to experience a series of sensations and situations that he had never experienced throughout his 18 years or, in that case, Kusi in her 56 years. The single-engine plane approached the runway and Namihit was attentive to everything. Leaving the airplane, Namihit looked back and observed a large Boeing airliner. He was impressed by its size and the amount of people who emerged from within. He couldn’t control himself and asked in Tupi: —What is the name of those white people? —I do not know - I replied. He looked at me in disappointment. Even without speaking, I understood his thoughts: How could I not know the name of the people of my “tribe”? During Kusi’s surgery, her skull was cleaned thoroughly, the membranes of the brain were rebuilt and treated. Part of the injured brain was removed and the bone fragments put together as a mosaic. The skull was closed again, and so was the scalp wound. At the end of the surgery the patient went to a ward where she was with another woman with a head operation. Her name was Fatima. —It was a tree that fell on her head?—Asked Namihit, referring to Fatima, who had been wounded by her husband with a machete. —But why did he do this to her?—He asked, unhappy. Any explanation was followed by a new question: —But why? Then I explained that her husband had been arrested. Next, a series of questions about the white prison. For him, there was no such possibility. How could anyone be so bad as to deserve a

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punishment to stay away from his wife, children, and relatives? Namihit was beginning to know of the true disease of the white man. On the second day after surgery, Kusi returned to their village. We flew back towards the Zo’é’s forest and placed her in a small office. Kusi was still taking medications and being closely watched after by Suely, a competent and dedicated nurse. The patient was among her people. Namihit looked at me and asked: How many whites are in prison there in the city? —Many—I answered. —Two? —More, much more than two. —Five? he asked, scared. —A lot more. —All this? he continued, showing his fingers and toes. —Much, much more! Namihit stopped for a bit, then looked at the forest around him: —As many prisoners as the leaves of all these trees? After my answer, he was never the same. Kusi died 2 years later, but not because of the injury in her skull anymore. She refused to eat, sad because of the loss of her son, Apan. (Simões 2015: 147–53) After the incident of the tree falling in the village, Dr. Jennings began to work directly in the Zo’é Indigenous Territory. Since 2003, he and a group composed of two nurses and two technicians assigned to SESAI have been serving an area of 668,500 hectares in the Brazilian Amazon. Dr. Jennings proposes a multidisciplinary management model that values the culture of the local people in community health planning. All actions are discussed to ensure they do not damage the Zo’é’s relationship with their environment and culture, and that they restrict the incidence of disease and suffering, both physical and psychological. According to the neurologist, one of the most harmful actions is to take a member of the Zo’é people to the city for medical assistance. When this happens, the indigenous people have to share the same physical space with whites and receive the standard treatment provided by contemporary medicine, which focuses on the individual and not on communities and cultures, a model that has proved unable to respond to the demands placed on it by society in the Covid-19 pandemic. As Possuelo states, “it is a shame” to use the professionals from “hospitals in the city, which are hospitals for whites, managed by whites, who despise the Indians” (Milanez 2015: 233). In contrast, the Zo’é Model aims to deal with as many problems as possible in the forest itself, avoiding exposure to the prejudice of nonindigenous people in the city and external epidemics. Other negative aspects of taking indigenous people to the city include the risks associated with the following: air and road transport to the health care unit; the high risk of hospital contamination, including the possibility of acquiring a disease that could be catastrophic if brought back to the Indigenous Territory; difficulty in adapting to the food, medication, physical, and social environment of hospitals; internal, social, family, cosmological, and psychological conflicts; conflicts between different indigenous ethnic groups in the city and in hospitals; and food supply problems related to the absence of community members, such as hunters, who are important food providers. The ZHM

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FIGURE 23.4  Dr. Jennings in the post-cataract surgery care for Zo’é patients. Photo: Zo’é Team.

respects ethnic and cultural particularities, as its medical principles and guidelines see the collective as a driving force for each individual. Since 2000, the ZHM has been financed by the Ministry of Health, which works in partnership with FUNAI. This partnership allows for the sharing of supplies and infrastructure, which ensures that work in the Indigenous Territory is feasible. In addition, air transport is shared in and outside of the region for the routine transfer of vaccination teams, medical professionals working on surgical procedures in loco, and transporting Zo’é patients to central hospitals in cities, such as Santarem or Belem (the capital of the State of Pará, 860 km from the Indigenous Territory). There is also support for the supply of fuel for use during the night at the support base. During the day, everything is run with energy produced by solar panels. The health team occasionally assists FUNAI in resolving conflicts between the Zo’é. FUNAI sometimes assists the health team in making the best therapeutic decision in cases resulting from contact with external agents, such as clandestine missionaries and extractivists, who, for various reasons, harass and disturb the social peace of the Zo’é people and expose them to health risks that would be difficult to control. The health care model for the Zo’é people is guided by three fundamental components, which reflect a concern to provide health care while reinforcing language and culture: 1. Respect for the culture and the sociocultural and linguistic particularities of the people, which includes consideration of taboos, the ethnic group’s traditional knowledge of health, and the adaptation of medical procedures to traditional methodologies and medicines whenever possible. Respect for the culture means acting according to professional ethics when dealing with patients and in daily contact with the community, minimizing cultural interference inherent in the health agents’ residence within the indigenous community. Residence and rotation of health care personnel should facilitate the presence in each shift of at least one member who is fluent

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FIGURE 23.5  Post-cataract surgery assessment in the Zo’é indigenous village. Photo: Erik Jennings.

in the Zo’é language, knows the families, and understands the community’s cultural practices, especially those on which their social organization is based. 2. Resolution in situ of medium and high complexity problems, that is, minimizing morbidity and mortality risks among Zo’é by avoiding the removal of individuals from their indigenous territory, since they have low immunity to pathologies in the external environment. It is necessary to take into account that recently contacted groups, such as the Zo’é, are highly vulnerable to infectious and parasitic diseases, which can quickly lead to death. Precisely for this reason, the transfer of individuals to hospitals in cities should only take place as a last resort in cases of high complexity. 3. Volunteer work and partnerships with the Zo’é people, in the form of service provision or institutional agreements, should ensure appropriate training for volunteers and prepare them to work within a multidisciplinary team, in accordance with the chosen health care system, and should provide the infrastructure necessary to guarantee the feasibility of health care and all the required procedures. The following guidelines apply to these three components: 1. Minimal intervention: only take medical action if strictly necessary, because every aspect of health care has a consequence, a side effect no matter how preventive in nature. The team should discuss all aspects of health care with the community prior to implementation, including basic health care measures, the prescription of medicines, and more overt actions, such as surgeries. Basically, if you don’t have to do it, don’t do it.

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2. Respect for the traditional diet: maintain the historical and cultural diet of the Zo’é people. The health care team realized that the group’s salt and sugar-free diet, with a lot of animal protein and rainforest fruits, benefits the health of the community. Every aspect of health care should ensure it does not change the Zo’é diet. 3. Noninterference in social relations: health care can affect these social relations, which are essential for the survival of this indigenous group. Ensure all personnel act appropriately. 4. Valuing traditional knowledge: relate the chosen treatment to the Zo’é’s own knowledge. Health care personnel should value traditional knowledge of herbs, prenatal care, childbirth, and so forth, and encourage the community to maintain its historical practices. 5. See the environment as a health service provider: the model associates the environment around the Zo’é with the health of the people in a holistic way. In other words, the habitat is a source of food, clean water, shelter, and so forth. 6. Dialogue and inter-institutional cooperation: the Zo’é Health Model requires the involvement of all agents and agencies present in the Cumunapanema Ethno-Environmental Front, including FUNAI, the Federal Police, the Federal Public Ministry, and so forth. They should work closely together and act promptly and efficiently to preserve the environment and security of the Indigenous Territory. 7. Speak the Zo’é language: all Health Model personnel must learn the Zo’é language in order to gain a proper understanding of the people’s culture and therefore be in a position to provide good health care. 8. Respect the people’s self-determination: prior to implementation, actions are discussed with the people to identify the community’s needs and wishes. Even the Zo’é Health Model was discussed with the group. This guideline applies not only to health care but also to everything concerning ethnicity, land, and nonindigenous society. 9. Team stability: in order to work with the Zo’é and other indigenous groups, team members must spend several years learning the language and studying the culture of the people. This can only happen if there is a permanent and stable team, as staff turnover hampers the creation of a bond with the community and reduces the effectiveness and efficiency of the work, whether on health or other issues. 10. Incorporation of technology: the ZHM questions the SUS primary care model assumes problem solving and sophisticated technologies in situ, such as the presence of x-ray and ultrasound machines. The action plan proposal, in accordance with the goals of the ZHM, seeks to (1) expand Zo’é’s knowledge about diseases and medical practices of nonindigenous people; (2) promote a dialogue between traditional knowledge and Western knowledge; and (3) develop strategies for the Zo’é to make the connection between epidemics and leaving the Indigenous Territory, incursions into their land, environmental health, and the entry of other external elements into their territory, even if authorized. The programme therefore requires the audio and video recording of verbal interactions between health team members and the Zo’é during health care provision; interviews to obtain written, audio, and video recordings of Zo’é culture methodologies, techniques, and traditional medicines; a historical record of the health of the people before contact and the healing practices used by

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FIGURE 23.6  Resident of a remote Zo’é indigenous village having an electrocardiogram (ECG). Photo: Zo’é Team.

them; and registration of how the Zo’é view the “white” medicine used in the course of the health care provided to them. This material has been gathered since 2016 and will be analyzed and systematized as a database for use in promoting the health of the Zo’é and developing an educational program in the future. For this to happen, says Dr. Jennings, it is important for the government to ensure provision of the necessary conditions for the relevant employees to participate effectively in the program.

THE PARADIGM OF CULTURALITY Environment health, which the World Health Organization defines as all of the health-related physical, chemical, and biological factors external to a person, and all the related factors impacting behavior, has become the most important contemporary determinant of human health. Merrill Singer affirms that the global health discourse on environmental health, despite its urgent tone at times, fails to fully acknowledge how the fundamental ways humans interact with their environments, built and natural, are (and always have been) a key influence on the quality of human life (Singer 2016). By the same token, as Laurie Anne Whitt, Mere Roberts, Waerete Norman, and Vicki Grieves explain, “the land and living entities which make it up are not apart from, but part of, the people. Nor is ‘the environment’ something surrounding a people. The relation of belonging is ontologically basic” (Whitt et al. 2001: 4). Melissa Checker, in turn, presents in “Environmental Racism and Community Health” three examples that demonstrate a similar dynamic between state

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agencies and local communities affirming the importance of including community perceptions and actions in assessing structural factors in environmental health. She argues that local communities resisted the promises and challenged the notion that neoliberal forms of redevelopment provide a cure-all for urban ills. Instead, she concludes, residents continued to assert their own environmental health and justice priorities (2016: 101–20). The culturality of medical activity emerges within a framework of exhaustion of modern medicine. A “crisis of paradigm” in rational medicine opposes the dominant model of the institutionalization of medicine and the disenchantment this model awakens in the disciplinary field itself, in its interiority and externality (Santos 2010: 225–42). Contemporary medical care in all its forms can be questioned on this point, from the mega structures linked to the care models concentrating specialties, resources, and even technological mediations, to the accumulation of medical power over other forms of knowledge and intervention in human health and the human body. Crisis is illustrated in its finest performance when the hypertrophy of rationalization and scientification erected walls of indifference in the doctor–patient relationship, created obstacles to the access to medical science, and instituted market competition in the interactions between medicine and human collectives that depend on medical assistance. Modern medicine promotes the concentration and domination of institutional and social powers at its very foundations. It is present in the public and private spheres as a social practice profoundly marked by social differences and inequalities, which is the logic of the valorization of predatory capitalism (McKeown 2009: 19–26). As Howard Waitzkin asserts, the “system in which capitalist health care is situated has become more fragile, with deepening stagnation, recurrent crises of increasing severity, unemployment and underemployment, and inequality” (2018: 17). It has become hegemonic knowledge, legitimized in the scientific system; it has been implemented as institutionality present in all individual, group, and class necessities; and it is represented under an opinion of religious force and decision making between life and death. It accumulates symbolic assets, reinvents the reproduction of natural life, and intervenes in the social regulation of habits and customs. As it infiltrates into all organizational areas of society, medicine, through medical practice, is present at every moment of the lives of individuals and groups. This presence is even expressed in its absence or in its precarious execution—one of the perverse effects of the dominant model (McKeown 2009: 19–26). As a commodity of the modern world, medicine had been erected on social and institutional contradictions that adhere to individual, collective, and ethic discriminations, and has been downgraded to all manner of sociocultural embarrassments that permeate throughout medical care. As a social practice, it is stratified, partial, unjust, and indifferent to deprivations; the dominant character of modern medicine challenges ethical, moral, community, and collective commitments. It is recognized that the dehumanization of medicine distances medical practice from human suffering. Contemporaneous reflections illustrate aspects of this dehumanization and accentuate conflicting tensions in the debate on its importance to humanity. Innovative perspectives are shaped in the thinking on enduring medical practice and criticism of the dominant paradigm. For the authors of Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective, our health care model was built on erroneous premises about the ecology of health and disease. Ann McElroy and Patricia K. Townsend argue that “there is no single cause of disease” and later conclude that “the immediate, clinically detectable trigger for disease may be a virus, a vitamin deficiency, or an intestinal parasite, but the matrix of disease itself resides in ecosystem imbalances” (2015: 21–2).

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In recent years, we have achieved fabulous scientific and technological progress in health care services. Contrary to this, however, we often talk of a growing need for humanization in medical activities. The technological progress of recent decades has placed machines, money, and managers between health care professionals and their patients. The loss of humanity in health care services has become increasingly visible. On the other hand, half of the doctors on the planet suffer from burnout, as the editorial of Lancet, published in July 2019, points out: “Physician Burnout: a Global Crisis.” Maintaining and preserving the human aspect, for both patients and health care professionals, has become incessantly sought after, an ethical obligation of every professional and every institution. We waste more time looking at a computer screen than looking at and listening to the human in front of us. On the level of development of knowledge, it is possible to say that an emerging paradigm has been accredited to respond to the numerous questions about scientific knowledge, on the manner of the institutionalization of the medical field, on the doctor–patient relationship, and on the dialogue between medicine and other legitimate forms of intervention in the health–disease relationship and society. This movement of ideas questions “the consequences of modernity” (Giddens 2013) in medicine and in doing so presents as an interlocutor for society, identifying the failure of the organization, the destabilization of the original commitments, and the social uprooting of medical care. It demands more attention to the Other, the conditions of life, and the search for daily solutions. It proclaims greater attention to the dimensions of individual, group, and community existence. It rejects a unique model of thought, of care, and of meaning in contemporary medicine. It contains proximities to and insights from postmodern, postcolonial, or decolonial approaches that break away from the determinations and impositions of the institutional totalitarianism of modern medicine and expose its causes and consequences on living beings. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos emphatically states, local knowledge reinvents intelligence by incorporating values of cultures and lived experience. It is an idea embraced by approaches of comprehensive sociology, now revisited in the paradigms of the South, ecocritical thinking, and postcolonial approaches in Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (2008). By repositioning medical practice locally, in the community and its surroundings, culturality directs medical action to the micro, to individuality, and to specificity. This singularity of daily life approximates the doctor to the common life and the manner of organization of human adaptability in their sociality, that is, of common life and the adaptability of humans in their physical and social environment, in the intimacy in which their lives manifest as biological and cultural beings. Medicine through culturality is a component of it and an integrator of all forms of knowledge, without being excluding. Culturality has been presented to the debate and disputes a place in the closest interactions between medicine and society. It actually constitutes a point of inflection that puts into question the material bases of modern medicine, the representations of credibility in dominant medical practice, the normative set of professional formation, and the modes of social organization of medical intervention in the interior dynamic of the relationship between medicine and society. Through the causes and consequences of the dominant model, the ideas of culturality configure the happenstance of the current hegemony, which manifests as inefficient, insufficient, and unsustainable as a system for the protection of life. In fact, it presents as being one of the conditioners of the process of becoming ill, one of the many factors in the acceleration of destruction of the planet.

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It is a paradigm of culturality, that is, the practice and organization of health care services that are no longer based on large cities and hospitals but on the community and culture to which those of a given population belong. The cultural dimension of each human being comes to be as important as their anatomy—something to be cared for, protected, and understood. It would require decentralization of action, maximum resolution outside hospital walls, with technological equipping and training of human resources in the villages and towns, and a proactive attitude to respecting and preserving cultures, individuals, and the environment. Culturality does not separate knowledge from culture and the natural environment. On the contrary, it integrates them into an ecological experience of interaction. The paradigm that emerges from the medicine of culturality questions the disorganization that the dominant model of technostructure causes in nonhegemonic systems of medical practice. It disrupts the foundations that support this expensive and concentrating form of medical practice. The health care model upon which most health care systems and modern medicine itself are based is responsible for the appearance of an enormous number of pathologies resulting from ecosystem imbalances (McElroy and Townsend 2015). Today, any imbalance between culture and the environment can cause disease (Leff 1993: 44–66). The necessity to practice medicine and establish our health systems based on culture, community, biodiversity, and social and epidemiological variables is becoming increasingly essential. Nevertheless, today we are equipping hospitals and not the community. We produce specialists that can transplant hearts, but we lack specialists that can see culture and the environment as forms of treatment and ways of protecting health. In Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein explain the issue of global climate change, an issue that has already received significant attention for its potential consequences for human health, warning that general neglect of the relationship between biodiversity and human health, we believe, is a very serious problem, for not only are the full human dimensions of biodiversity loss failing to inform policy decisions, but the general public, lacking an understanding of the health risks involved, is not grasping the magnitude of the biodiversity crisis and not developing a sense of urgency to address it. Tragically, aesthetic, ethical, religious, even economic arguments have not been enough to convince them. (2008: xxi) But what about culture and environment? What have we done to direct our attention and help preserve them or understand them during the process of caring for and curing each individual or community? Nature and culture are a single entity. The culture of communities and social relationships are neglected, destroyed in the name of strengthening buildings, institutions, machines, and government health care programs that have nothing to do with the local culture of certain communities, its peoples and environment. This is precisely what Tim Ingold calls attention to when he questions the modern conception of environment, which, according to him, “far from marking humanity’s reintegration into the world, signals the culmination of a process of separation” (2000: 209). What can be found in these health care models is not the “slow violence” on the environment and the bodies of the poor as alluded to by Rob Nixon (2011), but it can be ascertained that there is violence that is less and less slow; that which Isabelle Stengers (2010) called “the barbarism to come.” The health care actions performed with the best of intentions make many abandon their lands, their villages, and small cities to stay close to the large centers of medicine in the hope of being safer and more protected against various evils. Family and social

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ties are destroyed, and we collaborate to a certain degree in environmental imbalance. This same imbalance, in turn, causes other diseases. Consequently, we unintentionally create more and more diseases. Many of these diseases are caused directly by the loss and destruction of a determined culture, taking with it a battery of knowledge and practices that once helped in the prevention of ill-health and even in the recovery of good health. We have collaborated in the demographic explosion of big cities. We have created peripheries with perilous sanitary conditions and we have left the fields and the forests at the mercy of highly destructive models of development. This completes a cycle of cultural and territorial loss, the appearance of hospitals and deprived communities, the abandonment of lands, and more disease. As such, the indigenous leader and environmentalist Ailton Krenak criticizes our membership into the Humanity Club: Visiting a range of cultures, have enabled me to assess the guarantees given upon entry to the Humanity Club. Modernization has herded people from the fields and the forests into sprawling favelas and outlying slums, where they serve as cheap labour for the urban centres. These people were plucked out of their traditional ways of living and places of origin and literally flung into the great big blender of humanity. If they did not have deep ties to their ancestral memory, with references that sustain their identity, they’d go insane in this nutty world we share. (2020: 18) Under the denomination of culturality, the dominant critique of modern medicine can dialogue with medical organization and practice, countering both and demonstrating impacts and relationships of causality on its systemic functioning. Little by little it could identify the breaking points from which it could be converted into a creative subversion to the progress of the disciplinary field and medical practice. Nowadays, a cellphone can become an ultrasound machine. We have increasingly smaller and increasingly more efficient monitors and ventilators. We have light, disposable surgical drapes. We have small devices capable of performing an exam with just one drop of blood. We have the internet for the transmission of data. We have highly efficient drugs for anesthetic procedures. We also have a growing amount of lightweight health care technology that should be at the service of communities, villages, and the peoples of the forest. It has become wasteful to maintain all these conquests in the big cities. The idea of solving as many problems as possible in villages and districts is not new. Soon after the Cuban revolution, a movement began around the world that envisioned health care services organized close to the place of residence. The conference and Declaration of Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan, in September 1978, confirmed the fact that 80 percent of health problems could and should be solved where they happen, outside the hospitals (Mendes 2004: 447–8). However, the model was not subjected to the necessary modifications over time. It was not adjusted to the world’s climate situation. It did not incorporate the new technologies appearing in recent years. This same technology was being increasingly valued and employed in the city. Patient demand for large centers increased and, consequently, we reduced the resolutive capacity of those at the front line. An updated version of the model ratified at Alma-Ata is required, readjusting targets and concepts in accordance with the current technological, scientific, and environmental scenario. The ZHMl (mentioned above) shows us an alternative approach to health care delivery in the Brazilian Amazon. All this advanced, lightweight technology would enable us to resolve a wide range of problems in the villages and districts and even deep in the forest. The more we solve problems at the source, the

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FIGURE 23.7  Dr. Jennings preparing to vaccinate for H1N1 in the middle of the forest to avoid contact between groups of Zo’és during an outbreak of flu. Photo: Zo’é Team.

more we help maintain the connection of humans with their land and their community, protecting culture and the environment, and avoiding physical and psychological suffering at the large medical centers. Surgeries of medium and even high complexity can be performed outside large hospitals. The control of chronic diseases, blood tests, and even imaging can occur at the same facility. It is important to note that the current dominant health care model is overcentralized and, at the global level, too often ignores or even destroys the local curative knowledge on which the survival of local cultures depends and that could also prove so useful to the rest of the world. The ZHM looks at an example of how decentralization of health services can even be applied to isolated indigenous communities, despite the associated cultural and logistical problems. The ZHM teaches us that if it can be done there, it can be done anywhere. As Posey asserts in his chapter on indigenous knowledge and development,

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if technological civilization begins to realize the richness and complexity of indigenous knowledge, then Indians can be viewed as intelligent, valuable people, rather than just exotic footnotes to history. This, it is argued, is an “ideological bridge” whereby Indians can prosper in a modern multi-ethnic society with the dignity they need and the respect they deserve. (2002: 59) We are learning the hard way that combating Covid-19 would be much more effective if we had small health care centers and even small hospitals of reference to take care of less serious cases and take on the period of convalescence of others. We have centralized actions in large hospitals, all of which have entered into collapse, as has the system as a whole. We are seeing that big hospitals are becoming big problems. Patients hospitalized without Covid-19 become infected by the virus and the health care professionals, the ambulances, and drivers, all the existing networks for the transfer of patients to large hospitals, have been hit and have also become sources for more and more infections. The simple fact of someone entering a hospital is enough to make them sick. The bed is different, the noise level is high, the food is different. Strangers share spaces of healing and suffering. The rush to the big cities has hospitalized birth and death. We switch off culture, bonds, and customs well before the physical death of each individual. Even at the time of death we disassociate the individual from their culture. We are born and we die sterile! We make the natural processes of life something to be mechanized and conquered. The change in the cosmology of birth and death is the first cultural damage sustained by many peoples and cultures. Modern medicine is highly efficient at seducing us into believing we are immortal and that miraculous treatments do not have serious side effects. Death is a technical failure to be overcome at any cost. By drastically changing the cosmology of death, and also birth, we are creating an unsustainable demand. Frustration is certain when we realize that we are all going to die. But what we cannot allow is that cultures die together with people, or even before them. The dialogue of modern medicine with the different culturalities presupposes epidemiological and sanitary knowledge, as well as respect for and preservation of local culture. This respect is not a passive posture on the part of health care agents and institutions. It is not allowing a shaman to perform a ritual before a medical procedure, but doing everything to make sure the shaman’s practice happens. One possible action would be to equip communities with the necessary technologies without imposing the current biomedical model. Culturality is a necessary revolution, especially in the Amazon and specifically in the subsystems of indigenous health care. Throughout our history, medical practice has saved many lives but has killed many cultures. Thus, it should be understood that cultures do not only interest the anthropology and sociology of the peoples of the Amazon but that they also interconnect with the social technologies of other societies around the world. Medicine and health care systems make up one of the most powerful human activities with greater micro-social reach of excellence. Our actions need to be balanced and correct, in harmony with the biology, the psychology, and especially with the culture of our patients and our communities. The side effects of medical actions have been on individuals, on the climate, and on the environment, which in turn causes more diseases. We should reduce the side effects on nature and culture as much as possible. We should also take care of the planet. Only then will we really be a source of healing and reducing of suffering. Otherwise, we will continue to be complicit in the sterilization of our lives and everything that surrounds us.

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REFERENCES Bindá, N. H. (2001), “Representações do ambiente e territorialidade entre os Zo’é/PA,” MA dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo. Chivian, E., and A. Bernstein eds. (2008), Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, New York: Oxford University Press. Colón, M. (2020), “Slow Violence and Slow Seeing in Beyond Fordlândia,” in A. A. R. Ioris, R. R. Ioris, and S. V. Shubin (eds.), Frontiers of Development in the Amazon: Riches, Risks, and Resistances, 287–313, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Checker, M. (2016), “Environmental Racism and Community Health,” in M. Singer (ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health, 101–19, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. De Sousa Santos, B., ed. (2008), Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. New York: Verso Books. Fein, H. (1997), “Genocide by Attrition 1939–1993: The Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan: Links between Human Rights, Health, and Mass Death,” Health and Human Rights, 2 (2):10–45. Gallois, D., and L. D. Grupioni (1999), “O índio na missão Novas Tribos,” in R. M. Wright (ed.), Transformando os deuses: os múltiplos sentidos da conversão entre os povos indígenas no Brasil, 77–129, Campinas: Unicamp. Giddens, A. (2013), The Consequences of Modernity, Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Hanbury, S. (2020), “Amazon Poor Go Hungry as Brazil Slashes Social Safety Net, Cuts Forests: Study,” Mongabay, June 11. Available online: https://news.monga​bay.com/2020/06/ama​zon-poor-go-hun​gry-as-bra​zil-slas​hes-soc​ ial-saf​ety-net-cuts-fore​sts-study/ (accessed December 5, 2020). Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill, London: Routledge. Krenak, A. (2020), Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Leff, E. (1993), “Marxism and the Environmental Question,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4 (1): 44–66. McElroy, A., and P. K. Townsend (2015), Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective. London: Routledge. McKeown, R. E. (2009), “The Epidemiologic Transition: Changing Patterns of Mortality and Population Dynamics,” American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine (May 8). Available on: https://doi.org/10.1177/15598​ 2760​9335​350. Mendes, I. A. C. (2004), “Desenvolvimento e Saúde: A declaração de Alma-Ata e Movimentos Posteriores,” Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, 12 (3): 447–8. Menton, M., F. Milanez, J. M. de Andrade Souza, and F. S. M. Cruz (2020), “The COVID-19 Pandemic Intensified Resource Conflicts and Indigenous Resistance in Brazil,” World Development, 138: 105222. Milanez, F. (2015), Memórias sertanistas: cem anos de indigenismo no Brasil, São Paolo: Edições Sesc. Milanez, F. (2020), “Fighting the Invisible Anaconda amidst a War of Conquest: Notes of a Genocide,” Ambiente & Sociedade, 23. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Author unknown (2019), “Physician Burnout: A Global Crisis,” Lancet, 394 (10193): 93 (editorial, July 13). Posey, D. A. (2002), “Indigenous Knowledge and Development: An Ideological Bridge to the Future,” in Kayapó Ethnoecology and Culture, vol. 6, New York: Routledge. Randell, H. (2017), “Forced Migration and Changing Livelihoods in the Brazilian Amazon,” Rural Sociology, 82 (3): 548–73. Ribeiro, D. (1982), Os índios e a civilização: a integração das populações indígenas no Brasil moderno, vol. 5, Petrópolis: Vozes.

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Santos, B. S. (2010), “From the Postmodern to the Postcolonial—and Beyond Both,” in Rodriguez, Encarnación, Manuela Boatca, and Sérgio Costa (eds.), Decolonializing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, 225–42, Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Silva, J. A. A. (2016), “Evangelizando todas as tribos até a última ser alcançada: reflexões sobre a missão novas tribos do Brasil e a Antropologia aplicada às ações missionárias,” MA dissertation, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Paraíba. Simões, E. L. J. (2015), Paradô: histórias vividas por um neurocirurgião na Amazônia, Santarém: Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena. Singer, M. (2016), “Introduction,” in M. Singer (ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health, 1–17, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Stengers, I. (2010), Cosmopolitics I, trans. R. Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tregidgo, D., J. Barlow, P. S. Pompeu, and L. Parry (2020), “Tough Fishing and Severe Seasonal Food Insecurity in Amazonian Flooded Forests,” People and Nature, 2 (2): 468–82. Vilaça, A. (2020), Morte da Floresta, São Paulo: Editora Todavia. Waitzkin, H. (2018), Health Care Under the Knife. New York: Monthly Review Press. Wallace, S. (2011), The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes, New York: Broadway Books. Weichert, M. A. (2014), “O relatório da Comissão Nacional da Verdade: conquistas e Desafios: Projeto História,” Revista do Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados de História, 50. Whitt, L. A., M. Roberts, W. Norman, and V. Grieves (2001), “Indigenous Perspectives,” in D. Jamieson (Ed.), A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, 3–20, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

FURTHER READING Cabral, A. S. A. C. (1996), “Algumas evidências lingüísticas de parentesco genético do Jo’é com as línguas TupíGuaraní,” MOARA – Revista Eletrônica do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras, (4): 47–76. Cabral, A. S. A. C. (2019), “Atitudes linguísticas do povo Zo’é com respeito a sua língua e cultura,” Pesquisas em crenças e atitudes linguísticas, Araraquara: Letraria, 1 (1): 57–73. Colón, M. (2020a), “Amazônia Redux,” ReVsta (Cambridge), 19 (3): 81–3. Colón, M. (2020b), “Inquietudes Ambientales, Humanas y Sociales: una Entrevista con Enrique Leff,” Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña (HALAC) revista de la Solcha, 10 (2): 336–49. Colón, M., and E. Jennings (2020), “Covid-19 mostra que medicina concentrada em grandes hospitais tem que ser superada,” Folha de S.Paulo, April 22. Available online: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilust​riss​ ima/2020/04/covid-19-mos​tra-que-medic​inaconcentrada-em-grandes-hospitais-deve-ser-superada.shtml (accessed December 5, 2020). Colón, M., L. C. L. Boaventura, and E. Jennings (2020), “Offensive against the Amazon: An incontrollable pandemic (commentary),” Mongabay, June 1. Available online: https://news.monga​bay.com/2020/06/offens​ ive-agai​nst-the-ama​zon-an-inc​ontr​olla​ble-pande​mic-com​ment​ary/ (accessed December 5, 2020). Dupuits, E., and P. Cronkleton (2020), “Indigenous Tenure Security and Local Participation in Climate Mitigation Programs: Exploring the Institutional Gaps of REDD+ Implementation in the Peruvian Amazon,” Environmental Policy and Governance. Gwercman, S. (2004), “Como no tempo de Cabral,” Revista Superinteressante, June 30. Available online: https:// super.abril.com.br/ide​ias/como-no-tempo-de-cab​ral/ (accessed December 5, 2020). Labrador, J. G., and J. Ochoa (2020), “Two Ontologies of Territory and a Legal Claim in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon,” Journal of Political Ecology, 27 (1): 496–516.

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Lima, L. (2013), “Construção de rodovias no governo militar matou cerca de 8 mil índios,” Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, September 25. Available online: http://www.ihu.unisi​nos.br/notic​ias/524​054-con​stru​cao-de-rodov​ ias-no-gove​rno-mili​tar-matou-cerca-de-8-mil-ind​ios (accessed December 5, 2020). Milanez, F. (2019), “Rexistência nas fronteiras do capitalismo/colonialismo: a ecologia política do isolamento e da soberania,” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 16 (1): 164–75. Milanez, F., L. Sá, A. Krenak, F. S. M. Cruz, E. U. Ramos, and G. D. S. D Jesus (2019), “Existência e diferença: o racism contra os povos indígenas,” Revista Direito e Práxis, 10 (3): 2161–81. Pontes, A. L. M., and R. V. Santos (2020), “Health Reform and Indigenous Health Policy in Brazil: Contexts, Actors and Discourses,” Health Policy and Planning, 35 (Supplement_1): i107–i114. Sacco, G. (2019), “Zo’é: Povo Isolado, Estrela nas Notícias,” Indigenous Brazil – Princeton University, January 28. Available online: https://comm​ons.prince​ton.edu/ind​igen​ous-bra​zil/zoe-povo-isol​ado-estr​ela-nas-notic​ias/ (accessed December 5, 2020). Serva, L. (Originally published on 2017, updated on 2020), “Indígenas se refugiaram em região de difícil acesso com montanhas e muralha verde,” Folha de S.Paulo, August 28. Available online: https://arte.folha.uol.com. br/ilustr​ada/2017/sebast​iao-salg​ado/zoe/indige​nas-se-ref​ugia​ram-em-reg​iao-de-difi​cil-ace​sso-com-montan​ has-e-mura​lha-verde/ (accessed December 5, 2020). Silva, N. A., H. H. S. Vaz, A. F. Ribeiro, H. Sule, Z. C. Sifri, A. Nanda, and E. L. J. Simões (2019), “Neurosurgery in the Brazilian Amazon: Is It Possible?,” World Neurosurgery, 130: 192–200. Simões, E. L. J. (2017), “Plan of Action of the Health Team for the Zo’é Program,” Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica, 8 (2): 121–32. Siqueira-Gay, J., B. Soares-Filho, L. E. Sanchez, A. Oviedo, and L. J. Sonter (2020), “Proposed Legislation to Mine Brazil’s Indigenous Lands Will Threaten Amazon Forests and Their Valuable Ecosystem Services,” One Earth, 3 (3): 356–62. Vasconcelos, M. (2019), “Magia, anzóis e DNA: o que médico da floresta que desvendou mistério no fundo do rio Amazonas pode ensinar à ciência,” BBC News Brasil, August 31. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/ por​tugu​ese/geral-49455​353 (accessed December 5, 2020).

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Nature and Traditional Medicine in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart CHINONYE EKWUEME-UGWU

INTRODUCTION The popularity of Chinua Achebe’s foremost novels Things Fall Apart (TFA) and Arrow of God (AOG) notwithstanding, there seems, in the texts, a significant connection of traditional medicine with nature and the natural environment that is yet to be adequately explored. These relationships promise specifically to be significant toward an estimation of the indigenous medical and environmental cultures of the Igbo, Southeast Nigeria, represented in the texts. Both novels are set at a period when nature is valued, revered, and responsibly exploited for therapeutic and other purposes of meeting the spiritual and physical health needs of individuals and communities in the texts. Elements of traditional African medical thoughts and practices form parts of the consciousness of these representations. Animal and herbal species exploited for their perceived healing properties, and the healing processes associated with the natural and supernatural forces are instructive toward estimating, from the literary viewpoint, the intersection between medicine and the physical environment. The principles of ecocriticism, itself an interdisciplinary field that studies literary works from an environmental conscious perspective, provide the basic theoretical framework of this study, but with the concepts of ethnomedicine and environmental-humanities to strengthen the chapter’s interdisciplinary ties. With the attention of the broad fields of arts and humanities research steadily focusing on nature, culture, and the well-being of organisms in their physical environments/settings, this chapter seeks to reinterpret the Achebe novels in the light of these new fields. As a theory with a vast, almost limitless scope, Scott Slovic explains that “there is not a single literary work anywhere that utterly defies ecocritical interpretation” (2000: 160). Lawrence Buell, on the other hand, in Writing for an Endangered World, stresses, “It makes sense that the reach of ‘ecocriticism’ … should extend from the oldest surviving texts to works of the present moment”

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(2001: 3). From a postcolonial perspective, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin contend that ecocriticism performs the “advocacy function both to the real world it inhabits and to the imaginary species it opens up for contemplation of how the real world might be transformed” (2010: 13), while Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers posit that “postcolonial ecocritics seek … to include more postcolonial texts in ecocriticism and to argue that postcolonial literature and theory can transform ecocriticism through increased attention to imperial contexts” (2011: 3–4). Achebe’s novels, clearly colonial and postcolonial in their context, meet this demand and the demands of the foregoing ecocritics. The connections of traditional African medicine (TAM) and the environment, though a popular socio-anthropological and environmental topic, have traditionally not enjoyed the attention of Nigerian and African literary criticism. Eco-centric ideologies itself, being very nascent developments in global literature, the interconnectedness of medical and environmental humanities within the boundary of literature is even more remote from both the criticism and imaginative consciousness of Nigerian and African literature. In this revision of Achebe’s AOG and TFA, I have borrowed from ethnomedical and environmental humanities concepts to identify and explain the intersections of nature, the environment, and traditional medicine practices in the novels. Thus, intersections of environment, nature, and medicine are explored in the Achebe texts toward a contemplation of precolonial African medical practice in the context of the Igbo culture and epistemology. This is to further buttress the intersections of literature with these other elements.

ETHNOMEDICINE’S INTERSECTION WITH LITERATURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES Ethnomedicine, according to Marsha B. Quinlan, is the study of “different societies’ notions of health and illness, including how people think and … act about well-being and healing” (2011: 381). This notion of “treatment practices” is significantly represented in the Achebe’s novels, where dimensions of traditional beliefs and practices of medicine and healing are implicitly revealed through the narrative plot and characters’ actions toward sicknesses and sick persons. The notion that “ethnomedicine examines and translates health-related knowledge and theories that people inherit and learn by living in a culture” (Quinlan 2011: 381) is also instructive toward a cognitive grasp and assessment of some of the seemingly absurd healing practices in the novels, supporting the argument of this chapter for the ecological and health values of the indigenous practices that sustained African communities prior to the introduction of medicine from other worlds. This argument is clearly sustained by ethnomedicine’s goal of examining the basic ideas and knowledge about medicine and health-related issues, which the traditional people have inherited from their culture. The application of the ethnomedicine principle is thus informed by the need “to understand the medical thinking of one group … to compare ideas cross-culturally for regional and global understanding.” It is informed by the need to render the ethnomedical knowledge in the novels as applicable toward improving “health care delivery for the group studied, or to inform alternative health practices for Western and societies” (Quinlan 2011: 382). In deploying the anthropological viewpoints to underscore the significance of some of the traditional health care practices of the Igbo cultural group represented in the two novels, environmental humanities initiatives are quite relevant, with the arguments for environmental

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humanities having been advanced from the Swedish background and from various arts and humanities centers in Europe, North and Latin America, Australia, and Asia, with a fleeting suggestion of collaboration with “The African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town” (Nye et al. 2013: 18). Africa’s arts and humanities scholarship (clearly omitted as a significant area of interest) from history, linguistics, literature, and other departments have steadily shown awareness of and interest in the global environmental issues. Thus, from the perspective of African traditional medicine’s primordial dependence on the natural environment and on nature’s medicinal properties, this study develops, moreover, the scope of the environmental humanities. Data from a collection of nonfictional texts on Africa’s ethnomedicinal values, as well as “the values, sensibilities, esthetics, and achievements of traditional African thought and imagination” (Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa, and Madubuike 1980: 2), lend credence to the connection of African’s humanities scholarship with the environment. From the fictional perspective, the primary concern of this study, the entire human and nonhuman elements of the physical environment: the flora and fauna, landscape and the surrounding atmospheric elements—air/wind, sun, moon, rain, and the seasons; with the human cultural activities of landclearing, bush-burning, cutting, digging, crop-cultivation, planting, weeding, and harvesting that characterize events in the novels. Traditional medicine in this study is, therefore, considered against the backdrop of some ideas in nonfictional representations of African ethnomedicine, a few of which are represented here toward an understanding of some of the practices in the Achebe novels. As noted earlier, the problem of medicine has previously been an exclusive preserve of the natural sciences and then the social anthropological sciences. Isaac Sindiga, Chacha Nyaigotti-Chacha, and Mary Peter Kanunah explain ethnomedicine as “an approach to health problems based on the notion that each cultural group handles its medical problems in a particular way”; each has its own believes, customs, values, and foundations. They discountenance earlier works that link African medicine “with beliefs, religion and ritual” and contend that African medical practices encompass as well diagnosis and treatment of diseases from air, water, and insect vectors such as mosquitos (1995: 18).1 They contend also that natural and supernatural elements influence the causation and treatment of illnesses in African medicine. They equally recognize that African traditional medical practitioners are not merely “witchdoctors,” practicing magic and using it to harm the environment or their fellow human beings as certain adherents of Western medical practices would want everyone to believe; hence their adoption of Ampofo and Johnson-Romauld’s definition of TAM as the “totality of all knowledge and practices, whether explicable or not, used in diagnosing, preventing or eliminating a physical, mental or social disequilibrium and which rely exclusively on past experience and on observation handed down from generation to generation, verbally or in writing” (19). This position is instructive toward an understanding of the medical thoughts and practices of characters in the Umuaro, Umuofia, and the surrounding clans of AOG and TFA, where the Igbo concept of ogwu (medicine) is seen to encompass various dimensions of knowledge and application, with the full participation of biotic and abiotic organisms, and with the supernatural forces that pervade the mood of the texts. Furthermore, A. O. Onyeneke reveals that:

They refer specifically to Onesmus (1977) and Evans-Pritchard (1939) whose works attribute their short-sightedness to colonial mentality. 1

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Igbo view of the world reveals an integral triangular relationship between the divine, the supernatural and spirit world on the one side, the world of human beings on the second side and the world of material objects including animals lower than man on the third. The supernatural and spirit world can intervene and affect the life of man directly and through material objects [which] have their intrinsic powers and forces reposed on them by the [same] supernatural and spirit world to affect the state of man. Those natural forces or objects are discoverable and can be artificially applied by man to affect the state of fellow men. Gifted or talented men with this knowledge are called dibia (herbalist, medicine man). (1987: 90–1) This triangular relationship exists in the healing processes depicted in both TFA and AOG. It entails a holistic healing of the mind, body, and spirit of individuals and of the community as a whole. Thus, when a community’s survival is threatened, it seeks remedy in ogwu or medicine. Strong medicine men are employed, usually from a community far away to “make” or install a protective medicine for the clan. Thus, it is represented in AOG that when the survival of the clans that make up Umuaro is threatened by the hired soldiers of Abam [who] used to strike in the dead of the night, set fire to the houses and carry men, women and children into slavery … [t]‌hey hired a strong team of medicine-men to install a common deity for them. This deity which the fathers of the six villages made was called Ulu. Half of the medicine was buried at a place which became the Nkwo market and the other half thrown into the stream which became Mili Ulu … From that day they were never again beaten by an enemy. (Achebe 1964: 14–15) The notion of sickness or disease in the traditional practice, from the above, is anything that threatens the physical or spiritual well-being of an individual or a group. By ensuring the survival of the community from the threats by the pestilence-like Abam raiders, the survival of the individual Umuaro person is also assured. The physical and the spiritual are integrated in this whole process of medicine-making and administration. Also, the indigenous concept of medicine transcends the physical to encounter metaphysical forces that are believed to control the physical. This vividly revealed in the annual feast of the pumpkin leaf, which is loaded with rituals for the spiritual cleansing of both the individual and the community. As the Chief Priest runs round the circle of the entire community, gathered at the Nkwo market place, he carries away the people’s physical and spiritual burden; anyone who is afflicted or suspects an affliction utters prayers, waves a pumpkin leaf round her/his head, and pleads with Ulu, the all-powerful communal ogwu or medicine to carry the ailment away. Ugoye, one of Ezeulu’s wives, prays, “Great Ulu who kills and saves, I implore you to cleanse my household of all defilement,” and she waves round her head the “small bunch” of pumpkin leaves and flings it at the chief priest who symbolically carries away all her troubles (Achebe 1964: 72). In this, nature and the environment are part of the elements that facilitate healing to Ugoye, who, like the rest of the people, goes away lighthearted in the “knowledge that their Chief Priest was safe in his shrine, triumphant over the sins of Umuaro which he was now burying deep into the earth” (73). This passage also reveals that in the consciousness of the people, sin, an act of wickedness, is an ailment that is capable of destroying a people. When, however, an individual is struck by a physical malady, an initial home therapy, of common knowledge, is first administered to the individual. The physical effect of Ezeulu’s bodily exertion during the feast

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of the pumpkin leaf is, for instance, cured with camwood and fire; and the narrator attests to this remedy: “There was no medicine equal to camwood and fire” (86–7). Ezeulu’s physical pain is, however, not attributed entirely to his physical exertion. It has a spiritual explanation, as the narrator testifies: “This was a necessary conclusion to the festival. It was part of the sacrifice. For who could trample the sins and abominations of all Umuaro into the dust and not bleed in the feet?” (87).

THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION Some ailments require spiritual remedies. Any ailment that defies acupressure and the use of herbs is attributed to the spirits; hence the invocation of the spiritual essences through the use of other natural elements such as the blood of sacrificial animals and totems to set off the ritualistic healing processes. In AOG, Ogbuefi Amalu’s sickness is instructive toward an estimation of the concept of spiritual sickness. Ezeulu remarks to his friend Akuebue: “If Amalu’s sickness is the sickness of the Spirits … there is no medicine for it” (112). However, the medicine man does not give up in his attempts to ward off the spirits, perceived to be around to carry off the sick man to the world of the dead. Thus, he fortifies the sick room “against the entry of the Spirits” with totemic ornaments, as elaborately described in the text. The seeming absurdity in the activities of the medicine man notwithstanding, it conveys his strict sense of duty toward the dying. His efforts, including the endless firing of gunshots “to scare away the spirits,” futile though, buttresses the finality of the “disease of the ‘Spirits’.” Yet the presence and activities of the herbalist and the crowd who troop in to empathize with the sick are sources of hope to the dying. The lengthy passage reveals that physical and metaphysical entities are so connected in the people’s consciousness that when the demands of one is contradicted by those of the other, the human entity that embodies these two elements cannot subsist in the physical realm. To keep the sick Amalo on the physical side of existence, medicine has to provide physical relief as well as attempt keep at bay the metaphysical forces contending for the ailing man’s spirit and lifesustaining force. Thus, sensing through the sudden groaning of the sick man that his life support is pulled by the spiritual forces, “the medicine man, a ring of white [chalk]ed dubbed round one eye” (for sighting the spirit entities), rises once more to fire canon shots, in the hope of warding off the evil spirits (114). When this effort fails to yield the desired result, he tries another method—the ofo (a staff), a symbol of the protective presence of the ancestors. “Hold it! … Grasp it, and say no to [the death spirits]! Do you hear me? Say no!” This, uttered by the doctor, is a replication of faith healing, faith in the presence of the spirits—good and evil— contending for the man. The narrator observes that “the meaning of his command seemed at last to seep through many clogged filters to the sick man’s mind and the fingers began to close, like claws, slowly round the staff.” But terminal illnesses defy all medications. Thus, as soon as the doctor takes his hand “completely away Amalu’s hand jerked open and the ofo fell down on the floor.” The exchange of glances by the onlookers and Ezeulu’s almost immediate departure from the scene stamps the fatality of the malady (115). But then, as in modern medicine, the sick is not simply left to die. Caregiving is administered until Amalo passes on a few days later. This caregiving practice in AOG is an improvement over the practice in the earlier novel, TFA, where victims of similar diseases are forcefully taken to the “evil forests” and left there to die,

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because such a disease is an “abomination to the earth goddess” and to the “Oracle of the Hills and Caves” (Achebe 1958 [2008]: 14, 46)—rulers of the spiritual and physical lives of the people.

EXPERTS AND SCAMS, GOOD AND EVIL There are experts and scams in TAM. Evidence of these may be observed in the various scenes and conversations of characters. Ezeulu’s criticism of the sharp practices, quackery, and abuse of power in the practice of medicine (Achebe 1964: 121, 146), as well as the observation by Okeke Onenyi, Ezeulu’s half-brother and a medicine man himself, that “only those who carry evil medicine on their body should fear the rain” (146), attest to the fact of good and evil application of knowledge in TAM. The same practitioner may choose to harbor both good and evil. Magic, sometimes an additional gift to some practitioners, may be used for good or evil. Ezeulu’s father had indeed been a great medicine-man and magician … There was a time when war was raging between Umuaro and Aninta and no one from the one clan dared set foot on the other. But the Chief Priest passed through Aninta as often as he wished … Okeke Onenyi learnt many herbs and much anwansi or magic from his father … there were few priests in Athe history of Umuaro in whose body priesthood met with medicine and magic as they did in the body of the last Ezeulu. (146–8) But the general consensus is that although the former Ezeulu possessed these powers, he preferred to use them for good. The current Ezeulu’s hatred for contemporary medicine notwithstanding, he must, out of necessity, have recourse to them. His detractors point out that “it was Ezeulu’s jealousy that made him so disdainful of his brother’s renown in medicine. They point to the recent Covering-up Sacrifice for Obika’s wife when, rather than ask his brother, Ezeulu had sent for a worthless medicine-man who could not even eat three meals a day from his doctoring” (147). The testimony of these detractors proves the existence of good and evil practitioners in the system. Amid speculations that “Okeke Onenyi had tied up the womb of Ezeulu’s first wife after she had borne him only three children” (147), the opponents of Ezeulu’s camp argue that “Okeke Onenyi has never yet been accused by anyone of sealing up his wife’s womb,” an accusation attributed to evil medicine (148). The argument is, besides, instructive for contemporary medicine where families are encouraged to have fewer children, with its suggestion of traditional medicine practice of sealing a woman’s womb after three births, without any physical contact with the victim.

NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL MEDICINE IN THINGS FALL APART The significant improvement on care-giving and the healing process, noticed in AOG is a development from the futility of earlier practices in TFA. Nature’s mystification, observed through the two major characters, Okonkwo and his father, Unoka—“the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw” (Achebe 1958 [2008]: 11)—in the novel’s prehistoric setting is apparently demystified in the latter novel. Nevertheless, human beings, even in the prehistoric era, are not entirely helpless. The struggles and triumphs of Okonkwo and his family against iba—malaria—a perennial ailment common in the tropical setting of the story, and the ogbanje phenomenon (60–4) testify to this.

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To situate the problem within its indigenous context, the word iba is preferred by the narrator to malaria, its translation. Malaria is not mentioned in the passage cited above and perhaps nowhere in the entire narrative. Typical of the Achebe narrative, indigenous words and idioms are interjected to give the narrative its necessary African flavor. However, the narrator provides guides into the meaning of all such words. The above scene is, for instance, preceded by Okonkwo fighting mosquitos as he lies in his bed. The non-Igbo-speaking reader, as well as Igbo speakers, is then left to determine the connection between mosquito bites and the iba (fever) that Ezinma suffers here. Within the short scene, the symptom of the disease, as well as its curative process, is vividly revealed, an indication that the people are not helpless in the face of this natural affliction. The calm response of Okonkwo to the problem also reveals the people’s familiarity with the sickness and the availability of indigenous medicine for it. But beyond the natural ailment, there is an underlying spiritual affliction behind Ekwefi’s anxiety, and both physical and spiritual attacks are shown to constitute a significant health problem, so that the people have over time developed methods for containing both natural and supernatural affliction. Ekwefi is said to have “suffered a good deal in her life,” having lost nine out of her ten children, all in their infancy, prior to their third year (61). Okonkwo’s visits to diviner, medicine man, and oracle after the death of Ekwefi’s second child reveal that “the child was an Ogbanje, one of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mothers’ wombs to be born again” (61–2). Ezinma, the ogbanje, reputed to have died and reincarnated several times, is while in the natural world unconscious of her spiritual self and compact with the spiritual world; thus the need to awaken her consciousness to this reality, as a prelude to her cure. This conscious-awakening therapy is a specialty in the indigenous practice that eventually leads to breaking the victim’s tie with the “world of Ogbanje” (spirits). This is done through the successful unearthing of her iyi-uwa, which is dramatically accomplished within the novel’s plot (63–4), leaving the reader probably with at least one unanswered question.

OGBANJE: SICKLE CELL ANEMIA OR SCHIZOPHRENIA? The ogbanje phenomenon succinctly represented, besides, in Wole Soyinka and J. P. Clark’s poems, Abiku (another name for ogbanje in Southwest Nigeria), has equally been examined as a socioanthropological issue. Thus, while contemporary scholarships, among them highly respected academics, believe strongly in the ogbaje phenomenon as a socio-anthropological problem, others, more inclined toward Western medicine and thought, attribute the phenomenon to the genetic disorder known as sickle cell anemia, or to schizophrenia. In a nonfictional study of the ogbanje phenomenon, Chinwe Achebe, wife of the author of AOG and TFA, in her 1986 socio-anthropological attempt to make a distinction between the ogbanje phenomenon and schizophrenia, asserts that schizophrenia is “a complex illness which manifests in very complex combination of symptoms, but which is not well understood, whereas for the diviners, ‘ogbanje’ is … a phenomenon with peculiar spiritual dimension. They [the diviners] see their clients as part human and part spirit” (C. Achebe 1986: 55). She further discovers (similar to the TFA narrative) that (1) “no ‘ogbanje’ ever lives a full auspicious life cycle. Often they are called back at the peak of their successes or quite dramatically, by the spirit deities” (1986: 27); (2) “some children manifesting the phenomenon may be immature and inexperienced and therefore more amenable to treatment” (1986: 29); and (3) “the [ogbanje] pact may be sealed with bits and

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pieces of elements … available from the environment such as pebbles, nails [which] symbolize each ogbanje’s commitment to abide by the collective oath of the spirit group” (1986: 29). The ogbanje phenomenon is connected with medicine in their concern for human health or well-being. Bolaji Idowu’s identification, in the African practice of magic and medicine, that behind certain health issues are powers “wholly other” than the human person, clearly corroborates and validates the efficacy of the traditional healing practices in the imaginative texts. In such a situation, where the healer “recognizes the power as a divine being with whom man may have communion and communication,” the approach, according to Idowu, has been one of submission. “Where the healer conceives of the power only as the reservoir of elemental forces, he has sought to tap and harness it and make it subserve his own end” (Idowu 1973: 189). Hence, both Ezinma’s witchdoctor and healer in TFA and Ogbuefi’s Amalu’s medicine man in AOG are mere participants in the African traditional healing practices, based on their inherent kinship with the their surrounding ecosystem and its resources. Often, such elemental forces reside in nature and the physical environment. Chinwe Achebe, in her studies, reveals furthermore that the diviner or traditional healer, whose area of specialty covers the ogbanje phenomenon, is said to possess powers beyond the physical. He/she is said to have the power “to appease the spirit deities to relent their vicious clutch on the ‘ogbanje’ client hoping to renegotiate with his ‘CHI’ ” (A. Chinwe 1986: 57), in a transcendental union of the elemental forces of nature and the supernatural. In this way, health and medicine, physical and spiritual, are shown to have dimensions of connections with the natural environment and with the supernatural, and both make their entry into the imaginative consciousness of African authors. As noted above, in TFA, when Okonwo and Ekwefi’s daughter, Ezinma, is afflicted, the couple’s first reaction is to determine whether the affliction is spiritual or physical, since they are already familiar with the child’s health history of affliction with both natural and supernatural forces. As such, they are not limited to empirical elements for remedy to the child’s disorders; rather, they seek help from the spiritualist. Thus, the ogbanje narrative is followed conclusively by an elaborately lengthy detective narrative that validates the efficacy of the power of traditional medicine over even ethereal disorders. Punctuated with scenes, actions, and occasional dialogues, the narrative ends with all the women shouting “with joy because Ekwefi’s troubles were at last ended” when Okagbue the medicine man successfully digs Ezinma’s iyi-uwa from deep under the earth surface. However, the end of the battle with the spiritual entities only means that the victim, free from metaphysical afflictions, could hope to receive healings of a physical sort, from the physical environment. Thus, the narrative continues with the health crises perfectly overcome—an indication that within that natural environment and employing natural resources, the indigenous people have always figured out ways of overcoming health and other life issues (Achebe 1958 [2008]: 68–9).

HEALTH, MEDICINE, THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT, AND HEALING As remedy for ill-health, the environment plays very significant roles as deduced from the thread of intersections of health, medicine, the natural environment, and healing practices in the novels. Okonkwo’s recourse to forest resources—“grasses and leaves, roots, and barks of medicinal trees and shrubs”—which he carries home in a large quantity is an indication of this relationship and

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of the environment as a primary source of therapeutic remedy. The extraction and treatment processes—cutting up the plants, boiling them with precision; sitting the patient “astride the steaming pot” and covering the patient and the pot with a thick mat and allowing her to be drenched in perspiration—are some of the inherited indigenous treatment processes that are still practiced in many parts of tropical Africa and other malaria-endemic regions of the world as attested to by medical studies. Although not included in this excerpt from the primary text, the initial steam treatment is usually followed by days of oral administration of the medicinal herbal extracts in liquid form. In a study of the curative benefits of uncultivated medicinal herbs over domesticated (cultivated) herbs for the treatment of malaria, Okello and Kang demonstrated this, and they conclude, “In different parts of the world, the use of herbs and herbal extracts in the management and treatment of malaria is very common since herbs are cheap and readily available besides being effective” (Okello and Kang 2019). Merlin Willcox (2004), T. O. Odugbemi (2007), and J. O. Adebayo and A. U. Krettli (2011) are some of the scholars of whose works validate the efficacy of indigenous people’s treatments of malaria with herbal medicine.

CONCLUSION In this subdivision, representations of traditional medicinal knowledge and practices in Chinua Achebe’s AOG and TFA are discovered to embody a strong intersection between traditional African medicine and the natural environment. While the natural environment provides the usual setting and resources for the curative practices, healing transcends the natural to exploit some supernatural curative powers. This revelation is significant toward strengthening the medical and the environmental humanities ties in African literature, and is clearly demonstrated through the indigenous characters’ authentic exploitation of the natural herbs, roots, barks, animals, fire, and so forth, for medicinal purposes. Medicine in the indigenous thought, moreover, defies the physical and metaphysical boundaries to establish the cogency of both in therapeutic practice. There is a thin line between what may be considered good or evil, darkness or light, in traditional medical practice, as both exploit the forces of nature toward various therapeutic culminations. The study makes its contribution to the ongoing debates on the intersection between literature and environmental science, and to the discussion of African and global humanities’ engagement with nature, culture, and medicine, particularly through literature. It opens up a vista for further enquiries into indigenous medicine practices in African literatures of other regions of the African continent beyond the Igbo, Southeast Nigeria, worldview.

REFERENCES Achebe, C. ([1958] 2008), Things Fall Apart, London: Pearson Education. Achebe, C. (1964), Arrow of God, London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1986), The World of Ogbanje, Enugu: Fourth Dimension. Adebayo, J. O., and A. U. Krettli (2011), “Potential Antimalaraials from Nigerian Plants,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 133 (2): 289–302. Ampofo, O., and F. D. Johnson-Romauld (1978), Traditional Medicine and Its Role in the Development of Health Services in Africa. Brazzaville: WHO Regional Office for Africa (AFRO Technical Papers No. 12), 37–63.

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Buell, L. (1995), The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buell, L. (2001), Writing for an Endangered world: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caminero-Santangelo, B., and G. Myres (2011), Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press. Chinweizu, J. Onwuchekwa, and I. Madubuike (1980), Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, vol. 1, Enugu: Fourth Dimension. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940), The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Huggan, G., and H. Tiffin (2010), Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, London: Routledge. Idowu, B. (1973), African Traditional Religion, London: SCM Press. Nye, D. E., L. Rugg, J. Fleming, and R. Emmett (2013), “Background Paper: The Emergence of the Environmental Humanities,” 4–42, MISTRA, The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. Odugbemi, T. O., O. R. Akinsulire, I. E. Aibinu, and P. O. Fabeku. (2007), “Medicinal Plants Useful for Maleria Therapy in Okeigbo, Ondo State, Southwest Nigeria,” African Journal of Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Medicines, 4 (2): 191–8. Okello, D., and Y. Kang (2019), “Exploring Antimalarial Herbal Plants across Communities in Uganda,” Hindawi. Available online: www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2019/3057180/. Accessed March 11, 2022. Onesmus, O. K. (1977), The Legal Aspects of Witchcraft in East Africa: With Particular Reference to Kenya, Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau. Onyeneke, A. O. (1987), The Dead among the Living: Masquerades in Igbo Society, Nigeria: Holy Ghost Congregation Publication. Sindiga, I., C. Nyaigotti-Chacha, and M. P. Kanunah (1995), Traditional Medicine in Africa, Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Slovic, S. (2000), “Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes, Practising Doctrine,” in L. Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader, 160–2, New York: Routledge. Quinlan, M. B. (2011), “Ethnomedicine,” in S. Merrill and P. I. Erickson (eds.), A Companion of Medical Anthropology, 381–403, London: Blackwell. Willcox, M. L. (2004), “Traditional Herbal Medicines for Malaria,” US National Library of Medicine (2004). Available online: www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/pmc/article/PCM527695. Accessed March 11, 2022.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Tales of Chinese Herbs: Rethinking Environmental Medicine through Documentaries on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) KIU-WAI CHU

For thousands of years, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been known for its therapeutic effects in treating illness from a holistic perspective. In addition to a range of traditional Chinese medical practices (such as acupuncture, qigong exercises, moxibustion, cupping therapy and massage), edible TCM generally refers to herbal medicine (bencao本草) that is extracted from the natural world and processed in natural ways. Not only is it recognized for helping to maintain balance and harmony within the human body and in the relationships among human bodies, earthly nature, and the cosmos, but it also embodies the profound Chinese philosophical wisdom and art in “nurturing life” (yangsheng養生). Environmental medicine, on the other hand, is commonly regarded as a scientific discipline originating in Western culture in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the International Society of Doctors for Environment (ISDE), an international nongovernmental organization of physicians, health professionals, and scientific researchers, “environmental medicine” is a new type of medicine “for which our environment is the core medical concern and is consequently taken into account from clinical and biological viewpoints, not only to determine diagnosis, prognosis, and find new treatments; but especially to put prevention and protection into their rightful place in medicine.”1 It encompasses knowledge in the fields of epidemiology, toxicology, clinic medicine, and ethics (Rom and Markowitz 2007: xxvi). In brief, environmental medicine is organized on the “What Environmental Medicine Means”, La Medecine Environmentale. Available online: http://www.medec​ine-envir​onne​ ment​ale.org/en/enviro​nmen​tal-medic​ine/what-enviro​nmen​tal-medic​ine-means​_000​066.html. 1

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basis of the paradigm that health is dependent on the environment. It concerns with bodily health of humans and nonhuman animals impacted by air, water, and other forms of pollution; mental health affected by the degradation of living and working environments; and broader planetary health that faces intensified challenges from population explosion, global warming, ozone depletion to the loss of biodiversity, and mass extinctions. Environmental medicine, as health professionals and scientific researchers stress, aims to bring solutions to the urgent problems related to our external environment and human health. They emphasize that the key in strengthening environmental medicine’s scientific foundation and standardized practices relies on cognitive, diagnostic, and therapeutic approaches, thus making a clear distinction between environmental medicine as a scientific practice “from any ideologic or philosophical-based (non-scientific) approach.”2 Arguing for a more open and expansive notion of environmental medicine in environmental humanities that could reincorporate ideological and philosophical approaches, this chapter aims to bring Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and medicinal herbs into the discussion, proposing that they could contribute to the rethinking and redefining of environmental medicine from ecophilosophical and multispecies perspectives, in order to offer an environmental-humanitiesfocused intervention to the medical science-centered field of study. Despite the fact that TCM has been listed as an intangible cultural heritage in China since 2006, the world remains highly skeptical of TCM’s medicinal and therapeutic efficacy. It has been labeled by an authoritative scientific journal as “largely just pseudoscience, with no rational mechanism of action for most of its therapies” (Nature Editorials 2011:106). In addition, the information about and exposure to TCM and Chinese medicinal herbs continues to be limited outside of the Chinese-speaking world, and the prejudice contemporary people have toward them remains deeply rooted. This chapter argues that we are seeing the growing visibility and diversifying depictions of TCM and Chinese herbs in recent media productions: they are both Chinese and international; traditional and modern; natural and anthropogenic. These conflicting images, as the study goes on to show, are to a large extent shaped by the misunderstanding and misperceptions reinforced by the various media representations on TCM and Chinese herbs.

CHINESE HERBS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NURTURING LIFE Entering the twenty-first century, several medicinal classics continue to be regarded as the foundation of Chinese knowledge in health and medical science. These works include Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經) written nearly two millennia ago, The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica (Shennong Bencaojing 神農本草經) written between 200 and 250 CE, and the Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu本草綱目) published in 1596. As one of the earliest medical classics in the history of China, Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor dates back to the third century BC during the Han Dynasty. It consists of dialogues between the Yellow Emperor and his teacher Qi Bo on the philosophy of the human body and health. Through a range of Daoist concepts such as yinyang and the five elements, theories of the five organs, as well as Tianren Heyi (the unity of humans and nature) and other philosophical thoughts that shaped Chinese worldview, the book is vast in scope and encompasses topics ranging from astrology, geography,

2

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meteorology, phenology, acupuncture, and herbal medicine. Over time, it was rearranged into three separate books, and they together developed a holistic worldview that connects human body with nature and the cosmos. Some two thousand years later, Ming herbalist Li Shizhen conducted extensive research in his travels widely across Central China and examined collections of plants and other materials used in making medicinal drugs. He produced illustrations and descriptions, and critiqued some 40 earlier works of pharmacopoeia, such as The Divine Farmer’s Material Medica, and another 361 medical texts that centered on them, resulting in the publication of Compendium of Materia Medica, one of the most extensive and thorough compendium ever written in Chinese history (Hammond 2013: 151). Medical practitioners and scholars often trace environmental medicine’s lineage back to the teaching of European physicians and philosophers Hippocrates, Ramazzini, Agricola, and Paracelsus, the ancient and premodern medical pioneers who considered the interplay between the patient and the environment; as well as the relationship between work and disease (Rom and Markowitz 2007: xxv). Published in the first century CE, the Chinese medical classic the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor shares similar concerns in conceptualizing the relationship between one’s bodily health with the environment by incorporating religious ideas and practices from Daoism, such as the notions of yin and yang, as well as qi, the energy flow between the human body, earthly nature and the larger cosmos: The Inner Canon is a book that teaches medical theory [yili 醫理] (or the way of medicine [yidao 醫道]. Its opening chapters speak of nondesiring and vacancy, then it turns to the four seasons and the interactions of yin and yang – this tells everyone that the secret of a healthy longevity rests on whether one’s emotions and the qi and blood of the circulation tracks are moving smoothly and whether life’s phases of emergence, development, retreating, and storing are all in order. (Qu L., cited in Farquhar and Zhang 2012: 150) Comparing traditional Chinese and Western notions of medicine, one tends to criticise the former for its lack of a scientific or empirical foundation. From the Western medical perspective, all illnesses come with material causes, such as the spread of bacteria and viruses. The conventional way of treating them would be to use biochemical drugs, or invasive surgical procedures that may result in debilitating and permanent side effects. On the contrary, TCM represents “a more holistic and ecologically conscious form of healthcare than Western biomedicine” (Kohn 2001: 377) that “grew out of centuries of careful observation of natural phenomena, and trial and error. Based on this observation and an understanding of philosophical principles, Chinese physicians developed a thoughtful and consistent body of theory that guides the practice of the medicine and that allow for innovation to meet new challenges” (382). By emphasizing the human body’s natural healing ability that relies upon stimulating and balancing the body’s energy, or qi, Chinese medicine prioritizes prevention over cure, which is generally regarded as a way of nurturing life (yangsheng), a concept that is only beginning to be practiced in the West, as reflected in the growing emphasis on environmental medicine which promotes “prevention” to “identification” and “treatments” (Rom and Markowitz 2007: xxvi). In Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (2012), anthropologists Farquhar and Zhang examine the “yangsheng culture” (a culture of nurturing, nourishing, or cultivating life) in Beijing since the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.3 Traditional Chinese medicine Farquhar and Zhang (2012) examine yangsheng practices that are reflected in the range of activities “including exercises such as calisthenics, jogging, swimming, and walking backward; hobbies such as water calligraphy (performed outdoors with 3

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in a contemporary and global context, as they suggest, “claims the term yangsheng as rubric for its classical orientation toward preventive medicine, or ‘treating the not yet ill’ ” (2012: 17). The philosophy of yangsheng, in other words, refers to both internally—individual health and order within our bodies (via the regulation and balancing of qi); and externally—the well-being and good health that is sustained through beneficial social interactions and engagements with other humans and nonhuman species in the external environment. In various aspects, TCM’s fundamental principle, its focus on the philosophy of yangsheng and regulation of qi, is closely aligned to the practices of environmental medicine. Relying on pharmaceutical yangsheng practices such as acupuncture and consumption of herbal remedies, which were documented and developed over the centuries, TCM “recognizes that illness can result from spiritual and psychological disharmony in a person as well as from external causes” (Kohn 2001: 382). Unlike western biomedicinal methods that are often aggressive and coercive, TCM is regarded as “an ‘ecologically conscious’ form of medicine” that brings us “philosophical awareness and wisdom that will contribute to our personal wellness and to the well-being of our planet as well” (382–3). Many of the examples we will focus on of human–herb relationships are hinting at Chinese people’s belief in nourishing life, via the use of various kinds of natural herbs that brings humans close to nature and good health. Generally translated into “Unity of Human and Nature,” Confucian scholar Tu Weiming describes tienren heyi (天人合一) as an “anthropocosmic” mentality, which combines the cosmic (natural/tian) and the anthropocentric (human/ren), and stresses “a mutual dependence between the natural environment and all living matters in the universe, reflecting human beings’ perennial pursuit of a harmonious relationship with nature” (Tu 2007: 143–53). However, for over a century, the understanding of tianren heyi has been in dispute even within the Daoist and Confucian traditions. In addition to that, it is also suggested that the concept “demonstrates that the harmonious integration of humanity and nature advocated by the Chinese is not a mutually beneficial cooperation, but actually involves the projection of humanity upon nature and the effacement of nonhuman agency” (Wei and Zhuang 2019: 430). “In practice,” as Wei and Zhuang argue, “the Chinese advocates of ‘Tianren Heyi’ have produced a ‘hollow ecology’: human compose the score and force nonhumans to play the baseline” (440). More often than not, the philosophical ideal is reduced to a slogan in justifying human activities in reshaping nature, which can also be translated to the intensified problems of overharvesting of herbal plants, exploitation of animals for pharmaceutical purposes, as well as the excessive commoditisation of TCM. The widening gaps between TCM’s philosophical foundations of life nurturance, of harmony between humans and nature, and the actual productions and practices of TCM in contemporary world, have become more and more apparent in this new era characterized by ongoing global capitalist expansion, political pluralism, environmental crises, and more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on television documentary representations of TCM and its cultural practices, this chapter aims to reveal some of these challenges faced by TCM, in order to examine the roles and relevance of classical philosophical thoughts in defining TCM in the present world. In doing so, it also aims to facilitate the rethinking and reshaping of people’s general perceptions of Chinese herbal medicine and to promote its status in the redefining of global environmental medicine. large sponge brushes on pavement), dancing, singing and keeping birds (which must be exercised outdoors in their cages); forms of connoisseurship such as the appreciation of tea, wine, and medicinal cuisine” (18).

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FIGURE 25.1  Zhou Chuncai, Classic Comic of Chinese Medicines (Zhongyi Fangyao Tudian) (2012: 54–5).

CHINESE HERBS IN MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS The abovementioned Chinese medicinal classics, together with the knowledge on cultivating health and medical practices and herbs they describe, continue to be the major point of reference and influence on popular media representations of Chinese medicine, as reflected in comic books, contemporary art, fictional films, television series, and documentary series. In “Sketching the Dao: Chinese Medicine in Modern Cartoons,” Farquhar and Lai assess illustrators Cai Zhizhong (Tsai Chih Chung) and Zhou Chuncai’s comic books published since the mid 1990s that are adapted from the classical texts Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor and Compendium of Materia Medica. Cai and Zhou’s popular books summarise and translate the original texts into modern Chinese language and offer short commentaries that make the ancient texts and abstract medical knowledge accessible and applicable to contemporary people and their everyday lives. In Figure 25.1, taken from Zhou Chuncai’s Classic Comic of Chinese Medicine (2012), the comic strips explain the recipe and the philosophy behind “Sancai Tang” (三才湯), a particular type of soup that is made of three herbal plants, through the inclusion of plant sketches accompanied by simple texts that are summarized from the Daoist classics I Ching and Huangdi Neijing. Through the narration of two recurrent characters in the comic strips, a wise elderly sage and an anthropomorphised gourd,4 the text explains how the three plants (tiandong, dihuang, and ginseng) are representative of the three realms of cosmos (tian), earth (di), and humans (ren), and how their combinations unify and harmonize the realms that leads to the attainment of tianren heyi.

4

A gourd was commonly used in China as a container for storing herbs and drinks in the past.

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FIGURE 25.2  Exhibition Space, “Six-Part Practice: Wing Po So Solo” (2018), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. Image source: http://www.yshk-art.com/dyna​mic-det​ail-167.html.

If the illustrations have not made the abstract ideas behind TCM easier to understand, they have at least made it more fun to read. However, despite their contribution in bringing the classics a little closer to the public, these works often reflect “a potent (mis)representation of a central form of knowledge found in the classical sources” (Farquhar and Lai 2018: 504). After all, compared to the complexity of the medical concepts and philosophy depicted in the classical texts, “every picture is about the same as a caricature” (504). In the contemporary art scene, medicinal herbs have been used by Chinese artists as a medium for artistic expressions. In 2014, avant-garde artist Zhang Huan (b. 1965) used a number of political propaganda images from the Maoist revolution era, turning them into black and white paintings. Instead of using ink and brush, he used herbal incense ashes. With Chinese herb’s healing power, Zhang explains, he wishes his paintings could be a remedy for the traumatic historical experience suffered by the people (Chia 2013). Wing Po So, a young Hong Kong visual artist who was born into a family with generations of Chinese medicine practitioners, has been acquainted with the forms and smells of Chinese herbs since early childhood. In her recent installation work “Six-Part Practice Exhibition” (2020) exhibited in Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, she demonstrated her profound connection with the pharmacological herbs by incorporating them into large-scale sculptural works that reflect her contemplations on identity, materiality, and memories of matter and being (Figures 25.2 and 25.3).5 Cinematic narratives, on the other hand, offer us another form of imagination and representation of Chinese herbal medicines. Contemporary martial arts films and series, for instance, recurrently

Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. Exhibition Guidebook, “Six-Part Practice: Wing Po So Solo.” Available online: https:// www.taikwun.hk/assets/uploads/programme_files/MCBGQ9Nx7Z.pdf 5

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FIGURE 25.3  Wing Po So, “Part Six: Interior”, Sculpture. Powdered herbs, copper tubes. Approx. 80 cm x 80 cm each, height varies. (2017–18) “Six-Part Practice: Wing Po So Solo” (2018), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. Image source: http://www.yshk-art.com/dyna​mic-det​ail-167.html.

feature legendary herbs and flowers that could enable immortality and cure to all illnesses. Most of these herbs and flowers are not invented out of nowhere. In The Bride with White Hair (1993, dir. Tsui Hark), a Youtan flower is found only on the remote snowy mountain blooms once in every six decades. Legend has it that the rare plant could reverse the effect of aging. In the film it is seen as a cure for the tragic heroine, who aged overnight, her hair turning completely white after a heartbroken separation from her loved one. In reality, while without such magical power, the rare species of Saussureae Involucratae Herba found in the Tibetan mountains, commonly known as the Snow Lotus (Tianshan Xuelian) and often used in traditional Uyghur and Chinese medicine, is generally regarded as the prototype of the legendary species in the well-known tale of the white-haired witch. In films of contemporary settings, Chinese herbal medicine continues to be depicted as possessing unexplainable mystical power that could heal a range of illnesses. In a heart-aching horror film titled Three: Going Home (2002, dir. Peter Chan), a Chinese herbalist gives his dead wife a daily herbal bath treatment for several years in order to resurrect her from death.

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From comic sketches and contemporary art to cinematic representations, there has been an increase in media representations that make information about TCM and Chinese herbs accessible in recent decades. And yet they are not without their limitations and problems. As Farquhar and Lai put it, “every form of representation enables some readings while preventing others” (2018: 507). While comic strips are “designed to be nibbled rather randomly” (507) and risk oversimplifying the abstract ideas of the original texts, contemporary art has so far been using herbs as a material medium for artists’ individual expressions and reflections, without placing specific herbal medicine’s historical and cultural significance into context. On the other hand, existing cinematic representations tend to mystify TCM and herbal medicine, causing stigmatisation and misconceptions towards their uses and practices. In this study, we will examine whether documentary series could offer, more effectively, fundamental knowledge of the millennia-old cultural heritage of China. In 2006, China submitted its official list for UNESCO’s national intangible cultural heritage (ICH), in which several elements of TCM were included.6 However, despite these recognitions, TCM’s actual status remains fragile: “It is threatened by internal factors [concerning] standardisation and the break in transmission of knowledge, as well as by external ones that question its legitimacy” (Obringer 2011: 16). Despite the grand narrative that traditional Chinese medicine is a millennia-old culture deeply intertwined with and fused into Chinese people’s everyday life, in the decade that followed the listing of TCM elements as an intangible cultural heritage, the constant decline of its practices did not stop or slow down. While the number of doctors practicing Western medicine in China stayed high at 5.5 million, there were only 400,000 TCM practitioners, which shows a 20 percent drop in 50 years (16). It is perhaps partly for this reason that we see, since 2016, the emergence of state-sponsored, big-budget documentary productions dedicated to documenting the history and stories of TCM and herbal culture, offering it a new and refreshing image. In The Tale of Chinese Medicine (本草 中國, Seasons 1 and 2, 2016, 2019) (“The Tale”), co-produced by state-owned Shanghai Media Group and Yunji Media, the production crew traversed the immense territory of China, from South to North, West to East, digging, recording and staying for periods of time as recluses in mountain forests, high plateaus, and arid desert areas, depicting the medical history and culture of China, from the discovery of the natural herbs, their picking to drug processing. Their stories present the essense of Chinese medicine culture from the perspectives of common people’s way of living through the perspectives of herb hunters, growers, herbalists, manufacturers, and users of medicinal herbs. This documentary film project energizes TCM by highlighting its cultural inheritance and innovative developments, and paints a positive picture for future practitioners of the profession. With the support of the Publicity Department of National Health and Family Planning Commission, The Tale is marketed as the first documentary on Chinese medicine culture. It set a new record for domestically produced documentaries and received multiple local documentary awards. In 2019, a re-edited four-episode international edition of The Tale was produced (and renamed China’s Amazing Super Herbs) and commenced international broadcasts on Discovery Channel, furthering the mission to present the legendary charm of Chinese materia medica to the

Among many others, they include the diagnostic methods of TCM; technology of processing Chinese materia medica (paozhi炮製 / Chinese herbology); traditional galenic preparation methods in TCM; acupuncture and moxibustion; Tibetan medicine culture; as well as the medicinal culture of two major pharmacies in China—Tongren Tang (同仁堂) and Huqingyu Tang drugstores (胡慶余堂) (Obringer 2011: 21). 6

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world. The successful model of The Tale was replicated in Herbal China Season 1 and 2 (本草中華, 2017, 2019) co-produced by Yunji Media and Iqiyi Inc. The series shares the major production crew of The Tale that consists mainly of young documentary filmmakers of the post-1985 generation.7 These TCM documentary series (“TCM docs”) provide new narratives of individual herbs that depict the intriguing tales of interspecies encounters and interconnectedness. They engage viewers with stories of different people whose lives are intermingled with Chinese herbs in various ways, and enable the public to share their joy, sadness, anger and fear through their affective recollections. At times, established TCM companies and brands of herb-based medical products are occasionally featured in the documentaries for the purpose of product placement. The series also shows the processes of modernization, mechanization, and corporatization of these hundred-year-old brands. Shot entirely in 4K with the use of high-speed camera filming techniques and drones, TCM docs represent the world of herbs with multi-scalar perspectives that are able to depict something as vast as the spectacular aerial shots of dense forest along the Chongbai Mountain Range, where rare wild ginseng hides and as tiny as the millions of microscopic ganoderma spores dispersing from lingzhi mushrooms. It is hoped that the advanced technology and the energy instilled in the images could facilitate the revitalization of the millennia-old TCM culture with a modern outlook that might appeal to viewers of the younger generations.8 TCM docs thus set out to bridge the history of ancient herbs and their contemporary regeneration, connecting medicinal practices past and present, in order to enable a continuation and expansion of Chinese herbal culture. However, like comics, art, cinema and television series, and other forms of media representations, documentary series too has its limitations in offering a more holistic and coherent image of TCM and Chinese herbal culture, and in turn results in the often conflicting and contradictory images, for being both natural and anthropogenic; both traditional and modern; and both ecocentric and anthropocentric.

BETWEEN NATURAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC: PLANT, MINERAL, ANIMAL It is generally agreed that TCM is an ecologically conscious—hence a natural—form of medicine, owing to its herbal resources being obtained from nature and processed in natural ways. Not only are the herbs taken from nature, but they are usually collected, harvested, and processed according to the right seasons of the year, or time of the day. The traditional lunar calendar has divided the whole year into 24 Solar Terms since ancient time, and continues to offer important reference and guidance to people’s daily activities in the contemporary Chinese speaking world. The very first episode of the documentary series The Tale of Chinese Medicine (2016) makes “Time” its title and theme, and introduces several types of herbs that convey the message that “there is a time for everything, as reflected in the variability of natural herbs in their seasonal transformations and capacities for different applications.” One of the plants that has been featured is shuangsangye (霜桑 葉), or silvery mulberry leaf, a highly seasonal herb that reaches its prime quality and efficacy on the day of Autumn’s Frost (Shuangjiang霜降) in late October, which is expected to be the last and the “Bencao Zhonghua zhongyiyaoli pinwenhua (Herbal China: Seeing Culture in TCM),” Xinhua News, Sept 8, 2017. Available online: http://www.xinhua​net.com//2017-09/08/c_112​1628​370.htm. 8 Ibid. 7

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coldest day of Autumn. The episode suggests that if every part of the mulberry tree is harvested and processed according to the seasons, four distinctive types of herbal medicine can be produced: in spring, the mulberry twigs can be turned into an anti-rheumatism herb named sangzhi桑枝.. In summer, the tea of mulberry fruit makes a refreshing herbal beverage (sangshen桑葚). Autumn is the season for harvesting mulberry leaves for the multifunctional herb shuangsangye, and in winter, the root peel of the mulberry tree makes a diuretic herb named sangbaipi (桑白皮). The episode also introduces Tianma (天麻, rhizome gastrodiae), a common herb used for treating headaches, dizziness, and spasms, and improving blood circulation. This herb can only be harvested between the beginning of winter (Lidong 立冬) in early November and Qingming (清明), the following April, the optimal period of time when the rhizome is mature while its stem has not grown above ground. Not only are these Chinese herbs highly seasonal, but they are also natural for another reason, as the documentaries emphasize: they are precious resources that can be obtained only in the most remote and secluded environments and the harshest conditions in nature. From the sea cucumber in the deep ocean, rousongrong (desert cistanche deserticola) in the driest desert of Inner Mongolia, and shihu (dendrobium nobile) that is grown by rocky cliffs to the edible bird’s nests that are harvested in swallow caves in Yunnan, TCM docs show that it is only through human beings’ courage and determination in overcoming the natural obstacles and hardships, that one could eventually obtain these precious herbs as gifts from Nature. However, the traditional practice of using endangered animals such as deer horn velvets, rhinoceros horns, tiger bones, and dried seahorses, to name but a few, have opened up TCM in the contemporary world to global criticism. Scholars have also pointed out the demand for TCM derived from endangered flora and fauna is increasingly threatening the survival of many species and posing serious challenges for conservation (Cheung et al. 2021; Swan and Conrad 2014; Thomas-Walters et al. 2020). The Compendium of Materia Medica has documented over four hundred types of animal-based medicinal materials. A number of them have been introduced in the TCM docs. In one of The Tale’s episodes titled “Peculiar Encounter,” we are introduced to a herb named “earth dragon” (dilong 地龍, lumbricus), which refers to the earthworms used in traditional Chinese medicine. It is said that a combined use of worms with dried black-striped snakes (wushaoshe烏梢蛇, Zaocys dhumnades) could make an effective medicine for people suffering strokes or hemiplegia.9 In addition, centipedes, scorpions, leeches, and cockroaches are also commonly used insect-based medicines that are introduced in the series.10 However, given the unlikeliness of international viewers accepting them as herbal ingredients, it is perhaps unsurprising that all of the segments on animals and insects featured in the TCM docs are deliberately omitted in China’s Amazing Super Herbs, the four-episode international version of The Tale. So just how natural and environmental could TCM possibly be, when nonhuman animals and insects are frequently used in its production? To give a short answer to that, one thing that needs to be made clear is that bencao (本草), the Chinese word for herbs or herbal medicine, consists of three types of medical material that are obtained from nature: plant (e.g., roots, barks, seeds, leaves, etc.); mineral (e.g., salt, rocks, animal bones); and animal (e.g., insects, animal parts). All three types of “herbs” are collectively called materia medica (Hong 2016: xiv). It is important to note 9

The Tale, Season 1, Episode 4. Herbal China, Season 1, Episode 5; The Tale, Season 2, Episode 3.

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that instead of understanding the centuries-old TCM simply through contemporary ideological advocacies of animal justice and environmental conservationism, the philosophy that serves as a guiding principle behind TCM is the philosophy of life nurturance and anthropocosmic ideal of tianren heyi, as well as to follow the Natural Way (Dao) to maintain equilibrium by non-excessive harvesting and consumption of materials. It is due to this ideological tension between the ancient ecophilosophical ideal of herb-making and modern notions of environmentalism and animal justice, that we see the conflicting images of TCM in our contemporary world. China’s Amazing Super Herbs, however, completely omits the introduction to any animal herb (dongwuyao), which leads to a missed opportunity for further discussion and reflection on the subject. It is only through revealing these ideological tensions of past and present, East and West, via understanding some of the key virtues in classical Chinese philosophy, that we could design more effective global behaviorchange campaigns to tackle against what we considered unethical TCM practices, such as illegal wildlife trades in the future (Thomas-Walters et al. 2020). Going beyond the presentist tendency and polarized politics also enables us to further examine TCM’s validity as a natural medicine (as a contrast to chemical drugs), and its potential role and contribution to the development of contemporary environmental medicine.

BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND MODERN: TCM AS CULTURAL CONSTRUCTS Since the 1980s, China began to promote the professionalization of TCM practices; “it was decided to club together a whole series of doctrines and therapeutic practices from previous eras drawn sometimes from different schools, but all of them carefully shorm of anything smacking too much of ‘superstition’ ” (Obringer 2011: 15). However, the impulse in depicting TCM as something mystical, through the ethnic minorities’ ritualistic Buddhist and Daoist beliefs and practices, persists as a major characteristic depicted in the recent TCM docs. In addition to that, TCM docs also promote strong Confucian family ethics in the stories of the herb people. Herbs are therefore represented culturally, religiously, and traditionally, as Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian constructs, in the documentary series. Ginseng (Rensheng 人參) is the imp in the world of herbs due to its human-shape and the legendary tales told by its pickers.11 As the documentaries describe, legend has it that wild ginseng is sensitive to human voices. It will flee when it hears one. Therefore, it is a rule that people are strictly forbidden to talk during a ginseng hunt. If anyone wishes to communicate, he should whistle or knock on a tree trunk with a stick. In a modern world defined by cultural narratives of disenchantment, the tales of the mystical herbs depicted in TCM docs re-enchant the world through introducing the rituals and superstitious practices, particularly of those originating from non-Han ethnic minorities. In 2015, renowned incense maker Renqing Dezhe celebrated his tenth year of making incense by undertaking the Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage, kowtowing his way all the way from Aba, Sichuan, to Potala Palace in Lhasa. It took him 209 days to complete the 2149-mile journey (Figure 25.4). The journey was spotlighted in the TCM docs episode “Footsteps,”12 which presents the ritualistic he Tale, Season, 1 Episode 1; Herbal China, Season 1, Episode 3. T Herbal China, Season 1, Episode 3.

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FIGURE 25.4  Tibetan incense maker’s Buddhist pilgrimage. Herbal China, S1 Ep3 (2017).

practice of the making of Tibetan incense (zhangxiang藏香). Tibetan incense is made by combining various herbal plants from nature, including the rare Zhanghonghua (Tibetan safflower) gathered from the Himalaya. The episode sums up the process of how Renqing Dezeng makes his herbal incense. He is shown reciting Buddhist scripts both when he picks flowers in the wild and as he grinds them to make his incense paste. As Renqing explains, it is only through the ritualistic practice that one’s body, mind, and heart can be united with the natural herbs. “Tibetan incense is not made by one individual, it can only be completed with the collaborations among many [nonhuman] others, from the flora and fauna of the world,” he expresses. There is also no lack of martial arts practitioners being featured in the documentary series. From Henan’s Buddhist monks of the Shaolin Temple and the black herbal ointment patches they make (Shaolin heigaoyao少林黑膏药),13 to the Daoist Huashan School up on Wuling Mountains in Hunan, and their extraction and processing of wild Chinese knotweed (heshouwu 何首烏),14 the TCM docs suggest that philosophy in Buddhist and Daoist practices continue to influence and characterise TCM and herbal medicine. TCM docs also reflects a specific form of Confucian ethics that blends environmental concerns, place attachment, family values, and business management into the stories of herbs and people. A narrative that is recurrently seen in the series is the succession of a TCM family business, or a specific school of practice, from one generation to the next. Fifty-eight-year-old Li Feng is the heir of a family-owned business in Huazhou, Guangdong Province, where the distinctive dried pomelo peel (huajuhong 化橘红) was first manufactured in the fifteenth century during the Ming dynasty.15 We are told that huajuhong manufacturing was once a thriving industry in Huazhou, but the citrus trees were almost completely wiped out during the Cultural Revolution. It was in the 1990s, when the local government encouraged farmers to replant fruit trees, that the Li family erbal China, Season 1, Episode 1. H China’s Amazing Super Herbs, Episode 4. 15 The Tale, Season 1, Episode 4. 13 14

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FIGURE 25.5  Modern Farming of Greenhouse Lingzhi. The Tale of Chinese Medicine, S1 Ep2 (2016).

resumed the business. Today, Li’s family has turned their pomelo orchards into a huge business. With the introduction of modern machinery, the old way of preparing and slicing pomelo peels has gradually faded out. However, Li Feng stresses in the documentary that the family-owned business will be passed on to the next generations, in honor of the family instruction written by her late grandfather which she and her descendants must continue to uphold. These narratives that place a strong emphasis in family bonds is also seen in a segment on lingzhi (靈芝ganoderma lucidum). Commonly known as reishi mushroom, lingzhi is said to have countless beneficial effects, including strengthening one’s immunity system and aiding longevity.16 The episode features Deng’s family in Fujian, where both father and son are lingzhi growers. Their different practices, however, reflect the trend of modernization that is commonly seen in the TCM industry. Unlike father Deng, who has spent most of his life searching for wild lingzhi on Wuyi Mountain, but is finding it increasingly challenging due to his old age and the depopulation of lingzhi in the wild, the college-educated son has chosen to study modern planting techniques for lingzhi (Figure 25.5). The generational gap between father and son is thus played out in their conflicting methods of lingzhi sourcing, between searching in the wild and modern farming of greenhouse lingzhi. Interestingly, as the episode enfolds, nothing matters more than the strong bond and sense of mutual care within a family. Their divide is soon resolved with father Deng cooking a meal with a pot of warm, delicious lingzhi duck stew for his family, which “fills both father and son’s hearts with happiness” and melts away the differences between them. The story of rougui (肉桂), Chinese cinnamon, takes us to the Meng’s family in Pingnan, Guangxi Province,17 and shows us how family ties, or the making and recognizing of kin (Haraway 2016), can be extended to the nonhuman world. Rougui is both a spice and a medicinal herb that is widely used in China for everyday cooking. In order to obtain the best quality rougui, the outermost layer of large cinnamon trees would need to be removed for processing. The film crew spotlights old Mrs he Tale, Season 1, Episode 2. T Herbal China, Season 1, Episode 2.

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FIGURE 25.6  Mrs. Meng and Her “Transspecies Family Member”, an Eighty-Year-Old Cinnamon Tree. Herbal China, S1 Ep2 (2017).

Meng and a tall, eighty-year-old cinnamon tree (Figure 25.6). The old lady expresses her affection toward the tree, which she treated as a family member because it was planted by her grandfather eighty years earlier. As we are told, the old tree is now dying. With a heavy heart, Mrs. Meng and her family come to bid the tree farewell, before having it cut down and giving it a new life in the form of herbs. While these family tales suggest a strong sense of place attachment and human–land affinity that makes humans and tree “biotic sympoietic collaborators,” and that we all “make kin symchthonically, sympoetically” (Haraway 2016: 102), in reality, the cutting of the old tree, the overharvesting of wild ginseng and lingzhi, and the commercial expansion and corporatization of TCM business generate more doubts and questions regarding how our conflicting attitudes towards conservation and herbal extraction can be reconciled. These narrations and characterizations of herbs reassert the idea that TCM reconnects us with the classical Chinese environmental thoughts documented in ancient texts like Canon of the Yellow Emperor and the Compendium of Materia Medica. However, it is exactly because Chinese herbs are constantly regarded as “traditional,” and its reputation as an intangible cultural heritage, that people’s perception of it remains hard to change. Obringer points out that in the context of herbal medicine, “the word ‘traditional’ (chuantong) is hardly used in China”; the expressions ‘TCM’ and ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine’ are meant for foreigners when they are used outside of the Chinese-speaking world (2011: 15). In The Tale, several successful pharmaceutical chain companies in China and elsewhere in Asia have been featured to reveal the drastic modernization and technologization of their productions of herbal commodities in recent years (Figure 25.7).18 Today, herbal tea sachets and capsulized herbal tablets that are manufactured by these large multinational brands have become highly Examples include Hu Qingyu Tang in Hangzhou, Eu Yan Seng International (est. 1879) in Singapore, and Wei Yuen Tong Medicine (est. 1897) in Hong Kong. 18

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FIGURE 25.7  Eu Yan Seng International in Singapore. The Tale of Chinese Medicine, S1 Ep7 (2016).

accessible throughout the world. In featuring the first Chinese Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou and her discovery of qinghaosu (青蒿 素artemisinin) for treating malaria, the original series also recognizes the growing use of TCM and Chinese herbs in modern medical sciences.19 Beyond the advancement of Chinese herbal technologies, consuming herbal tea is also emerging as a life-nurturing (yangsheng) practice in contemporary China. With the country’s rapid urbanization and the severe air pollution making chronic respiratory disease (CRD) one of the leading illnesses after heart disease and diabetes, one of The Tale’s episodes features a café in Huazhou City in Guangdong Province that serves herbal drinks made of huajuhong (dried pomelo peels) (Figure 25.8). In today’s China, herbal beverages are easily found in busy cafés not so different from chain coffee shops from the West.20 Even better, their tea can be taken as a form of environmental medicine that facilitates the alleviation of CRD symptoms. However, it is perhaps telling that TCM’s modernization, corporatization, and popularization in the abovementioned segments, and the interviews with the owners of transnational pharmaceutical companies and Nobel-winning scientist, have been excluded from the international version of the series. Being state-funded productions, the TCM docs present a renewed official image of herbal medicine that China wishes to exhibit to both its people as well as the outside world. However, while it manages to highlight locally TCM’s emergence as a yangsheng practice, for preserving some of its traditional and religious features while also successfully modernized and commercialized in cosmopolitan Asian cities, the image it chooses to exhibit to the West remains more one-sided, being hugely oriental, traditional, and mystical.

he Tale, Season 1, Episode 7. T The Tale, Season 1, Episode 4.

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FIGURE 25.8  Drinking Huajuhong Herbal Beverage as an Urban Lifestyle. China’s Amazing Super Herbs, Ep3 (2019).

BETWEEN ECOCENTRISM AND ANTHROPOCENTRISM: CHINESE HERBS IN THE MULTISPECIES WORLDS In Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), Tsing reminds us through her exploration of the worlds of matsutake mushrooms that we are “surrounded by many world-making projects, human and not human” (21). One could say that the worlds of Chinese herbs are also characterized by such “mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life” (4). One of the first herbs that is introduced in Herbal China is the Tibetan caterpillar fungus (Dongcong xiaocao 冬蟲夏 草, cordyceps sinensis)21 (Figure 25.9). With a name in Chinese that is literally “winter worm, summer grass,” the highly prized herb is a parasitic fungus that infects the larvae of ghost moths in summer, gradually killing and mummifying them while they are buried underground. Throughout autumn and winter, the fungus will absorb sufficient nutrients to grow through the worm’s body, and by spring, emerge through the head of the caterpillar corpse and grow into a dark brown, fewcentimeters-long stalk above ground. Besides fungal herbs, there are also other types of Chinese herbs that are formed based on the fascinating chemistry and entanglements among different living and nonliving matter. In the episode “Peculiar Encounter,”22 we are introduced chenxiang (沉香, Lignum Aquilariae Resinatum), the precious agarwood from South China, particularly Hong Kong and Guangdong, known for the unique fragrance that makes it valuable as Chinese incense and medicine. The aroma of agarwood originates from open wounds on the tree bark. When the wounds get into contact with various types of fungi, the tree will secrete resin as a reaction to heal itself. Over a long enough period of time (of two decades or more), the “encounter” between the resin and the parasitic fungi will impregnate the rotten wood with a unique fragrant, resulting in the rare herb of chenxiang.

erbal China, Season 1, Episode 1. H Herbal China, Season 1, Episode 4.

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FIGURE 25.9  Tibetan Caterpillar Fungus. Herbal China, S1 Ep1 (2017).

Tianma (天麻 Rhizoma Gastrodiae), on the other hand, is the rhizomatic plant that is often believed to possess a spirit because it can grow without any leaf or root. The truth is it has a symbiotic relationship with the honey fungus (Armillaria mellea) which grows on rotting wood. The honey fungus dissolves the wood and provides the nutrients needed for tianma to grow. As the TCM docs suggest, it is through these “peculiar encounters,” among insects, woods, and fungi, and with the reactions of, and entanglements with, other external agents such as water, sunlight, time, and human interventions, that the extraordinary and unique Chinese herbs are created. Chinese herbs are good examples of what recent scholars describe as the various “assemblages” in the world-making processes (Bennett 2010; Haraway 2016; Tsing 2015). “Different species make arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others” (Tsing 2015: 22) to build multispecies worlds based on the different forms of interconnectedness and relationships. As Tsing suggests, Ecologists turned to assemblages to get around the sometimes fixed and bounded connotations of ecological “community.” The question of how the varied species in a species assemblage influence each other—if at all—is never settled: some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place. Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. (22–3) In fact, dating back in 200–250 CE, such conceptualizations of multispecies connections, particularly in the context of the relationships among different herbal ingredients, have already been put forward in the ancient medicinal classic The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica (Shennong Bencaojing 神農本草經), in what is called TCM’s Theory of Seven Emotions (or Seven Relationships) (七情和 合 Qiqing Hehe): Medicinals should coordinate [with each other] in terms of yin and yang … Some [medicinals] can go [i.e., be used] alone. Some need each other. Some mutually reinforce [each other]. Some fear each other. Some are averse to each other. Some clash with each other. Some kill each other. These seven emotions [i.e., relationships] require that, when combining [medicinals], it is proper

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to use those that need each other and are mutually empowering. One should not use those that are mutually averse or mutually clash. As for toxic medicinals, they should be processed with those to which they are averse or with those that kill them. Otherwise they cannot be used in combination. (The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica Classic, Preface, xi–xii)23 Knowledge from both past and present, and East and West, reflect the idea that many living and nonliving beings in the natural world are interdependent on and connected with each other in various ways, and all the more so in the world of Chinese herbal medicine. However, whether these relationships could generate beneficial or detrimental effects, also depends on whether we are speaking from the human’s, plant’s, or the planet’s perspective. In the present world characterized by global climate change and biodiversity loss, in addition to the many other forms of environmental destruction caused by human beings, it is apparent that global capitalism continues to tie economy and environment closely together, turning both nonhumans (the natural herbs) and humans (the precarious herb hunters) into capital resources. In the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan regions, scientific research has shown that the caterpillar fungus production is seriously threatened by the combined pressures of habitat degradation, climate change and especially overharvesting for TCM (Hopping, Chignell, and Lambin, 2018). Similarly, with illegal logging, over-harvesting, and over-poaching, numerous types of rare Chinese herbs from nature, such as the wild lingzhi, wild ginseng, zhanghonghua, and chenxiang, are all at risk of disappearing from their original habitats, if not facing their own extinction. Meanwhile, many of the local herb hunters, with generations of ancestors in the same business, are finding it hard to continue their practices due to the drastic depopulation of the plants as a combined result of climate change, habitat degradation, and overexploitation. While TCM docs offer a window for seeing and understanding the multispecies worlds of Chinese herbs, minimal efforts have been placed on offering a more ecocritical perspective that goes beyond the human-centered narratives of the herb people, and more importantly, beyond stressing the commercial and instrumental values of the herbs. With media representations that prioritize promoting TCM as a historical and cultural heritage, we are still far from realizing the post-anthropocentric multispecies worlds that are genuinely based on the ideal of tianren heyi, a harmonious coexistence that reflects a sustainable “collaborative survival” among all (Tsing 2015: 4).

CONCLUSION Through introducing a total of over a hundred types of Chinese herbs, the TCM docs discussed in this chapter—The Tale of Chinese Medicine, Herbal China, and China’s Amazing Super Herbs—aim to depict the world of TCM characterized by the interconnectedness and interdependence of human beings, natural plants, minerals, and animals. On the one hand, they present TCM as a world of multispecies coexistence guided by traditional religio-philosophical thoughts that shape Chinese people’s ways of thinking, living, and their relationships with all beings in the world. On the other hand, by highlighting the modern turns and developments in the TCM business, technology,

《神農本草經·序例》：“藥有陰陽配合,子母兄弟,根莖花實,草石骨肉,有單行者，有相須者，有相使者，有相畏者，有 相惡者，有相反者，有相殺者。凡此七情，和合視之，當用相須，相使者良，勿用相惡、相反者，若有毒宜制，可用相 畏、相殺者，不爾，不合用也。” 23

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and culture in various episodes, the TCM docs offer Chinese-speaking audience glimpses of how TCM has been gaining good successes in being modernized, industrialized, and corporatized. However, when facing the broader international audience, these documentaries quickly retreat to presenting and reinforcing TCM’s image as being ancient, mystical, daunting, reinforcing some of the deep-rooted social stigmas in foreigners’ eyes. In addition to that, while the TCM docs have achieved some success in renewing the image of herbal medicine but are inevitably caught in the ideological clashes between past and present, East and West, as reflected in what the docs highlight—the ecophilosophical ideals of harmony between humans and nature in the multispecies world; and what the docs deliberately avoid to address—namely the contemporary concerns in environmentalism and animal justice. Historians Stanley-Baker and Lo remind us that “the imagination of a coherent and pervasive Chinese tradition” in the context of TCM is “illusory, ephemeral. Those who have tried to capture it, as a counterpoint to a Western tradition, inevitably run the risk of addressing the subject in crude and unsustainable ways” (Lo and Stanley-Baker 2022: 9). As the environmental and health crises in our world continue to intensify and expand, the role of popular culture and mass media texts in facilitating medical communications and exchange between China and the world have also become increasingly significant. While these texts may continue to represent TCM and Chinese herbs in conflicting and contradictory ways, TCM’s diversified and pluralistic images and their growing visibility to the world will be the first step in proving their importance in promoting the philosophy of life nurturance, as well as in shaping the global development of environmental medicine.

REFERENCES Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cheung, H., H. Doughty, A. Hinsley, E. Hsu, Lee T. M., E. J.Milner-Gulland, H. P. Possingham, and D. Biggs (2021), “Understanding Traditional Chinese Medicine to Strengthen Conservation Outcomes,” People and Nature, 3: 115–28. Chia, A. (2013), “Yishujia Zhang Huan de Zhongyao Hua: Tantao jibing he shuailao藝術家張洹的中藥畫：探討 疾病和衰老 (Artist Zhao Huan and his TCM Paintings: Exploring Illness and Ageing),” Sina News, June 25. Available online: http://col​lect​ion.sina.com.cn/cqyw/20130​625/055​1117​858.shtml. Farquhar, J., and L. Lai (2018), “Sketching the Dao: Chinese Medicine in Modern Cartoons,” in V. Lo and P. Barrett (eds.), Imagining Chinese Medicine, 497–508, Leiden: Brill. Farquhar, J., and Q. Zhang (2012), Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing, New York: Zone Books. Hammond, K. J. (2013), “Li Shizhen,” in T. J. Hinrichs and L.L. Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, 151–3, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hinrichs, T. J., and L. L.Barnes, eds. (2013), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hong, H. (2016), Principles of Chinese Medicine: A Modern Interpretation, London: Imperial College Press. Hopping, K. A., S. M. Chignell, and E. F. Lambin (2018), “The Demise of Caterpillar Fungus in the Himalayan Region due to Climate Change and Overharvesting,” PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), 115 (45): 11489–94.

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Kohn, L. (2001), “Change Starts Small: Daoist Practice and the Ecology of Individual Lives,” in N. J. Girardot, J. Miller, and Liu X. (eds.), Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape, 373–90, Cambridge, MA: Harvard CSWR. Lo, V., and M. Stanley-Baker (2022), “An Introduction,” in Lo, V. and M. Stanley-Baker (eds.), in Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, London: Routledge. Nature Editorials (2011), “Editorials - Hard to Swallow: Is It Possible to Gauge the True Potential of Traditional Chinese Medicine?,” Nature, 448: 106. Obringer, F. (2011), “Chinese Medicine and the Enticement of Heritage Status,” trans. N. Jayaram, China Perspectives, 2011 (3): 15–22. Qu, L. (曲黎敏). (2007), Huangdi neijing yangsheng zhihui [The Yangsheng Wisdom of the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon /黃帝內經養生智慧], Xiamen: Lujiang Press (in Chinese). Rom, W., and S. Markowitz, eds. (2007), Environmental and Occupational Medicine, 4th ed., Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Rom, W. (2007), “The Discipline of Environmental and Occupational Medicine,” in W. Rom and S. Markowitz (eds.), Environmental and Occupational Medicine, 4th ed., 3–8, Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Swan, K., and K. Conrad. (2014), “The Conflict between Chinese Cultural and Environmental Values in Wildlife Consumption,” in P. Harris and G. Lang (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Environment and Society in Asia, 321–35, London: Routledge. Thomas-Walters, L., H. Cheung, Lee T. M., Wan A. K. Y., and Wang Y. (2020), “Targeted Values: The Relevance of Classical Chinese Philosophy for Illegal Wildlife Demand Reduction Campaigns,” People and Nature (2): 964–71. Tsing, A. L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tu, W. (2007), “An ‘Anthropocosmic’ Perspective on Creativity,” in Zhao D. (ed.), Dialogue of Philosophies, Religions and Civilizations in the Era of Globalization: Chinese Philosophical Studies, 143–53, Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Veith, I., trans. ([1975] 2016), Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wen / The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, Oakland: University of California Press. Wei, G., and Zhuang P. (2019), “Ecophobia, ‘Hollow Ecology,’ and the Chinese Concept of ‘Tianren Heyi’ (天人 合一),” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 26 (2): 430–41. Yang, S., trans. (1998), The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica: A Translation of the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing by Yang Shou-zhong, Boulder, CO: Blue Poppy Press. Zhou, C. (周春才) (2012), Manhua Zhongyi Fangyao Dudian (漫畫中醫方藥圖典). Taipei: ACE Reading (in Chinese).

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Literary Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Intercorporeality in Aboriginal Australian Poetry: “Into the Sap Stream” JOHN CHARLES RYAN

INTRODUCTION As sustenance, fiber, medicine, and ornamentation, vegetal bodies sustain human and more-thanhuman health and well-being. Yet, in many ways, the neoliberal transfiguration of plants into natural resources, globally exchanged commodities, and aestheticized objects decorporealizes them, negating their vibrant presence in the world. However, theorizations of phenomenological intercorporeality (Weiss 2013) and new materialist transcorporeality (Alaimo 2010, 2016: 111–41) foreground human–nonhuman bodily interdependencies particularly regarding the shared effects of environmental contamination. In conjunction with emerging scientific research into plants’ complex sensory and somatic faculties (Chamovitz 2012; Lamers, van der Meer, and Testerink 2020), the premise of botanical corporeality offers a generative provocation for an inclusive view of human, vegetal, and other bodies-in-the-world as co-extensive and co-agential. In developing the concept of human-plant intercorporeality, this chapter examines the narrativization of human and vegetal entanglements in Aboriginal Australian poetry and the ancestral stories that underlie this literary-ethnobotanical tradition. Indeed, plants occupy a prominent position in the work of Aboriginal Australian writer-activists Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993) and Lionel G. Fogarty (born 1958). As expressions of literary ethnobotany, their poetry asserts the significance of traditional people-plant relations, as mediated by sensing bodies-in-contact (Ryan 2019b). Their embodied phytopoetics, moreover, recuperates deep-time-inscribed, plant-based knowledge originating in Country (Aboriginal homeland) and the Dreaming (Creation narratives). The narratives of Noonuccal and Fogarty accordingly reclaim the value of somatic understandings, perceptions, and practices related to Australian flora. In stark contrast, Anglo-Australian cultural narratives tend to construct native plants—wattle, waratah,

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Sturt’s desert pea, and others—vis-à-vis their usefulness to the appropriative state-apparatus as symbols, icons, materials, and commodities.1 Whereas these dominant narratives devitalize vegetal life through a fixation on beauty and serviceability, the botanical wisdom encoded in Noonuccal and Fogarty’s poetry rouses the manifold senses, inspires the interaction of bodies, and appeals to the affective domain. Aboriginal Australian poetry is predicated on the recognition of long-standing kinship networks enfolding plants and other beings. The vibrancy of plant life derives from the Dreaming yet remains palpable through the senses extending tentacularly into the everyday world. The intercorporeality of Aboriginal poetry affirms affective identification with plants as a means to heal human–nonhuman estrangement. Within the context of plant-non-plant well-being, this chapter examines the ways in which Aboriginal poetry mediates embodied human-flora engagements. I argue that, understood as corporeal literary ethnobotany, the work of Noonuccal and Fogarty countervails the erosion of biocultural knowledge in the wake of declining floristic diversity in Australia and elsewhere (Humphreys 2019). Guided by these interrelated claims, I first elaborate the framework of literary ethnobotany and then postulate the idea of human-plant intercorporeality before performing a close reading of the somatic phytopoetics of Noonuccal and Fogarty.

LITERARY ETHNOBOTANY: CORPOREAL KNOWLEDGE OF PLANTS IN POETRY I characterize the work of Noonuccal and Fogarty as literary ethnobotany—a form of environmental literature comprising poetry, prose, scripts, verse-narratives, and other textual artifacts that narrate cultural knowledge of plants as food, medicines, fibers, materials, ornaments, decorations, totems, teachers, agents, and personae (Isbister, Pu, and Rachman 2019; Ryan 2019b). Literary ethnobotany constitutes an intervention into the (neo)colonial impetuses of both botany and ethnobotany. Scholars have critically traced the relationship between botany and empire (Miller and Reill 1996), as well as the historical emergence of “colonial botany” (Schiebinger and Swan 2007) and “imperial botany,” for instance, in the plant collections of prominent nineteenth-century naturalists such as Joseph Dalton Hooker (Endersby 2008). Colonial-imperial practices of botany are characteristically based on a binary opposition between scientific and so-called folk systems of plant knowledge expressed through culturally-specific paradigms of classification and nomenclature. In this vein, postcolonial studies scholar Projit Bihari Mukharji (2014) theorizes retro-botanizing as the process by which a modern, taxonomic designation for a plant is rendered equivalent to an older, traditional signifier. Consider the Aboriginal term waratah, on the one hand, in comparison to the binomial designation, Telopea speciosissima, on the other. Waratah derives from the Dharug language west of Sydney and specifically the word warrada (Clarke 2008: 49). Although these terms are presented as more or less interchangeable—waratah is T. speciosissima in the technical literature of botany—Aboriginal names for plants in fact denote a broad range of species and plant-non-plant intergradations that fall outside the significatory capacity of taxonomic discourses (Clarke 2007).

Throughout this chapter, I use the term Aboriginal (capitalized) to refer to the original human inhabitants of Australia and native (decapitalized) to denote the original plant life of the continent existing prior to European colonization in the late-eighteenth century. The use of the term Indigenous (capitalized) refers broadly to the First Nations people of the world (North America, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, etc.) including—but not limited to—the original inhabitants of Australia. 1

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For Mukharji (2014), retro-botanizing relegates nonmodern human-vegetal relations to the domain of “local” or folk knowledge and reconfigures “that very cosmological universe within which plant identities are embedded” (69). In disregarding the vital distinctions between plants—and between botanical knowledge systems—retro-botanizing propounds: A false claim to transparent translation that overlooks the opacity of difference that lurks in-between the two plant names. In its denial, retro-botanising also masks the political, contingent, and reversible relationship between the two names of a plant and presents it as an automatic, predetermined and unmediated equivalence. (Mukharji 2014: 69–70) Retro-botanizing thus attempts to produce a single, coherent vegetal identity through the homogenization of the heterogeneous cultural histories of a plant. As Mukharji (2014) further claims, “the politics of retro-botanical negotiations is therefore patently also a negotiation over possible futures for and of the plant” (80). In contrast to Anglo-European botanies, embodied intersections between Aboriginal Australian people and plants counter the ideological drive to appropriate flora as dematerialized symbols, icons, and emblems. As a case in point, a Dreaming story from the Illawarra region of New South Wales tells of a young woman named Krubi, wrapped a red kangaroo cloak, awaiting the return of her lover, the warrior Bahmai (McLeod 2001: 110). After his death in battle, she refuses to eat, withers away, and dies. A crimson flower—its stem as high as a long spear—emerges from the spot where she passed away. Resembling a broken heart, the flower bears petals shaped like teardrops. Named waratah, the brilliant red blossom affirms the undying passion between Krubi and Bahmai (McLeod 2001: 111). Among the Dharug of present-day Sydney, moreover, the species retains considerable significance. Mourners place the flower alongside the body of a deceased person, and foragers extract nectar from the tubular flowers (Clarke 2008: 49). For the Dharawal of the Sydney basin area—for whom the waratah is known as moolone or mooloone—the species is a food, drink, decoration, and ceremonial object (Wesson 2005: 100). These bodily predicated, regionally embedded, and culturally specific imbrications between plants and people defy the totalizing logic of (neo)colonial botanical paradigms. In contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry, vegetal life embodies cultural heritage, galvanizes community identity, and constitutes a reagent of political struggle (Ryan 2019a). Grounded in oral traditions and song-poetry—some of which are based on a sixty-thousand-year history— Aboriginal poetry resounds with allusions to the natural-cultural sphere of plants, animals, water, elements, forebears, supernatural deities, and human communities (Berndt 1976; Brandenstein and Thomas 1974). From an Aboriginal stance, the natural environment is a fluid assemblage of human–nonhuman beings including Creation ancestors (Rose 1992). Kombumerri-Wakka Wakka philosopher Mary Graham (2008) explains that “the sacred web of connections includes not only kinship relations and relations to the land, but also relations to nature and all living things” (187). Hybridizing typographical and oral conventions, Aboriginal poetry communicates biocultural knowledge, voices urgent environmental concerns, and formulates critiques of the asymmetries that undermine traditional livelihoods. Aboriginal poetry discloses epistemologies of vegetal nature that run counter to the strict Western demarcation between human and nonhuman—a separation that arguably propels Anglo-Australian settlerism. This logocentric hierarchization of humans, animals, plants, and other life-forms reduces the nonhuman domain to the inert substratum of (neo)colonial desire—the mute material out of which empires arise.

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In response to the intrusions of the dominant culture, Aboriginal poetry calls attention to the longstanding intercorporeal relations between people, communities, and plants (Clarke 2003: 144– 8, Rose 1992). Contrary to the figuration of plants as emblems of state authority, Noongar activistpoet Jack Davis in “The Red Gum and I” (1970) addresses the native Australian tree as a listening subject with the capacity to heal colonial trauma: “Take me through the bark / Into the sap stream” (38, ll. 3–4). Similarly, in the verse-poetry collection Story about Feeling (1989), Kakadu Elder “Big” Bill Neidjie initiates dialogue with a tree as “e” (or “he”). The interlaced natural-cultural— or “ethnobotanical”—elements of Aboriginal poetry, however, have not been fully explored in Australian literary studies (e.g., Cooke 2013; Kinsella 2013; Mudrooroo 1994; Taylor 1967). Critics instead have viewed contemporary Aboriginal verse through the optics of dissentive politics (Mudrooroo 1994), postcolonial counter-mimicry (Huggan and Tiffin 2010: 94–7), linguistic defiance of cultural imperialism (Kinsella 2013), or, in some early appraisals, versified vernacular with performative rather than literary value (Taylor 1967). These extant approaches elide the biocultural potentialities of Aboriginal poetry as a medium for propagating traditional plantbased knowledge ever more under threat in Australia. Prevailing approaches also overlook the spatiotemporal continuities between ancestral song-poetry and contemporary Aboriginal poetry vis-à-vis human–plant interactions (Cooke 2013). Narrativizing botanical wisdom and countering epistemological totalization, the poetry of Noonuccal and Fogarty is significant on an island continent beset by rampant ecological degradation, as evident during the calamitous 2019–20 bushfire season (Cave 2020). Moreover, inhering within Aboriginal phytopoetics is an abiding respect for plants as kin, relations, totems, and teachers. As such, literary ethnobotany constitutes a vital medium for preserving Indigenous people’s knowledge of botanical life while, at the same time, recognizing the intrinsic wisdom of plants themselves as percipient, embodied subjects (Ryan 2019b). However, rather than reinforcing the positivism of anthropology and botany that has constituted plants as “voiceless” objects of research, literary ethnobotany extends advances in anti-colonial theory and decolonial aesthetics by scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) as well as Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez (2013). Tuhiwai Smith acknowledges that the dominant Western research paradigm is inextricably linked to Anglo-European imperialism. In contrast, decolonial praxis underscores Indigenous perspectives that uphold “self-determination, decolonisation and social justice” (Tuhiwai Smith 2012, 35). For Mignolo and Vazquez (2013), decolonial aesthetics “moves towards the healing, the recognition, the dignity of those aesthetic practices that have been written out of the canon of modern aesthetics” (pt. vii, para. 2). As an expression of decoloniality, literary ethnobotany constitutes a basis for understanding the work performed via the embodied phytopoetics of Noonuccal and Fogarty.

SOMATIC RESONANCES: HUMAN–PLANT BODILY HOMOLOGIES One of the principal concerns of Aboriginal Australian poets is the avaricious exploitation of Country through techno-industrial activities such as corporate mining. Poets figure environmental disturbance, including the clearance of sacred trees for roads, as a pathology of the earth-(plant)-body (Black 2011: 31–2). Rather than an enfleshed manifestation of a strictly demarcated subjectivity, the human body is entangled with(in) the somatic presences of plants, land, and cosmos through

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a multiscalar, multiversal form of intercorporeality (Morrissey 2015: 2). Originally propounded by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the idea of intercorporeality foregrounds “the role of embodied interactions between the self and the other in the process of social understanding … Through these embodied interactions, intersubjective meanings are created and directly shared between the self and the other, without being mediated by mental representations” (Tanaka 2015: 455). Through bodily homologies and somatic congruences between native flora and Indigenous people, Aboriginal poets narrativize human–plant relations as intensely embodied transactions. Defined as a structural similarity between organismic anatomies—the wings of birds, for instance, as comparable to the arms of primates—homology results from biological diversification from a common progenitor. With its basis in evolutionary science, homology also constitutes a transdisciplinary heuristic for appreciating Aboriginal Creation narratives such as, for instance, in the Illawarra where the broken heart of the Dreaming Ancestor Krubi becomes the waratah blossom (McLeod 2001). The premise of somatic resonance, furthermore, affirms that the harmonization of human and plant bodies is innervated by the deep-time, kin-based ontological mesh of Aboriginal law. As a case in point, the section “When You Sleep … Blood E Pumping” of Neidjie’s Story about Feeling (1989: 2–4) homologizes the processes of transpiration and photosynthesis in trees with blood circulation in mammalian bodies. Neidjie’s use of homology heightens a sense of somatic empathy—of shared bodily feeling—for nonhuman beings. An embodied phytopoetics of native Australian plants thus emerges. Aboriginal poetry inscribes Indigenous understandings of vegetal embodiment—the idea that trees and other botanical life forms inhabit sensing bodies, although of course radically different to our own, through which somatic relationality takes shape. In comparison, the Western technoscientific tradition disavows the vegetal body through entrenched notions of plants as genetic repositories, mechanical assemblages, exploitable materials, and aestheticized images fixated hypersexually on the reproductive anatomies of flowers (Ryan 2018: 53–80). In the late eighteenth century, though, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe postulated plant morphology as a countertradition attentive to the temporal emergence of the whole plant (Kaplan 2001: 1712). Published in 1790, The Metamorphosis of Plants introduces the “laws of metamorphosis by which nature produces one part through another, creating a great variety of forms through the modification of a single organ” (Goethe 2009: 5–6). Goethe’s Bauplan (body plan) supplies the organizational framework promulgating the features of symmetry, segmentation, and positionality that characterize the vegetal corpus (Kaplan 2001: 1717). It is critical to acknowledge the centrality of vegetal embodiment to Aboriginal Australian poetry and, moreover, to recognize how Indigenous perceptions of plants synchronize to an extent with the Goethean countertradition of holism advanced in studies of vegetal cognition (e.g., by Baluška et al. 2006). To be certain, Aboriginal literary ethnobotany reflects an uninhibited narrative movement across the categorical oppositions that have historically impeded human–plant relationality—Indigeneity versus Settlerism, intuition versus intellect, spirit versus body, individual versus species, poetry versus science, story versus disquisition, and so forth. In Neidjie’s versenarrative, for example, human-vegetal intercorporeality presents a means of sustaining nourishing relations between people and plants. In turn, somatic resonances and bodily homologies mediate this intercorporeality. My claims gain footing in “Laying Down,” the opening chapter of the versenarrative, in which trees, grass, and stars

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got blood pressure but same thing … spirit on your body, but e working with you. (1989: 2) Deceptively simple, these lines nonetheless deftly traverse non-Indigenous demarcations between plant, human, spirit, and universe. The serialization of “tree, grass, star” in the stanza juxtaposes multifarious subjectivities, affirming interrelation without purging identity. Rather than merely a figurative or metaphorical strategy, the invocation of “blood pressure” is a bodily homology that insinuates the arboreal and vegetal in the human and celestial. The consanguineous homology originates in Gaagudju Dreaming and Aboriginal law. Bodily homologies and somatic resonances recur in Neidjie’s “Laying Down.” The pervasive intercorporeality provokes affection and empathy for—as well as identification and kindredness with—grasses and trees. Communication between plants and humans arises on a nonverbal, affective-kinesthetic basis: I love it tree because e love me too. E watching me same as you tree e working with your body, my body. (1989: 4) The line “tree e working with your body, my body” evokes human–plant interdependency. Inspirited by mutual affection, the intercorporeal network of beings and elements functions according to the Dreaming. Repeated elsewhere in the chapter, the phrase “your body, my body” structurally approximates somatic congruence and engenders corporeal propinquity. The radically inclusive pronoun “e” encompasses manifold subjectivities—both animate and inanimate—within the collective whole. Other lines—for instance, “In my blood in my arm this grass”—homologize human blood and grass sap, both of which are energized by the vital force, or djang, of Neidjie’s Dreaming. Indeed, comparable expressions of human-plant intercorporeality are evident in the literary ethnobotany of Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

“KAA GOT PITCHERI”: NOONUCCAL’S LITERARY ETHNOBOTANY Aboriginal rights activist, poet, educator, and environmentalist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993), née Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska, became the first published Aboriginal poet with the release of We Are Going (1964). A second collection, The Dawn Is at Hand (1966), followed soon after. During the late 1970s, Noonuccal established Moongalba, or “sitting-down-place,” a coastal nature sanctuary on North Stradbroke Island, Queensland, where visitors could learn about Aboriginal foodgathering practices and sustainable long-term interactions with the land. Her heritage comprised Noonuccal (the traditional owners of North Stradbroke), inland Aboriginal, and Scottish ancestries. In narrativizing the botanical knowledge of these and other Aboriginal language groups, some of her poems can be understood as literary ethnobotany countering the hegemonic arrogation of plants as metaphors, models, and materials in service to Anglo-Australian settlerism. Noonuccal’s subsequent publications My People (2008, originally 1970) and the prose Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972) further materialize the idea of plants—and the cultural knowledge that surrounds them—as embodied figures, rather than decorporealized figurations, of Indigenous sovereignty.

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Originally published in We Are Going, Noonuccal’s “Tree Grave” narrates the usage of swamp oak (Casuarina glauca) for funeral ceremonies and, in the final stanza, calls attention to the acoustic phenomenon known throughout Aboriginal Australia as “sheoak whispers” (Ryan 2015: 6–8). The vernacular sheoak refers to members of the genera Casuarina and Allocasuarina; the swamp oak at the center of Noonuccal’s narrative is also a kind of sheoak. The three-stanza poem opens: When our lost one left us For the Shadow Land, In bark we bound him. (Noonuccal 2008: 6, ll. 1–8) In melodic diction that alternates between rhymed and unrhymed lines, Noonuccal invokes the burial tree ceremony documented by ethnobotanical observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anthropologist and collector Lindsay Black noted the pervasiveness of burial trees among the Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri people of inland New South Wales. Black (1941) defined taphoglyphs as “all trees found at burial grounds” (13). The carved trees accompanied the graves of doctors, leaders, warriors, and other prominent individuals. An extensive ceremonial mound— known as a tumulus—was sometimes constructed over a grave. Black gave an account of seven burial trees surrounding a funeral ground at Warren, New South Wales, used for chiefs killed in battle and other respected community members. As the anthropologist observed, “the dead in this case were all buried in a sitting position, and after the ceremonies were over a large heap of wood was placed on the grave” (Black 1941: 18, 23). Elsewhere, the gravesite of a tribal physician who died while attending to a headman was marked by four trees positioned according to the cardinal points. In narrating the ritual of bounding the hunter in bark and entombing his body in the swamp oak, Noonuccal recuperates an ethnoarboreal tradition that resists the utilitarian conversion of trees into fungible commodities. The taphoglyph signifies the funeral site yet also becomes the grave, as the corpse of the beloved is interred within the tree. As evident in other examples of literary ethnobotany, a pronounced sense of human–plant intercorporeality characterizes the narrative. Noonuccal lyricizes other aspects of the ceremony, specifically through the notion of sheoak whispers in which the voice of the deceased becomes the murmur of the wind through the tree’s needle-like leaves. The appropriation of the sheoak as a symbolic figuration or raw material of empire building can neither accommodate such nuances of sensory memory nor recognize the textured imbrications between the afterlife, the ancestors, and the tree. In the Noongar language of the Southwest of Western Australia, sheoak is known as gulli or kwela where kwel means “name.” Noongar people regard the sheoak as the tree of naming—a species that holds the names of everything and everyone, living and deceased, animate and inanimate, and that enunciates those names through its “whispers” (Ryan 2015: 6). From a literary-ethnobotanical perspective, “Tree Grave” is further significant for its recognition of the spiritual botany between the deceased, the sheoak, and the wetland. First appearing in The Dawn Is at Hand (1966), “Municipal Gum” is an elegy addressed to an urban gum tree. Hardly a coincidence, the poem’s inclusion in a volume called My People gestures toward a conception shared among Aboriginal cultures of trees and other vegetal forms as encompassed within a network of human–nonhuman kin relations. The repercussions of settler colonialism impinge on the gum’s corporeal vitality in the denatured landscape: “Gumtree in the city street, / Hard bitumen around your feet” (Noonuccal 2008: 45, ll. 1–5). The speaker communicates

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a gripping—though ultimately ineffable—feeling of empathy for the gum by homologizing human and arboreal anatomies in images such as “your feet.” Later, the gum appears “castrated, broken” with a “hung head” and “listless mien,” signifying its hopelessness. To characterize Noonuccal’s diction as affective fallacy, however, would be to commit a fatal misstep in critically reading the poem. Quite the reverse, the poem can be understood as literary-ethnobotanical; the deceptively simple narrative expresses intricate traditional relations between trees and people. These longstanding plant-human filiations have been ruptured by the juggernaut of Anglo-Australian settler culture and its fixation on colonizing the plantscape. Although a “fellow citizen,” the gum is marginalized as an outlier estranged from its own land. The final question starkly discloses the interspecies trauma of Australian (neo)colonialism: “What have they done to us?” (Noonuccal 2008: 45, l. 16). Echoing the speaker in Noonuccal’s poem, Noongar Elder Ted Wilkes (1998) laments that “the trees in the forest in the southwest of Australia have gone through exactly the same thing that Aboriginal people have gone through—annihilation, dispossession” (45). To restore dialogue with trees, nevertheless, is to recuperate cultural vitality and personal wellbeing, as the speaker makes clear in the opening quatrain of the poem “?” from My People: “Hello tree; / Talk to me” (Noonuccal 2008: 53, ll. 1–2). I have suggested that Noonuccal’s embodied phytopoetics and its literary-ethnobotanical nexus proffer a countermeasure to the loss of ancestral knowledge of plants as foods, fibers, medicines, ornaments, and totems. While coopting plants as symbols of state hegemony, Australian settler culture at the same time—through practices of voracious land clearance, avaricious infrastructure overdevelopment, and myopic broadscale open-pit mining—depletes the very ecological fundament required for flora and other life forms to survive. In comparison, the narrow Western attribution of value to plants lacks an underlying ethical framework ensuring long-term care for the green-more-than-human world. For Aboriginal people, the same plant-beings misappropriated as decorporealized signifiers of state power are also mediators of identity-formation, catalysts of community cohesion, and agents of physical and psychological health, especially for women and children. In many Aboriginal societies, women are keepers of everyday herbal wisdom. Among the Kutjungka people, for instance, children are known to accompany women to gather and prepare bush medicines for “household healing” (Oliver 2013: 6). Concern for traditional human-plant interactions in the wake of Australian settlerism coalesces in “Nona,” a poem originally published in The Dawn Is at Hand (1966). The child protagonist, Nona, emerges from her mother’s gunyah—a dwelling made of natural materials—“Naked like the rest, and like the rest / Unconscious of her body” (Noonuccal 2008: 34, ll. 5–6). The young girl is festooned with the gifts of the bush and delights in the generous provisions of vegetal nature. The narrative draws attention to the intergenerational transmission of plant-based knowledge, specifically, from mother to daughter for the purpose of physical beautification through the use of gum resin, red berries, and reeds. Yet the poem also elucidates the interlinked abuses of female and vegetal bodies. In contrast to the women, the men “had no eye for the red berries, / They did not look at these things at all” (Noonuccal 2008: 34, ll. 20–21). That the men “had no eye” for the visual appeal of the local plants implies that their attention was directed elsewhere, presumably toward Nona’s vulnerable unclothed body. This perverse gaze signifies that the men—“Ah, the men”—have lost their souls yet also illuminates the struggle of women against the patriarchal defilement of the vegetal order and the desecration of intimate human–plant exchanges.

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The overlays between Aboriginal people, plants, music, and poetry are lyricized in “Jarri’s Love Song,” originally featured in The Dawn Is at Hand (1966). The poem-song narrates Jarri’s all-consuming passion for his betrothed, Nona. As he voiced his love, “Jarri sat with legs out / Thudding a hollow log with waddy” (Noonuccal 2008: 54, ll. 11–12). A waddy—or nulla nulla—is a multipurpose wooden club for hunting, fire-making, and hand-to-hand combat. The “thudding” of the log with the waddy signals the tactile bond between Jarri and the tree from which the implements are made. In Central Australia, for example, the Arrernte people use endemic Birdsville wattle (Acacia peuce) to make waddy clubs (Commonwealth of Australia 2020). In the poem, the log and waddy mediate the expression of sound and, by extension, emotion, as Jarri serenades Nona. The lyrics of Jarri’s song comprise the poem’s second half: “Kaa got pitcheri, Gwabba got drone-pipe” (Noonuccal 2008: 55, ll. 31). On a literary-ethnobotanical note, Jarri in the poem alludes to pitcheri or pituri, pronounced “pitch-ery” and known to botanists as Duboisia hopwoodii. Native to the Simpson Desert, west of the Mulligan River of south-west Queensland, the tall shrub has been dried, mixed with ash, and chewed traditionally for its stimulating psychoactive effects (Keogh 2011: 199). Four times stronger than tobacco, the species contains poisonous levels of the alkaloids nicotine and nornicotine (Keogh 2011: 199; Watson 1983: 481). Exchanged as a currency and processed during rituals, pitcheri enhanced endurance, alleviated stress, increased adrenaline, suppressed hunger, and produced euphoria (Watson 1983: 483). With high nicotine levels, the young regrowth of D. hopwoodii was sought for making pitcheri. As ethnopharmacologist Pamela Watson (1983) suggests, Aboriginal people “developed an extensive knowledge of nicotine and applied this knowledge to the skillful exploitation of locally occurring plants, producing an item of great economic and social importance for consumption over a much larger region” (483). In 1878, botanist and explorer Ferdinand von Mueller observed the great lengths to which Aboriginal people would go to acquire high-quality pitcheri: I am not certain whether the [people] of all districts in which the Pituri grows are really aware of its stimulating power. Those living near the Barcoo [River in western Queensland] travel many days’ journey to obtain this to them precious foliage, which is carried always about by them broken into small fragments and tied up in little bags … [Aboriginal people] use the Duboisia to excite their courage in warfare; a large dose infuriates them. (quoted in Curl 1878: 412–13) In narrativizing medicinal flora through the poem-song—via an allusion to pitcheri—Noonuccal potently reclaims the sacred botanical knowledge co-opted and broadcast globally without Aboriginal permission by Anglo-European chroniclers such as von Mueller. Jarri’s lyrics, furthermore, decommodify the vegetal world by situating the plant as an agential subject within a network of interacting beings (dog, dingo, possum) and objects (canoe, boomerang, rug).

“HIM SILLY, HIM TALK TO THAT TREE”: FOGARTY’S LITERARY ETHNOBOTANY Poet, activist, and educator Lionel Fogarty’s ancestry is Murri—the demonym for the Aboriginal ethno-linguistic groups whose Country roughly comprises present-day Queensland and northwest New South Wales. His grandfather, Roy Fogarty, was of the Yoogum Yoogum people of the Beaudesert area spanning the border between Queensland and New South Wales (Fogarty 1982). He traces his genealogy to the Wakka Wakka and Kudjela cultural groups of the Murri. Fogarty

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spent his childhood at Barambah Mission, now Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, located about 150 miles north of Brisbane in Queensland. At age sixteen, he left Barambah to work as a ringbarker, railway employee, and cleaner. In the early 1970s, he became active in the campaign for Aboriginal land rights. Along with Kargun (1980) and Yoogum Yoogum (1982), Fogarty’s collections New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera (1995) and Minyung Woolah Binnung (2004) constitute a literary ethnobotany that recognizes plants as sentient, embodied subjects to be engaged rather than mute materials to be managed. In its prominent inclusion of Aboriginal vernacular and dialects, Fogarty’s poetry disrupts the imperialist paradigm of the English language and, as such, deviates strikingly from Noonuccal’s prevailing usage of “correct English accessible to everyone to tell of the genocidal destruction which has befallen the Aboriginal people” (Johnson 1986: 47). The flattened rhythms, abrupt imagistic shifts, and sheer linguistic density of Fogarty’s verse align his work—in an Anglo-European context—with experimental and modernist poetics and, to an extent, with the avant-garde L-AN-G-U-A-G-E poets of the late 1960s and 1970s. Like Noonuccal before him, however, Fogarty remains a passionate poet-activist who advocates for Country. As also evident in Noonuccal’s verse, plants serve as embodiments of cultural sovereignty in Fogarty’s phytopoetics. In “My Cry is Lost in a Name,” Fogarty (1980) declaims, “I found myself / sucked by seed” (41, ll. 10–11). Fogarty’s phytopoetics narrativizes plants as corporealizations of resistance to the hegemonies underlying, inter alia, the forced removal of Aboriginal people from their homelands. Shifting focus from the figurative potential to the material presence of plants, Fogarty’s narratives bring into prominence traditional botanical knowledge and practices degraded by the neocolonial apparatus of Australia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The harrowing poem “Ringbarking – the Contract Killers” recounts the poet’s recollections of ringbarking—or girdling— as a brutal means to eliminate tracts of native trees in toto. The poem’s dialogical structure inscribes an Aboriginal stance on plants as percipient entities. The singing tree instructed the human to “ ‘Cut me, but don’t make tears / inside the upper guts’ ” (Fogarty 1995: 138, ll. 4–5). The speaker’s direct address to the tree elicits an intercorporeal narrative with a forceful moral imperative. As an animate subject, the tree is responsive and performative—“this singing tree”—and, what’s more, has the capacity to communicate with Aboriginal interlocutors. In dialogue, the speaker and the tree contemplate the biocultural implications of ringbarking by the underpaid Murri laborer: “The tree smiled / knowing a pain will come” (Fogarty 1995: 138, ll. 11–12). Spared from poisoning, the Sister Tree reproaches the Murri—presumably Fogarty himself, who worked as a ringbarker—for targeting her kin; she expresses their suffering. The percipient tree-persona of “Ringbarking – the Contract Killers” communicates botanical wisdom to the human preoccupied with subduing vegetal nature: “ ‘if you kill me, or the grass / the pain is the same’ ” (Fogarty 1995: 138, ll. 32–3). Commiseration is shared among botanical life forms, irrespective of the human hierarchies that classify some plants as weeds (scrub, bushes, grasses) to expunge and others (trees, especially ancient ones) to protect as valuable commodities. The laborer explains his precarious circumstances to the tree-listener, imploring the Sister Tree to empathize with him: “Can’t you see we are both in the same position. / Lined up for POISONING” (Fogarty 1995: 138, ll. 46–7). The laborer’s appeal aligns the well-being of Murri people to the health of the botanical world and to the vitality of Country, “in the same position.” The speaker eventually discards the contrivances of land management and rejects the indifference to plant life upon which industrial progress is based: “Wattle, gum, sandle, Currajong, / Blood, stringy bark, iron

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bark / to touch your leaves and boughs / Is my ultimatum” (Fogarty 1995: 139, ll. 70–2). Instead of poisoning the Sister Tree community, the Murri narrator embraces Aboriginal technologies of care involving attentive listening to—and contact with—vegetal life to avoid causing suffering and death to plants. In its versification of Murri views of trees and other vegetal forms—wattle, currajong, iron bark—as dialogical subjects, Fogarty’s “Ringbarking – the Contract Killers” can be understood as an embodied phytopoetics with a literary-ethnobotanical orientation. The Sister Tree is a minded subject who communicates knowledge selflessly to the Murri worker. As her proper name signifies, she is also kin. The tree-persona is a member of the human–nonhuman Dreaming mesh that recognizes plants as ancestors. The relational deep-time conception of botanical life in Fogarty’s work counters the impulse of Australian settler culture to recruit plants for self-affirming discursive functions. Consider Sturt’s Desert Pea, or Swainsona formosa, one of Australia’s most celebrated and iconic wildflowers. Native to arid central and north-western Australia, the species bears the name of the British explorer Captain Charles Sturt who, in 1844, noted the brilliant red flowers during an expedition in search of the continent’s fabled inland sea (Sturt 1849). Adopted by South Australia in 1961 as its floral emblem, the charismatic flower has appeared regularly on postage stamps, university logos, and touristic media. In contrast to this nationalistic iconography, Yorta Yorta Elder Francis Firebrace relates an intercorporeal counternarrative of the wildflower. In a Dreaming story from the Lake Eyre region of South Australia, a young man, Borola, falls in love with a girl, Purlimil, already betrothed to an older man of her tribe, Trlta, who possesses magical abilities. The couple escapes to Borola’s Country and gets married. After some time, jealous Trlta travels across the desert to punish the couple and, so, ruthlessly kills all members of the tribe, including Borola and Purlimil: “The blood of those slaughtered ran across the plains and stained the desert sands red” (Firebrace 2001: 107). The blood-soaked earth then turns into a mass of striking, crimson blossoms with black eyes: “Now, when you see the beautiful red flower, the Sturt Desert Pea, known to the Aborigines as Flowers of Blood, be reminded of the tragic love story of these two young people, which happened a long time ago, when the world was young” (Firebrace 2001: 107). Fogarty’s prose-poem, “Koala Trees Turn Her Borobi,” reinterprets the human–plant narratives of the Yugambeh people for contemporary readers. In the story, Binga places his daughter, Borobi, in a tree for four hours during which she transforms into a koala. When asked about Borobi, Binga replies, “Oh she jump into a tree wanting to eat leaves and looked like happy” (Fogarty n.d.: para. 2). In the tree, Borobi encounters Bilin Bilin (king parrots), Kargaru (kookaburras), Taran (frogs), Nyung Nyunga (bower birds), and Wogun Wogun (scrub turkeys). Becoming a member of the forest community, she sings “they are my people the birds animal around I loved the four hours forever” (para. 7). The Koala Tree transforms people into animals but also inspirits embodied identification with the forest community: “Now the story is never go into a tree for a long time cause you can be missed” (para. 9). Although outwardly lighthearted and ludic, Fogarty’s human–plant narrative reclaims the ecological embeddedness of animals, such as koalas, appropriated as symbols of empire. In their ecocritical approach to Aboriginal Australian poetry, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin (2010) propose “counter-mimicry” to denote “an ironic version, which is also an inversion, of the white ventriloquism of Aboriginal loss” (95). Ironic, counter-defeatist resistance characterizes Fogarty’s “Black Gum Trunk” from Yoogum Yoogum (1982: 127). The poem foregrounds human– plant intercorporeality as a means to reclaim Aboriginal epistemologies of vegetal life. At the same time, this recuperation destabilizes the hegemonic ideologies that underlie the interlinked repression

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of native plants and Indigenous people. The concluding juxtaposition of the four-syllable phrases “Hey, him silly” and “Him life finished” typographically approximates the friction between AngloEuropean and Aboriginal Australian perceptions of trees. This phrasal collocation allows Fogarty to mimic the dominant, binaristic Linnaean marginalization of human-plant dialogue as “silly”—as merely the domain of myths, folklore, or popular culture. What’s more, corporeal relationality is mediated in “Black Gum Trunk” through the sensory faculties of taste (“Gum fetched sweeter,” l. 5) and sensation (“Hug sugar gum numb,” l. 8), as well as embodied identification (“Laid. Spread out. Poor gum trunk done,” l. 14) and recognition of the tree’s deep-time habitus (“Trunk of gum aroot. It blazed,” l. 24). The speaker evinces a felt regard for the tree-subject by asserting that “gumtrees got courage” (l. 28). “Black Gum Trunk” constitutes an Indigenous phytopoetics with a literary-ethnobotanical emphasis centered on somatic interaction with trees over time, through the seasons, and with the elements.

CONCLUSION: LITERARY ETHNOBOTANY AND VEGETAL EMBODIMENT The intercorporeal narratives featured in this chapter foreground the imbrications between human, botanical, and environmental well-being. Positioning poetry as a means to recover human–plant traditions, literary ethnobotany constitutes a corrective to biocultural knowledge loss. Noonuccal and Fogarty’s poetic recuperation functions as a counterforce to the appropriation of plants as devitalized symbols of national identity or resources to be exploited for economic aggrandizement. Their literary ethnobotany affirms the resonances of vegetal nature encountered in everyday experience, for instance, in the urban gum suffocated by tar or the Sister Tree indignant over the loss of her poisoned plant-kin. In Noonuccal’s “Nona” and Fogarty’s “Ringbarking,” embodied plant knowledge is encoded in Dreaming stories, humanflora interactions, multisensorial exchanges, and place-based ecologies (Florescano 1997). The intercorporeal bearing of literary ethnobotany thus illuminates the kinship networks to which plants belong and which vastly predate Anglo-Australian settler culture. This deep-time cultural standpoint contrasts starkly to the narrow temporal-relational frame according to which settlerism operates. In conjunction with ecocritical and other environmental humanist reading practices, literary ethnobotany consequently brings attention to the somatic epistemologies embedded in—and mediated by—human-plant narratives and provokes new insights into the work that poetry performs in response to biocultural change.

REFERENCES Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, S. (2016), Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baluška, F., D. Volkmann, A. Hlavacka, S. Mancuso, and P. Barlow (2006), “Neurobiological View of Plants and Their Body Plan,” in F. Baluška, S. Mancuso, and D. Volkmann (eds.), Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life, 19–35, Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Berndt, R. (1976), Three Faces of Love: Traditional Aboriginal Song-Poetry, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson.

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Black, C. F. (2011), The Land Is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with Indigenous Jurisprudence, London: Routledge. Black, L. (1941), Burial Trees: Being the First of a Series on the Aboriginal Customs of the Darling Valley and Central New South Wales, Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens. Brandenstein, C. G., and A. P. Thomas (1974), Taruru: Aboriginal Song Poetry from the Pilbara, Melbourne: Rigby. Cave, D. (2020), “The Fires Are Out, But Australia’s Climate Disasters Aren’t Over,” New York Times, February 23. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/2020/02/23/world/austra​lia/clim​ate-cha​nge-extre​mes.html. Chamovitz, D. (2012), What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses, Brunswick, Australia: Scribe. Clarke, P. A. (2003), Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Clarke, P. A. (2007), Aboriginal People and Their Plants, Kenthurst, NSW: Rosenberg. Clarke, P. A. (2008), Aboriginal Plant Collectors: Botanists and Australian Aboriginal People in the Nineteenth Century, Kenthurst, NSW: Rosenberg. Commonwealth of Australia (2020), “Acacia peuce: Waddy, Waddi, Waddy-wood, Birdsville Wattle.” Available online: http://www.envi​ronm​ent.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/pub​lic/public​spec​ies.pl?taxon​_id=8301 (accessed October 28, 2020). Cooke, S. (2013), “Tracing a Trajectory from Songpoetry to Contemporary Aboriginal Poetry,” in B. Wheeler (ed.), A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, 89–106, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Curl, S. M. (1878), “On Pituri, a New Vegetable Product That Deserves Further Investigation,” In J. Hector (ed.), Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 411–15, London: Trubner. Davis, J. (1970), The First-Born and Other Poems, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Endersby, J. (2008), Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Firebrace, F. (2001), “The Sturt Desert Pea: A Story from Around Lake Eyre in South Australia,” in P. E. McLeod, F. F. Jones, J. E. Barker, and H. F. McKay (eds.), Gadi Mirrabooka: Australian Aboriginal Tales from the Dreaming, 106–7, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Florescano, E. (1997), “Sobre la naturaleza de los dioses de Mesoamérica,” Anthropologica, 15: 71–95. Fogarty, L. G. (1980), Kargun, North Brisbane: Cheryl Buchanan. Fogarty, L. G. (1982), Yoogum Yoogum, Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. Fogarty, L. G. (1995), New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera, South Melbourne: Hyland House. Fogarty, L. G. (2004), Minyung Woolah Binnung: What Saying Says, Southport, Qld: Keeaira Press. Fogarty, L. G. (n.d.), “Koala Trees Turn Her Borobi.” Available online: https://www.austr​alia​nboo​krev​ iew.com.au/poe​ t ry/sta​ t es-of-poe​ t ry/sta​ t es-of-poe ​ t ry-que ​ e nsl ​ a nd/sta ​ t es/3099-sta ​ t es-of-poe ​ t ry-que ​ e nsl ​ and-koala-trees-turn-her-bor​obi-by-lio​nel-foga​rty?tmpl=compon​ent&print=1 (accessed October 28, 2020). Goethe, J. W. von. (2009), The Metamorphosis of Plants, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graham, M. (2008), “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews,” Australian Humanities Review, 45: 181–94. Huggan, G., and H. Tiffin (2010), Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, London: Routledge. Humphreys, A. M., R. Govaerts, S. Z. Ficinski, E. N. Lughadha, and M. S. Vorontsova (2019), “Global Dataset Shows Geography and Life Form Predict Modern Plant Extinction and Rediscovery,” Nature: Ecology and Evolution, 3 (7): 1043–7. Isbister, D., X. Pu, and S. Rachman (2019), “Blurred Centers/Margins: Ethnobotanical Healing in Writings by Ethnic Minority Women in China,” in C.-j. Chang (ed.), Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins, 81–96, Cham: Springer Nature.

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Johnson, C. (1986), “Guerilla Poetry: Lionel Fogarty’s Response to Language Genocide,” Westerly, 3: 47–55. Kaplan, D. (2001), “The Science of Plant Morphology: Definition, History, and Role in Modern Biology,” American Journal of Botany, 88 (10): 1711–41. Keogh, L. (2011), “Duboisia Pituri: A Natural History,” Historical Records of Australian Science, 22 (2): 199–214. Kinsella, J. (2013), Spatial Relations, Volume One: Essays, Reviews, Commentaries and Chorography, ed. Gordon Collier, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lamers, J., T. van der Meer, and C. Testerink (2020), “How Plants Sense and Respond to Stressful Environments,” Plant Physiology, 182 (4): 1624–35. McLeod, P. E. (2001), “The First Waratah: A Love Story from the Illawarra Region of the South Coast of New South Wales,” in P. E. McLeod, F. F. Jones, J. E. Barker, and H. F. McKay (eds.), Gadi Mirrabooka: Australian Aboriginal Tales from the Dreaming, 110–11, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Mignolo, W., and R. Vazquez (2013), “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Social Text Online, July 15. Available online: https://social​text​jour​nal.org/perisc​ope_​arti​cle/dec​olon​ial-aesthe​sis-colon​ialwound​sdec​olon​ial-heali​ngs/ (accessed October 28, 2020). Miller, D. P., and P. H. Reill, eds. (1996), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morrissey, P. (2015), “Bill Neidjie’s Story about Feeling: Notes on Its Themes and Philosophy,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), 15 (2): 1–11. Mudrooroo (1994), “The Poetemics of Oodgeroo of the Tribe Noonuccal,” Australian Literary Studies, 16: 57–62. Mukharji, P. B. (2014), “Vishalyakarani as Eupatonum ayapana: Retrobotanizing, Embedded Traditions, and Multiple Historicities of Plants in Colonial Bengal, 1890–1940,” Journal of Asian Studies, 73 (1): 65–87. Neidjie, B. (1989), Story about Feeling, ed. K. Taylor, Broome, WA: Magabala Books. Noonuccal, O. (1972), Stradbroke Dreamtime, Sydney: HarperCollins Australia. Noonuccal, O. (2008), My People, 4th ed., Milton, Qld: John Wiley & Sons. Original edition, 1970. Oliver, S. (2013), “The Role of Traditional Medicine Practice in Primary Health Care within Aboriginal Australia: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 9 (46): 1–8. Rose, D. B. (1992), Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, J. C. (2015), “The Virtual and the Vegetal: Creating a ‘Living’ Biocultural Heritage Archive through Digital Storytelling Approaches,” Global Media Journal, 9: 1–10. Ryan, J. C. (2018), Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination, New York: Routledge. Ryan, J. C. (2019a), “ ‘No More Boomerang’: Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Poetry,” in I. S. Campos (ed.), Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays, 3–33, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ryan, J. C. (2019b), “Towards Literary Ethnobotany: Burmese Poetry and Biocultural Knowledge of Plants,” in K. Maiti and S. Chakraborty (eds.), Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Critique, 227–35, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Schiebinger, L., and C. Swan, eds. (2007), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sturt, C. (1849), Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, Performed under the Authority of Her Majesty’s Government during the Years 1844, 5, and 6, vol. 1, London: T. and W. Boone. Tanaka, S. (2015), “Intercorporeality as a Theory of Social Cognition,” Theory and Psychology, 25 (4): 455–72. Taylor, A. (1967), “New Poetry,” ABR, 36: 44.

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Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed., London: Zed Books. Walker, K. (1964), We Are Going: Poems, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press. Walker, K. (1966), The Dawn Is At Hand, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press. Watson, P. (1983), “Australian Aboriginal Exploitation of Duboisia hopwoodii,” Toxicon, 21: 481–4. Weiss, G. (2013), Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality, 1st ed., New York: Routledge. Original edition, 1999. Wesson, S. (2005), Murni Dhungang Jirrar: Living in the Illawarra, Hurstville, NSW: National Parks and Wildlife Service, Department of Environment and Conservation. Wilkes, T. (1998), “Ted Wilkes. Perth Aboriginal Medical Service, Director. 12:55pm. 29:06:98,” in T. McCabe (ed.), Nyoongar Views on Logging Old Growth Forests, 44–5, West Perth, WA: Wilderness Society.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Turkish Classical Song Lyrics and Related Idioms for a Literary Therapy for Curing Ecodepression: An Ecological Cognitive Semantic Approach FAZILA DERYA AGIS

INTRODUCTION Ottoman Turkish music maqams were used for healing people from depression, other mental illnesses, or other physical illnesses. This study aims to show the healing effects of ecological metaphorical words of some Turkish song lyrics just like those of poetry pieces on the attitudes of people toward earthquakes and virus fears from an ecolinguistic, cognitive, and semantic point of view as proposed by Arran Stibbe (2015) since people may feel depression, fright, and anxiety related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic around the globe. These disturbing disasters derive from humans’ carelessness about the environment. On the one hand, iD4D (Ideas for Development) (Espagne, Calas, and Lugassy 2020) suggests that bats carry SARS-Cov2 as a virus transmitted from animals to humans; humans have disturbed the ecological system with the destruction of forests and have caused ecological imbalance related to what humans can eat or cannot eat since animals hunt other creatures for sustaining the environment, some animals are raised in unnatural conditions in farms, and animals that migrate transmit diseases to other animals via newer or different routes due to climate change. On the other hand, hydraulic fractures can be a reason for man-made earthquakes, such as those “in the Barnett Shale area around Dallas-Fort Worth” (Connelly, Barer, and Skorobogatov 2020). Drilling for gas and oil can also cause humanmade earthquakes (Sakuma 2016). Therefore, this study hypothesizes that the healing linguistic elements of classical Turkish music songs, which are still listened to, consist of environmental metaphors of animals and plants that

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may raise awareness of the environment by evoking different emotions. The distribution rates of these linguistic metaphors will be analyzed in accordance with the composition styles, thus the following maqams of the songs: Rast cures mental illnesses and paralyses, Irak soothes anger, Isfahan reduces fever, Buselik is a remedy for waist pain, Hicaz combats headache, Nihavend eases blood circulation, Uşşak brings joy, and Hüseyni makes one feel relaxed (Kılıç 2015; Fikriyat 2018; Tümata n.d.; Turkish Music Portal n.d.). Therefore, the ecological metaphors in the lyrics of the songs in these styles are analyzed in two categories as animals and plants by referring to the related Turkish idioms. Related to fears about earthquakes and viruses, eighteen participants from different countries read the song lyrics, and later in a survey, they were asked about which songs with animal and plant metaphors provoked what types of emotions in these songs regardless of their maqams, including Rast, Irak, Isfahan, Buselik, Hicaz, Nihavend, Uşşak, and Hüseyni, which are thought to make healthy people feel happier through concentration, relaxation, pain relief, and normal blood circulation mainly as antidotes for stress. This study shows which animals and plants were used culturally in these songs that are literary pieces to take the readers to a different ambience mentally in order to boost their moods and fight against depression by making them think of the richness of nature also expressed culturally via several idiomatic expressions from ecolinguistic, ecopsychological, and ecoanthropological perspectives for convincing them to protect nature. Concerning Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistics theory, in this study, linguistic elements, that is, ecological metaphors in the lyrics of songs, can be regarded as useful as poems selected in poetry therapies, as expressed by Chavis (2011), alongside anthropological beliefs underlying idioms—as in the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980)—for building empathy toward animals and plants as parts of nature.

LITERATURE REVIEW Regarding former studies, a previous study on the psychological effects of classical Turkish music songs was conducted by Erdal Kılıç (2015), where he examines a song journal published in the eighteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, Mecmûa-yı Letâif fî Sandukati’l-me’ârif, written by Subhizade Abdülaziz Arif Effendi, the chief physician of the empire. He analyzes which Turkish classical music styles cure what types of diseases since this journal sheds light on the effects of music on human health. Besides, he cites that Ottoman emperors appreciated music: Sultan Ahmed III, Sultan Mahmud I (1730–54), Sultan Abdülhamid I (1774–89), and Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) were interested in music (2015: 21). Another previous study by Sühan İrden (2018) depicts the history of the composition style of Nişâbûrek, whereas a chronological study by Esra Meltem Koç et al. (2016: 53) discusses the history of Sufi music therapies pioneered by Zekeriya Er-Razi (854–932), Al-Farabi (870–950), and Avicenna (980–1037). Koç et al. state that Al-Farabi categorized several classical music maqams that provoked different emotions alerting the human brain: Rast leads to joy, Isfahan encourages the timid people, Hüseyni refreshes and relieves people, Buselik evokes force, Hicaz makes some feel modest, and Uşşak makes some laugh (2016: 53). As well, they mention that in the thirteenth century, Safiyuddin Urmevi invented some musical instruments known as mugni, santur, and nüzhe; Bahaeddin Veled formulated the Sufi culture in Anatolia followed by Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi; and some musical therapies were conducted in the following Seljuk hospitals: Nureddin Hospital

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(1154), Kayseri Gevher Nesibe Medical Madrasa (1206), Divriği Ulu Mosque and Hospital, as well as Amasya Hospital (1308) (2016: 53); they also mention that musical clinics included Fatih Hospital (1470), Edirne Bayezid II Hospital (1488), and Süleymaniye Hospital (1557) in the Ottoman Empire (2016: 53). Moreover, an Ottoman physician called Şuuri Hasan Effendi proposed that composition styles should have been listened to at specific times of the day to cure mental illnesses, and accordingly, Rast must have been listened to at dawn, Hüseyni in the mornings, Irak between the mornings and the afternoons, Nihavend in the afternoons, Hicaz between two Moslem prayers, Buselik in the mid-afternoons, and Uşşak during the sunset (2016: 54). Koç et al. also add that Hekimbaşı Gevrekzade Hasan Effendi suggested that Rast would cure illnesses associated with strokes, whereas Irak treated meningitis, Isfahan decreased body temperature, Hicaz was a cure for urinary diseases, Buselik could fight eye pain, Uşşak could kill various pains, and Hüseyni could stop heart and liver inflammation (2016: 54). Moreover, Burçin Uçaner and Birsen Öztürk (2009: 6) evaluate musical therapies around the globe and mention that TÜTEM (the Turkish Treatment Music Application and Research Group) and TÜMATA (the Turkish Music Research and Presentation Group) are involved in musical therapy research in the contemporary Republic of Turkey. However, this study differs from all these previous studies, being based on the ecolinguistic therapeutical effects of classical Turkish music song lyrics with words depicting the environment— thus, animals and plants—for raising awareness of environmental issues at the same time. Besides, Turkish idiomatic expressions support the cultural beliefs described in the lyrics of Turkish songs.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Lakoff and Johnson (1980) posited that source domains, which were metaphorical concepts’ peculiarities, deciphered the cultural and/or intended meanings of concepts in the target domains: for instance, “BOOKS ARE LIGHT” and/or “SACRED BOOKS ARE LIGHT” in accordance with their “conceptual metaphor theory,” which regards metaphor interpretations as sociocultural cognitive processes. In this case, light is a metaphor, an abstract concept, associated with bright ideas and happiness, or relief hidden in the concrete concepts of books or cultural sacred books that shed light on solutions to difficult vital problems and fight against the metaphorical darkness of ignorance or disbelief. Meanwhile, in ecolinguistics, “source frames” decipher “target domains” (Stibbe 2015: 64). Therefore, “a frame” shall be regarded as “an area of life”; if words related to this frame are uttered, a “manifestation” may appear via metaphors, which constitute stories with “a frame to structure a distinct and clearly different area of life” (Stibbe 2015: 17). According to Stibbe, the “source frame” is a metaphor used to describe the “target domain”: for instance, “Climate change is a time bomb,” where “a time bomb” appears as a metaphor in a terror source frame for a limited time warning, and “climate change” consists of the target domain as dangerous as an explosive bomb that will create poverty and scarcity of resources (2015: 206, 64–6). Wordplays are responsible for the formation of frames; “evaluation” is the selection process about how to behave in a certain situation as “an area of life”; some linguistic features/elements define “the world as true, uncertain, or false,” leading to the formation of a story on this world description, known as a story of “conviction” (Stibbe n.d.). Some unnecessary life stories constructed with wordplays are subject to “erasure,” while other worthy life stories are subject to “salience,” which

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consists of linguistic effects that make them prevail (Stibbe n.d.). This study tries to figure out these ecolinguistic elements in the songs that provoke emotions by emphasizing the importance of nature for the survival of all the species.

DISCUSSION: SONG ANALYSES Regarding classical Turkish song analyses, eighteen students from different cultural backgrounds participated in the survey of eight Turkish classical music song lyrics for some bonus points. They were asked to mention the emotions they felt reading some Turkish song lyrics; these songs’ notes were composed in different maqams by some Turkish composers, which this study does not deal with. Accordingly, some words from the lyrics of the following songs that do not have any copyrights1 were analyzed from an ecolinguistic point of view: (1) an Istanbul folk song titled Bahçeye indim ki asma salıncak (The Hanging Swing That I Saw Going Down to the Garden) or known just as Salıncak (The Swing) composed in the Rast maqam (whose lyrics are registered as 0044175.22 in the public domain in the database of the MESAM); (2) Hasretle temam, “nal”e döndüm sensiz (Enough Is Enough with Longing, What Did I Become without You?) by Ismail Dede Effendi (1778–1846; unregistered in the MESAM) in the Irak maqam where nature alludes to different moods; (3) an Isfahan maqam song, titled Fesleğen ektim gül bitti (I Planted Basil, but Roses Blossomed), composed by Tambour Mustafa Sergeant (1700–1770) where the unknown lyricist complains about the appearance of basil instead of roses in his arable field (found in the database of the MESAM as 0552116.07, indicating that the lyrics are in the public domain); (4) Bir pür-cefa hoş dilberdir (A Pure-Cruel Beautiful Lady) (a Buselik song), by the Ottoman Emperor Selim III (1789—1807) (registered in the MESAM as 0926121.85 with a note that the lyrics are in the public domain); (5) El zanneder ben deliyem (Foreigners Think That I Am Mad), a folk song in the Hicaz maqam depicting a lover who appreciates the natural behavior of the loved one (registered in the MESAM as 0114271.37, mentioning that the lyrics are in the public domain); (6) Çamlıca yolunda/âşığı kolunda (On the Way to Çamlıca/Arm in Arm with Her/His Lover), a song whose lyrics are in the public domain (and that is registered in the MESAM as 0028992.83), composed in the Nihavend maqam where green sceneries are appreciated; (7) the anonymous song (listed as 0089425.77 in the public domain in the MESAM database) titled Yangın olur, biz yangına gideriz (A Fire Takes Place, and We Go to the Fire) in the Uşşak maqam; and (8) another anonymous song titled Ay doğarken gecelerden (When the Moon Comes to Life from the Nights) composed by Sadettin Kaynak (1895—1961) in the Hüseyni maqam (and registered as a song whose lyrics are in the public domain in the MESAM database as 0093811.96). Regarding the feelings of the participants, Descartes (1649) listed “joy, sadness, love, desire, hatred, and wonder” as six “passions” (as cited in Kowalska and Wróbel 2017). However, the

In July 2021, the copyright status of each of the eight songs was checked with the documentation unit of the MESAM (Türkiye Musiki Eseri Sahipleri Meslek Birliği [Turkish Music Owners Professional Association]) via email communication with Kaan Turan, the database checks on this association’s copyright holder and status registration archives at https:// mesam.org.tr/eser-arama/sea​rch, and email communication with Ferdi Fenercioğlu working for the MSG (Musiki Eseri Sahipleri Grubu Meslek Birliği [Music Owners Group Professional Association], Mechanical Licensing and Distribution Department). Only public domain lyrics were chosen for this study. Composition styles are just mentioned for classifying the songs. 1

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TABLE 27.1  Distribution of the Percentage Rates of Emotions in the Lyrics of Songs Composed in

Various Maqams Curing Various Diseases Maqam (composition style)

Love (%) Happiness (%)

Rast

2.87

Irak

1.149

Isfahan

1.149

Buselik

6.32

Hicaz

9.770

Nihavend

3.448

Uşşak

3.448

4.59

1.72

Hüseyni

1.149

1.149

6.32

6.32 2.87

Sadness (%)

Fear (%)

Anger (%)

Jealousy (%)

Total (%)

4.0229

1.72

4.0229

0.57

19.54

3.448

1.72

1.149

0.57

6.896

1.72

8.045 12.64 9.195

0.57

0.57 13.79

1.149 0.57

10.91 0.57

0.57

19.54

0.57

10.34

0.57

9.77

Source: F. D. Agis (2021). (Statistical Tool: Microsoft Office 365: Excel).

students referred to love, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and jealousy as the emotions they experienced, reading the lyrics of Turkish classical music songs. Some students indicated that they felt different emotions for the words in the same song, whereas others focused only on one emotion: seventeen of them felt love for the song in Hicaz (only 9.770 percent of the total number of emotions felt), whereas one (0.57 percent of the total number of emotions felt) of them felt happiness alongside fear, but the song in Nihavend made many of them feel sadness (13.79 percent of the total number of emotions), as one sees in Table 27.1. In Table 27.2, one sees that the difference of negative and positive emotions evoked by animal and plant metaphors was not statistically significant, convincing humans to take as much care about animals as plants. Thus, in the next sections, Turkish idiomatic expressions based on animal and plant metaphors in the eight songs will be analyzed. Rast As Rast is believed to give joy especially at dawn, according to Al-Farabi (870–950) (as cited in Tümata n.d.), nature may get involved in the lyrics of these songs as in the first song in this study, titled Bahçeye indim ki asma salıncak (The Hanging Swing That I Saw Going Down to the Garden) (see Vikikaynak 2021 and “Bahçeye indim ki asma salıncak” n.d.). In this song, the Edenic garden is a metaphor for the happiness that love can cause; the garden source frame involves flowers, trees, and green grass in a summer or spring scene; thus, the singer expects that the one s/he loves will respond to her or his love. Culturally, a Turkish idiom indicates that a person can exhibit exaggerated enthusiasm in front of love due to her or his youth: “her or his youth hits her or his head” (idiom in Turkish: “baharı başına vurmak” [English: “her or his spring hits her or his head”]). The participants felt happiness and love with mixed emotions for this song; if interpreted in accordance with one’s personal experiences, reading this song, the person may feel hope for another “salient” love affair opportunity against a terminated “erased” one. The depicted

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TABLE 27.2  Chi-Square Test Results on the Emotions Felt with Animal and Plant Metaphors

Environmental Element

Emotion Type

Animals Plants Marginal Column Totals

Negative

Positive

Marginal Row Totals

32 (28.45) [0.44]

20 (23.55) [0.54]

52

61 (64.55) [0.2]

57 (53.45) [0.24]

118

93

77

170

The chi-square statistic is 1.14114. The p-value is .234817; it is not significant because p < .05. The chi-square statistic with Yates correction is 1.0421, and the p-value is .307325; it is not significant because p < .05. Source: F. D. Agis (2021); statistical tool by Stangroom (2020).

spring scene attracts the readers. When read early in the morning, the folk song can make one feel happiness in the beginning of a new day regardless of its composition style. Therefore, in the Turkish song, the season of spring alludes to hope via the following ecolinguistic metaphor, “SPRING/NATURE IS HOPE,” as the beauty of nature becomes “salient” against the grey winter sky, and hopelessness, regarded as dark weather, gets “erased” in the ecolinguistic source frame picture of spring by the cognitive imagination process of blue sunny skies, green leaves, and colorful flowers that are blossoming. The rebirth of nature is mapped onto the target domain of hope from an ecolinguistic point of view in terms of Stibbe’s theory (2015) based on Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory (1980), according to which a concept’s properties are associated with another’s for forming metaphors during thought processes. Irak Irak may cure anger according to Fikriyat (2018). In the second song, Hasretle temam, “nal”e döndüm sensiz (Enough Is Enough with Longing, What Did I Become without You?), the singer who misses the loved one wishes to see that loved one; otherwise, s/he may continue to feel nostalgia and unhappiness, and s/he underlines that s/he resembles “a new jade moon” shining like “the sun” without the loved one (lyricist: Dede Effendi [Yedinota n.d.a]. The lyricist died in 1846; therefore, the song is in the public domain). In this song, the sun is a symbol of hope, whereas an unusual new green moon is a symbol for a strange despair: those who suffer from mental illnesses due to unreturned love may start to feel joy, thinking about these sun and moon metaphors. A Turkish idiom indicates that a bad person could not rise on anybody if s/he were the sun (“güneş olsa kimsenin üstüne doğmaz”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 411). In this source frame, an unreturned love may make a person lunatic, and green is the color of an invaluable stone known as jade; jade is a metaphor for self-respect: a person who respects herself/himself stops to love desperately. Thus, the moon’s light is hope for one’s future without being obsessed with anybody: “MOONLIGHT IS HOPE” is an ecolinguistic mental metaphor where the source frame of moonlight, imagined as light and illumination in the darkness of the night, is used to refer to the target domain of hope, depicted by light in the dark within the framework of Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistic theory.

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Isfahan Isfahan is a maqam effective in the afternoons used to reduce fever and increase concentration (Tümata n.d.). The third anonymous song titled Fesleğen ektim gül bitti (I Planted Basil, but Roses Blossomed) (see Emin Ongan Üsküdar Mûsikî Cemiyeti n.d.a) values two plants: one is basil, and the other is a rose; both are edible, give freshness, and smell nice; besides, the anonymous lyricist tells a personified nightingale not to sing. However, basil is used in salads, but lovers give roses to their loved ones. In this song, the salient metaphorical figures of basil and roses form a summer source frame that has hope in its target domain: the nightingale sings nice songs; thus, the animal appears as a metaphor for happiness. The Turkish idiom “güllük gülistanlık” (“like a rose garden”) refers to prosperity (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 407). Besides, a faithful lover never cheats on the one s/he loves: “gül üstüne gül koklamaz” (“s/he never smells a rose after another rose”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 408). However, the basil and roses are salient elements, waiting for the erasure of tears from the source frame after the loved one comes back and responds to the lover’s love. Thus, “ROSES ARE LOVE,” “BASIL IS HEALTH,” and “A NIGHTINGALE IS HOPE” as cognitive metaphors underlying this song. Buselik As Buselik (something to kiss in contemporary Turkish) may cure different types of pain, one shall listen to songs in this maqam such as the fourth song in the study, titled Bir pür-cefa hoş dilberdir (A Pure-Cruel Beautiful Lady) (see Yedinota n.d.b) where the cheek of the loved woman is depicted as a rose by its lyricist Selim III, an Ottoman Emperor that lived between 1789 and 1807 (Beydilli 2009). The lyrics are in the public domain as more than seventy years have passed since the death of the lyricist. In the ecolinguistic source frame of roses not only with thorns, but also with beautiful smells and aspects, roses are metaphors for pure love; springtime appears as a metaphor for hope: “SPRING IS HOPE,” as well as “ROSES ARE THE LOVED ONES” and “THORNS ARE INSIGNIFICANT DEFECTS” in terms of Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistics. Accordingly, in Turkish culture, the source frame of spring imagined with green leaves is mapped onto the target domain of hope since the metaphorical color of green depicts hope as in the Turkish idiom “yeşilden gitmek” (“to go through green”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 811), which means that one’s life is progressing positively. Besides, the loved ones are called roses in Turkish such as in the phrase “gülüm benim” (“my rose,” which means “my love”). However, roses have thorns regarded as dangers; thus, a loved one may hurt somebody sometimes. In this ecolinguistic frame, a rose, the loved one, can respond to the lover’s love, or may hurt her or him like a thorn if s/he does not love the lover. The lover waits for an answer from the loved one to continue this love affair in the song. Besides, roses are symbols of prosperity in Turkish idioms: “gül gibi bakmak” (“to look after somebody as if s/he were a rose”) can be interpreted as “to take extreme care” and “güllük gülistanlık” means “a place where roses are grown, and which is full of them” (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 407). Metaphorically, the term alludes to prosperity. Many participants associated the song with the positive emotion of love. Besides, “çiçek gibi olmak” (“to be like a flower”) is “to be clean” (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 244). Roses are metaphors for beauty and tidiness in Turkish culture. Thorns are forgivable mistakes. The song’s lyrics evokes courage in the listeners as many may have small sins.

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Hicaz Hicaz may cure urologic diseases (Fikriyat 2018); an example to an anonymous song in this maqam is a song in the public domain titled El zanneder ben deliyem (Foreigners Think That I Am Mad). The lyricist suggests that s/he is a nightingale and a faded rose because of her or his desperate love (see Akbıyık 2016). Therefore, nature is pure beauty. Moreover, a nightingale is a metaphor for people whose voice is beautiful, as in the Turkish idiom “bülbül gibi şakımak” (“to sing like a nightingale”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 211). Thus, “THE SEASON OF AUTUMN IS DESPAIR,” whereas “GREEN NATURE IS HOPE.” Nihavend Nihavend helps blood circulate easily (Fikriyat 2018). The sixth song entitled Çamlıca yolunda/âşığı kolunda (On the Way to Çamlıca/Arm in Arm with Her/His Lover) involves several nature metaphors (see Emin Ongan Üsküdar Mûsikî Cemiyeti n.d.b). Many participants felt sadness in this song; however, if and only if the loved one does not come, the flowers will not blossom. Pine trees that are always green are metaphors for happiness and hope, and both the day and the night can bring happiness when one is with her or his loved one. The Turkish idiomatic expression “rüzgar gelecek delikleri tıkamak” (“to close the holes from where the wind will blow”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 676) means that one is precautious about all the obstacles that may occur to prevent an event. However, the season of summer is depicted in the song. The season of summer is a metaphor for hope (“SUMMER IS HOPE”), as well. Regarding the Turkish idioms in this frame, “çiçeği burnunda” (“someone with a flower on her or his nose”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 243) is a young person full of hope, and being like a flower is being pure and clear as flowers are all around in the summer. Çamlıca is a quarter in Istanbul that means “full of pine trees.” Thus, “NATURE IS LOVE, HEALTH, AND JOY.” Pine trees, green mountains, fresh water resources, and vineyards of Çamlıca are appreciated in the song. The Turkish idiomatic phrase “dağ anası” (“mountain mother”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 253) alludes to a strong woman who never gives up in the face of difficulty. The Turkish idiom “çam devirmek” (“to make a pine tree fall down”) means to cause harm (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 234). Another Turkish idiomatic expression “ağaca çıksa pabucu yerde kalmamak” (“one’s shoes do not stand on the land if s/he climbs up the tree”) is used to refer to a person who can handle difficulties easily (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 26). Besides, “bağ bozmak” (“to ruin a vineyard”) is to harvest grapes in Turkish (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 134). Additionally, “su gibi aziz ol!” (“be a saint like water!”) is a Turkish expression referring to those who bring some water to drink (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 715). Considering all of these Turkish expressions, the lyrics of the song also make us appreciate nature with its numerous useful resources by emphasizing that “SUMMER AND SPRING ARE HAPPINESS,” “WATER IS A SAINT,” “PLANTS ARE HEALTH AND WEALTH,” and “NATURE DEVASTATION IS A MURDER.” Uşşak Uşşak cures heart, liver, or stomach diseases (Fikriyat 2018). The seventh song titled Yangın olur, biz yangına gideriz (A Fire Takes Place, and We Go to the Fire) is for firemen (see “Yangın olur biz yangına gideriz” n.d.).

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Fires leading to death are problems that may destroy all the plants and animals. The participants felt love and happiness mainly referring to the efforts of the firemen. The environment is the source frame for happiness, which is the general target of humans in life: “NATURE IS HEALTH AND FOOD” is the best conceptual metaphor that summarizes why humans need nature and why they must protect it. Firemen are depicted with the metaphors of “partridges” and “hawks.” The Turkish idiom “keklik gibi” (“like a partridge”) is used to describe a beautiful person (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 536), and another Turkish idiom, “şahin bakışlı” (“with hawk-like vision quality”) is used to allude to a person who has sharp vision (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 723). The lyrics of the song make the readers appreciate animals and firemen who save their lives together with those of human beings and plants. Hüseyni Hüseyni leads to relief (Fikriyat 2018). Light is a metaphor for relief. Accordingly, in the source frame, moon is hope and relief against the darkness of hopelessness, thus the source frame of a dark night in the eighth anonymous song titled Ay doğarken gecelerden (When the Moon Comes to Life from the Nights) (“Ay doğarken gecelerden” n.d.). Crying is an act depending on one’s attachment to those whom s/he loves (Nelson 2005: xii). In this case, the protagonist of the song feels homesick, and for aiming to show this homesickness, s/he refers to the moonlight metaphor in the source frame where the darkness of the night is replaced by the light of the stars and the moon, in fact. Her or his poverty explains that s/he is a low-wage worker abroad. The sky looks like a marble, because it is not totally dark; some light is coming through it. Metaphorically, this environmental fact refers to hope. Besides, a Turkish idiom “ay parçası” (“moon piece”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 125) is used to refer to beautiful people. Something purer than the moon and more lucid than the morning is something clean, clear, transparent, and beautiful in the following Turkish idiom: “Aydan arı, günden duru” (“Purer than the moon, more lucid than the day”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 124). This light gives relief to homesick people via this song. Besides, the Turkish idiom “yıldızı parlamak” (“one’s star shines”) (Püsküllüoğlu 1998: 812) refers to the sudden good luck of a person. The protagonist of the song has a job, although s/he lives abroad; thus, s/he is lucky for not being unemployed. The moon-and-star light source frame aims at removing despair by making one think about nature enlightened by their light at night in the target domain of the song, “LIGHT IS A NUTRIENT,” since everybody needs it to grow food, to work, and to study in order to be recognized as productive. Furthermore, “THE MOON AND STARS ARE HOPE” from a conceptual metaphorical point of view: hopelessness causes depression and stress-based illnesses.

CONCLUSION A Chi-Square test showed no statistical significance concerning the results on the effects of animal and plant metaphors that soothed ecodepression and stress in the lyric readers, as the literary aspects of the songs have been investigated. Turkish idioms helped us understand the positive environmental cultural elements present in the medical Turkish songs. The ecological animal and plant metaphors have shown that they may provoke mixed emotions. The source domains with environmental metaphors assist one to experience various emotions in the target domain.

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According to Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistic theory, metaphors are used to underline another aspect of life, as in the case of ecological elements used in the eight songs mentioned above. The common ideology of these classical Turkish music songs is to heal people through maqams, but this study also showed that metaphorical words play a crucial role in evoking diverse emotions. The plant and animal metaphors are associated with happiness in the songs. The lyrics of the eight songs may cure a depressed person who interprets the metaphors in them and understands that her or his sadness is futile since the presence of the beauty of nature is emphasized as a cure against negative ideas, and metaphorically, “NATURE IS A SHELTER.” In this metaphor, the concept of nature is associated with the concepts of happiness, relief, and protection since it provides humans with crops and beautiful plants that lead to the formation of fresh air; besides, animals appear as humans’ best friends in their discovery of the beauty of nature. Thus, “NEGATIVE IDEAS/FEELINGS ARE VIRUSES OR EARTHQUAKES” that destroy not only a person’s health but also her/his wealth by convincing her/him not to work on earth, not to think and care about the environment, and not to be clean enough to be accepted by society, as one may encounter depressed people who reject to tidy themselves up, work, or study hard due to their mental illnesses. “LYRICS ARE MEDICINE OR STRONG SHELTERS AGAINST DISASTERS,” as people may be experiencing the same feelings as those of the protagonists in the songs, or they may build empathy toward others’ problems, getting involved in the emotions the protagonists of the songs express due to some issues in their lives. Environmental metaphors raise awareness about the earth’s issues as long as the readers of these songs understand the emotions associated with these metaphors by activating their visual imaginary abilities about natural disasters, fires, animals, and plants. Moreover, “NATURE IS A CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONS AND HEALTH,” since products are grown in the soil, and the metaphors of fruits and animals refer to the expression of emotions by humans. Besides, two ecolinguistic metaphors are crucial warnings for the humanity: “NATURE DESTRUCTION IS A VIRUS” and “INDIFFERENCE IS AN EARTHQUAKE” against which humans must fight together, remembering that throwing trash all around can cause the extinction of species and nature devastation; for instance, if fish devour plastic bottle pieces, they will die and disappear, or an unextinguished cigarette butt thrown in a jungle after a picnic may cause a wildfire. Therefore, nature destruction due to pollution will lead to the extinction of species. The spread of indifference to environmental issues is like a virus that may threaten the lives of different species, accordingly. This indifference is similar to that of a construction worker careless about building a safe apartment complex: if humans are indifferent to environmental issues, such as the extinction of species, pollution, and climate change, the earth will disappear together with its resources like a weak apartment complex destroyed in an earthquake for being built without any preventive measures against earthquakes. . Concisely, the lyrics of the Turkish classical music songs have educational purposes for the protection of the environment, gender equality, and empathy building toward creatures other than humans on this earth. Lyrics activate various emotions and empathy, and they can be interpreted culturally by considering their languages’ idiomatic expressions from an ecoanthropological point of view against the ecodepression of humans who reject to see the beauties in nature by trying to destroy it: ecopsychologically, the lyrics make them experience some emotions so deeply that they can feel empathy toward all the creatures on earth.

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REFERENCES Akbıyık, S. (2016), “Kırık Havalar: ‘El Zanneder Ben Deliyem.’” Repertükül: Türküpedia: Türkü Ansiklopedisi. Available online: https://www.rep​ertu​kul.com/EL-ZANNE​DER-BEN-DELI​YEM-678. Accessed March 16, 2021. “Ay doğarken gecelerden” (n.d.), Şarkılar: Notalar: Türk Sanat Müziği: Türk Halk Müziği: Türk Sanat Müziği: Şarkılar: Notalar. Available online: https://sark​ilar​nota​lar.blogs​pot.com/2018/12/ay-dogar​ken-gec​eler​ den.html. Accessed March 16, 2021. “Bahçeye indim ki asma salıncak” (n.d.), Şarkılar: Notalar: Türk Sanat Müziği: Türk Halk Müziği: Türk Sanat Müziği Şarkılar Notalar. Available online: https://sark​ilar​nota​lar.blogs​pot.com/2011/11/bahc​eye-indim-ki-asma-salin​ cak.html. Accessed March 16, 2021. Beydilli, K. (2009), “Selim III,” in TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 36, 420–5, Istanbul: TDV İslâm Araştırmaları Merkezi. Available online: https://cdn2.isl​aman​sikl​oped​isi.org.tr/dosya/36/C36016​356.pdf. Accessed March 16, 2021. Chavis, G. G. (2011), Poetry and Story Therapy: The Healing Power of Creative Expression, London: Jessica Kingsley. Connelly, K., D. Barer, and Y. Skorobogatov (2020), “How Oil and Gas Disposal Wells Can Cause Earthquakes,” State Impact. Available online: https://stat​eimp​act.npr.org/texas/tag/ear​thqu​ake/. Accessed March 16, 2021. Emin Ongan Üsküdar Mûsikî Cemiyeti (n.d.a), “Fesleğen ektim gül bitti.” Available online: https://www.uskuda​ rmus​ikic​emiy​eti.com/media/kun​ena/atta​chme​nts/429/Fesleenekt​imgl​bitt​i_Ta​nbur​iMus​tafa​avu.pdf. Accessed March 16, 2021. Emin Ongan Üsküdar Mûsikî Cemiyeti (n.d.b), “Çamlıca yolunda/âşığı kolunda.” Available online: https://www. uskuda​rmus​ikic​emiy​eti.com/media/kun​ena/atta​chme​nts/429/amlcayolu​ndaa​kolu​nda_​Nuri​Hali​lPoy​raz.pdf. Accessed March 16, 2021. Espagne, E., J. Calas, and L. Lugassy (2020), “Pandemics: The Environmental Origins of Covid-19,” ID4D: Blog Coordinated by the Agence Française de Développement, April 20. Available online: https://ideas4​deve​lopm​ ent.org/en/pandem​ics-enviro​nmen​tal-orig​ins-covid-19/. Accessed March 16, 2021. Fikriyat (2018), “Musikiyle Gelen Şifa,” April 11. Available online: https://www.fikri​yat.com/kul​ tur-sanat/2018/04/11/musiki​yle-gelen-sifa. Accessed March 16, 2021. İrden, S. (2018), “Edvar Geleneğinden Günümüze Nişâbûrek Makâmi Tahlili” [“Analysis of the Makâm Nişâbûrek from Edvar Tradition to the Modern Day”], Eurasian Journal of Music and Dance, 13: 1–22. Kılıç, E. (2015), “Mecmûa-yı Letâifte İnsan Sağlığına Dair İpuçları” [“Clues about Human Health in Mecmûa-yı Letâif ”], Medeniyet Sanat Dergisi, 1 (1): 19–29. Koç, E. M., D. A. Başer, R. Kahveci, and A. Özkara (2016), “Ruhun ve Bedenin Gıdası: Geçmişten Günümüze Müzik ve Tıp,” Konuralp Tıp Dergisi, 8 (1): 51–5. Kowalska, M., and M. Wróbel (2017), “Basic Emotions,” in V. Ziegler-Hill and T. Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, Cham: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_495-1. Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Microsoft Office 365, “Excel,” https://www.micros​oft.com/en-us/micros​oft-365/excel, accessed on July 2, 2021. Nelson, J. K. (2005), Seeing through Tears Crying and Attachment, New York: Brunner-Routledge. Püsküllüoğlu, A. (1998), Türkçe Deyimler Sözlüğü, Ankara: Arkadaş. Sakuma, A. (2016), “Oil and Gas Industry Ensnarled in Spate of Oklahoma Earthquakes,” NBC Universal, November 14. Available online: https://www.nbcn​ews.com/news/us-news/oil-gas-indus​try-ensnar​led-spateoklah​oma-eart​hqua​kes-n682​511. Accessed March 16, 2021.

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Stangroom, J. (2020), “Chi-Square Calculator,” Social Science Statistics. Available online: https://www.socsc​ista​ tist​ics.com/tests/chisqu​are/defau​lt2.aspx. Accessed July 15, 2021. Stibbe, A. (2015), Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, London: Taylor and Francis. Stibbe, A. (n.d.), “The Stories We Live By: A Free Online Course in Ecolinguistics, Part 4: Metaphors, Slides.” Available online: https://www.stor​iesw​eliv​eby.org.uk/part4. Accessed March 16, 2021. Turkish Music Portal (n.d), “Klasik Türk Müziği: Müzikle Tedaviler.”Turkish Cultural Foundation. Available online: http://www.tur​kish​musi​cpor​tal.org/tr/turk-muz​igi-eserl​eri/kla​sik-turk-muz​igi-muzi​kle-ted​avi. Accessed March 16, 2021. Tümata (n.d.), “Türk müziği makamları ve insana etkileri.” Available online: https://tum​ata.com/muzik-ter​api/ turk-muz​igi-makaml​ari-ve-etkil​eri/. Accessed March 16, 2021. Uçaner, B., and B. Öztürk (2009), “Türkiye’de ve Dünyada Müzikle Tedavi Uygulamaları,” I. Uluslararası Eğitim Araştırmaları Kongresi, Çanakkale 18 Mart University, Çanakkale, Turkey, May 1–3. Available online: http:// www.muzike​giti​mcil​eri.net/bilim​sel/bild​iri/Uca​ner-Ozt​urk.pdf. Accessed March 16, 2021. Vikikaynak (2021), “Bahçeye indim ki asma salıncak,” CC BY-SA 3.0. Available online: https://tr.wik​isou​rce.org/ wiki/Bahçey​e_İnd​im_k​i_As​ma_S​alın​cak. Accessed March 16, 2021. “Yangın olur biz yangına gideriz” (n.d.), Şarkılar: Notalar: Türk Sanat Müziği: Türk Halk Müziği: Türk Sanat Müziği: Şarkılar: Notalar. Available online: https://sark​ilar​nota​lar.blogs​pot.com/2019/04/yan​gin-olur-biz-yang​ ina-gide​riz.html. Accessed March 16, 2021. Yedinota (n.d.a), “Dede Efendi: Hasretle temam, “nal”e döndüm sensiz.” Available online: https://www.yedin​ota. com/beste/hasre​tle-temam-nale-don​dum-sen​siz-5384. Accessed March 16, 2021. Yedinota (n.d.b), “Bir pür-cefa hoş dilberdir.” Available online: https://www.yedin​ota.com/beste/bir-pur-cefa-hosdilber​dir-2250. Accessed March 16, 2021.

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Expressing Concepts of Environment through Concepts of Madness in Some Irish Literature: Astray at Home TESS MAGINESS

CONSTRUCTIONS OF MADNESS: A CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES FRAMEWORK This chapter will explore how “madness” is constructed by certain Irish writers to represent differing conceptions of “environment.” The writers under consideration will include William Carleton, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett, but the main focus will be on Seamus Heaney. While it must be said that the medical model of madness, referred to most currently under such terms as mental ill-health or even mental health, is still very much in evidence, there have been some profound challenges to the medicalization of madness, most especially from writers like Michel Foucault ([1961] 1964) and Thomas Sasz (1961). Foucault argued that madness is not an objective set of conditions but a construct. In other words, different societies, at different times and in different places, regard at least certain forms of madness in quite different and even contradictory ways. Foucault is concerned with how the mad are controlled within an asymmetric power relationship. Madness, as Andrew Scull (2015) has, argued, is dependent upon what has been determined as normative. Or to put it another way, madness is counter-hegemonic. Thus, I would argue that the representation of madness in literature is critical in ventilating the cultural, political, and economic questions of a particular time, often a crux or crisis of representation of some sort. Madness is strikingly pervasive in Irish literature. What is interesting is the many manifestations and purposes. More often than not, “madness” is related to land/landscape/place/environment. I propose to draw upon the theoretical orientation of Critical Medical Humanities. The University of Liverpool website offers a succinct definition of the field: “The Critical Medical Humanities is an emerging area in Medical Humanities research. It encompasses scholarly work in the humanities

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and social sciences that is concerned with the critical examination of how issues around, and knowledges of, health, illness, wellbeing and medicine are constituted, represented and governed at various levels (historical, political, economic, socio-cultural)” (“Critical Medical Humanities” n.d.a). Thus, this chapter will focus less on medical typologies of mental illness and more on how madness has been constructed for specific literary purposes in the context of Irish literature. Those literary purposes, in turn, are often predicated upon certain cultural-economic and social matrices, which ultimately could be said to reach down (and up) to power relations about land, about the functions of land, and, thus, of how land (and the land) and environment ought to be treated, used, abused, regarded, and experienced.

DEFINING ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES Turning to the word “environment” we are immediately aware of how many ways this term can be experienced. Nash (2006) argues that one of the major cultural developments in the late twentieth century was the re-envisioning of human beings’ place in the world. Within an ecocentric worldview, then, we may give place and space to Environmental Humanities—a transdisciplinary field that, according to Thornber (2016: 53), is becoming a key part of liberal arts and an indispensable component of the twenty-first-century university. Adding to the understanding of what Environmental Humanities can include, the Medical Humanities Research Group, School of English, Leeds University, suggests that the focus is on utilizing “the critical thinking practices of the arts and humanities” (“Medical Humanities Research Group” n.d.b). This chapter can be situated also within a critical framework of ecocriticism. According to Trexler and Johns-Putra (2011), ecocriticism, linking culture, literature, and the environment, gained momentum in the 1990s. Branch and Slovic (2003: xiv) contend that ecocriticism is the term now widely used “to describe scholarship that is concerned with the environmental implications of literary texts.” In the realm of aesthetics, Kagan (2014) speaks of “art in nature,” which seems especially relevant to the writers here. Seamus Heaney did not, for all his urbanity, use the word “environment,” but he certainly did deliberate quite a lot about different conceptualizations and perspectives about place, land, and landscape. He distinguishes between the sense of place as “lived, illiterate and unconscious” and a perspective on place that is “learned, literate and conscious” (Heaney 1980: 132). These contrasting, even dialectical, positionings are a useful starting point for the representation of nature/place/space in Irish writing. For some writers there is also a strong sense of rural place as temporal, and, as such, places are sites of conflict and contention, of possession, of dispossession, within an historical framework. In relation to theoretical rubrics, Lidström (2015: 8) cites Tiffin and Huggan (2010) who draw attention to concepts such as conquest and indigenity as being central to both postcolonial and environmental studies. Lidström (2015: 9) also makes reference to Twidle’s concept of “green imperialism” (2014: 6), evincing the example of Cecil Rhodes trying to introduce English songbirds in South Africa. There are obvious parallels in the “planting” of nonnative species like limes and the re-sculpting of land around the Big House estate in Ireland and, indeed, in other countries like the Caribbean (Stoddard 2012). As Wenzell (2009: 128), citing Schama, has pointed out, colonization led to a long process of deforestation—forty-five thousand acres cut down by landlords between 1841 and 1881. The vanished forests remain only in the place names and surnames, a vivid revenantal of how environment can be despoiled. Looked at from a

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different but related perspective, it is hard not to agree with Hughes (1994), cited by Lidström (2015: 13) that “the story of the mind exiled from nature is the story of western man.” Magan (2020: 156) notes also a more global dis-location; the charged, temporally laden sense of place in Ireland (with all its contradictions jarrings and complexities) is “the polar opposite of our current [post-modern] sense of disconnection and alienation from our surroundings.” The subsequent quest for unspoilt, wild nature forms part of the context for the work of Yeats at the end of the nineteenth century. It might be argued that Heaney’s Sweeney Astray is the story of the mind exiled in nature.

MADNESS AS CHORIC; LAND AS CONQUESTED COMMODITY When we go back to the nineteenth-century Irish writer, William Carleton, the first thing we must accept is that the word “environment” did not quite exist and neither did a word like “ecological.” In Carleton’s world, which is almost entirely rural, ordinary country people or “peasants” as the landlords called them, have a strong, even desperate, relationship with land as both a familiar and beloved place with a “local habitation and a name” but also as a source of life—and death. What we have with Carleton is one of the first registrations of the perspective of the people who live in and on the land—to use Heaney’s formulation, the “lived, illiterate and unconscious” experience of land. Yet, there are also elements of Carleton’s rendition of the rural world that are not unlike Heaney’s “literate and conscious” apprehension of land (Heaney 1980: 132). Carleton occupies a double position, as do many Anglo-Irish writers: on the one hand, affecting the stance of the outsider, wherein, within the conventions of the early nineteenth century, the sublime and the lyrical are drawn up, and on the other, the insider perspective, registering the experience of the people living and working in the land. In this chapter, what I want to suggest is that these two views of land/landscape, of place/space are, also, indubitably, a reflection of power relations. Both landlord and peasant may view the local place as, in one sense or another, beautiful, but the less appetizing reality is that the land is, under the landlord system, rendered down into a commodity, a basis of wealth for the landlords. Within this arrangement, the main priority of the tenant (peasant) is to survive so as to submit the “gale” (rent). Ireland was not exceptional in this nexus, though, like some other countries, the extraction of resources, in this case, mainly rents, was accompanied also by an entire cultural apparatus that, inter alia, encouraged the peasants to devalue their own language, customs, and aesthetic culture and religions. Again, this is by no means exceptional. That landlord and Plantation families were the first to lead the way in “rescuing” the lost culture that their near ancestors had suppressed and violated is not exceptional either. What I want to focus on here, though, is what happens to these compounding ironies when the country (if country it could be called) is faced with what the Existentialists termed a “limit situation.” The limit situation is the Great Famine of 1845. This was represented as a natural disaster or a predicament made by the Hand of God, upon the land. A country of small farmers, many of whom were living at subsistence level, over-reliant on the ultimate subsistence crop—the potato—find even their tiny patch of land, once owned by their clans and now rented back to them, is a place of terrible misery. The most able take their chances on the coffin ships, the poor sink, survive or go out on the roads, large numbers of people made refugees. What Carleton’s writings revealed was that this Famine, and, by implication, all famines, were the result of human action, was by nature serial, and pleaded that lessons be learnt. But Carleton was not, for complex reasons,

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always able to speak directly, and so he draws upon what other devices are available. One of these is the use of madmen to reveal or get across the “condition of Ireland.” The outsider in his 1845 novel, Valentine McClutchy, is an English tourist called Evory Easel, whose very name suggests that his perspective is that of the detached artist, viewing the land as landscape, as a scene to be enjoyed and painted. On his travels, he encounters Raymond-na-Hattha (Raymond of the Hats), “a sobriquet very properly bestowed on him, in consequence of a habit he has of always wearing three or four hats at a time, one within the other—a circumstance which, joined to his extraordinary natural height, and great strength gives him an absolutely gigantic appearance” (Carleton [1845] 1992: 85). This Raymond is the fool of the parish … There is not, in fact, a field, a farm-house, or a cottage within a circumference of miles, which he does not know, and where he is not also known notwithstanding his privation is, however, exceedingly shrewd in many things … very benevolent—and consequently feels a degree of hatred and horror at anything in the shape of cruelty or oppression. (86) Raymond’s anatomy of the causes of famine and his attribution of blame to “Val the Vulture” are shortly ratified by what Easel sees for himself: The desolate impresses of the evil agent began … to become visible. On the roadside there were the humble traces of two or three cabins, whose hearths had been extinguished, and whose walls were levelled to the earth. (87) And we note how the very land itself has become a putrefying wilderness, as if Hamlet’s rotten State of Denmark had become literal as well as figurative: The black fungus, the burdock, the nettle, and all those offensive weeds that follow in the train of oppression and ruin were here; and as the dreary wind stirred them into sluggish motion, and piped its melancholy wail though these desolate little mounds, I could not help asking myself, if those who ever do the reckoning in after life, where power, and insolence and wealth misapplied and rancour, and pride, an rapacity, and persecution and revenge and sensuality, and gluttony, will be placed face to face with those humble beings, on whose rights and privileges of simple existence they have trampled with such a selfish and exterminating tread. (87) Raymond’s tour offers Easel further shocking insights into the condition of Ireland; and it is the fool of the parish who is the keeper of the stories of each of the families, thrown on to the roads. The insider, illiterate perspective of the fool is, in effect, allied with the outsider perspective of the literate and conscious gentleman.

LANDSCAPE AS SPACE FOR THE MADMAN AS COUNTERCULTURAL ARTIST The younger Yeats (1893) admired Carleton and his circus of grotesques and mad peasants. We may note the distinctly distanced and, indeed, patronizing attitude to the “peasants.” The Yeatsian perspective is essentially Pastoralist. His landscape is mostly atemporal and, significantly, much less specific and locatable than that of Carleton. Some critics suggest that the Yeatsian perspective and that of the Irish Revival more generally, is specifically backward looking and sentimental (Frawley

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2005). Perhaps borrowing from Noh drama, the “set” for his characters is often elemental, stylized. One of his earliest poems features a protagonist given to madness, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899). Yeats drew on what Ó hÓgáin (1992: 40) has characterized as “one of the most otherworldly of the tales from the Mythological Cycle,” the story of his dream dating back to a ninth-century source. Aengus was an ancient Irish god. I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread. (Yeats [1899] 1994: 47) We may note that Aengus goes to the wood because of the fire in his head—as if this environment was somehow, assuaging and might help the madman to settle a while from his restless (manic) wanderings. As scholars have pointed out, madness and the woods were closely associated in medieval culture. Heron and Pilz (2019: 77), for example, point to the early use of the word “woodness” to denote mental derangement and, significantly, they elucidate a further connection between the old Irish word for poet and the word for madness. Aengus is the Irish god of love, youth, and poetic inspiration (Ó hÓgáin 1992), so the mad artist analogue for Yeats is clearly enough implied. Yeats probably draws on the tradition of Gaelic poetry here and or the French reverdie in which the protagonist, in nature, often under a tree, experiences a trance like state in which he dreams of a beautiful woman. It is notable that the political allegory is quite absent in the Yeats treatment. Indeed, the extraordinarily beautiful concluding couplet presages late Yeats in its representation of a nature gilded and stylized. Nonetheless, in the early poetry of Yeats, we also have the dramatic use of elemental landscape to signify, as it were, the anticipatory moment of political independence: The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand, Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand; Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies, But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan. ([1904] 1994: 65) To be sure, the poem then tends to swoon into the vapidity of the “delicate” poetry of the fin de siècle and fair clanks with the heavy apparatus of the occult that was so fashionable at the time. But there is a discernible desire to identify with the tradition of Bardic poetry; Red Hanrahan being a kind of remaking of the Gaelic poet, Owen Roe (Red) O’Sullivan (1748–1784), whose aisling poems “lament the loss of Gaelic Ireland as a result of the Plantations or colonisation of Ireland and dream, of the return of the rightful Stuart king” (Welch 1996: 9). There are ironies galore, here, given that Yeats’s ancestors would have been, in some sense part of that movement that had among its reforming missions, the stamping out of the barbaric Gaelic culture. Yet, it can also be argued, that such poetic identifications and ventriloquizations, may represent an awakening or an expiation, or/and a new form of oppression. The land, taken first by force and then by cultural appropriation. In his later poetry, Yeats deploys a number of “mad” figures including Crazy Jane ([1933] 1994: 217). These figures roam through or dance through a mythical empty rural space, cleared, as it were, of people, a retreat in the face of the native “gombeen” commercial class in the wake

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of actual national independence. They are like the mad figures of Carleton, mouthpieces for their author, but their agenda is a little different, concerned with upbraiding what he saw as the philistine Catholic middle class and the Catholic Church.

FROM CHORIC TO FUGAL: MADNESS IN THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SPACE Beckett’s Waiting for Godot represents a kind of logical conclusion in some respects to the trend begun by Yeats, with perhaps a flick or two of mordant irony. Beckett, committed or condemned to a postmodernist universe that could not accommodate madly articulate philosophers like Crazy Jane creakily devoted to a nostalgie de la boue, nor the Modernists’ arch fragments shored against the ruins, might be said to go for broke with Godot, since the madness that play so tenderly and comically enacts is, as Casey (2018) argues, dementia. It may be speculated mischievously that one of those thorn trees cracking with such splendid theatricality in that early Yeats poem, is now dragged on to the set of Godot. The set directions read: “A country road, a tree” (Beckett [1955] 2018: n.p.). Like Yeats, Beckett does not favor local habitation and name either. Yet Beckett’s “landscape” is far from picturesque and is quite lacking in the stylized grace of Japanese theater. What we have here, makes even Lear’s heath seem positively Arcadian. This is a place that is stripped back, post-apocalyptic, and, as such questions the very idea of landscape and, more deeply, the idea of a land or place where people belong. This is a play about dislocation, about characters who are condemned to wait for a saving force that never comes. Beckett’s characters are not fugal in the psychiatric sense, since they are not in flight. Rather, the play is a kind of ironic aisling. The characters shuffle and stagger in a space that seems, though without clear boundaries, to be somehow also confined. There is a road, but they do not travel up or down the road. They are demented but, for all their constraints, they are not passive; their humor and care for one another illuminates their existential humanity. Just as Carleton, Yeats, Beckett, and many other Irish writers created representations of the madman not just in their own personal image, as an image of the artist, but also, sometimes as a choric voice to embody the condition of Ireland (or the world). Seamus Heaney’s version of Buile Suibhne, Sweeney Astray, becomes a complex site for his own complex interrogation of his positioning as a poet. Sweeney is fugal, he is constantly in fight, and he is dislocated, yet paradoxically, at home in this rural space. He is a fugitive, hunted by well-meaning relatives.

INSIDER AND OUTSIDER, HEANEY’S SWEENEY AS ARTIST According to Regan (2015), Heaney began translating the poem in the autumn of 1972, shortly after he left Northern Ireland and went to live in the rural isolation of Glanmore, Co Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland, but the poem was chastened and redrafted; Sweeney Astray was not published until 1983. Heaney based his poem on the O’Keeffe (1913) translation. The story refers to events that happened in the seventh century (mainly the Battle of Magh Rath, present day Moira, some fifteen miles from Belfast), but it is thought that the poem was composed in the ninth century and appeared in a manuscript in the seventeenth century (Van de Woude 2007: 25). The poem recounts the story of an Ulster king or chieftain called Suibhne (Sweeney). As Heaney (1983: v) points out in his introduction, Sweeney’s historical authenticity is open to question. Heaney also points up

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how the “literary imagination” has fastened upon him was clearly in the grip of a tension between the newly dominant Christian ethos and the older, recalcitrant Celtic temperament (vi). Just as specifically, he identifies Sweeney as an artist figure. However, unlike the “crazy” artist figures in Yeats, Heaney’s madman is far more complex and even contradictory. Heaney’s representations of nature are never sentimental, what Garrard (1998: 168) identifies within ecologisms as a “naturalization of political identity in an idealized community (Gemeinschaft).” Heaney’s treatment, as many commentators have argued (Regan 2015) is very much situated within the history and politics of his own time. Indeed, Heaney’s version seems to have evolved from an allegory to a kind of dialogy, a drama of conflicting conceptions of what the poet’s role should be in society. Is the poet to be a Bardic voice of and for his people, like Eoghan Roe O’Sullivan or Carleton, or a lone figure standing against the hegemonic culture, escaping the nightmare of a recurring history, like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus? Heaney comes to view the poet as is an insider and an outsider; a liminal figure—both native, both of the place but also alien. The poet is, as Lidström (2015) and others have argued, both at home and not at home. Heron and Pilz (2019: 87) argue that Heaney is able to incorporate, albeit within a dialectic, the two sides of his own calling as a poet. Speaking of Early Irish nature poetry, Heaney says this (1980: 183) “ On the one hand there is the pagus, pagan wilderness, green, full-throated, unrestrained; on the other there is the lined book, the Christian disciplina, the sense of a spiritual calling a religious calling that transcends the almost carnal lushness of nature itself.” Thus, the poem enacts Heaney’s recognition that his own journey away from Northern Ireland is a kind of penitential and hermetic one and his flit is also an obedience to the call to be a poet who celebrates wild nature. The woods are traditionally associated with hermetic penitence and, indeed, retreat from the world. According to Schama (1995), cited in Wenzel (2009) the hermit was concerned both with penitence and with the production of poetry. And that poetry is engaged deeply with the environment, with nature, but also allows for transport and vision. Nature is seen more sharply, becomes almost suprareal. As Heaney would have been very aware, there are still place-names in Ulster like Desertmartin and Desertcreat that were, in fact, hermetic habitations and the word “desert” is cognate with the practices of the Desert monks of North Africa. And, as Schama (1995), cited by Wenzell (2009: 135) tells us, these desert cells were grafted on to older pagan practices, sacred groves, and woodland altars. They are thus suitable sites for a poet like Heaney, now exercised to dramatize what he sees as two elements for the poet. Doubtless, the potentiality of the visionary, the expanded imagination is not unattractive; solitude creating the conditions for mystical transports (Schama (1995) cited by Wenzel (2009: 132). Within these antinomies, nature can represent a place of banishment, a refuge, a hiding place, and a country of the imagination. That Heaney was acutely conscious of how his decision to leave the battles taking place in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, to do nothing but write poetry in hermetic seclusion in the peaceful Wicklow woods, is made almost unbearably evident in a poem he wrote about the time he began translating Buile Suibhne (Exposure) ([1975] 1998: 144): An inner йmigrй [immigrant], grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne Escaped from the massacre And the voice Heaney creates for Sweeney enables him, as poet, to embody this riven, hybrid and polyvalent or plural or fluid identity in the very element of the language describing place and nature

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(O’Brien 2004: 69). Perhaps this is what Heaney (1980: 132) meant when he spoke of the sense of place as “a country of the mind, whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture or from, a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both. It is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation.” Magan (2020: 138)) comments that “the most direct and visceral way the Irish language is connected to landscape is through place names.” There are, he tells us, sixty thousand townlands. He alludes to the Dinnseanchas, a collection of lore to do with place names and the events and people associated with them. The Dinnseanchas was important because the Gaelic bard could draw upon this lore to legitimize the sense of belonging, the claim to the place, to the lands. The irony of the predicament of the suppressed and erased Gaelic language and culture would not be lost on some readers. That sense of collective psychic alienation a familiar place, being a stranger in your own land has its own threnodic undertones for a writer from Heaney’s particular cultural, religious background. We hear that tone in the dispossessed Gaelic poets, for example in, Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta’s (c. 1647–1733) lamentation about the cold house he encounters in the new Colonial dispensation (Dillon 2012: 148). So as Heaney’s Sweeny flits fugally through townlands, small places that have not yet been subjected to the forces of appropriation and cultural extirpation, he is not having to deal with what the modern reader (and writer has to deal with); that most people do not even know what the townland names mean nowadays. The story begins, as it were in medias res: We have already told how Sweeney … went astray when he flew out of the battle. This story tells the whys and wherefore of his fits and trips, why he of all men was subject to such frenzies. (Heaney 1983: 3) Sweeney becomes “suddenly angered” when he hears that St Ronan wants to build a church in his kingdom and he rushes to “hunt the cleric from the church” (3). Sweeney is furious, perhaps because he sees Ronan’s actions as a “land grab.” He flings the saint’s psalter into a lake. Here land is conceived of as territory and, in Sweeney’s eyes. Ronan is an invader, a conqueror. An otter retrieves Ronan’s psalter and hands it to him, a lovely magic realist interspecies detail in which the otter assumes a certain human dexterity in the service of Christianity. Then without warning, Sweeney is summoned to the Battle of Moira (Mag Rath). Sweeney seems to Ronan to be mad before the battle: “he came all of a sudden, hurtling/, raving and ringing wild against me” (4). Yet, a little later, it seems as if it is the battle that “drove him mad” (5). Ronan also foreshadows here, the subsequent fate of Sweeney: “He shall roam Ireland, mad and bare. He shall find death on the point of a spear” (5). Ó Béara (2014: 266) discusses the Gaelic word geilt interpreting it to mean someone who goes mad from terror, a panic-stricken fugitive from battle. It may be, as some commentators have argued, that geilt means also that the flight is an act of cowardice (Van der Woude 2007: 36). And this may also be behind Heaney’s own very particular choice of words in describing Sweeney: “displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance” (1983: v) Like Heaney, Sweeney, the geilt , or madman, ends up living in the woods and is believed to be endowed with the power of levitation (Regan 2015: 331). Ó Béara cites the Celtic scholar, Kuno Meyer, who points out that the tradition of battle madness is evident also in Old Norse saga. Apparently, the geilt, possibly from cowardice, ran wild and after twenty years in the woods, feathers grew on his body to protect him from the cold. Ó Béara (2014: 268) wryly concludes that the tradition of the geilt may have simply been a

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literary creation. Nonetheless, the pathological or medical basis for battle madness has long been recognized (Shephard 2001). It may be that the nature of how the poem was composed from various sources in a palimpsestic configuration may account for some riddling or inconsistency in how the causes of madness are accounted for. But, it may also be, as it is now, that people can go mad with fear and terror. Whether they can be cursed by others, is perhaps a rather more problematic question, though a Foucauldian view would imply that those who defy the norm can be cursed and cast out into the wilderness. With reference to the title of the original Irish text, Buile Suibhne, Ó Béara (2014: 265), like other scholars, identifies the word buile (as connoting vision, frenzy or madness). He notes that buile “is also considered to be the inspiration of poets and that Suibhne’s buile is associated with poetic prodigiousness, equivalent to the Classical insania poetae, or furor poeticus.” Sweeney defies the rules of battle set down by Ronan. He appears beautifully apparelled, every inch the noble king. From personal observation, I wonder if this is not a little like what can happen to some people in the first “euphoric” stages of mania. Yet Sweeney, paranoid, thinking he is being mocked by the holy men, hurls a spear at one of the psalmists and kills him “in one cast” (1983: 6). This time the saint turns the druidic power of cursing back on the Pagan Sweeney. In dramatic contrast, the sumptuous king is now to go bare, naked, and is condemned to wander across the island and further afield, at home in it, yet also alien in his own land. Furthermore, he is cursed to be half-bird, half-man: a cumbersome interspecies creature, ill equipped for earth or air; a liminal freak. Sweeney’s madness, as a result of Ronan’s curse, is almost cosmically expansive. This madness is a shockingly visceral rendering of explicit medical conditions, as Heaney blends medical typologies of bipolar mania with medieval literary representations: His brain convulsed, His mind split open. Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings And launchings came over him, He staggered and flapped desperately, He was revolted by the thought of known places And dreamed strange migrations. And he levitated in a frantic cumbersome motion Like a bird in the air. And Ronan’s curse was fulfilled. (8) The homely (heimlich) has become strange, alien (unheimlich), to borrow from Garrard (1998: 174). Sweeney is engulfed in a full-blown manic state where he can know no rest. In the medical sense, he is in a “fugue state” (Pam 2018): An amnesic dissociated state characterized by physical flight from an unbearable situation. A fugue is a more extreme form of escape than the more common types of amnesia, since the patient not only loses his identity but actually leaves his normal surroundings for days, weeks or even years. There is a scene in which Sweeney’s antagonist at the Battle of Moira, Donal, offers his own plangent tribute to this “good man’, flower among them all” (1983: 10) who, by his own testimony, is wasted away, fugal, self-estranged; “God has exiled me from myself ” (9):

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To see your handsome person go Was morning after a fall of snow The blue and crystal of your eyes Shone like deepening windswept ice. (10). Interestingly, Donal states that while Sweeney was a wonderful warrior, his fault was to stumble in the path of kingship. This kind of critique would also be familiar to readers of the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, which Heaney was later to translate (Heaney 1999). Thus, the dramatic tension is between Pagan epic warrior culture and a societal Christian culture in which Christian virtues of wisdom and good judgment are elevated. The punishment of madness for bad kingship is also, of course, a theme in Lear. Donal’s analysis of the cause of Sweeney’s madness is thus a little different from the dramatization of the tension between one kind of religion and another with its implications for who controls the land. All the characters appear to be endowed with poetic gifts, but Sweeney is a poet non pareil, perhaps only because he is mad, since in the culture that produced the poem in the first place, some kind of unhinging from the natural order almost a precondition for the poetic vision. As O’Donoghue (2017) suggests, Sweeney’s mental state is often equated with nature. Or, perhaps, expressed through nature, this extended pathetic fallacy also renders the boundaries between the physical and mental—soul and mind and body more porous, again creating a blurring between traditional polarities. Sweeney is mad and not mad. Strictly speaking, within medical model definitions of insanity, it would be unusual for a person in a psychotic state, to write staves of incomparable beauty. Heaney himself diagnoses Sweeney as paranoiac and schizophrenic (1989). According to Cherney (2018): Not everyone with schizophrenia will develop paranoia. However, paranoia is a significant symptom and the person is likely to experience: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, disorganized behaviour and suicidal thoughts. Now, this is where medicine and literature appear to collide. Are Sweeney’s thoughts delusional or a perfectly understandable response to his transformation? A bird-man producing staves of considerable eloquence is not manifesting disorganized speech. As to disorganized behavior, there does seem to be a very discernible pattern in Sweeney’s flights. And there is no suicidal ideation; rather a sense that he must live out the curse. But nature, place, space, environment, is always there, a necessary foundation for the mad to achieve poetic vision. Thus, in a wry writing back to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and his theory of the artist hovering above his handiwork, Sweeney staggers between earth and air, between hell and heaven, a cursed trans-species freak and yet, of course also, paradoxically, the poet who, can go beyond insane lamentation and personal anguish to compose staves of exquisite beauty. And yet, he is a madman. Or is he only mad in a literary sort of way? Or is the intensity of fugal estrangement a necessary condition for really seeing nature? Nature is often very harsh, jagged and unwelcoming, and Heaney conveys the sensory privations of his hero with a near preternatural vividness: A long time he went faring through Ireland Poking his way into hard rocky clefts, Shouldering through ivy bushes. (1983: 11)

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He reflects upon his fall from power, his outcast state, with mordant irony: scavenging through the glen On my mad royal visit: no pomp or king’s circuit but wild scuttles in the wood. Heavenly saints! O Holy God! (13) And then hunger, painfully somatic: I woke at dawn With a fasting spittle. (16) From the extreme close-up of this apprehension, Heaney transports us to the visionary, cosmic capaciousness of Sweeney’s migrations. He is vouchsafed rare delights: on solitary cliffs, a stag Bells and makes the whole glen shake And re-echo. I am ravished. Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast. (17) But, in a kind of bipolar rapid cycling, the labile Sweeney is, the next moment, plunged into desolation, homesick, haunted: I pined the whole night … And peopled the dark With a thousand ghosts. (18) Later he embarks on another “high demented spree” (Heaney 1983: 35), which takes him, physically or metaphorically (a characteristic ambiguity), from Innishowen in the extreme north of Ireland) to Galtee in the far south. But if he manages superhuman flights, he is also, always, hunted, fugal. In one phantasmagoric episode, he is tracked by wolves and we, as readers, feel Sweeney’s visceral fear: “Their vapoury tongues/their low-slung speed.” (37). Later he is visited by a terrible apparition—bleeding headless torsos pursue him (60–1), an echo, perhaps of Montague’s haunting in “A Grafted Tongue” ([1972] 2005: 31), or a writing back to the Yeats poem ([1934] 1977: 642), “Alternative Song for the Severed Head,” where we find the lines, “The King that could make his people stare,/ Because he had feathers instead of hair.” The severed head symbolizes the poet singing, even after death. Yet, in a poem so full of contradictions and subtleties, Sweeney comes also to prefer the “scurry and song of blackbirds to the ‘usual blather of men and women’ ” (Heaney 1983: 38). Indeed, at times he envisions himself as an animal, he crosses the border between human and animal, he is, variously, a Royal stag and a “timorous stag/feathered by Ronan Finn” (40). And, a little later, in Scotland, he “mates” with the Ailsa Craig, the rock: “it hard-beaked/me seasoned and scraggy” (47). And, of course, there is the issue of Sweeney’s hybrid identity as an interspecies protagonist. Such characters are not uncommon in fantasy or allegory; we have the classical Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), in which a man is turned into a giant insect— his anguish a model, perhaps, for Sweeney’s alienation. And there is Gabriel García Márquez’s

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story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” ([1955] 1972). But, given the implication of ecocentric worldviews and the emphasis on the importance of nonhuman forms, as Jayaraman (2018) suggests, the interplay of human forms highlights the connections and well as the disconnection between human and nonhuman. Heron and Pilz (2019) are keen to emphasize the liminality of Sweeney’s experience; the environment he inhabits in one where things change, where borders and boundaries collapse, including, perhaps most obviously, the boundary between the human and animal worlds through interspecies crossing. Van der Woude (2007: 26–7) draws attention to another aspect of the insider/outsider view of nature in Heaney’s depiction of Sweeny’s view of nature. He reminds us that Heaney (1980: 133) recalls hiding as a child in a willow tree and “seeing the world behind a pane of strangeness.” The foundation for a marvelous or magical view of the world, half-Pagan, half-Christian, is richly, inexorably sensory. Perhaps, contingently, the interplay between madness and sanity helps the reader also to realize that these worlds are not so very discrete but can inform one another through the imagination. They who would look after him, like his half- brother or foster brother, Lynschsea, have terrible difficulty “shackling” him for his own good. They restore him to sanity but then, he is taunted by a mill hag and flies off, again, into madness. Yet, from time to time, there is the respite of Glen Bolcain, “a natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland used to assemble, once their year in madness was complete” (11). Heaney’s registration of Glen Bolcain exemplifies what he identified in a talk he gave on Irish radio (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) in 1978 as the character of early Irish nature poems; “the tang and clarity of a pristine world full of woods and water … little jabs of delight in the elemental” (Heaney 1980: 181). Where green-topped watercress and languid brooklime Philander over the surface. (Heaney 1983: 11) Regan (2015: 323) has noted the Keatsian mellifluousness. Thus, as a further aspect of the poems double vision, Heaney valorizes both English and Gaelic poetic traditions and styles. The stark contrasts in the depiction of place, of nature reflect, in a kind of extended Pathetic Fallacy, Sweeney’s madness—his great distress, his occasional elation. Furthermore, in his introduction to the translation, Heaney graciously acknowledges that the Irish Sweeney may have been a development of the British madman, Alan (vi). And, indeed he includes a meeting with Alan in the poem and an affecting bond between the two is created, fellow outcasts, like Lear, Edgar and Tom (49). Alan and Sweeney stay a year with each other, mutual protectors—a wonderful image of the relationship that might be wrought between England and Ireland. The fate of both Alan and Sweeney is preordained, and the prose Heaney uses to describe what happens to Alan is almost unbearably moving in its terse plainness; “The Briton set out for the waterfall and when he reached it he was drowned in it” (52). Finally, after many years of wandering, Sweeney is rescued by Saint Moling, who looks after him in his last days. Sweeney repents, but he also makes it clear that now, after all his years in nature, he would prefer to “study the pure chant/ of hounds baying in Glen Bolcain.” Heron and Pilz (2019: 87) argue that Sweeney’s terrible metamorphoses allows him to change. Certainly there is a sense in which he becomes more like victim than murderer; an ironically crucifixional figure in dramatic contrast to the reckless and defiant Pagan we meet at the start of the story. Moling, a poet too, offers a final prayer that beautifully catches his final state, no longer, liminal, unstable, fugal, but miraculously inhabiting both air and earth. The arc of his final transport is both upward. But, he

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is at rest, in mind, soul and body, now after all the tumult, the despair to ecstasy. Moling’s spiritual framework (pagus and disciplina) is defined, above all by compassion: I ask a blessing by Sweeney’s grave His memory rises in my breast His soul roosts in the tree of love His body sinks in its clay nest. (75) More than one commentator on Heaney has remarked that, contingently, maybe, his poetry “progresses” as it were in topographical terms, beginning with digging—roots and gradually becoming more airborne. In one sense, then, Sweeney Astray signals that liminal state in which Heaney is struggling awkwardly like his mad bird-man to ascend; he can make it up as far as the trees, but is apt to get jagged and impaled or to fall from his perch. As Regan notes (2015: 338) in Heaney’s next collection, Station Island (1984), we have a poem called “First Flight” in the “Sweeney Redivivus” sequence; now the poet-hero is “mastering new rungs of the air” (Heaney [1984] 1998: 274). It is a brilliant refiguring of Yeats’s determination to “lie down where all the ladders start” in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (Yeats [1950] 1994: 296) as Heaney ascends toward a new aerial authority and vision. But as the title of his penultimate collection, District and Circle (2006), indicates, and in the last poem in his last collection, “A Kite for Aibhin” in Human Chain (2010), Heaney is still keen to keep the local in sharp focus. He literally takes his stand for and in his own townland of Annahorish, while rising as poet, or (perhaps more profoundly, as poem) above and beyond the world: Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher The longing in the breast and planted feet And gazing face and heart of the kite flier Until string breaks and—separate, elate— The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall. (Heaney 2010: 85) And what a windfall Sweeney Astray is too bruised, discarded, grounded, and a kind of serendipity, a felix culpa, making poetry possible.

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Carleton, W. ([1845] 1992) “A Land Fit for Heroes: Easel’s Portrait from Valentine McClutchy,” in T. Hurson [Maginess] (ed.), Inside the Margins: A Carleton Reader, 85–90, Belfast: Lagan Press. Casey, B. (2018), “Dementia and Symbiosis in Waiting for Godot,” in T. Maginess (ed.), Dementia and Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 37–52, London: Routledge. Cherney, K. (2018), “What Is Paranoid Schizophrenia?,” Healthline, September 2. Available online: https://www. hea​lthl​ine.com/hea​lth/schizo​phre​nia/paran​oid-schizo​phre​nia. Dillon, C. (2012), “An Ghaelig Nua: English, Irish and the south Ulster Poets and Scribes in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in J. Kelly and C. M. Murchaidh (eds.), Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600–1900, 141–61, Dublin: Four Courts Press. Foucault, M. ([1961] 1964), Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Trans. Richard Howard, New York: Vintage Books. Frawley, O. (2005), Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth Century Literature, Newbridge, Co Kildare: Irish Academic Press. Garrard, G. (1998), “Heidegger, Heaney and the Problem of Dwelling,” in R. Kerridge and N. Sammells (eds.), Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, 167–81, London: Zed Books. Heaney, S. ([1980] 1983), “The God in the Tree,” In Preoccupations: Selected Prose. 1968–1978, 181–9, London: Faber and Faber. Heaney, S. (1983), Sweeney Astray, London: Faber and Faber. Heaney, S. (1989), “Earning a Rhyme: Notes on Translating Buile Suibhne,” in R. Warren (ed.), The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, 13–20, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Heaney, S. ([1975] 1998), “Exposure,” In Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996, 143–4, London: Faber and Faber. Heaney, S. ([1984] 1998), “The First Flight” [Sweeney Redivivus sequence], Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996, 273–4, London: Faber and Faber. Heaney, S. (1999), Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber. Heaney, S. (2010), ‘A Kite for Aibhin’, in Human Chain. London: Faber and Faber, p. 85. Heron, T., and A. Pilz (2019), “Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray,” Études irlandaises, 44 (1): 87–99. Jayaraman, U. (2018), “Ecopoetics and the Bestial: Negotiating Human Dignity in Two Contemporary Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia,” Journal of Ecocentrism, 8 (1):1–10. Kafka, F. (1915), The Metamorphosis, Leipzig: Kurt Wolff. Kagan. S. J. (2014), “The Practice of Ecological Art.” Available online: https://www.resea​rchg​ate.net/publ​icat​ ion/274719395_​The_​prac​tice​_of_​ecol​ogic​al_. Lidström, S. (2015), Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocentrism and the Poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, London: Routledge. Magan, M. (2020), Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, Dublin: Gill. Márquez, G. G. ([1955] 1972), “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” trans. Gregory Rabassa, New York: Harper and Row. Montague, J. ([1972] 2005), “A Severed Head,” In The Rough Field, 31, Winston Salem, NC: Wake Forest Press. Nash, L. (2006), Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ó Béara, F. (2014), “Buile Suibhne: vox insaniae from Medieval Ireland,” in A. Classen (ed.), Mental Health, Spirituality and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 15), 242–89, Berlin: De Gruyter.

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O’Brien, E. (2004), “More Than a Language . . . No More of a Language: Merriman, Heaney, and the Metamorphosis of Translation,” Irish University Review, 34 (2): 277–90. O’Donoghue, J. (2017), “The Politics of Metaphor in Heaney’s Sweeney Astray,” Irish University Review, 47 (Issue Supplement): 450–69. Ó hÓgáin, D. (1992), Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopaedia of the Irish Folk Tradition, New York: Prentice Hall Press. O’Keeffe, J. G. (1913), Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney), London: David Nutt, for the Irish Texts Society. Pam, M. S. (2018), “Fugue State,” PsychologyDictionary.org, November 28. Available online: https://psych​olog​ ydic​tion​ary.org/fugue-state. Regan, S. (2015), “Seamus Heaney and the making of Sweeney Astray,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 21 (2): 317–39. Sasz, T. (1961), The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, New York: Harper & Row. Schama, S. (1995) Scull, A. (2015), Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, London: Thames & Hudson. Shephard, B. (2001), A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–94, London: Jonathan Cape. Stoddard, E. W. (2012), Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space: Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thornber, K. (2016), “Humanistic Environmental Studies and Global Indigenities,” (Editorial), Humanities, 5 (3): 52. Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/52/htm. Trexler, A., and A. Johns-Putra (2011), “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism,” WIREs Climate Change, 2 (2): 185–200. Van der Woude, P. W. (2007), “Translating Heaney: A Study of Sweeney Astray, The Cure at Troy and Beowulf,” MA thesis, Rhodes University. Available online: http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/acc​ess/mana​ger/PdfVie​wer/ vital:2213/SOURCE​PDF?view​PdfI​nter​nal=1. Welch, R, ed. (1996), The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wenzell, T. (2009), “Ecocriticism, Early Irish Nature Writing, and the Irish Landscape Today,” New Hibernia Review, 13 (1): 125–39. Yeats, W. B. (1893), “Irish National Literature,” Bookman, July. Available online: http://www.rico​rso.net/rx/ az-data/auth​ors/c/Car​leto​n_W/comm.htm. Yeats, W. B. ([1934] 1977), “Alternative Song for the Severed Head,” in The King of the Great Clock Tower: The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, 641–2, London: Macmillan. Yeats, W. B. ([1899] 1994), “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” in The Collected Poems of W B Yeats, 47, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library. Yeats, W., B. ([1904] 1994), “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland,” in The Collected Poems of W B Yeats, 65, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library. Yeats, W. B. ([1933] 1994), “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop,” in The Collected Poems of W B Yeats, 217, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library. Yeats, W. B. ([1950] 1994), “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in The Collected Poems of W B Yeats, 296, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Epilogue: Our Bodies, Our Minds, Our Planet YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU GOT ’TIL IT’S GONE SCOTT SLOVIC

In so many ways, Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” a song contemporaneous with the first Earth Day in 1970, has defined the experience of 2020 and 2021, as Swarna, Vidya, and I have worked on this book with our many contributors. It has been a time of restriction and curtailment, a time of wariness and precarity, a time of injury and illness, a time of age-related strain. Time catches up with all of us eventually, but living through the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated my own awareness of time and bodily precarity in ways that I had never quite known before. As Mitchell so eloquently expresses, it’s hard to appreciate what we have until we no longer have it: a fit, healthy body and mind … or a robust, intact biosphere. I entered the field of ecocriticism and interdisciplinary environmental humanities research back in the 1980s, as a doctoral student, before these terms were even being used widely to describe the convergence of literary and environmental interests. A big part of what drew me into this work was a sense of youthful vibrancy, almost a sense of immortality. I loved—and still love—being out in the world, using all of my senses to make contact with the earth while walking and running, biking and skiing, mountain climbing and body surfing. To me, in those early years, ecocriticism was a kind of “muscular scholarship,” not so much because a certain kind of physical acuity was necessary but instead because through bodily exertion in the world I felt it was possible to conjoin ideas and experience, to ground truth intellectual ways of knowing by being deeply present in my body and in space. Through ecocritical inquiry, I felt I could somehow manage to know and savor my own animalness in ways that didn’t seem abstract. The unity of avocation and vocation has long been a motivating feature of my life. I came of age as an athlete and outdoor adventurer, in my teens, just as I began to get a sense of my voice as a writer. These facets of my identity, physical and mental, were closely linked to my life experiences

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in specific places: long-distance runs on Heceta Beach on the Oregon coast, extended backpacking and mountain-climbing excursions with high school friends in the Three Sisters Wilderness Area of central Oregon. As I began to develop a formal interest in environmental literature and ecocritical research, while in my mid-twenties, I associated this work gleefully with the healthy, muscular ability to be out savoring the natural world. I tried to erase the episodes of shin splints and other running injuries and adolescent depression from my memory, compartmentalizing these phases of my young life as aberrations from normal health, forgetting disability in order to charge forward into what I imagined to be an endless future of vigor and health. But time catches up to all of us. Pandemics occur. The stresses of relationships and parenting and university politics cause anxiety and depression, or at least stressful distraction. The youthful spring in our stride eventually reduces to a geriatric hobble. I began my work as an environmental humanities scholar in my mid-twenties, and as I write this section of the epilogue, I am entering my sixties, still happy and energetic, but also much wiser than before in my awareness of life’s struggles. I have been thinking a lot about health and illness and the frailty of body and mind during the 2020 pandemic. One of the watchwords for me this year has been the term I’ve adopted from the title of Pramod K. Nayar’s recent book Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019). In 2020 and 2021, when asked to give virtual lectures on my pandemic experience and the environmental humanities, I used the phrase “contemplating ecoprecarity” in the titles of my presentations, as I found myself dwelling more and more on the mirroring vulnerabilities of human beings and the more-than-human planet. Few things focus the mind on vulnerability more than the onset of a mysterious, life-threatening pandemic. I will never forget what it was like in March 2020 when American universities went virtual, when we were told in this country to wipe down our groceries with disinfectant, to wear masks in public, to vigilantly maintain two meters (actually, in the States we were told “six feet”) of social distance between ourselves and strangers. As I write this essay more than a year after the onset of pandemic restrictions in the United States, I hope to hold onto the vivid feeling of precarity I experienced early in the pandemic because that feeling made me somehow more alive and preciously vulnerable. I have devoted much of my career as an ecocritic to thinking about varieties of awareness and sensitivity (or insensitivity), initially tracing the Thoreauvian tradition of awareness in American environmental writing and since that time going on to consider particular cognitive tendencies that obstruct human sensitivity to humanitarian and ecological crises. What I would like to do somehow is to learn from the precarity I have felt during the Covid pandemic in order to better understand how to inculcate a sense of planetary urgency through various kinds of cultural expression—or, rather, to explain as a scholar and teacher, how other writers and artists and public speakers are using communication strategies to raise awareness and spur action. This is what I’ve always been interested in as a scholar and writer, and this is what I consider a potential takeaway from the pandemic. It is also, perhaps, a takeaway from the simple, inevitable, universal process of aging. “You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.” As the pandemic raged on through news of surging infections and rising fatalities, I received word in September 2020 that my mother—a lively and socially engaged 81-year-old—had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. For the past year, my family and I have been monitoring her progress through a series of battering chemotherapy treatments. Susie and I moved to my hometown, so that we could be close to my family, especially my mother, as I shifted my teaching at the University of Idaho entirely to a virtual format, at least

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for the time being. I began running each morning with my father, only to develop painful Achilles tendinitis, forcing me to take time off from running and to hobble on daily walks with Susie and our dog Hanna. Apart from the pandemic itself, these close encounters with cancer and tendinitis— with bodily frailty—have accentuated my attentiveness to pain and loss, to opportunity costs and opportunities seized before they are fully lost. By attending to the medical circumstances of my own life and that of my family, I feel I’ve been able to think in newly sensitive ways about the larger environmental issues we’re facing today. Of course, I’ve written about this in the past, as in my essay “ ‘Be Prepared for the Worst’ ” from the mid-1990s, which explores “anticipatory nostalgia” in the context of the short life of my infant son named Pablo. I am not entirely new to the intersection between medical and environmental ideas and experiences, but I do find myself freshly attuned to the power of these connections as I age and as I continue to weather the Covid pandemic with the rest of humanity. “Take this in,” I tell myself. Be present to this experience, the emotional rawness, the physical sharpness. This morning, while limping along a dirt road in Ürgüp, Turkey, on a dusty May day, amid a three-week pandemic lockdown, my colleague Emrah and I stopped to listen to a raucous chorus of frogs in a slender creek, a rare green sliver in an arid region of Asia Minor. I am here to give a series of lectures and could easily have stayed in my guest apartment and focused on ideas, especially because my legs hurt and there’s fear of contagion in Turkey right now, thus the lockdown. But by venturing out into the world and being alive to my own vulnerabilities, I also become more fully alive to the fragile beauty of the planet—and better able to contemplate both precarity and resilience.

THE GASPING TURTLE AND OTHER HYPOXIA NARRATIVES: PRANA IN A THREATENED WORLD SWARNALATHA RANGARAJAN

The idea of this book germinated in grief during the summer of 2019—the days following my father’s death, a long and cruel battle with Parkinson’s disease for over a decade. This book is catalyzed by my own challenges as a primary caregiver who had to constantly adapt to the new challenges that my father’s progressive neurodegenerative disorder brought about, balancing in the process the demands of my profession in the institute of eminence where I work and the exigencies of my home front. “I think of … / The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway” (Roethke 1964). This line from Theodore Roethke’s poem burst into my memory as I recall the countdown moments of my father’s life, making multiple material connections between my father’s oxygenstarved body and those of countless others who literally gasped to death during the first and second waves of Covid-19. The image of the gasping turtle throws up a whole host of hypoxia narratives— my father’s lungs gurgling with the slowly filling fluid, the ominous beeping of the pulse oximeter that announced his protracted release from life when oxygen supply was gradually withdrawn. These images converge with more sinister stories of oxygen-starved Covid patients being driven

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around for hours in ambulances without hope of finding a hospital bed or even temporary oxygen support—a scene that replayed itself in most Indian cities during the peak of the second wave in 2021. As hypoxia narratives came to occupy the center stage in both public discourses and private conversations, government and wellness centers in India began promoting alternative therapies like yoga and pranayama (the art of conscious breathing) to raise oxygen intake levels and improve lung capacity. The complex yoga of breath enumerated in ancient Indian texts describe five functions of breath, namely: prana, the inbreath associated with heart and organs of respiration; apana, the expelling breath associated with the intestines, kidneys, and the excretory organs; samana, the assimilating breath associated with the digestive system, liver, pancreas, and stomach; udana, the sensory breath associated with receptors in the eyes, tongue, nose, and ears; and vyana, the coordinating breath, is associated with the nerves, joints, and muscle functions that support the other breaths as well. Indian ritualistic practices involving the offering of consecrated food to the deities invoke and venerate these five breaths that are so vital to well-being. We are now revisiting and learning from ancient Indian wisdom traditions and cosmological models that eschew the body/mind duality by conceptualizing the human as a multitiered entity, a Russian matroyshka doll of sorts, made up of nesting sheaths ranging from the material body (annamaya kosha) and the vital breath body (pranamaya kosha) to the other subtler bodies of the mind, intellect, and spirit. I have been struck by the resonance between these ancient worldviews and the new material theories articulated by ecocritics like Serenella Iovino, Serpil Oppermann, and Stacy Alaimo that emphasize the materiality of ecological relationships and the multiple entanglements of the human with plural nonhuman natures. The second wave of the pandemic that brought in its wake huge numbers of oxygen-starvation deaths in hospitals throughout India demonstrated that the country’s swamped health care systems had not paid much thought to the idea of breath. Prominent among the many reasons cited for the shortage of medical oxygen was the country’s excessive focus on producing industrial oxygen and the bureaucratic hurdles involved in the distribution of this critical resource to all parts of the country. This second wave was also a period that witnessed the peak of the black marketing business in India. Remdesivir, the antiviral drug for Covid patients with advanced respiratory problems, was being hoarded and sold in the black market at exorbitant prices. Prices rocketed to around 400 USD for a single dose of the injection with a legitimate retail price of 12 USD. Oxygen concentrators normally costing anywhere between 469 and 536 USD became a scarce commodity and were surreptitiously sold in the black market at prices ranging from 1,677 to 2,683 USD in badly hit metros like Mumbai and Delhi. Contrary to the perception that “nature” was getting a break from anthropogenic activities during the days of the pandemic, nonhuman nature also suffered collateral damage during the second wave. Delhi, the capital city, was forced to build makeshift funeral pyres, as the city ran out of space to cremate its growing dead. The forest department allowed the felling of trees to meet the demands of firewood needed for the cremation. According to a newspaper report, Delhi’s three municipal corporations issued 33,109 death certificates in April and May this year at the peak of the Covid second wave. An online website covering the news interviewed an employee of one of Delhi’s overflowing crematoriums, who was quoted saying, “It takes at least 300 kgs of wood to cremate one body. … There are more bodies than wood. … We will keep cutting trees but at this rate we will not have any left” (Lalwani and Johari 2021).

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Clearly the nation’s prana was not in balance. My situatedness as a Global South academic has always prompted me to look at the intersections of race, class, and gender and pay special attention to the environmental justice dimensions in my ecocritical practice. My work in the field so far has largely dealt with questions of how literary narratives from the Global South reexamine the socioeconomic and political dispensations that are instrumental in the invisibilization of subaltern people and other forms of eco-apartheid that accompany the crises relating to water wars, toxic landscapes, and a whole host of environmental problems. My father’s disease prompted me to explore how environmental damage is mapped on the porous human body. Landmark books like Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara pointed to the intersectional resonances between ecocriticism and disability studies, introducing me to a somatic paradigm of ecological thinking that takes into account the multiple material ties that connect flawed human bodies to diseased land, air, and water. I came to understand and value the importance of the materialist politics of care advocated by writer-activist Eli Clare’s compassionate storytelling technique, which raises such questions as: “How do we witness, name and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of bodies—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human” and “How do we make peace with the reshaped and damaged bodies themselves, cultivate love and respect for them?” (Clare 2017: 252). My reading about Parkinson’s-specific research to understand what causes the disease revealed that a strong link has been established between Parkinson’s and exposure to pesticides and herbicides. The greatest offender in the proscribed list is paraquat dichloride, a common herbicide that has been banned in thirty-two countries and also in Kerala, my neighboring state. Despite its toxicity, paraquat was being used in most states in India on twenty-five cash crops in violation of the directive of the Central Insecticide Board & Registration Committee (CIBRC), which has approved its use in only nine crops (Kumar 2016: 6). I wondered what genetic predisposition in my father called out to the deadly toxin that must have insidiously percolated into his system through the vegetables we buy from Koyambedu, Chennai’s biggest wholesale vegetable market, also one of the largest perishable markets in Asia, with supplies coming in from all parts of the country. Suddenly it all came together. The pervasive “slow violence” that Rob Nixon talks of and the many invisible environmental harms that silently invade our bodies and the earth body escaping detection many a time. I gained more insights regarding this topic from Stacy Alaimo’s book Exposed (2016), which pointed out that if metrics for environmental impact assessment took into account factors like disease, genetic damage, and death resulting from the long-term impact of resource extraction, manufacturing methods, use, and disposal, the picture that would emerge from this data will be very different. In a similar vein, Scott and Paul Slovic’s book Numbers and Nerves (2015) proposed a unique convergence of visual and narrative communication narratives that have the potential to yoke together the abstraction of numbers with experiences and lived emotions. The book helped me understand the power of narratives in deepening our cognitive responses to the deluge of statistical data in which we are always afloat. Although this handbook was conceived in the pre-Covid days, one of the core ideas that went into the CFP ended up being prophetic about the challenges that the pandemic would throw at the world in the months to come. Our objective was to engage with literary imaginaries centering on categories such as body/physicality, mind/emotions, dealing with the themes of disease, disrepair,

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treatment, and recovery. In many ways, this handbook unified my academic trajectories and lived experiences and squared the circle by bringing ecocriticism in conversation with medical humanities via crisscrossing narratives. In these times of ecological breakdown, one’s “cabined, cribbed and confined” (to use Shakespeare’s packed phrase) lockdown existence in the beehive-like apartments of a megapolis like Chennai, where I live, has also ushered in new ways of imagining time. I am reminded of Paul Huebener’s counsel to reimagine time in a situation when our familiar ways of engaging with ecological and cultural time no longer hold good. Huebener alerts us that in these changed times “every narrative, every action, every process, functions as a clock in waiting.” Fear of airborne transmission has deprived me of evenings on the apartment’s terrace where I can enjoy the gusty evening breeze, the crimson of the setting Indian sun, and the incessant chatter of parrots that have made the tall nearby coconut trees their perch. I too have lost the sense of ecological time. Much as I realize the reality of the “dark ecology” (to use Timothy Morton’s phrase) that enmeshes our surreal pandemic existence, I long to be re-enchanted by nature. I am reminded of Peter Linebaugh’s luminous definition of the act of enchantment as “an action of joy, … of hope, of the imagination. … It’s to reconceive of what we are on the planet. … To enchant is to sing into community once again” (Linebaugh 2019). I practice the Zen art of enchantment in the space of my tiny balcony with the help of plants ordered online from different parts of the country. I am grateful to these green bodhisattvas who have survived long journeys and bad packaging for having acclimatized themselves to the dust and grime of my apartment. I bow to them as I learn how to adapt, survive, and breathe.

REFERENCES Alaimo, S. (2016), Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clare, E. (2017), “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure,” in S. J. Ray and and J. Sibara (eds.), Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, 242–65, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Huebener, P. “Time as Power: Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Require us to reimagine Time,” ASLE. Available online: https://www.asle.org/featu​res/time-as-power-clim​ate-cri​sis-and- covid-19-require-us-to-reimaginetime/ (accessed June 23, 2021). Kumar A. D., D. (2016), Conditions of Paraquat Use in India. Available online: https://www.iuf.org/wp-cont​ent/ uplo​ads/atta​chme​nts/Joint%20p​araq​uat%20st​udy%20Indi​a_0.pdf (Accessed June 21, 2021). Lalwani, V., and A. Johari (2021), “Bodies after Bodies Are Coming: Death and Devastation in Delhi,” Scroll, April 29. Available online: https://scr​oll.in/arti​cle/993​561/bod​ies-after-bod​ies-are-com​ing-death-and-deva​stat​ ion-in-delhi (accessed June 1, 2021). Linebaugh, P. (2019), “US Capitalism Was Born in the Destruction of the Commons: Interview by Laura Flanders,” Resilience, April 4. Available online: https://www.res​ilie​nce.org/stor​ies/2019-04-04/us-cap​ital​ ism-was-born-in-the-dest​ruct​ion-of-the-comm​ons/ (accessed May 15, 2021). Ray, S.J. and J. Sibara, eds. (2017), Disabilities Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Roethke, T. (1964), “The Meadow Mouse.” Available online: https://allpoe​try.com/The-Mea​dow-Mouse (accessed June 15, 2021).

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Slovic, S., and P. Slovic, eds. (2015), Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion and Meaning in a World of Data, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.

DYING TO BREATHE: FEAR AS A COMORBIDITY IN THE DESERT VIDYA SARVESWARAN

Growing up in India in the late 1980s, Tom Cruise was my Greek God in Aviators. My heart would skip a beat every time I watched Top Gun. The theme song of the movie was “Take My Breath Away,” sung by Berlin. It won an Academy Award, and it was my teenage mantra. Three decades later, as I write this piece under a full lockdown, the song does not seem anachronistic. I hum it gently as I type this epilogue, and I realize that I still have it crackling in the crevices of my head. In India, conjugations of the word breathe have become raucous sirens over national and international media during the spring of 2021. The country gasped breathlessly for medical oxygen support in the violently virulent second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The word “oxygen” in Sanskrit can be translated as Prana Vayu. The word Prana means a life-giving force. Prana is seen as a universal energy that flows in currents, in and around the body, while Vayu is wind. My personal experiences with yoga have introduced me to pranayama or the art of mindful breathing. My online yoga and meditation classes during these abysmally low lockdown phases have been gentle healers and have contributed immensely to my physical, cognitive, and emotional wellbeing. Pranayama has become my lockdown morning ritual. This is also because I am paranoid that my lungs may be weak and that I may die of breathlessness. Tweets tell me that pranayama is a definite adjuvant in the prevention and recovery of Covid. Information explosions ranging from conspiracy theories to alternative healing and medical breakthroughs overwhelm the air along with the dust that I breathe in this remote, dusty desert town. I live alone—an only child and a single woman, on a stunningly wild academic campus of about eight hundred acres. We are in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, in Northwest India in the Thar Desert. The Thar Desert is India’s only desert. Living about twenty-five miles away from the city teaches you to be both pliable and resilient, especially during a pandemic. The spatial privilege and the single child syndrome make you an extroverted ascetic. I find refuge in my Buddha coffee mug, as his serene face comes alive every morning when I fill the mug with fresh coffee. I need the borrowed calmness to get me through the rest of the day. Teaching, webinars, research, chores, cooking, coordinating lives of my octogenarian parents in distant Chennai (a city in the far south of India), and the lack of domestic support of any sort due to the pandemic (in India it is common to hire a maid) has made me vulnerable in these surreal times. My inner Buddha tells me I am a wee bit spoilt. Perhaps I am. I desperately need a normal—not a new normal. I have an aversion for both the semantic and syntactic understanding of “new normal,” and I am not a fan of pandemic jargon. I do not want language to hoard dis-eased memories.

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As with most schools around the world, we have switched to digital pedagogies—I zoom in and my equally burnt-out students zoom out. I miss the garrulous millennials and precocious physical classroom conversations. I miss my morning cycle rides and cafeteria hang outs with students and friends. I simply miss the sound of another voice and footfall in my oversized apartment. The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht employed the term “Solastalgia” in 2005 to describe this “lived experience of distressing, negative environmental change,” particularly when the environment is one that the sufferer has inhabited. But in my case, this instantaneous transmogrification of the “cultural environment” has thrown me off my familiar campus-cultural environmental map. I desperately try to negotiate the new cartographies without a rudder. This pandemic is a psychoterratic game changer. The isolation, disease, loneliness—are like tenuous spider webs in your head. I am homesick at home. I struggle to maintain my equanimity in these transformed spaces. I have a karmic connection with deserts all over the world. Several years ago, I lived in the United States as a Fulbright Fellow in the University of Nevada, Reno, to pursue my doctoral research on the writer Terry Tempest Williams. I also had the privilege of spending a few days with Terry in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Mojave, the Sonoran, and the Great Basin deserts have all been homes for me at some point in time. But the Thar is unique for its dust. I dread the dust in this desert. I am terribly allergic to it. But the dust here is singular. Both aeolian and fugitive, as environmentalists would say. Dust is like a palimpsest in my house. I sweep, swab, wipe, and Lysol mop, but the desert insists on returning with a vengeance. Every layer is a new story. Dust in this desert forms my karmic patterns, as it does for many others who live here. I am distracted by a noisy phone call. It is my maid. There is an ominous pause on the other end. She has called to tell me that her husband has passed on. “Covid?” I ask. “No, the dust disease,” a muffled voice announces. I know she means silicosis. In the state of Rajasthan, men who quarry exquisite, rose-colored sandstone are afflicted with deadly silicosis. It is an occupational disease that causes irreversible damage to the lungs. Years of inhaling silica crystals due to drilling and hammering scar the lung tissues. Victims die of hardened lungs and an inability to breathe. The disease is declared as an endemic in the state. Rajasthan produces more than 90 percent of marble in India and 11 percent of the global market. As a documentary filmmaker, having smuggled some drone shots over mining quarries for a film on the environment, I know how dramatic the mines appear. The mining quarries look like anything from nuclear-bombed craters to giant crop circles or meteor-impacted terrains. Ironically, some of the world’s most beautiful monuments that are built from white marble and pink sandstone find their way from the recesses of the fragile earth in this region. The earth here wears the badge of blood, disease, and death. We have failed as a human race. I break down after the maid’s news and quickly call a friend. Of late, I have been waking up to, or going to sleep with, obituaries—friends and family have passed on. Fear, disease, and death have become constants in this lockdown journey. The fear of the idea of disease and death is perhaps worse than death and disease themselves. I no longer want to live alone. I do not want to be my own pall bearer. I have no words to describe exactly how I feel right now. Reading, writing, and photography have become my prayers. I wear them like a string of rosary beads. I keep them close. While I struggle to find my own voice, I realize that my voice is most powerful in silence. Photography

Epilogue

FIGURE 29.1  A marble mine c. 2020. Courtesy Vidya Sarveswaran.

FIGURE 29.2  Pink Sandstone, c. 2021. Courtesy Vidya Sarveswaran.

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FIGURE 29.3  Pink Sandstone architecture, c. 2021. Courtesy Vidya Sarveswaran.

has become my meditative anchor during the lockdown. I soon realize that the wilderness I live in is willing to throw open its precious, unexplored secrets to me. I am stoked and honored by the generosity of this partnership. As I cycle down the Indian Gazelle (Gazella Bennetti) trail this beautiful winter morning, to look for them, I am reminded of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear asks one of his blinded companions how he “sees” the world through his blindness. The amused companion responds by saying that he sees the world not with his eyes, but with the fullness of his heart. What we learn from Shakespeare’s most vital characters is this deep sense of empathy for the world. Reflection, research, and the praxis of environmental humanities have made me more mindful of my role—both as a witness and as a participant—in this beautiful planetary narrative. The air hangs dense with morning peace and silence on this spectacular campus. The lack of humans has made the campus stark and barren. Birds of all kinds are my avian-circadian rhythm keepers. This morning I change the lens on my EOS 600 to focus on a peacock, lest I miss him in the wilderness. I see he is not afraid. He is patient. I see him through my viewfinder. His eyes are focused on my lens. Suddenly, I am a little shaken by a flutter of wings. He does a dramatic and flirtatious display of his brilliant plumes and insists on doing the happy dance for me. We both see each other—I through my lens and he through his eyes. The moment is visceral. Visceral, in other words, simply means “the fullness of the heart” or soliphilia (Albrecht 2019). I take a full breath to imbibe the crisp and clement air filled with bird calls.

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FIGURE 29.4  The Happy Dance, c.2020. Courtesy Vidya Sarveswaran.

REFERENCES Albrecht, G. (2005), “`Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 3: 44–59. Albrecht, G. (2019), Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Berlin (1986), “Take My Breath Away,” Top Gun, Columbia Records, Compact Disc. Nayar, P. K. (2019), Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Fazila Derya Agis, PhD, is an online adjunct volunteer instructor in the Department of General Courses at the University of the People. She has been teaching Composition and World Literature. Her research interests focus on environmental anthropology, ecolinguistics, medical humanities, and cognitive literary studies. She has published on Judeo-Spanish and cognitive linguistics. Her most recent article is “Turkish and American Female Sephardic Children among Turkish Children in the 1950s” (Folklor/Edebiyat, 2019). It is about the environmental teachings in children’s games. Henry Obi Ajumeze is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Manchester. His research interest mobilizes petroculture in the Niger Delta in thinking about the intersection of literature and environment. Mita Banerjee is Professor at the Obama Institute of Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. In her research, she focuses on life writing, ethnic American literature, indigenous studies, and medical humanities. She has published on the intersection between naturalism and naturalization in nineteenth-century American literature. Her most recent book is Medical Humanities in American Studies (2018). Françoise Besson is Emerita Professor of Literatures in English at the University of Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès, France. Her research focuses on ecology, landscape (chiefly mountains), and travels in Anglophone literatures. Among her most recent publications are Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet (2019) and, with Scott Slovic, Zelia Bora, and Marianne Marroum, Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature (2021). She has also published collections of poems and short stories and, with her mother, books on regional culture. Chia-ju Chang is Professor at Brooklyn College (CUNY) in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research interests include Chinese comparative ecocriticism, multispecies and critical animal studies, eco-cinema studies, and eco-Buddhist studies. She is the author of The Global Imagination of the Ecological Communities: Western and Chinese Ecocritical Praxis (2013). She has edited an anthology, Chinese Environmental Humanities: Environing at the Margins (2019), and coedited two volumes: Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts (2016) and Heart of the Animals: Contemporary Critical Animal Studies Anthology (2020). Her articles have appeared in many peer-reviewed journals as well as scholarly collections. Kathryn Yalan Chang is an Associate Professor in English Department at National Taitung University, Taiwan. Her current research interests include nature therapy, material ecocriticism, medical and environmental humanities, environmental justice and activism, food and animal studies, and ecofeminism. Chang’s recent project was entitled “Resilient Healing: Eco-Narratology,

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Neuroplasticity, and Matters of Care in Environmental Literary Texts.” Her latest publications include “ ‘Slowness’ in the Anthropocene: Ecological Medicine in Refuge and God’s Hotel,” (2017); and “Affective Ecocriticism: Environmental Trauma and Eco-Healing in Mingyi Wu’s The Man with the Compound Eyes” (2020). Kiu-wai Chu is Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities and Chinese Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He earned his PhD in University of Hong Kong, and his previous degrees from SOAS University of London and University of Cambridge. He was Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Zurich and Western Sydney University. He teaches and researches on environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and contemporary cinema and visual art in China and broader Asia. His work has appeared in the journal Asian Cinema and in books such as Transnational Ecocinema, Ecomedia: Key Issues, Cli-fi: A Companion, Chinese Environmental Humanities, and elsewhere. Marcos Colón, PhD, teaches Environmental and Public Health in the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University. His research focuses on Brazilian literary and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on representations of the Amazon and the environment in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Brazilian literature and film. He has produced and directed three documentary films that represent diverse perspectives on humanity’s complex relations with the natural world and public health: Beyond Fordlândia: An Environmental Account of Henry Ford’s Adventure in the Amazon (2018); Zo’é (2020), based on his experiences with the Zo’é people, an Amazonian Indigenous community that has had scant contact with the outside world; and Stepping Softly on the Earth (2022), which profiles Indigenous environmental activists from Brazil and Peru seeking solutions to contemporary environmental and public health crises through ancestral traditions. He is also the editor and founder of Amazonia Latitude, a digital environmental magazine. Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). She majors in fiction, with particular interest in literature and the environment. Her “Ecological Degradation in Selected Niger Delta Novels” is, to date, among the few select PhD thesis published in the UNN virtual library. Her published works in the area of literature and environment include “Environmental Crisis and the Renewable Energy Alternatives in Nigerian Novels” (2016); “Allotropes of Natural Trajectories in the Poetics of J.P. Clark”, and many more. Chinonye is married, with children. She currently resides in Nsukka, South-Eastern Nigeria. Z. Gizem Yilmaz Karahan is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey. Her research interests include elemental ecocriticism, ecophobia, new materialisms, old materialisms, and performance studies. She has published on ecophobia, elemental ecocriticism, ancient philosophy, early modern English drama, and monster studies. Her most recent publications include an article entitled “Airy Agency in Early Modern English Drama: Ho Trilogy” (2020) and a book chapter entitled “The Ecophobia/Biophilia Spectrum in Turkish Theatre: Anatolian Village Plays and (Karagöz-Hacivat) Shadow Plays” (2021, coauthored with Simon C. Estok).

Contributors

405

Susanne Lettow is a Senior Researcher at the Margherita-von-Brentano Centre for Gender Studies and teaches philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests focus on feminist theory and philosophy, critical social philosophy, history and philosophy of biopolitics, and the environmental humanities. She is currently editing the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman turn with Sabine Nessel (2022). Tess Maginess is Professor of Lifelong Learning in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK. Her research interests focus on adult education, medical humanities, mental health and illness, literature and arts-based pedagogy and research. She has published several books and numerous articles, including “Legacy” (poem on dementia) (Journal of Medical Humanities, 2017); Dementia and Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2018); “From the Margins: The Role of Literature” (Journal of Educational Research, 2019); Enhancing the Wisdom and Wellbeing of Learners: A Co-Research Paradigm (2020); and “Language as Resistance: Anna Burns’ Milkman” (book chapter, 2020). Jorge Marcone is a Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature. His research focuses on the history of environmentalism and ecological thinking in Hispanic literatures and cultures, and on the representation of Amazonia in literature, film, and other visual arts. Marcone has published on Alexander von Humboldt, Amazonian colonial literature, ecology in the Spanish American Regional Novel, Mexican literature, Chicana literature, Pablo Neruda, José María Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the emergence of the “environmentalism of the poor,” among other topics. He is a collaborator for the Microbiota Vault Initiative. Animesh Mohapatra teaches English literature at Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, University of Delhi, India. His research interests include literary history, modernity studies, translation, and print culture. He has coedited a selection of critical essays by eminent Odia critic Natabara Samantaray in English translation. He has recently contributed a chapter on Odia devotional songs to a volume titled Bonding with the Lord: Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation. At present, he is coediting a volume consisting of twenty-five Odia critical essays in English translation, which forms a part of a series titled “Critical Discourses in South Asia.” Eric Morel teaches composition as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Delaware. With Erin James, he coedited the collection Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology (2020), as well as a special issue of English Studies also bringing together ecocriticism and narrative theory (2018). Additional article-length publications include a piece on Henry James and ecotourism in Viatica (2020) and one on literary historiography of Hamlin Garland’s conservation romances in Western American Literature (2013). Chinmay Murali is an Assistant Professor of English at the Sanatana Dharma College, Alappuzha, Kerala, India. His research interests include literature and medicine, graphic medicine, and critical health humanities. His recent coauthored monograph is Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine (2021).

406

Contributors

Raghul V. Rajan, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University Centre, Malappuram, Kerala, India. His research interests focus on environmental humanities, Indian literature, and literary theory. He has published on psychoanalytic criticism and ecofeminism. Currently he is a fellow in the National Film Archives of India, Government of India. His most recent paper presentation is “Environmentalism in Sarpa Kavu Myths of Kerala” (2020) at Sahitya Academy (Indian Academy of Letters), Delhi. Heather Leigh Ramos teaches in the English Division at Glendale Community College, California, US. Her research interests focus on contemporary American literature and social movements, gender studies, and medical and environmental humanities. Swarnalatha Rangarajan is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the founding editor of the Indian Journal of Ecocriticism (IJE). Her academic publications include Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies (2018) and coedited works titled Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development (2014) and Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015). She is the co-translator of Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior (2018). She is one of the series editors for the Routledge Studies in World Literatures and Environment and the coeditor of the Routledge Book of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019). Animesh Roy is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, St. Xavier’s College, Simdega (Ranchi University), Jharkhand, India. His doctoral research was in the area of literature and postcolonial ecologies. His areas of research interest include environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, medical humanities, indigenous studies, gender studies, communication studies, and the North–South discourses. His recent publications include “Ecocriticism and the Southern Challenge” (RILE) and Provincializing Ecocriticism: Postcolonial Ecocritical Thoughts and EnvironmentalHistorical Difference (Rowman and Littlefield). His forthcoming books, journal essays, and edited volumes are to be published with Bloomsbury, Springer, and Rowman and Littlefield. John Charles Ryan is Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia, and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Nulungu Research Institute, Notre Dame University, Australia. His research focuses on Aboriginal Australian literature, environmental humanities, ecopoetics, and critical plant studies. His most recent books include Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2021, authored with J. Andrew Hubbell), The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence (2021, edited with Monica Gagliano and Patrícia Vieira), and Nationalism in India: Texts and Contexts (2021, edited with Debajyoti Biswas). Vidya Sarveswaran is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Jodhpur. A Fulbright Fellow at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a Rachel Carson Fellow from the Center for Environment and Society, Munich, her research interests include Environmental Humanities and Blue Humanities. Vidya is the coeditor of Ecoambiguity, Community and Development (2014), Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015), and The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019). Passionate about environmental documentary filmmaking, her first documentary, “Under another Sky,” was released in 2020.

Contributors

407

Lars Schmeink is Vice President’s Research Fellow in American Studies at Europa Universität Flensburg, Germany. He served as President for the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung from its inauguration 2010 to 2019. His publications include Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society, and Science Fiction (2016), Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Cyberpunk Culture (2020), and Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022). Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho, USA. The founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment from 1992 to 1995, he served as editor-in-chief of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) for twenty-five years before stepping down in 2020. He has been a Fulbright Scholar four times (in Germany, Japan, P.R. China, and Turkey), and his thirty monographs, edited, and coedited books include, most recently, Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature and Nature and Literary Studies. He is currently coeditor of the series Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment and Routledge Environmental Humanities. He is also the Associate Director of the HIBAR Research Alliance: www.hibar-research.org. Tathagata Som is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the department of English at the University of Calgary. He completed his MA at Presidency University, Kolkata. His interests lie in the broad fields of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies. His critical and creative work have appeared in international journals such as Postcolonial Text, ARIEL, and The Goose. Jyotirmaya Tripathy is a member of the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. He works at the confluence of cultural studies and development thought in the Indian context. Some of his papers have appeared in Development in Practice, Journal of Developing Societies, Journal of South Asian Development, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature, among others. Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai is a Professor in the English Department at Tamkang University, Taiwan. His areas of specialization include Gary Snyder, ecocriticism, and the medical humanities. He coedited two books on ecocriticism: Introduction to Ecoliterature (2013) and Key Readings in Ecocriticism (2015). His Chinese monograph, entitled Ecological Crisis and Literary Studies, won the 2019 Academia Sinica Humanities and Social Sciences Book Prize. Sofia Varino is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. With a focus on health and ecology, their research interests cut across science and technology studies, environmental philosophy, medical humanities, gender and sexuality studies, and American studies. Varino has published and taught on body technologies, ecology, gender and embodiment, and coedited a special issue of Somatechnics on Data Matters: (Un)doing Data and Gender in the Life Sciences (2019). Their most recent article is “Multidirectional Thalassology: Comparative Ecologies between the Venetian Lagoon and the Indian Ocean” (2021), coauthored with May Joseph for a special issue of Shima Journal on Venice. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Associate Professor at National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (India), in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research concentrates on

408

Contributors

posthumanism, graphic medicine, and literary health humanities. He has published more than ninety research articles and his recent books are Gender, Eating Disorders, and Graphic Medicine (2020) and India Retold (2021). Samantha Walton is Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University, UK. Her research focuses on the intersection between environmental and health humanities in Scottish and English literature. She coedits the ASLE-UKI journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism and has published three books: Guilty but Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (2015), The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (2020), and Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (2021) on ecology and mental health in culture and science. Maria Whiteman is the Artist in Social Practice at Indiana University/Bloomington’s Environmental Resilience Institute. Her photography, video, and installation art have been widely exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Most recently, the Grunwald Art Gallery at Indiana University exhibited Living with Mycelia 2020 and Forgotten History, Wind Energy and Gospel Train 2021. Whiteman’s work “Mountain Pine Beetle and Roadside Kestrel” premiered at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival and Rice Media Center. Her photo-essay “Into the Forest” has been published in the Duke University journal Polygraphy. Nikoleta Zampaki is a PhD candidate in Modern Greek Literature at the Faculty of Philology, NKUA, Greece. Her research interests are comparative literature, literary theory, environmental humanities, posthumanities, and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She has published on environmental humanities and posthumanities, and she coedited Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice (2022) with Peggy Karpouzou.

409

INDEX

Abod, Susan 5, 118, 119, 120, 122–5, 129 Aboriginal Australian poetry 347–61 Achebe, Chinua 257, 317–24 Achebe, Chinwe 324 Adamson, Joni 9, 28, 32, 33, 140, 157, 205 affective ecocritism 3 Agamben, Giorgio 190, 212 Agis, Derya Fazila 9, 363 Agricola 329 Ahmed, Sara 118 air pollution 6, 118, 119, 131–42, 145, 163, 191, 341 Air Pollution Control Act (Taiwan) 131, 141 Ajumeze, Henry Obi 7, 211 Al-Farabi 364, 367 Alaimo, Stacy 3, 6, 7, 119, 133, 138, 139, 173, 186, 192, 213, 216, 219, 265, 347, 392, 394 Albrecht, Glenn 86, 398, 400 Alex, Rayson K. 132 Alexander, Sheila 44 Alger, Mary Kate 17 Allister, Mark 3 Amazon, the 43, 203–8, 293–313 Ampofo, O. 319 Anthropocene 6, 42, 43, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 129, 171, 173, 178, 180, 186, 188, 191, 193, 202, 206, 224, 266, 400 Apparao, M. V. 283 Arnold, David 254, 278–9, 281, 287, 289 Assam 281 Attention Restoration Theory 101, 107 Australia 8, 92, 132, 319, 347–58 auto-ecology 120 (auto)pathogenesis 125 Avicenna 364 Ayurveda 8, 263–75, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284, 285, 287, 288, 290 Bacigalupi, Paolo 77 Baker, J. A. 98 Bal, Mieke 23 Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar 253 Banerjee, Mita 4, 27

Barad, Karen 63, 64, 65, 67, 71, 213 Barsh, A. L. 253 Bashford, Alison 73, 187, 279 Bassey, Nnimmo 7, 212–19 Beckett, Samuel 375, 380 becoming fungi 55 becoming-with 73 Bellacasa, Maria Puig de la 59, 158, 159, 160, 164, 165, 166, 167 Bengal 256, 281, 288 Bennett, Jane 74, 77, 79, 81, 343 Berger, Rachel 278, 281, 283, 286, 287 Berlin 397 Bernstein, Aaron 310 Besson, Françoise 7, 235 Bhopal 2, 190, 241 Biden, Joe 84 Bidyaratna, Nilamani 288 Biedler, Katie 54 Bifrostonline 9, 157, 168 Bihar 282, 288 Bilderback, Diane and Dave 21–2 Bio-Art 171, 178, 179 Black, Lindsay 353 Black Lives Matter 6, 27, 143, 153, 229 Black Sheep 77 Bladow, Kyle 3 Blake, William 22 Blaser, Martin J. 201 Bleakley, Alan 270 Boccaccio, Giovanni 66–7 Bogost, Ian 73, 74, 75, 76 Bohr, Niels 64 Bolsanaro, Jair 295 Bonnett, Alastair 86 Boyle, Danny 5, 74 Branch, Michael P. 376 Brazil 8, 293–313 Brody, Howard 13, 14, 19 Bron, Wichertje A. 15 Brown, H. 90 Brown, Michael 153

410

Bryant, Levi 73, 74 Buddhism 224, 231–3 Buell, Frederick 212, 218 Buell, Lawrence 2, 317 Bullard, Robert D. 149, 150 Burdick, David 17, 18 Butler, Judith 2, 5, 90, 91, 92, 196 Byron, Lord 226 Cai, Zhizhong (Tsai Chih Chung) 329 Cairo, Alberto 15 Callard, Felicity 85 Callison, Candis 15 Calman, K. C. 247 Caminero-Santangelo, Byron 318 Campbell, Nancy 99 Camus, Albert 7, 235, 237–40, 244, 253 cancer 56, 123, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, 143–54, 158, 161, 162, 166, 190, 191, 192, 194, 201, 212, 213, 242, 243, 392, 393 Capitolocene 110 Carleton, William 375, 377–8, 380 Carrie, Arnold 241 Carroll, Robert 85 Carson, Rachel 119, 125, 147, 160, 194, 212, 220, 243 Cartesian dualism 7 Cassell, Eric 42 Çelebi, Evliya 69 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 85 Chakraborty, Mithun 277 Chan, Changchuan 140 Chan, Peter 333 Chandler, David 223 Chang, Chia-ju 7, 223 Chang, Kathryn Yalan 6, 157 Charaka 286 See also Caraka 263, 265, 266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273 Charon, Rita 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 29, 30, 37 Chatterjee, Partha 286 Chauvin, Derek 154 Checker, Melissa 307 Chen, Hui-wen 158–67 Chen, Mel Y. 7, 119, 186, 192 Cherney, K. 384 Chernobyl 190, 243 Chi, Po-Lin 6, 131, 133, 135–6, 138, 141 Chi, Scott Wen-Chang 6, 133, 134–6, 138–9, 140, 141 China 7, 8, 223–5, 227, 238, 244, 286, 327–45 Chinese medicine 244, 245, 327–45 Chivian, Eric 310 Chopin, Frédéric 226

Index

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) 45, 49, 117 Chu, Kiu-Wai 8, 327 Churchill, Winston 289 Chute, Hannah 43 Citizen science 4, 14, 15, 16, 19–23 Clare, Eli 395 Clare, John 100 Clark, David 67 Clark, J. P. 321 Clark, Timothy 87 climate change 2, 5, 59, 68, 75, 83–93, 103, 160, 162, 167, 186, 188, 189, 193, 199, 205, 207, 224, 259, 295, 310, 344, 363, 365, 372 climate grief 5, 83, 90–3 Club of Rome, The 187 Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) 4, 16, 20–2 Coastal Research Survey Team (CRV) 16, 17, 18, 20 Cocker, Mark 102 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 5, 59, 78, 79 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 99 Coles, Robert 246 Colón, Marcos 8, 293 Coope, Jonathan 84 Covid-19 (SARS-CoV2) 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 42, 43, 63, 67, 73, 74, 77, 93, 157, 158, 161, 162, 164, 167, 193, 201, 202, 22–33, 237, 293, 295, 296, 297, 303, 313, 330, 363, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398 Crane, Jeff Chapman 236 Crawford, Paul 42, 133 Critical medical humanities 85, 375–6 Cronin, A. J. 253 Cruise, Tom 397 Crutzen, Paul 83, 84, 171 Cuarta, Séamas Dall Mac 380 Cuba 122 Cullers, Patrisse 152 culturality, the Paradigm of 307–13 Czerwiec, M. K. 44 Daly, Mary 144 dark ecology 74 Darlington, Miriam 99 Das, Radhashyam 279, 288, 290 Davis, Devra Lee 147 De Waal, Frans 230 Deborah, Susan 132 Decroly, Etienne 236 n.1 Delgado-Pugley, Deborah 203 Densham, Andrea 151 Descartes, Rene 254, 366

Index

Devi, Mahasweta 257 Dezhe, Renqing 337 Dickinson, Adam 6, 14, 171–8, 180, 181 Diedrich, Lisa 118, 120 disability studies 2–3, 395 Doherty, Thomas 84 Domínguez-Bello, Gloria 201, 205 Downie, R. S. 247 Drake, Henrik 52–3 Dunkel-Schetter, Christine 45 Dunlap-Shohl, Peter 44 Duthie, M. 247 Dyck, I. 212 ecocriticism 2, 3, 6, 8, 15, 22, 27, 29, 39, 63, 67, 68, 71, 85, 97, 142, 205, 225, 317, 318, 376, 391, 395, 396 ecofeminism 185, 186, 195, 196 econarratology 4, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23 See storytelling ecopathodocumentary 6, 131–42 ecopathography 6, 132 ecophobia 3, 64 eco-recovery memoir 97–113 Effendi, Dede 366, 368 Effendi, Hekimbasi Gevrekzade Hasan 365 Effendi, Subhizade Abdülaziz Arif 364 Effendi, Suuri Hasan 365 Ehrlich, Paul 187 Eisler, Riane 193–4 Ekwueme-Ugwu, Chinonye 8, 317 Eliot, George 253 Emmett, R. S. 264, 274, 275 Engel, George 42 environmental humanities 376 environmental illness 117, 192, 213, 218, 220 environmental justice 4, 19, 32, 39, 119, 134, 140, 141, 144, 145, 149, 190, 191, 192, 212, 214, 215, 395 Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) 53–4, 59 Er-Razi, Zekeriya 364 Estée Lauder 147 Estok, Simon 64 ethnoecomedicine 8, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258 ethnomedicine 252, 253, 261, 317, 318, 319 Evans, Mei Mei 28, 32, 33, 140 Extinction Rebellion 223 Fajardo, Pablo 43 Farquhar, J. 329, 331, 332, 334 Fies, Brian 44

411

Fikriyat 364, 368, 370, 371 film 27–40, 332–6, 344–5 Fink, Sheri 19 Firebrace, Francis 357 Fitzgerald, Des 85 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 240 Flaubert, Gustave 253 Flesh of the world 171–81 Flint, Michigan 4, 32, 34–9 Floyd, George 153, 154 Fogarty, Lionel G. 347, 348, 350, 355–8 Fogarty, Roy 355 food 6, 7, 53, 58, 59, 66, 70, 77, 78, 125, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 153, 157–67, 187, 188, 191, 196, 207, 243, 265, 266, 267, 279, 283, 287, 288, 289, 294, 295, 300, 303, 306, 313, 348, 349 Forney, Ellen 44 Foucault, Michel 104, 189, 190, 254, 255, 256, 278, 375, 383 Fowler, Cory 199 Freud, Sigmund 230 Friedson-Ridenour, S. 195 Frost, Samantha 58 Fungi 51–61, 79, 80 Fungi for the People (FFTP) 51 Gaard, Greta 9, 166 Gaia Theory 186, 193, 195 Gallois, Dominique 299 Gandhi, Mahatma 289 Garden, Rebecca 133 Gardiner, Phillip 147, 148 Garrard, Greg 103, 104, 381, 383 Garuba, Harry 214 Garza, Alicia 152 Gates, Bill 225 Gay, Roxane 154 Geal, Robert 230 Gee, S. 90 Genette, Gerard 21 Ghosh, Amitav 8, 84, 253, 256 Girard, René 7, 224, 228, 229, 230, 231 Girl with All the Gifts, The 79, 80 Global Microbiome Network 7, 199, 201–4 Global North 32, 185, 227 Global South 159, 185, 212, 214, 226, 227, 252, 395 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 351 Golden, L. 85 Goliath 27, 30, 31–4, 36, 38, 39 Graham, Mary 349 graphic medicine 41, 42, 44, 49 Gray, Thomas 99

412

Great Chain of Being, The 88 grey ecology 5, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81 Grieves, Vicki 307 Guattari, Felix 102–3, 133 Guha, Ramachandra 3 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich 27, 28 Gusha, Ishiwara 53 Habila, Helon 257 Hanbury, S. 295 Hangarter, Roger 54 Hanna-Attisha, Mona 19, 35–40 Haraway, Donna 4, 67, 68, 73, 193, 219, 339, 340, 341, 343 Hartmann, Betsy 189 Hartman, Steven 9, 157 Hawkins, Anne H. 6, 132 Hayles, Katherine 64, 65, 67 Haynes, Todd 119 Head, Leslie 91, 93 health humanities 42, 43, 44, 98, 102, 104, 105, 110, 132, 133, 141, 142 Heaney, Seamus 375, 376, 377, 380–7 Heise, Ursula 13, 14, 264 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle 64 Hell of the Living Dead 77 Hellsgard, Carolina 80 Heron, T. 379, 381, 386 Hillerman, Tony 7–8, 235, 236, 238–40, 243, 245, 246 Hippocrates 245, 329 Hitchcock, Alfred 77 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 173 Homer 69–70 Hooker, Claire 73 Hooker, Joseph Dalton 348 Hopi 8, 245 Houser, Heather 3 Hovey, Richard Bruce 85 Huebener, Paul 396 Huggan, Graham 318, 350, 357, 376 Hughes, Helen 132 human-plant intercorporeality 347–8 Hunter, W. W. 281 Hurt, R. Douglas 159 hypoxia 393–6 I Am Legend 76–7 Idowu, Bolaji 324 India 263–76, 277–92, 393–401 infertility 4, 41, 42, 44–5, 47, 48, 49 Ingold, Tim 310 Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) 207

Index

interculturality 199, 206 interdisciplinarity 13, 14 Iovino, Serenella 3, 67, 71, 265, 274, 394 Irden, Sühan 364 Ireland 375–89 Istanbul 69, 366, 370 James, Erin 15, 23 Jay, David 151 Jayaraman, U. 386 Johnson, Glenn 149 Johnson, Jenell 44 Johnson, Mark 364, 365, 368 Johnson-Romauld, F. D. 319 Johns-Putra, Adeline 376 Jones, Ken 231 Jones, Terese 133 Joyce, James 381, 384 Kafka, Franz 385 Kagan, S. J. 376 Kanagarathinam, D. V. 281, 290 Kanunah, Mary Peter 319 Kaplan, Rachel and Stephen 101 Kapuscinski, Ryszard 216 Karahan, Z. Gizem Yilmaz 4, 63 Karpouzou, Peggy 181 Keats, John 226, 243, 386 Kerridge, Richard 99 Khan, Shamshad 280 Kiliç, Erdal 364 Kimmerer, Robin Wall 53, 57 Kingsolver, Barbara 160, 161 Kinkaid, Jamaica 255 Kiowa 246 Kirkman, Robert 5, 74 Klawiter, Maren 150 Klugman, Craig 133 Knight, Paula 4, 41, 42, 44, 45–9 Knopf-Newman, Marcy 151 Koç, Esra Meltem 364 Komen, Susan G. 144, 147 Kopp, Bob 200 Krause, Johannes 68 Kreiswirth, M. 22 Krenak, Ailton 311 Krzywinski, Martin 15 Kushi, Michio 162 Ladino, Jennifer 3 LaDuke, Winona 157–8 Lakoff, George 364, 365, 368

Index

Latour, Bruno 141, 160, 161, 164, 193, 223 Lau, Jen 59 Lauro, Sarah Juliet 74, 75 Leavitt, Sarah 44 Lebron, Christopher 152, 153 Leder, Drew 101, 173 LeMenager, Stephanie 216 Leopold, Aldo 188 Lertzman, Renee 5, 86 Lettow, Susanne 7, 185 Lewis, Bradley 42, 43 Lewis, Simon L. 83 Li, Feng 338–9 Li, Shizhen 329 Li, Xu-ying 158–67 Lidström, S. 376 Lin, Shihsian 140 Linebaugh, Peter 396 Linnaeus, Carolus 255 Lipsitz, George 153 Liptrot, Amy 5, 98, 100–1, 110 Literary ethnobotany 347, 348, 350, 351, 352, 353, 355, 356, 358 Lo, V. 345 Lobato, João 301 Lobel, Marcl 45 López, Ian Haney 29 Lorde, Audre 6, 120, 143–55 Lott, Joshua 241 Love, Glen A. 22 Lovelock, James 186, 193–4 Low, Matthew M. 15 Luhmann, Niklas 139 Lykke, Nina 7, 186, 191 Mabey, Richard 5, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 Macaulay, Thomas 255 MacDonald, Helen 5, 98, 102–4 Machu Picchu 68 Macro-scale 75–9 madness 375–87 Mad Studies 105 Madras 288 Maginess, Tess 9, 375 Mahapatra, Ramakrishna 290 Major, Alice 5, 85–93 Malabous, Catherine 172 Malecki, Wojciech 3 Malm, Andreas 92 Marchetto, Marisa 44 Marcone, Jorge 7, 199 Margulis, Lynn 73, 186, 193

413

Márquez, Gabriel García 385–6 Martin, Paul S. 92 Martin, Trayvon 152 Martinez-Alier, Joan 3 Marx, Karl 230 Maslin, Mark A. 83 Masson, Cora F. 85 material ecocriticism 3, 6, 8, 63, 67, 68, 71 Mautner, Susan Hester 151 Mbembe, Achille 66, 190, 217 McCabe, Janet 54 McElroy, Ann 308 McKenna, Terrence 53 McLeod, Sandy 199 McWinney, Ian 42 medical-ecological framework 28, 29 medical environmental humanities 110–12 Mee, A. H. 280 mental health 2, 5, 9, 43, 85, 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 153, 273, 375–87 mental health humanities 5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6, 51, 171, 172, 173 metabolic poetics 6, 9, 171, 172, 173 metaphors 46–7, 174, 175, 215, 286, 352, 363, 364, 365, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372 Meyer, Kuno 382 Microbiocene 202 Microbiota Vault 7, 201–2, 204 micro-scale 78 Midtvet, Tore 199 Mies, Maria 186, 187, 188 Mignolo, Walter 350 Milanez, Felipe 295, 296, 300, 303 Miller, Daphne 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 Milton, Riah 152 Mimetic pathology 223 Mistilis, Kia 212 Mitchell, Joni 391 Mitra, Manmohan 251, 252 Moerman, Daniel E. 245, 246 Mohapatra, Animesh 8, 277 Mohapatra, Sri Krushna 281 Momaday, N. Scott 246 Moore, Michael 27, 30, 34–40 Moraga, Cherríe 119 Morales, Aurora Levins 5, 118, 120–2, 129 Morel, Eric 4, 13 Mormen, Essie 147, 150, 151 Morton, Timothy 74, 75, 76, 79, 103, 177, 259 Moss, P. 212 Mueller, Ferdinand von 355 Mukharji, Projit Bihari 278, 283, 348, 349

414

Mukhopadhyay, Balai Chand 253 Mulder, Sara 15 Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) 5, 117–30, 190, 192 Munson, Peggy 5, 118, 120, 125–9 Murali, Chinmay 4, 41 Murphy, Michele 119, 191–2 mycelium 53, 55 Myers, Garth 318 Naess, Arne 266 narrative medicine 4, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39 Nature Conservancy, The 17 nature cure 5, 98, 105, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110 Navajo 7, 8, 235–6, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 245 Nayak, Jatindra Kumar 291 Nayak, S. 282, 287 Nayar, Pramod K. 2, 241, 390 Neelakantan, Thirumangalath 274 Nehru, Jawaharlal 283 Neidjie, Bill 350, 351, 252 new nature writing 97, 98, 99, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich 230 Niger Delta 7, 211–20 Nigeria 56, 212, 214, 317–25 Nixon, Rob 6, 133, 138, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 159, 211, 219, 310, 395 Noailles-Pizzolato, Marie-Christine 246 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo (née Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska) 347, 348, 350, 352–55, 356, 358 Norman, Waerete 307 Northwest Cascades 51 Nyaigotti-Chacha, Chacha 319 Nye, D. E. 264, 274 O’Béara, F. 382, 383 object-oriented ontology 73, 74 Odisha 8, 277–92 O’Donaghue, J. 384 Okada, Mokihi 162 Onyeneke, A. O. 319–20 Oppermann, Serpil 3, 9, 63, 67–8, 69, 71, 265, 394 Oregon 54, 56, 390 Osler, William 270 O’Sullivan, Eoghan Roe 381 Oughourlian, Jean-Michel 230 Ovid 385 Öztürk, Birsen 365 Packham, Chris 5, 98, 111–12 Panda, Lakhminarayana 280

Index

Paracelsus 329 Parker, Pat 151 Pasternak, Judy 241 Patnaik, Banbehari 279, 280, 281, 283, 286, 287 Patnaik, Padma Charan 289 Pattanayak, Gopalchandra 283, 284, 285 Peckham, Robert 226, 227 Peeters, Frederik 44 Pérez, María Cristina Mogollón 207 Peru 199–208 Peshlakai, James 245 Pharmakon 7, 225, 231–3 Pilz, A. 379, 381, 386 plagues 66, 68 planetary health 2, 42, 43, 44, 164, 186, 193, 194, 195, 328 Plumwood, Val 274 poetry therapy 85 Pollan, Michael 53 Pope, Alexander 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92 Porter, Natalie 43 Possuelo, Sydney 296, 300, 303 posthumanism 2, 5, 49, 64, 65, 73, 74, 174, 177, 179, 182 Potts, Phoebe 44 Prakash, Gyan 279, 283, 286 precarity 2, 9, 176, 216, 220, 241, 391, 392, 393 psychological ecocriticism 3 psychology 3 Pulkkinen, Tuija 196 Quammen, David 9 Quinlan, Marsha B. 318 Rajan, Raghul 8, 263 Rajastan 397–401 Rajya, Ram 289 Rakha, Naseem 241 Ramazzini 329 Ramdev, Baba 289 Ramos, Heather Leigh 6, 143 Randolph, Theron 119, 125 Rangarajan, Swarnalatha 1, 28, 29, 393 Rath, Gobind 287 Ray, Sarah Jaquette 2, 3, 395 Ray, Satyajit 251 Regan, S. 380, 386, 387, 381, 382 relational ontologies 4, 63 Resident Evil 77–8 Ribeiro, Darcy 296 Richardson, Tina 146 Ricoeur, Paul 230

Index

Rigby, Kate 15 Risky zoographies 43 Roberts, Mere 307 Robinson, Kim Stanley 200 Roethke, Theodore 393 Rogers, J. Earl 91 Romberge, James 44 Ross, Ronald 254, 255 Roudeau, Damien 43 Rowland, Susan 3 Roy, Animesh 8, 251 Roy, Arundhati 147 Rumi, Mevlana Celaleddin 364 Russia 56, 84, 283 Ryan, John Charles 8, 347 Sabuncuoğlu, Şerefeddin 71 Sagan, Dorion 73 Salmón-Mulanovich, Gabriela 203 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 308, 309 Sarveswaran, Vidya 1, 28, 29, 397 Sasser, Jade S. 187, 188, 189 Sasz, Thomas 375 Satterfield, Terre 15 scapegoating 15, 223, 224–6, 228, 229, 230 Schama, Simon 376, 381 Schindler, Ja 51 Schmeink, Lars 4, 73 Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew 3 science fiction 34 Scull, Andrew 375 Seager, Joni 185, 186 n.1, 190 Sebald, W. G. 98 Sedgwick, Eve 120 Sen, Amartya 252 Sengupta, Prithwish 251, 252 Seveso 190 Shakespeare, William 65, 253, 396, 400 Sharma, Baidyanath 288 Sharma, Brajabandhu Tripathy 287 Sharma, Madhuri 281, 289 Sharma, P. V. 271 Shaw, Wendy S. 86 Sheldrake, Merlin 51, 53, 55, 57 Shelley, Mary 4, 63, 65, 66, 70 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 226 Shepherd, Nan 98 Shinji Shumeikai 161, 162 Shinrin-yoku science 105, 107 Shiva, Mira 187 Shiva, Vandana 159, 185, 186, 187, 188 Sibara, Jay 2, 3, 395

415

silicosis 398 Silko, Leslie Marmon 3, 242, 243 Simard, Suzanne 53 Simões, Erik Jennings 293, 298, 301–3, 304, 307, 312 Simon, Stacy 148 Sims-Durall, Pamela 147 Sindiga, Isaac 319 Slovic, Paul 395 Slovic, Scott 1, 3, 15, 22, 28, 131, 132, 157, 241, 242–3, 244, 317, 374, 391, 395 slow violence 6, 7, 133, 136, 138, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 159, 310, 395 Smith, Frederick 279 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 350 Smith, Tracy K. 154 Snow, C. P. 19, 264 Snyder, Gary 232 Snyder, Rick 34–5, 37, 38 Solastalgia 86, 398 Som, Tathagata 5, 83 Sontag, Susan 120, 127, 217, 226 Soros, George 225 Soyinka, Wole 323 Spellmeyer, Kurt 223 n.1 Spencer, Danielle 30–1 Spiegel, Maura 30–1 Spivak, Gayatri 252 Sprackland, Jean 99 Squier, Susan 44, 118 Stamets, Paul 53, 55 Stanley-Baker, M. 345 Stein, Rachel 28, 32, 33, 140 Steinberg, Emily 44 Steingraber, Sandra 242 Stengers, Isabelle 193, 310 Stephenson, Steven 53, 54, 55 Stibbe, Arran 363, 365, 368, 372 Stone, Brayla 152 storytelling 4, 14, 15, 18, 19, 53, 57, 68, 71, 98 Stratefied vulnerability 7, 190 Stress Reduction Theory 107 Sturt, Charles 357 Sultan Abdülhamid I 364 Sultan Ahmed III 364 Sultan Mahmud I 364 Sultan Selim III 364 Sushrutha 263, 265, 270, 271 See also Shusruta 284, 286 Sweeney, B. 247 Syndemic 6, 157, 161 Systemic racism 6, 143, 146, 147, 149, 152, 154 Sze, Julie 7, 186, 190

416

Taiwan 6, 131–42, 157–67 Tardy-Joubert, Sophie 43 Taylor, Breonna 153, 154 The Last of Us Part II 76 Thompson, E. 143, 148, 156 Thomson, Jennifer 194 Thoreau, Henry David 99 Thornber, Karen 376 Three Mile Island 190 Tiffin, Helen 318, 357, 376 Tirtha, Swami Sadashiva 263, 269, 271, 272, 274 Tometi, Opal 152 Torres-Espinoza, Luis Felipe 203 Townsend, Patricia K. 308 Traditional African medicine (TAM) 317–26 Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) 327–46 Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) 204 transcorporeality 6, 7, 8–9, 131, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 190, 192, 193, 196, 213, 214, 220, 347 Trexler, Mark 376 Tripathi, S. C. 287, 289 Tripathy, Jyotirmaya 8, 277 Trump, Donald 225, 228 Tsai, Robin Chen-Hsing 6, 131 Tsing, Anna 53, 56, 342, 343, 344 Tsue, Hark 333 Tsui, Suxin 133 Tsukayama, Pablo 203 Tu, Weiming 330 Tu, Youyou 341 Turan, Kaan 366 n.1 Turkey 9, 363–74, 393 Turkish folk music 9, 363–74 Turner, Luke 5, 98, 105–6, 110 Twining, William 256 Uçaner, Burçin 365 Urmevi, Safiyuddin 364 Valiathan, M. S. 265, 267 Van der Woude, P. W. 382, 386 Van Vliety, Arnold J. H. 15 Varino, Sofia 5, 117 Vazquez, Rolando 350 Veled, Bahaeddin 364 Venkatesan, Sathyaraj 4, 41 Vilaça, Aparecida 296, 297 viruses 4, 63–72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 128, 157, 201, 225, 236, 244, 296, 329, 364, 372 Vizcarra, Martin 294 Vogt, William 188 n.5

Index

Wa Thiongo, Ngũgĩ 8, 256, 258–9 Wagner, Eric 20–1, 22 Waitzkin, Howard 308 Walking Dead, The 5, 74, 76, 78, 79 Wallace, David Foster 3 Wallace, Robert 195 Walls, Laura Dassow 19–20, 22 Walton, Samantha 5, 97 Wang, Hsiao-Li 6, 133, 136–7, 141 Watson, Pamela 355 Watts, Michael 218 Wear, Delese 133 Webber, Georgia 44 Webster, John 65 Weik von Mossner, Alexa 3 Weisman, Alan 75–6 Weiss, Ron 158–67 Weller, P. 85 Wenzell, T. 376, 381 West Africa 8, 254 Whiteman, Maria 4, 51, 52, 54, 59, 60 Whitt, Laurie Ann 307 Wiebe, Rudy 243–4 Wilkes, Ted 354 Williams, F. 143, 148 Williams, Ian 44 Williams, Joy 213 Williams, Terry Tempest 19, 398 Williams, Wendy 21 Williams, William Carlos, 247, 247 n.13 Willox, Ashlee Cunsolo 84 Wing, Po So 332, 333 Winslow, C.-E. A. 141 Wojnarowicz, David 44 Wordsworth, William 99 Wujastyk, Dagmar 278, 279 xenophobia 225, 227, 228 Yaeger, Patricia 215 Yeats, William Butler 375, 377, 378–80, 381, 385, 387 Yoldas, Pinar 6, 171, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181 Zampaki, Nikoleta 6, 171 Zhang, Huan 332 Zhang, Q. 329 Zhou, Chuncai 331 Zimmerman, George 152 Zo’é 8, 293–314 zombie text 5, 73–82 zoonotic disease 7, 9, 42, 43, 63, 164, 167, 193, 195