Nature, Space and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives 9780754666868, 9781315248318

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NATURE, SPACE AnD THE SACRED

Nature, Space and the Sacred Transdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by S. BERGMAnn, P. M. SCOTT, M. JAnsDOTTER SAMUELssOn AnD H. BEDFORD-STROHM

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © The editors and the contributors S. Bergmann, P. M. Scott, M. Jansdotter Samuelsson and H. Bedford-Strohm have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Nature, space and the sacred : transdisciplinary perspectives 1. Human ecology – Religious aspects 2. Environmental ethics 3. Religion and geography 4. Sacred space I. Bergmann, S. 201.7’7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment. Inaugural Conference (2007 : University of Bamberg) Nature, space, and the sacred : transdisciplinary perspectives / S. Bergmann ... [et al.]. p. cm. Papers presented from the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment’s inaugural conference held at the University of Bamberg, 24–26 May 2007. ISBN 978-0-7546-6686-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Nature—Religious aspects—Congresses. 2. Religion and geography—Congresses. 3. Sacred space—Congresses. I. Bergmann, Sigurd, 1956– II. Title. BL65.N35E97 2008 202’.4—dc22 ISBN 9780754666868 (hbk)

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Contents List of Illustrations    Preface  

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List of Contributors  

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Sallie McFague

1 Editorial   S. Bergmann, P. M. Scott, M. Jansdotter Samuelsson and H. Bedford-Strohm 2 Nature, Space and the Sacred: Introductory Remarks   Sigurd Bergmann PART A 3 4 5

9

19 31 45

ETHICS IN NATURAL AND BUILT SPACE

Atmospheric Space, Climate Change and the Communion of Saints Michael S. Northcott Biodiversity and Christian Ethics: A Critical Discussion   Anders Melin Master of the Universe or the Humble Servant: How the Concept of Sustainable Development is Affecting Our Understanding of Humanity and Nature   Björn Vikström 9 The Proper Praise for an Architecture of the Improper – Joseph Beuys: Building with Butter   Annette Homann

6 7 8

1

EARTHING THE SACRED

Transforming the Theological Climate in Response to Climate Change: Jesus and the Mystery of Giving   Anne Primavesi The Whole Household of God: The Use of the Oikos Metaphor in the Built and the Non-Built Environment   Ernst M. Conradie Interpreting Heaven and Earth:The Theological Construction of Nature, Place, and the Built Environment   Forrest Clingerman

PART B

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57 75

85 97

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10 11

Ideal Landscapes – Landscape Design Between Beauty and Meaning Carola Wingren The Altar of the Dead: A Temporal Space for Memory and Meaning in the Contemporary Urban Landscape   Anna Petersson

PART C

The Wedge and the Knot: Hammering and Stitching the Face of Nature   Tim Ingold 13 Knowing Natural Spaces: Reinterpreting Deep Ecology as Phenomenology   Kingsley Goodwin 14 Seeking Transformation in a Consumer World: Can We Achieve a Unity of Ends and Means?   Anna Duhon and Lisa M. Jokivirta 15 Restoring or Restorying Nature?   Glenn Deliège

16 17 18 19 20

21

147 163 175 189

SACRED GEOGRAPHIES

Indigenous Embodied Knowing: A Study in Crow/Apsaalooke Space, Nature, and the Sacred   John A. Grim Natural Sacred Places in Landscape: An Estonian Model   Marju Kõivupuu The Domestic Order and its Feral Threat: The Intellectual Heritage of the Neolithic Landscape   Tihamer R. Kover Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan: Spiritual Mission, Health and Pilgrimage   Gulnara Aitpaeva Keeping the Sacred Secret: Pilgrims’ Voices at Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan   Zemfira Inogamova

PART E

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NATURE AS ENTANGLEMENT

12

PART D

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203 223 235 249 265

TURNING TO THE EAST

Touching the Depths of Things: Cultivating Nature in the Thought of Wang Yangming   283 Mary Evelyn Tucker

Contents

22

Stone and Sacred Space in China and Japan: Implications for our Treatment of the Earth   Graham Parkes 23 The Way Forward? Shinto and a Twenty-First Century Japanese Ecological Attitude   Daniel M. P. Shaw Index

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List of Illustrations 9.1 Joseph Beuys, Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts [The End of the Twentieth Century], 1982, 21. Basalt rocks and various other elements. Collection Marx, 1982. Photo: author. Copyright DACS. Reprinted with permission. 9.2 Joseph Beuys, Infiltration – Homogen für Cello [Infiltration], 1967/85. Cello, felt, linen, glass cabinet. Collection Céline und Heiner Bastian. Photo: author. Copyright DACS. Reprinted with permission. 10.1 A so-called ‘No man’s land’ created by the road system, Parc Trinita, Barcelona. Photo: author.  10.2 Photo collage showing how a baled silage landscape can influence the visual experience in the monastery garden of Varnhem, Sweden. Photo: author. 10.3 Photo collage showing the idea of the Filter project. Photo: author. 10.4 The architectural illustration of the project in the Borås commercial area by Carola Wingren Landskap in collaboration with O. Bergman. Photo: author. 10.5 The artist Robert Moreau’s illustration: meaningful messages between spruce trees. Photo: author. 10.6 Model dog on a roundabout at Malmö, by an unknown artist, may represent an effort to create an environment richer in meanings. Photo: author. 11.1 Remaining pieces of the blackboard wall. Photo: author. 16.1 At Cloud’s Peak, where the Apsaalooka became a nation. Photo: R. Craig Kochel. 16.2 Preparing the ‘Ashkisshe’ tree with buffalo head at the centre of the Sundance lodge. Photo: R. Craig Kochel. 16.3 In camp after the Sundance with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Magdalene Medicine Horse-Mocassin, and John Grim. Photo: R. Craig Kochel. 17.1 Kassinurme grove hill in Jõgevamaa county, July 2005. Photo: author. 17.2 The oldest known cross-tree in Estonia. Cross-pine of Laatre, Valgamaa county, August 2004. Photo: author. 17.3 Cross-pine in Hargla parish in Võrumaa county, October 2004. Photo: author.

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19.1 Built site: Mausoleum Zulpukor. © Aigine Research Center, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 19.2 Kyrgyzchylyk Followers on the Sacred Site, 1. © Aigine Research Center, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 19.3 Kyrgyzchylyk Followers on the Sacred Site, 2. © Aigine Research Center, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 20.1 An Eye spring at the sacred site of Nyldy ata, March 2006. Photo: author. © Aigine Research Center, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 20.2 Path into the sacred site Nyldy ata, March 2006. Photo: author, © Aigine Research Center, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 23.1 Large Shimenawa straw rope adorning the Grand Shrine of Izumo. Photo: Jnn. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image: Izumooyashiro89.JPG. 23.2 A famous ‘floating’ torii at Itsukushima Shrine, signifying that the entire island constitutes a sacred space. Photo: Dan Smith. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image: Itsukushima_torii_distance.jpg.

250 252 259 267 274 313

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Preface Sallie McFague

In 1993 I wrote in my book The Body of God the following sentence: ‘Geography, often considered a trivial subject compared to the more splendid history (the feats of the forefathers), may well be the subject of the twenty-first century’ (p. 101). Climate change has made this statement painfully true. We now know that we all live in one place, planet Earth, and we share one space with its limited resources. Christianity, traditionally a religion of time (the history of salvation), is in the process of a transformation, as the threats to our planet make its adherents realize that space and place must take priority. We no longer see ourselves as separate individuals, sojourners on earth, whose only true place is the eternal heavenly one. Re-awakening to the radical incarnational roots of Christianity, we now see this planet as the household of God, the place where we belong along with all other creatures. Our task is to work with God to bring about a just and sustainable place for all of us. This ‘mundane’ theological perspective moves our eyes from heaven to the earth, and therefore to the very issues undertaken in the volume, Nature, Space and the Sacred. The multi-dimensionality of the concepts ‘space’ and ‘place’ is now ripe for an investigation of their religious potential. Nature as sacred place and space becomes a central preoccupation for theologians, architects, anthropologists, artists, ethicists, philosophers, and scientists as they join together in the central task of our century – how to live well and justly on planet Earth. ‘Nature’ is everything there is; we are nature; we are also nature reflecting on nature; nature is our physical, emotional, and spiritual home; it is our place and our space – our one and only place and space. So what could be more important than such a task? Climate change has raised the ante on the significance of this interdisciplinary study of our planet. We know now that we need all fields of study to help us to understand the space we, humans, inhabit, and especially our place in that space. Place and space (geography) are now matters of the highest importance, together with what pertains to them: their quality for the maintenance of life; their just distribution among all planetary users; their preciousness, beauty, and vulnerability. This fine volume, Nature, Space and the Sacred, explores the many dimensions of space and place with depth, breadth, and insight. The wide-ranging topics – from sacred sites to consumerism, from landscape design to deep ecology, from biodiversity to Eastern views on the sacred space, from First Nations’ embodied knowing to climate change – suggest the richness and importance of this interpretive lens. Geography does indeed appear to be the subject facing the

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twenty-first century, and I commend the essays in Nature, Space and the Sacred as serious forms of engagement with this central issue of our time.

List of Contributors Gulnara Aitpaeva has been working in the field of literature, folklore, anthropology and education in Kyrgyzstan since 1993. In 1999 she created the Kyrgyz Ethnology Department at the American University in Kyrgyzstan, with the purpose of introducing social science and anthropology there and of facilitating connections and collaboration among social scientists in Central Asia. In 2002 she took the initiative to transform this department into the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Archeology in order to expand its scope and function. In 2004 she founded the Aigine Cultural Research Center, which was designed to expand research into lesser known aspects of the cultural and natural heritage of Kyrgyzstan, to integrate diverse local, esoteric and scientific epistemologies relating to cultural practices, and to promote tolerance and mutual understanding among the many different cultural groups living in Kyrgyzstan. With the support of several international foundations, Aigine has been conducting extensive collaborative research projects on the sacred sites and rituals of Kyrgyzstan and on its cultural and biological diversity.  Heinrich Bedford-Strohm holds the Chair of Systematic Theology and Contemporary Theological Issues and is Dean of the Faculty for Human Sciences at the Otto –Friedrich University of Bamberg, Germany. He is also the director of the Dietrich –Bonhoeffer Research Centre for Public Theology at Bamberg (which is a member of the Global Network for Public Theology) and President of the Society for Protestant Theology in Germany. Recent publications are on theological themes such as ressurection and the last judgement (Und das Leben der zukünftigen Welt. Von Auferstehung und Jüngstem Gericht, NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag 2007), but his main field of research and publication is social ethics. His books deal with themes such as social justice (Vorrang für die Armen. Auf dem Weg zu einer theologischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus 1993), social cohesion in modern society (Gemeinschaft aus kommunikativer Freiheit. Sozialer Zusammenhalt in der modernen Gesellschaft. Ein theologischer Beitrag, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus 1999) and the ecumenical discussion on creation (Schöpfung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 2001). As a member of the World Council of Churches’ working group on bioethics, he has published numerous articles on this topic. Recently he has published work dealing predominantly with the role of religion in the secular state, with questions of poverty, and with globalisation from the perspective of public theology.

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Sigurd Bergmann’s previous studies have investigated the relationship between the image of God and the view of nature in late antiquity; the methodology of contextual theology; visual arts among the indigenous Arctic and Australians – as well as visual arts, architecture and religion. He has co-managed the interdisciplinary research group on ‘Technical Spaces of Mobility’, and he chairs the executive committee for the ‘European Forum on the Study of Religion and Environment’. His main publications are Geist, der Natur befreit (Mainz: Grünewald 1995; Russian edition Arkhangelsk 1999; revised English edition under title Creation Set Free, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2005); Geist, der lebendig Macht (Frankfurt am Main: IKO-Verlag für interkulturelle Kommunikation 1997); God in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003); In the Beginning Is the Icon (London: Equinox 2009); Så främmande det lika [So Strange so Similar] (Trondheim: Tapir 2009 – a volume on Sámi visual arts, globalisation and religion). As editor, his main works are Architecture, Aesth/Ethics and Religion (Frankfurt am Main and London: IKO-Verlag für interkulturelle Kommunikation 2005); Theology in Built Environments Exploring Religion, Architecture and Design (New Brunswick NJ and London: Transaction 2009); Spaces of Mobility, co-edited with T. Hoff and T. Sager (London: Equinox 2008); and The Ethics of Mobilities (edited with T. Sager; Aldershot: Ashgate 2008). Forrest Clingerman, PhD, is Assistant Professor at Ohio Northern University, USA, where he teaches classes on theology, ethics, and the history of Christian thought. His doctoral dissertation (from the University of Iowa) explored the ways philosophical theology can identify religious depth in particular places. His research focuses on the relationship between theologies of nature and hermeneutics in a scientific and pluralistic world. In addition to recent essays on the ways place informs our reading of nature, he is currently investigating the potential of traditional Christian concepts like ‘pilgrimage’ and the ‘book of nature’ for a better understanding of the natural world. Ernst M. Conradie teaches systematic theology and ethics in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of the Western Cape. He is the author of the following recent monographs in the field of ecological theology: Hope for the Earth: Vistas on a New Century (Bellville: UWC 2000 / Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock 2005); An Ecological Christian Anthropology: At Home on Earth? (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005); Waar op dees aarde vind mens God? Opsoek na ‘n aardse spiritualiteit (Wellington: Lux Verbi.Bm 2006) and Christianity and Ecological Theology: Resources for Further Research (Stellenbosch: SUNPress 2006). He is the current conference secretary of the Theological Society of South Africa and the secretary of the Network for Earthkeeping Christian Communities in South Africa, and he serves on the management committee of the South African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute.

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Glenn Deliège has a PhD-fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and he is currently connected to the Husserl Archives and Centre for Phenomenology of the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte, K.U. Leuven, Belgium. After having obtained his MA and MPhil at the University of Leuven, he is currently working on a PhD project concerning the conceptualisation of the value of nature within current nature-preservation practices and legislation. He has previously been guest editor to a special volume of Ethical Perspectives entitled Environmental Philosophy after the De(Con)struction of Nature, were he also published his paper ‘Pining for the Wild’ (2007). Another paper, ‘Toward a Richer Account of Restorative Practices’, was published in the journal Environmental Philosophy 4, 1&2 (2007). Anna Duhon has accumulated experience by working for a range of conservation organizations. She has completed her undergraduate studies in social anthropology at Harvard University and is currently undertaking an MPhil in natural resources and peace at the United Nations Mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. Anna can be reached at [email protected]. Kingsley Goodwin is a doctoral student in philosophy at University College Dublin. His research interest is in the experiential and sceptical basis of deep ecology, as developed by Arne Naess. He has published ‘Postmodernism, Deep Ecology and the Idea of Wildness’, in Ethical Perspectives 14.4 (2007). John A. Grim is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He is also, together with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Coordinator of the Forum on Religion and Ecology and a series editor of ‘World Religions and Ecology’ from Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. In that series he has edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2001). He has been a Professor of Religion at Bucknell University and at Sarah Lawrence College, where he has taught courses in native American and indigenous religions, world religions, and religion and ecology. His published works include: The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (Maryknoll, NY: University of Oklahoma Press 1983) and a volume edited with Mary Evelyn Tucker entitled Worldviews and Ecology (Norman, OK: Orbis 1994, 5th printing 2000), as well as a Daedalus volume (2001) entitled Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change?. Again with Mary Evelyn Tucker, he is also an editor of the ‘Ecology and Justice’ series at Orbis Books, which lists so far nineteen titles. John is currently President of the American Teilhard Association. Annette Homann is Architect and Adjunct Research Professor at the School of Architecture, Carleton University, Ottawa and author of Spielräume des Glaubens. Anthropomorphismus in der Architekturtheorie und die Umwandlung von St. Maximin in Trier [Leeways of Faith. Anthropomorphism in Architectural

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Theory and the Conversion of St Maximin in Trier] (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin 2005). Homann’s research interests are: the history and theory of architecture; the poetic a priori; and the future of architecture in a more than human world. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland and has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North; on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history; on the role of animals in human society; and on issues in human ecology. His recent research interests are in the anthropology of technology and in aspects of environmental perception. He has edited the Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London: Routledge 1994), and was editor of Man (the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) from 1990 to 1992. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His major publications include: as an author, Evolution and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986), The Appropriation of Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1986) and The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge 2000); as an editor, Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (co-edited with Kathleen Gibson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), Key Debates in Anthropology (London: Routledge 1996), and Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (co-edited with Elizabeth Hallam, Oxford: Berg 2007). He is currently writing and teaching on the comparative anthropology of the line, looking at the changing relations, through history, between lines of movement, of inquiry and of description, while also addressing issues at the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His latest book, Lines: A Brief History, was published by Routledge in 2007. Zemfira Inogamova is a MSc student in Holistic science at Schumacher College, Plymouth University, UK. She conducted research in Talas province of Kyrgyzstan in 2005, exploring the cultural phenomena of reverence at sacred sites and the ethics of making public, through maps, the traditional knowledge of sacred sites and pilgrims. She has taken her degree in the Cultural Anthropology Department at the American University of Central Asia. Currently she is attending the MSc in Holistic Science full-time postgraduate program (2008–2009) organized by Schumacher College in partnership with the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. She is also interested in systems thinking, holistic agriculture and farming, bio-cultural diversity, customary economy, resilience, deep ecology and research ethics. Lisa M. Jokivirta is Junior Lecturer in the Master’s Programme in Development and International Cooperation at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Having worked at the Earth Charter International Headquarters at the United Nations

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Mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica, Lisa is interested in the areas of environmental ethics and civil society mobilization. More specifically, her research interests include ‘western’ environmental values and worldviews, ecotourism, and the intersection between economic and environmental perspectives. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Maria Jansdotter Samuelsson, PhD, is Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her main research interests lie in the field of feminist and ecotheological perspectives on God and nature. She is also interested in popular worldviews and values, especially in relation to nature. Publications include: Ekofeminism i teologin. Genusuppfattning, natursyn och gudsuppfattning hos Anne Primavesi, Catherine Keller och Carol Christ [Ecofeminism in Theology. Views of Gender, Nature and God in the writings of Anne Primavesi, Catherine Keller and Carol Christ] (PhD diss., 2003) and ‘Redemption from Mother Nature to Our Father the Lord? An Ecofeminist Analysis of Hymns in the Swedish Church Edition of Psalmer i 2000talet’, Feminist Theology 18.1 (2009). Marju Kõivupuu has a PhD in literature and ethnology studies and is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Landscape and Culture in the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia. His research has concentrated on culture studies, comparative folk belief, and death culture (the subject of his PhD dissertation in 2002, which resulted in a subsequent monograph and several articles). His publications include the article ‘The Transformation of the Death Cult Over Time: The Example of the Burial Customs in Historic Võrumaa County’, Folklore. Electronic Journal of Folklore 22 (2001), 66–91, and two monographs on ethnomedicine (2000 and 2004, in Estonian). She can be contacted at [email protected] Tihamer R. Kover is a PhD student in philosophy at the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte, KU Leuven, Belgium currently working on Paul Shepard’s naturalised account of human subjectivity and its relevance in providing an evaluative basis for grounding environmental protection. His main research interests include environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology, but they extend also to other areas of social, political and ethical thought – specifically, the interplay between modernity, post-modernism, trans-humanism and neo-primitivism. His most recent publication is ‘The Beastly Familiarity of Wild Alterity: Debating the ‘Nature’ of our Fascination with Wildness’, Ethical Perspectives 14.4 (2007). Anders Melin is Assistant Professor in Ethics at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Melin sustained the public examination of his dissertation, Judgements in Equilibrium? An Ethical Analysis of Environmental Impact Assessment, at Linköping University, Sweden, in 2001. After that he was employed to work within various research projects, mainly on environmental ethics. In 2003 Melin worked on the genetical modification

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of animals and plants at Lund University. From 2003 to 2006 he took part in the interdisciplinary research project ‘The Technical Rooms of Mobility’ at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Since 2006, he is employed at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University and works with a project on biodiversity and ethics. Michael S. Northcott is Professor of Ethics in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh and a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church. He has been visiting professor at the Claremont School of Theology, California; at Duke University, North Carolina; at Flinders University, Adelaide; and at the University of Malaya. He has research degrees from the Universities of Durham and Sunderland. He is the author of many books and papers on ecological ethics and theology, including The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: I. B. Tauris 2005, and A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (London: Darton, Longman and Todd 2007). Graham Parkes, a native of Scotland, taught for thirty years in the Asian and comparative philosophy programme at the University of Hawaii and is now Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at University College, Cork, in Ireland. He has authored, edited, and translated several books on Asian and European philosophy, and has published numerous essays on environmental topics, mostly from an East-Asian perspective. He is currently working on a book (tentatively) entitled Returning to Earth: Toward a More Global Philosophy of Nature. Anna Petersson, currently a PhD student in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Lund University, Sweden, has a Master of Fine Arts in Design and a Licentiate degree in Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics. Her present research investigates why and in what way material places and things are invested with meaning in the proximity to death, specifically in relation to their function as links between the space of life and the space of death. Her main publication is The Presence of the Absent. Memorials and Places of Ritual, PhLic (Department of Architecture, Lund University 2004). Anne Primavesi, a theologian, became a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, Birkbeck College, University of London after holding a Research Fellowship in Environmental Theology at the University of Bristol. She is also a Fellow of the Westar Institute and Jesus Seminar, Santa Rosa, California. The context of her theology is the scientific worldview offered by James Lovelock’s Gaia theory. She explores this systematically in her books Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science (London: Routledge 2000); Gaia’s Gift: Earth, Ourselves and God after Copernicus (London: Routledge 2003); and Gaia and Climate Change: A Theology of Gift Events (London: Routledge 2008).

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Peter M. Scott is Senior Lecturer in Christian Social Thought and Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Theology, Ideology and Liberation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; paperback edition 2008), of A Political Theology of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and of numerous articles. He is co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell 2004, paperback edition 2006), of Future Perfect? God, Medicine and Human Identity (London: Continuum 2006), and Remoralising Britain? (London: Continuum 2009), and of a special issue of the International Journal of Public Theology, on the theme of theology and the urban. He has lectured widely and is currently writing a book on the politics of nature for an ecological, global age. Daniel M. P. Shaw was educated at the Durham, Lancaster and London Universities and has been focusing on environmental philosophy, eco-phenomenology, environmental health and religion and the environment. Two years spent in rural Japan fuelled an interest in Shinto, particularly from an environmental perspective, and in the practical application of religion to environmental questions. He is currently writing the Shinto entry for the FORE online resource on religions and ecology and presently employed at the World Health Organization headquarters, Geneva. His other interests include world religions and cosmologies, world music and environmental sounds. He recently founded ‘Endangered Sounds’, a group which aims to preserve and promote the endangered sonic environment. Mary Evelyn Tucker is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Scholar at Yale University, where she holds appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies as well as in the Divinity School and in the Department of Religious Studies. With John Grim, she is co-founder and director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. Together they organized a series of ten conferences on world religions and ecology at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. She is a research associate at the Harvard Yenching Institute and at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She is the author of Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter their Ecological Phase. Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism and of The Philosophy of Qi. She also co-edited the following volumes: Worldviews and Ecology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); Buddhism and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998; Confucianism and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) Hinduism and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); When Worlds Converge (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2002); Confucian Spirituality (New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 2003); Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? (special issue of Daedalus, 2001). She also edited Thomas Berry’s volume Evening Thought. She is a member of the Interfaith Partnership for the Environment at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and served as a member of the Earth Charter Drafting Committee from 1997 to 2000.

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Björn Vikström, PhD in Theology, is a Senior Researcher at Åbo Academy University, Finland. His previous studies include Verkligheten öppnar sig. Läsning och uppenbarelse i Paul Ricoeurs bibelhermeneutik [Reality Reveals Itself. Reading and Revelation in the Biblical Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur] (PhD diss., 2000) and Den skapande läsaren. Hermeneutik och tolkningskompetens [The Creative Reader. Hermeneutics and Interpretation Competence], (Lund: Studentförlaget 2005). In his current research Vikström is applying hermeneutics to the fields of interdisciplinary understanding and environmental ethics. Carola Wingren has held a professorship in theoretical and applied aesthetics in landscape architecture at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU, in Alnarp since 2003. She has a long experience in practical landscape planning and design, and her principal work focuses on exploring the aesthetic field of landscape architecture, both in practice and in theory. Her PhD thesis was The artistic Practice of a Landscape Architect: Knowledge Development through an Autobiographical Study. Wingren belongs in a transdisciplinary research group Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in Contemporary Urban Landscapes. Between 2004 and 2006 she was part of the research network ‘Exploring Architecture’ with its base at Chalmers, Göteborg. Between 1990 and 1995 she was co-editor of the Swedish review for landscape architecture Utblick Landskap (at www.slu.se).

Chapter 1

Editorial S. Bergmann, P. M. Scott, M. Jansdotter Samuelsson and H. Bedford-Strohm

The spatialization of nature – how nature and space interact, in theory and in practice – is a significant area of enquiry that crosses many disciplines. The spatialization of nature in religious and theological perspectives is a less well developed area. We offer Nature, Space and the Sacred as the first exploratory mapping of this new and highly significant agenda: the spatial interactions between religion, nature and culture. In this ground-breaking work, different concepts of religion, theology, space and place and their internal relations are discussed in an impressive range of approaches. While we think that the interaction between religion, space and nature needs its own dedicated treatment, we also consider that religious/theological perspectives are necessary but not sufficient. A wider range of disciplines is required to engage comprehensively with this theme. In this book, the reader will find a weaving together of perspectives – from religious studies and theology as well as from geography, anthropology, architecture, landscape architecture, archaeology, and philosophy. As such, this book embodies an innovative and truly transdisciplinary environmental science. Of course, space has never been absent from the religions. Religions happen in spaces: religious communities occupy places and religious adherents have for millennia travelled to sacred places in order to honour the deities associated with such sites. This traditional area of enquiry is represented in the present volume and, as editors, we are especially delighted to present studies from countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, a new agenda is emerging, which is wider than the location of religious communities and pilgrimage to sites designated as sacred. In his opening chapter, Sigurd Bergmann presents some aspects of this emerging agenda: What is the relationship between spaces and places? How does attention to space enable us to reconsider urban spaces and their relation to nature? What happens to spaces under the pressures of globalisation? What is the religious contribution to making spaces more habitable? Should we, finally, speak of the spatiality of divinity?



Nature, Space and the Sacred

Earthing the Sacred To present some of these questions, old and new, the chapters of the book are grouped into five sections. Contributions to the first section, ‘Earthing the Sacred’, begin with locating ‘religion’ in a natural context. Religions, including Christian faith, do not present ideologies only of the beyondness of divinity but also of divinity as embedded in nature and affected by it. In ‘Transforming the Theological Climate in Response to Climate Change: Jesus and the Mystery of Giving’, Anne Primavesi argues that the deep interrelationships and interactions of the ecosystem are manifested in Christian tradition as well as in science. Humans and natural entities both give and take, but this is not a simple exchange of objects between giver and receiver. The mystery of giving is about giving and taking from the thread of life, which could be translated as a counter-imperial ecology of love – like an earth-bound vision of the kingdom of God, expressed by Jesus. Next, in ‘The Whole Household of God’, Ernst Conradie shows how the metaphor of household has been used in theology in many ways. He then contends that there are differences in the applicability of the metaphor in built and non-built environments – for example, the image of the earth as a house does not take the self-productive activity of the earth into account, and Conradie regards this as a challenge for further reflection. Moltmann’s notion of the inhabitation of the Spirit in the earth serves to balance out a one-sided use of the idea of oikos. The human reception of the Spirit’s work may be understood as the (passive) experience of grace (thankfulness for the home received) and the (more active) expression of gratitude (preparing the house). Conradie concludes that only a mutually interpretative use of the notions of ‘house’ and ‘home’ will suffice: it is the homemaking engagement of God’s Spirit that makes the house into a home. Offering a metaphorical interpretation of ‘building heaven’, Forrest Clingerman argues next that place offers us a means of engaging with nature. This manner of engaging he characterises as ‘emplacement’. Yet, as he notes, such an approach encounters a theological difficulty: the tension between this affirmation of place and the Christian affirmation of the placelessness of divine activity. As a way of negotiating this tension, Clingerman argues nicely that ‘we build Heaven through the reflexive practice of thinking about how we are emplaced in place, something potentially present in any place wherein we dwell’. In short, that ‘Heaven is the reinterpretation of a place in light of its depth of meaning’. Resonances with the theology of Paul Tillich are obvious and enable Clingerman to affirm the importance of place as a site of in-depth learning. Ethics in Natural and Built Space The second section, ‘Ethics in Natural and Built Space’, explores the concept of space with regard to nature as it is designed, shaped and affected by human activities. The changing space of earth, its climate and its biodiversity are challenging the

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ethics of human self-understanding, and they demand an alternative practice in architecture and in the design of artefacts and landscapes as a spiritual and creative human skill. In the first contribution, ‘Atmospheric Space, Climate Change and the Communion of Saints’, Michael Northcott argues against a tendency to interpret climate change in terms of a future threat and contends that, especially for the poor, climate change is a present, spatial reality and threat. Of particular interest is Northcott’s deployment of the traditional discourse of sin to indicate disruption between humans and the earth as well as between humans and God. We are here dealing with a moral economy/ecology, and Northcott deftly situates this economy in relation to the doctrine of providence. Next, Anders Melin’s article presents four contributions to the debate on the ethics of creation: Ruether’s and McFague’s feminist accounts of creation seen as a web of relationships leading to a partnership-oriented view; Sideris’ critique of such views as the denial of evolution theory; and, finally, Gregersen’s theological approach of God as ‘the Creator of creativity’, which offers a view of nature intended to be consistent with the scientific understanding of nature as self-regulative. Melin himself favours Gregersen’s view and adds two comments on biodiversity. First, he argues that we should acknowledge the intrinsic value of different life forms, as these are products of the divine creativity. Second, he wants to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic extinction, since natural selection ‘seems to be’ a part of God’s plan for creation. To preserve biodiversity is mainly a negative duty, which consists in refraining from actions that could lead to the extinction of species. In the following chapter, ‘The Master of the Universe or the Humble Servant’, Björn Vikström explores how the concept of sustainable development is altering our understanding of humanity and nature. He argues that the concept can be interpreted in more than one way and much depends on the anthropology explicitly or implicitly being discussed. Is this the human as a technician or the human as a servant, and which meanings of the spaces of nature are operative under each account? He concludes with some discussion as to how a religious view of the human as servant might be brought into dialogue with different ethical positions towards the enhancement of practices that support sustainable development. In ‘The Proper Praise for an Architecture of the Improper – Joseph Beuys: Building with Butter’, Annette Homann inaugurates an architectural discussion where the body, linked as it is with with the erotic, the sacred, and the subconscious, has a significant place in the creation of architecture. Symbolic references and imaginary processes are compared with those established in the work of Joseph Beuys. As the work of Beuys invites an interpretation of, and imperative respect for, the more than human world, so architectural practice is able to educate us about the phenomenological world and about the ancient, erotic space of chora. As a point of departure from theory to practice, Homann refers to her work with architecture students at the Carleton School of Architecture in Ottawa. This study is followed by Carola Wingren’s ‘Ideal Landscapes: Landscape Design between Beauty and Meaning’, which offers an interesting and, for scholars of religion and



Nature, Space and the Sacred

culture, extremely fruitful insight into the world of landscape design and gardening architecture. Drawing on her own practice as a landscape architect and on her experience of the bureaucracy and politics of roads in Sweden, she argues that requests for the designing of beautiful urban landscapes are usually also requests for meaningful landscapes. In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Anna Petersson investigates how the surviving families and friends of those killed in road accidents in Sweden invest in different types of place as ways of remembering their relatives. The reason for this appears to be the varying ability of different places to bring about a positive presence of the deceased. The placing of things representing the deceased’s personal or social life by the gravesite or accident site could in this context be seen as a way of linking the positive presence of the deceased to a site that is connected to negative feelings of pain and sorrow, and hence of bringing life to a place which has taken life. Nature as Entanglement While dominant concepts of nature have emphasized the dimension of time and treated organisms as closed entities, the articles in the third section, ‘Nature as Entanglement’, offer an alternative view. Tim Ingold’s contribution depicts organisms as knots where lines are interconnected in ‘zones of interpenetration or entanglement’, and the following chapters explore the political dynamics which are evolving through such an ecologically deep understanding of the sacred web of life. In ‘The Wedge and the Knot: Hammering and Stitching the Face of Nature’, Tim Ingold notes that, in outlining his idea of the ‘struggle for existence’ in The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin compared the face of nature to a surface riven by innumerable wedges. In subsequent ecological thinking this image has gained currency, along with the idea that organisms are externally bounded, solid entities that compete for limited space along the lines of their adjacency. Taking a different track, much influenced by Henri Bergson, Ingold explores the implications of an alternative viewpoint suggested by the image of entanglement. Here the organism is imagined not as a wedge-like block in a carpentered world, but rather as a line – or rather a knotted bundle of lines – in a world that is woven. In such a world, how should we conceive of ‘the environment’? What we have been accustomed to calling ‘the environment’ might, he suggests, be better envisaged as a zone of entanglement. Thus an ecology of life must be fashioned in the stitching of lines, not in the hammering of blocks. In ‘Knowing Natural Spaces’, Kingsley Goodwin addresses the realist– constructivist debate in environmental philosophy through a reinterpretation of Arne Naess’ deep ecology. Arguing that Naess’ position does not need to be interpreted as realist but can instead be interpreted phenomenologically, Goodwin maintains that deep ecology is open to engaging with concepts of nature from sciences and religions. For Anna Duhon and Lisa Jokivirta in ‘Seeking Transformation in a

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Consumer World: Can We Achieve a Unity of Ends and Means?’, increasing consumerism and a growing awareness of the global environmental problems are linked. Awareness of consumerism as one cause behind environmental destruction, they argue, is not always included in campaigns to ‘save the earth’. They propose ecospirituality as a multi-traditional movement that tries to link humans to earth through a small-scale, community-based and practice-oriented environmental ethics; this in turn makes ecospirituality a strong alternative when it comes to changing the values and attitudes prevalent among Western people. In the final essay of this section, ‘Restoring or restorying nature?, Glenn Deliège offers the region of Flanders in Belgium as the context for a sophisticated argument that seeks to move from practices of restoring nature to the matter of restorying nature. If the latter were practised, he argues, a clearer and stronger identification of people with their local places would result. Only in this way, Deliège argues, can places have their proper ‘weight’ ascribed to them and thereby their full value to local inhabitants acknowledged. Sacred Geographies In this section, sacred geographies are interpreted in a variety of local explorations. Indian North America, contemporary cultural sites in Kyrgysztan and Estonia as well as mesolithic and neolithic landscapes, offer places and sites for anthropological and archaeological reflections. The authors begin from the intrinsic value of place and investigate how cultural practices and ideologies interact with them. The section profiles what we can call a ‘sacred geography’ in a broad sweep of human history. For John A. Grim in ‘Indigenous Embodied Knowing: A Study in Crow/ Apsaalooke Space, Nature and the Sacred’, the Sundance or Ashkisshelissua of the Crow/Apsaalooke Peoples of Montana is interpreted as a ritual where people’s quest for knowing centres on multiple experiences of space, nature and the sacred. The experiential learning of the Sundance aims to manifest the deep embodiedness of the personal body, the community, the bioregion, as well as the complex of heavenly bodies. In ‘Natural Sacred Places in Landscape’, Marju Torp Kõivupuu offers a very valuable contribution to a contextual exploration of nature, space and the sacred. Describing the Estonian practice of cutting a cross in the bark of a tree as a tradition of cultivating holy places in times of modernity, she shows how difficult it is to keep this tradition in the midst of new interests, especially economic ones. She describes how the landscape that expresses a common history has an important role in the development of identity. She also shows how cultural heritage is concerned with the relationship between lore culture and the preservation of antiquities. In ‘The Domestic Order and its Feral Threat’, T. R. Kover considers the origin of the current devaluation of nature: how far back should we go to trace it? When precisely did the dichotomy between humanity and nature first became instantiated?



Nature, Space and the Sacred

Drawing in part on the work of Paul Shepard, Kover argues that the ecology and subsistence practices of agriculture, with their need to impose and maintain an artificial order upon the natural world, initiated the symbolic conception of this cosmological dichotomy, in which the domestic order became synonymous with the good and the wild became a symbol for chaotic and malevolent evil. There is some suggestion that this fundamental dichotomy could be challenged by a rethinking of what wildness might mean: as difference, but not as threat. Gulnara Aitpaeva’s chapter offers exciting observations from a less known field of local worship at sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan. It emphasizes especially how spirituality affects the health of practitioners of traditional Kyrgyz culture and the role of sacred sites in this context. There is a strong belief in Kyrgyz traditional society that certain people are chosen for spiritual missions like healing, reciting epics, guarding sacred sites, or mediating between this and the other world, and that their health is directly affected by their acceptance or rejection of the spiritual mission. Usually a process of recognizing and developing a supernatural gift is based on pilgrimages to sacred sites. Zemfira Inogamova’s chapter, entitled ‘Keeping the Sacred Secret’, discusses the practices of believers at sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan. She raises the ethical issue of how observers and scholars should deal with the hiddenness and integrity of sacred sites, in Kyrgyzstan as well as in other places. The experiences, hopes and fears that practitioners have about sacred sites in relation to changing economic and social organization are the focus of this chapter: how people think about these sites, what kind of respect they show, how they maintain control over the sites, and the matter of cultural property rights. Do sacred sites belong to the people of Kyrgyzstan or to certain private owners? Turning to the East The book’s final section, ‘Turning to the East’, offers evidence of an increasing exchange of perspectives between the so-called East and West and of the constructive fruitfulness of this dialogue. Gardening and village planning practices are analysed with regard to their religious and cultural implications. While the previous section offered insights into a central Asian context, these chapters draw on fields in northern and southern Asia. They are all driven by an intense desire to provide new inspiration and elaborate conditions for human interaction with nature, in a deep inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue between East and West. In ‘Touching the Depths of Things’, Mary Evelyn Tucker maintains that, while science and policy approaches are clearly necessary, they are not sufficient in helping to transform human consciousness and behaviour for a sustainable future. Tucker then emphasizes the importance of values and of ethics, religion and philosophy for this transformation. She sees a growing role for religions in shaping attitudes and action for a broader commitment to environmental protection and restoration, and she describes various activities in the field of environment and religion. Neo-

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Confucianism, and especially the philosophy of Wang Yangming, are explored as a source of wisdom which can help us today to find an appropriate understanding of science. Wang emphasizes that empathetic knowing affirms human subjectivity as a primary way of apprehending the nature of things. For him, embodied acting is something that unifies knowledge and action. By living compassionately a common kinship with the larger community of life is acknowledged and enacted. Tucker expresses her awareness of the danger of narcissistic subjectivism in Wang’s thought but sees this danger as being dealt with through his emphasis on connectedness with the wider social community. In ‘Stone and Sacred Space in China and Japan: Implications for our Treatment of the Earth’, Graham Parkes notes that, in traditional Chinese culture, stones are thought of as a certain configuration of the essential energies of the earth. For humans to flourish, stones have to be arranged in patterns so as to harmonize the energy flow of the place, a practice known as fengshui. Similar thoughts are to be found in the Shinto tradition of Japan, where especially high intensities of Kami were to be found in stones and rocks, generating a sacred space around them. Parkes argues that such commitments could serve as an inspiration in the effort to transform Western attitudes to nature. For Daniel M. P. Shaw, in ‘The Way Forward? Shinto and a Twenty-First Century Japanese Ecological Attitude’, nature, space and the sacred all converge in Shinto, the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan. Shinto believes in Kami as a vital energy, present in natural entities and phenomena and inspiring a sense of awe. Shinto values form a holistic ecological attitude which could be used as a source of inspiration for environmental ethics to meet the challenge of environmental problems in Japan today. All the chapters elaborate on a fundamental point: human beings cannot use natural space simply for self-mirroring. Instead, the self and its surroundings are ontologically parts of each other. Nature in such a perspective may be regarded as a space of the Sacred. As a whole, the book provides creative analytical perspectives on the spatiality of nature, culture and religion, and experiments with conventional as well as new concepts. Its broad range offers a rich exchange of insights, methods and theoretical engagements. Acknowledgements The papers presented here emerge from the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment’s inaugural conference, held at the University of Bamberg (24–26 May 2007). We would like to thank the participants for their lively contributions to the conference which made the meeting such a success, and for their work in revising their papers as part of the process of bringing them to a wider audience. And we would like to express our appreciation to Sallie McFague for writing a preface at short notice. We thank Anja Benoit, Anne-Helene Kratzert and Anne Rux, staff in the office of the Chair of Systematic Theology at Otto Friedrich University, for all their work



Nature, Space and the Sacred

in organizing the conference. Financial support for the conference was provided by the Faculty of Arts at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, and by the Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg, Germany. We are very grateful for this financial assistance. We are also grateful for the hard work of the staff at Ashgate Publishing, especially Sarah Lloyd, in bringing this book to publication. We thank Andrew Wilshere and Stuart Cunningham for their initial work on the text. Finally, we commend these essays as contributing to a new area of intellectual enquiry: the transdisciplinary work of reinterpreting the spatiality of nature in religious perspectives.

Chapter 2

Nature, Space and the Sacred: Introductory Remarks Sigurd Bergmann

Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird. [The human being only knows herself as far as she knows the world, which she only becomes aware of in herself, and only in the world she becomes aware of herself].

In his compressed formulation, Goethe rejects the classical imperative ‘Know yourself!’, which he considers a piece of occult cunning designed to confuse people and to delude them with a false introspectiveness leading their senses away from the environment (Aussenwelt). Today we would rather talk about narcissism, egocentrism and anthropocentrism to describe late modern ‘man’s’ autocracy. Marcuse talked about the ‘onedimensional man’. Probably today it is no longer the wisdom from the Delphi oracle’s ‘know yourself!’ that attracts but the temptation to become a truly ‘selfmade person’ through, for example, the accumulation of money. What kind of significance is ascribed to our surroundings, to the other, to nature and to the environment in this culture of self-mirroring? Does nature only exist for the sake of the human Self? Does nature carry an intrinsic value, or does it only offer extrinsic ones? As we know, this question has been debated in environmental discourse for a long time now, confronting anthropocentrism with ecocentrism. Goethe’s short imperative takes us beyond this controversy. The outer world, he claims, can only be approached in the human being’s inner world, and the Self, in turn, can only be approached in the surrounding world. The split between Self and nature is more or less an illusion. Sein und Schein, that which is and that which seems



  Johann Wolfgang Goethe, ‘Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort’, in Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, besonders zur Morphologie: Erfahrung, Betrachtung, Folgerung, durch Lebensereignisse verbunden (Munich 1989 (original publication 1817–24)), pp. 306–309.

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to be, are confused. ‘Enlightened vitalism’ and contemporary environmentalism offer another basic code: neither the world nor the Self can be approached, experienced, perceived and interpreted without each other. The organism is rather an ‘entanglement’ than a closed entity within a separated spatial Umwelt. In such a context, the words ‘nature’ and ‘world’ are used in deep continuity with European classic history, where the term ‘nature’ is at the very heart of our understanding of reality in general and of the self-understanding of humanity in particular. The new social movement of environmentalism, which is based on the experience and analysis of the fact that human agency in nature harms the bodily being of human persons, societies, species, ecosystems, landscapes and the Earth, subsists on this old cultural code of European self-understanding and updates it: physis as the birth, existence and fading away of life generates the space where reality takes place. Physis is the space where places emerge and it can itself evolve. Not only organisms but also landscapes have been regarded through the lens of sacred geography, in European history as well as in indigenous cultures around the planet. The visible land reveals the invisible spiritual power in some kind of ‘physiognomy’, where the Earth’s surface appears as a face, to put it in Alexander von Humboldt’s words. If Goethe’s claim and that of modern environmentalism that the Self and its surroundings are ontologically parts of each other makes sense, then reflection about space becomes crucial. What kind of space is it that offers the conditions of life, and what about the spatiality of life itself? How is space perceived, conceived of and lived in human culture, and how do religious ideologies, rituals and practices contribute to it? My personal motivation in formulating our theme is that space – whatever the word means – generates the conditions of life before life itself can emerge. Places originate from space. Space should not – as in Newtonian or other concepts –be regarded just as an entity which is equal and uniform to time. Space is not just an empty and dead container in which things happen and where history takes its course. Space is a vital, all-embracing gift which needs to be there before life can evolve and before time can flow. The concept of space, as well as the concept of time, needs to be radically revised if we want to proceed to an alternative agency of non-human nature.   Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005).   This term is attributed to Tim Ingold.   Gernot Böhme, Die Natur vor uns: Naturphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Kusterdingen: Die Graue Edition, 2002), p. 10.   Alexander von Humboldt, ‘Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse’ (original publication 1804), in Adolf Meyer-Abich (ed.), Ansichten der Natur (Stuttgart, 2004), p. 76.   Günter Altner, ‘Alles hat seine Zeit – Unsere Verantwortung für die Zeitgestalten der Schöpfung’, in Arnd Heling (ed.), Brot und Fisch: Leben für die Ostsee (Hamburg: EB Verlag 2009), pp.208–15.

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According to such a view, space is also at the base of religion’s business. Religions can in fact themselves be analysed as ritualizations which depend on space and reshape it. Whatever concept of religion one prefers – either the substantive, strictly functional, or perhaps a synthetic one – the foundational code of religious processes approaches reality as a given spatiality in connection to the acting spirits, gods or God. Visible space as a perceived lived space is composed of invisible dynamic elements which affect the health, well-being and life quality of a human community. Throughout the ages, religious systems have developed better skills than science to maintain the insight into lived space as a form of wisdom from which knowledge itself can spring. It might be through the Asian wisdom of geomancy, built as it is on the experience of energy flows which create and sustain spaces and places, the Chinese gardens or the Shinto shrines; or it might be through the Abrahamitic religions’ vision of the world as creation, as a space in which the creator acts through traces as well as through liberating synergies with the creatures. It might be through the indigenous people’s perception of the land as a given open space or through the belief that ancestors always remain present and active in the dreamtime continuum of life through space. With regard to the classical European insights of wisdom and knowledge, updated in the quotation from Goethe, the unenlightened reductionism of science and the one-eyed instrumentalism of technology break with a substantive epistemological principle, while not perceiving and conceiving nature by analogy to the human bodily being. The consequence of such a science should not be surprising, as Georg Picht has formulated it: How could a science be true that destroys its own object, nature? How could technology be meaningful if its artefacts damage life? An ecological philosophy necessarily must be developed with a sceptical and selfcritical consciousness about the limitedness of knowledge. Late modern science seems to be far away from its own roots and history, which it cuts off in some kind of self-amputation, excluding the humanities in general and regarding them as hindrances to so-called socially relevant innovations (that serve the interests of money and power accumulation). Against this horizon, it is difficult to understand why religious studies and theology, and also related disciplines such as anthropology, geography and architecture, have for such a long time not paid attention to the spatiality of religion and to the spiritual dimension of natural and built environments. A change, though, seems to be on its way, and what has been described as ‘the spatial turn’ is also reaching the study of religion. Our conference therefore fits very well with this increasing interest in the spatiality of life, and it is the first one that explicitly puts the theme of ‘nature, space and the sacred’ on the agenda for the  Georg Picht, Der Begriff der Natur und seine Geschichte (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1989), p. 5.    Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Theology in its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God’, Religion Compass 1/3 (2007): 353–79. 

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study of religion and of the environment. One could also claim that it challenges radically the self-understanding of what is usually called ‘environmental science’, which so far has not integrated, in a satisfying and acceptable way, the human or the spatial dimension in its development. The many exciting contributions to this book elaborate on the richness of religious and cultural concepts about, and practices within, space, be it the natural environment which has not been heavily affected by humans or the built environments of the post-metropolis. The atmosphere of the city of Bamberg, where these contributions were presented, and its hospitality to visitors and strangers – by the way, xenophilia (love to the stranger) represents one of the oldest Christian virtues for the Concordia of the (medieval) European town – has in itself acted as a partner in the discourse. Geographer (and founder of the critical theory of urban studies) Edward Soja has followed Henri Lefebvre and in his ‘trialectics of being’ has related the concepts of spatiality, historicity and sociality. In the ‘trialectics of spatiality’ Soja relates together lived, perceived and conceived space. He furthermore makes the plea for a third-space discipline, where space is not regarded just in its physical or in its conceived and imagined dimensions, but understood as a lived space. Processes of synekism are studied from this perspective as creative multiple phenomena of human beings who co-inhabit their common city space and where space and the embodied minds of humans affect each other reciprocally. Further, Soja makes it evident that the process of an expanding urbanization, which in late modernity can be studied as a regionalization of the metropolis colonializing its surroundings like a planetary postmetropolis, is a central characteristic of the present state of our late modern culture. However, the question of what city space does to humans and to nature, and the question of how it should be conceived of, designed, built and developed into a habitable place for all, is seldom at the core. Therefore reflections about the spiritual dimension of city space from scholars such as those who gather in this event have crucial contributions to make for urban planning. What are the religious sources for humane and ecological city planning? What does the good city look like – good for all kinds of creatures and inhabitants? How can principles of habitability be negotiated,10 and what is in fact the spiritual quality of a city and of a habitable place?11 How is one to deal with increasing urban injustice in the post-metropolis; and how is one to deal with   Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell 1996), pp. 71, 74. 10  Pauline von Bonsdorff, ‘Habitability as a Deep Aesthetic Value’, in S. Bergmann (ed.), Architecture, Aesth/Ethics and Religion (Frankfurt am Main and London: IKO-Verlag für interkulturelle Kommunikation; 2005), pp. 114–30. 11  Philip Sheldrake, ‘Spirituality and Cities: The Urban as Theological Text’, in S. Bergmann (ed.), Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture and Design (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Transaction Publishers 2009), pp. 151–72.

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widespread ‘urban amnesia’?12 What do places, landscapes and artefacts mean for our individual and collective social memory? In my view, Soja’s plea for a third-space discipline not only challenges scholars to contribute to questions like these, but it challenges the concept of religion radically. Do theologians dare to talk about God’s own spatiality? Will religious studies not only research the mapping of territories in religious keys, but also regard religion itself as a socially and historically spatialized phenomenon? Could moral philosophy and environmental ethics leave behind the dogma that there exists something distinct, which can be called morality and ethics, and move on to embed constructions of normativity in power-sharing processes with regard to the usage of territories, cities, lands and places? What kind of concepts of God and religion would work in trans-disciplinary projects within a third-space environmental science? I could go on for a long time and expand the agenda of challenges and tasks, but I want to end here. I am satisfied if the urgent challenge to a deeper reflection about spatiality has become evident not only to the study of religion and of the environment, but also to science in general. I hope, further, that it has become evident that the all-embracing space should be given a priority on the agenda of rebuilding places and environments. Moreover, science in general should operate an alternative method of studying nature through ‘experiencing, perceiving and interpreting, interconnected through life events’ – to use once again Goethe’s formulation from the title of his writings on ‘Naturwissenschaft’. Trans-disciplinarity is not a goal in itself in such a context, but nothing more than a method and an instrument. Scholars who take space and place seriously in their research will – independently from their training and their disciplines’ history and succession lines – develop skills for a trans-disciplinary and truly environmental science to come. The present imbalance across faculties is still a hindrance, and so is the dominance of technology over science and the dominance of both, in alliance with purely commercial bodies, in the politics of research within higher education. Humans, however, always remain human. And, to heed Goethe’s imperative to know oneself not by oneself but in nature – as well as the imperative to approach nature in, and by analogy with, the human being – the future of science necessarily needs to negotiate its power balance between the faculties anew. In my view, the whole map of separated areas with regard to the natural, the technical, the social and the human must be overcome. Concepts like environment, space and place will definitively locate themselves at the centre of a new understanding of science, even if we cannot at all give empirical evidence for such an optimistic vision in the present distribution of resources; but one hopes nevertheless for what one cannot see.

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  Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Making Oneself at Home in Environments of Urban Amnesia. Religion and Theology in City Space’, International Journal of Public Theology, 2.1 (2008): 70–97.

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One of space’s most beautiful characteristics is its limitedness. The limitedness of space represents at the same time a condition for the uniqueness of organisms and for that of places. The biological diversity, which was agreed on in the Rio convention, as well as the cultural diversity, which was emphasized in the Perez de Cuellar Commission, is dependent on the spatial complexity of places and landscapes. The differentiation of life and the complex manifold of life forms on the planet have, in evolution, created a multi-facetted pattern of life spaces and specific places. If we, with Tim Ingold, regard life forms as entanglements rather than as closed entities, it is obvious how places and living beings interact and evolve each other. ‘Sacred Gaia’ – as Anne Primavesi has tenderly called the planet – and its skill to offer both sheltered and open spaces to its inhabitants remains always an open evolutionary space. The question is whether this will be a habitable place with a comfortable climate for all, for some, or only for a few privileged human beings to live in. Mainly ecofeminists have so far developed the notion of ecojustice, which nowadays is also applied in climate ethics. The Earth Charter therefore speaks of the Earth as our home, and aims, with ‘our’, to reach all its inhabitants. The character and mission of a scientific meeting is not the same as that of the political meeting of governments or social movements. The sceptical position, however, which claims that academia in general and religious studies in particular need to stay in a strictly separated area of outside observation and analysis in order to fulfil their scientific and critical mission, seems to me a cynical position of irresponsibility. A truly critical third-space investigation should therefore not be afraid to reflect self-critically about its own normatively ongoing discourses. The practice of spatiality, as geographers have known for a long time, is a highly normative and political activity. Ecological spiritualities produce and provoke strong political alternatives. The power over land, and especially over sacred sites, and the ideological control of what is regarded as sacred land offer a highly dynamic political agenda. To connect religion and space to each other heightens the political temperature even more. The future of collaborations on nature, space and the sacred therefore should endeavour to achieve a maximum of self-critical consciousness with regard to its normative implications. This book intends to achieve sound analytical perspectives on the spatiality of nature and religion, and to begin to experiment and exchange observations, methods and theoretical attempts. One of the key questions, therefore, is how to establish an agenda for trans-disciplinary environmental science to investigate how modes of ‘making oneself at home’ on Earth can be studied and what sacred and non-sacred places and buildings mean in this context. I am glad that so many scholars have followed the invitation to spend some energies upon reflecting on the theme and have produced so many exciting and creative contributions. I am further gladdened that the European Forum, after four years of increasing activities, has been able to arrange its first inaugural conference, which has prepared the ground for the following chapters. I am also glad that the theme, which the Benediktbeuren workshop 2005 and our executive committee

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has chosen, has addressed scholars from religious studies and theology as well as from other disciplines such as geography, anthropology, architecture, archaeology, and philosophy. Finally, I am thankful to the faculties of arts in Trondheim and Bamberg, which have supported the conference with the necessary funds. In the invitation we mentioned that a main reason for the formulation of the Conference’s theme is found in the potential and need to map out a new agenda for the study of the spatial dimension of interactions between religion, nature and culture. In spite of many constructive developments, the distinctions between bodies, environment, place and space, and the integration of these four, still fall short of a satisfying exploration. In an ecological key, the challenge is to reflect the embodied human and his/her being-in-between-environment-and-space as an indissoluble process. Different concepts of space and place need to be investigated in order to inspire trans-disciplinary perspectives on space, place, and environments in diverse disciplines.

There is no doubt that the chapters of this book have turned this intention into a vital reality.

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Bibliography Altner, Günter, ‘Alles hat seine Zeit – unsere Verantwortung für die Zeitgestalten der Schöpfung’ (Lecture at the Summer University in Ratzeburg, 14–19 August 2006). Bergmann, Sigurd, ‘Making Oneself at Home in Environments of Urban Amnesia: Religion and Theology in City Space’, in International Journal of Public Theology, 2/1 (2008): 70–97. — ‘Theology in its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God’, Religion Compass 1/3 (2007): 353–79. Böhme, Gernot, Die Natur vor uns: Naturphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Kusterdingen: Die Graue Edition, 2002). von Bonsdorff, Pauline, ‘Habitability as a Deep Aesthetic Value’, in S. Bergmann (ed.), Architecture, Aesth/Ethics and Religion (Frankfurt am Main and London: IKO-Verlag für interkulturelle Kommunikation; 2005), pp. 114–30. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, ‘Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort’, in Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, besonders zur Morphologie: Erfahrung, Betrachtung, Folgerung, durch Lebensereignisse verbunden (Munich: Hanser 1989 (original publication 1817–24)), pp. 306–9. von Humboldt, Alexander, ‘Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse’ (original publication 1804), in Adolf Meyer-Abich (ed.), Ansichten der Natur (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004). Picht, Georg, Der Begriff der Natur und seine Geschichte (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989). Reill, Peter Hanns, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005). Sheldrake, Philip, ‘Spirituality and Cities: The Urban as Theological Text’, in S. Bergmann (ed.), Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture & Design, (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Transaction Publishers 2009. Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell, 1996).

PART A EARTHING THE SACRED

Chapter 3

Transforming the Theological Climate in Response to Climate Change: Jesus and the Mystery of Giving Anne Primavesi

Transformations occur in a relational process within space and time, a process that both effects change and is itself affected by changes within and between life forms and their environments. Any particular instance of such a transformation belongs within an overarching process of evolutionary change and our adaptation to it. There are moments when we can record such instances and discern their transformative aftermath in our environments and within ourselves. W. B. Yeats recorded this ripple effect in his poem ‘Easter 1916’: The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute.

The poem’s title refers to more than visible transformations within the Irish landscape at that time. Its focus is on a transformative moment in Ireland’s history: the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and consequent execution of sixteen Irish men by the British. Some of the sixteen – and subsequent readers – intentionally related their deaths to the religiously transformative event of Easter: Jesus’ ‘Rising from the dead’. For Yeats, their execution changed his perception of them and of his relationships with them. Hitherto he might have nodded, or passed a remark, to some of them in a Dublin street, each playing a part in the ‘casual comedy’ of life. Now, one he had so far dismissed as a ‘drunken, vainglorious lout’ has been changed:

   William Butler Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, in L. Robinson, The Golden Treasury of Irish Verse (London: Macmillan 1930), pp. 155–7.

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Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

His historic, poetic record of transformation in an individual’s views of, and relationships with, others also marks a change in his outlook on the world. It draws attention to those moments when changes in our environment and culture require, indeed force us to modify long-held views of ourselves and others in order to deal with them. When the facts change, so too do our minds, our interactions with others and our self-perception. This essay presupposes that the facts associated with climate change and our increasing understanding of what they entail is such an historic transformative moment, not least for our religiously based opinions and perceptions. The Present Climate Theologically, climate change calls for a faith grounded in our bodiliness, with all that that implies (1 Corinthians 15: 44). It requires above all an understanding of ourselves as an interdependent species within the whole community of life on earth. We are now learning how the life of that community is sustained by a climate which is itself changed over time, through transformations within that same community. One obvious example (obvious to us now) is the industrializing of western societies over the past two hundred years. We have to adapt our worldview, particularly our view of ‘progress’, to the fact that the effects of industrialization have changed the global climate in increasingly unpredictable ways. Furthermore, those effects are now impacting on those without any involvement in industrialized societies. The rise in carbon dioxide emissions, for example, is now being tracked by a rising number of deaths in some of the world’s poorest communities – not directly from industrial pollution but from hunger, floods, desertification or food riots. In Europe, a project called PRUDENCE has produced specific projections of future temperature rises, among them a jump by the end of this century to temperatures in the Paris region of 30°C for 50 days per year, compared to the current 6–9 days. How the poorest and most vulnerable Parisians will cope with these lethal temperatures is as yet unknown. A potent transformative factor in these changes is the growing realization that they are attributable to human activities and lifestyles. So they are also transforming our perception of ourselves and of our relationships with the global environment. We can no longer view them from a bystander’s perspective. Observation of their effects both highlights and challenges a religious view of ourselves as a species specially created by God; created, that is, outside of general evolutionary processes 

  Ibid., p. 156.  Robert Henson, The Rough Guide to Climate Change (London: Rough Guides Ltd 2006), p. 53. 

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and the constraints of ecological principles. Indeed, as we slowly come to see climate change and its effects as an unintended consequence of our activities over the past two centuries or so, we find they accord us the status of a geological agent rather than a divinely privileged species. We rival volcanoes, glaciers, wind erosion and water in reconfiguring Earth’s crust and climate through industrialization, mining, and accelerated soil erosion accompanied by population growth. Therefore the religious view of ourselves which has legitimated the unintended consequences of these activities must itself undergo change. For we are responsible for inflicting those consequences not only on ourselves, but also on those least responsible for them and unable to do anything about their causes. A powerful European template for such a change of perspective is that of post-colonialism, signalling as its does not only a transformation of attitudes to the British Empire, for example, but also a growing acknowledgement of responsibility for the continuing worldwide effects of colonization. With that goes an acknowledgement that the legitimation of those effects is based on an imperial form of Christianity. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the British Empire ruled about one quarter of the Earth’s land area and population. The reasons for its expansion included the desire to integrate new lands, with their natural resources and cheap labour, into the growing British economy. Population growth in Britain meant that the acreage of agricultural land lost to houses, factories, schools, roads and railways was regained many times over through the acquisition and use of land overseas. Raw materials were drawn from ecosystems abroad, which meant subjecting them eventually to deforestation and desertification as native species were replaced by profitable monocultures or plantations. And, since the planted trees did not protect and maintain the soil as well as did the former dense vegetation, indigenous animal pasturing or rotational field systems, erosion became (and remains) an increasing problem. Such human-induced global environmental changes were symptomatic of the frontier expansion of Europe, beginning with the conquest of the Americas and continuing today in the integration of world agricultural, economic and industrial markets. With this went the expansion of a western Christian worldview, one that, in its different forms, underpinned this imperialist, militarist and economic project. The resulting political, cultural and religious transformations have not only altered the social structures of the colonized in favour of the colonists. They have also altered the relationships of the colonized with their environments. Christianity has functioned intentionally as a powerful tool of such transformation by destroying the indigenous inhabitants’ own religious relationships with the land.   John McNeill, Something New Under The Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York and London: W. W. Norton 2000), pp. 21–39.    Johnson Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World (London and New York: Routledge 2001), pp. 123–7.   Laura Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan (eds), Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse (New York: Routledge 2002), pp. 5–6. 

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Native American George Tinker sets out this conflict in the clearest terms. Western Christians, he says, claim that God reveals God’s self in history, in words spoken and written in time, and that those who first heard the gospel have and will always maintain a critical advantage over those who heard it later. Native American culture, however, argues out of a spiritual experience and praxis in which God reveals God’s self in creation, in space or place, and not in time. The issue, he says, one directly addressed by this conference, is not whether time or space is missing in one culture or another, but which one is dominant. Imperial Christianity The battle for dominance between these religious claims to locate the revelation of God has not, however, been fought or won in academic debates, or in the pages of religious journals. It has been, and is, accompanied by violence of all kinds, violence legitimated by Christian claims to act with divine power against those considered to be sinners or enemies of Christianity. Within the present ‘space’ of climate change, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer discerns a startling, indeed troubling analogy with competing views of where and how we locate our experience of God. The ‘inconvenient truth’ of the troubling realities of climate change, he says, ought to alert theologians to the ‘inconvenient truth’ that certain readings of sacred texts, and the traditional images based on them, have both provided and sanctioned violent images of God which have in turn sanctioned violence of all kinds. How do we deal with this? I suggest two allied approaches, based, as NelsonPallmeyer urges, upon a choice of nonviolent Christian texts. The first is to realize that climate change is teaching us that, while we may (and do) destroy large portions of the fabric of life on the planet, we did not create it and, even more importantly, we cannot re-create it. That was, and is, beyond human power. So to see ourselves within what Catherine Keller calls ‘the spatiality of the present global order’ forces us to face the fact that, like all other terrestrial species, we have always been and still are totally dependent on the life support systems which evolved long before our emergence and made Earth habitable for us. The history of those systems, whether written by scientists or by theologians, is found to be bound into the structure of the planet: rocks are its written words; geological periods its punctuation marks; it is illuminated by the planet’s unique atmosphere, illustrated by the lives of micro-organisms, mighty trees and human families. Our past is literally inconceivable without it; and so is our present and our future. This self-understanding lies behind microbiologist Lynn Margulis’ remark

 David Hallman (ed.), Ecotheology: Voices from South and North (New York: Maryknoll 1994), p 220f.    Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, ‘Another Inconvenient Truth: Violence within the ‘Sacred’ Texts’, The Fourth R, 20 (2007): 9–15. 

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that ‘independence is a political, not a biological concept’ – nor can it persist as a theological one either. Thinking consistently along these lines deflates any claim that we and our human institutions might make to the ‘ownership’ of the life support systems created, maintained and used by countless others. Our true status within the Earth community is one of indebtedness to a complex web of interrelational, interacting, visible and subvisible organisms. Our bodies, and our projects, are actually the joint product of interrelationships between the descendants of diverse ancestors. The Mystery of Giving Against this background, the second, allied approach that I adopted in Sacred Gaia,10 and again in Gaia’s Gift,11 is to reinterpret the nature of those interrelationships and interactions in terms of gift events. This opens us up to what a contemporary Irish poet, Brendan Kennelly, has called ‘the mystery of giving’.12 It takes for granted that giving involves more, far more than simply an exchange of goods between two people. The ‘more than’ refers to the relational processes within the ‘more than human’ community of life on Earth. What matters there are the relationships between giver, gift and receiver rather than their individual features. What makes the giving ‘mysterious’ is that the import and character of the relationships far exceeds any description of the features. Nevertheless, naming this relational process ‘the mystery of giving’ emphasizes the role of the giver. From our present perspective, there was an initiating moment in the process, which we see as a free act of giving. At its most personal and obvious, this was the moment when each of us was given life and birth. But that moment belongs within and depends upon a continuum of gift relationships and events, whose beginnings are shrouded in mystery. One such moment, long ago, is when photosynthesizers first split water into its primary components and so gave oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere. Its presence there prevented the hydrogen of water from escaping into space, as happened on Venus or Mars.13 Without that antecedent act of giving there would have been no life on Earth (as we know it). Nor would we be here to perceive it or influence it, for good or ill. So, while the precise timing of that antecedent gift event is beyond calculation, attempting to trace its origins back through evolutionary time to a point or place before the emergence of our species reminds us that, without it, our emergence

 Anne Primavesi, Sacred Gaia (London and New York: Routledge 2000), p. 17.   Ibid., ch 2, pp. 13, 14. 11  Anne Primavesi, Gaia’s Gift (London and New York: Routledge 2003), chs 8, 9. 12   Brendan Kennelly, Familiar Strangers (Northumberland: Bloodaxe 2004), p. 23. 13   James Lovelock, ‘Foreword’, in Mary Midgley, Earthy Realism (Exeter: Imprint Academic 2007), pp. 1–2. 

10

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would not have been possible. This allows me to name it, and what followed from it, as a ‘preoriginal’ gift event.14 Now climate change science is making us all aware of the importance of the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, of our relationship with it and above all, of our contributions to it. It is teaching us that its creative processes bind the relationships within a present gift event to those of preceding ones, where the role of receiver was played by the present giver, and that this process of giving and receiving continues to produce new relational configurations. We are also being reminded that the past and present products of the process of giving provide the means and conditions for others in future to act as givers and receivers. Jacques Derrida describes this diffuse and diffused relationship, stretching back between the present giver, gift and receiver and beyond them into the future, as a ‘living thread’.15 This expresses the truth that anything given to one person is also entwined with the lives of others: its effects are woven into, and throughout, lives unknown to and undreamt of to the original giver and receiver. Paul highlights these temporal connections between receiver, gift and giver. ‘What have you that you have not received? And if then you have received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ (1 Corinthians 4: 7). ‘Boasting’ about the past and present products of the process of giving, as if they were our possessions, follows from thinking that we and our technologies are their sole producers and that they exist to be consumed, bought, sold and discarded by us. It is this entrenched view of ourselves as the sole owners of the Earth’s resources, and of them as our possessions rather than as gifts to the whole community of life, that makes changing our present mindset and lifestyle so difficult. Jesus and the Mystery of Giving Present philosophical understandings of the mystery of giving and of our part in it run directly counter to this mindset. So what does a religious understanding of the mystery of giving offer us? This is where an anti-imperialist religious tradition binds together our global interrelationships. Taking Nelson-Pallmeyer’s advice and consciously choosing religious texts which do not sanction violence, we find that, before Paul, Jesus prioritized the fact that we have first to receive in order to be able to give. But he went beyond Paul by saying that the defining characteristic of receiving and giving is that it should be done freely. In a passage in the Gospels

14  Anne Primavesi, ‘The Preoriginal Gift and our Response to It’, in Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (eds), Ecospirit: Religion, Philosophy and the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press 2007), p. 217. 15   Jacques Derrida, ‘On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion’, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlan (eds), God, the Gift and Postmodernism, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999), p. 60.

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literally without precedent or parallel, when Jesus sends his disciples to preach and teach, he instructs them: ‘Freely you have received, freely give’ (Matthew: 10: 8). The verses following this injunction set out some of the more conventional requirements governing the conduct of newly hatched disciples. They are to carry no gold, silver or copper coins, no knapsack, second shirt, sandals or staff; no possessions that could be bought, sold, bartered or used as evidence of economic or imperial power. In the Acts of the Apostles, the early Christian communities preserved a sense of the importance of this edict. When Simon the Magician saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of hands by Peter and John, he offered them money, saying: ‘Give me also this power, that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ Peter retorted: ‘Your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!’ (Acts 8: 14–20). This encounter endorses Jesus’ injunction to the disciples to give ‘freely’ and shows that, to some extent at least, they grasped what it demanded of them. Derrida, too, understood its total demand. God asks, he said, that one should give without knowing, without calculating, reckoning or hoping; for one must give without counting, and that is what takes it outside of sense.16 This certainly takes giving outside of economic sense, as the latter is usually understood. For today the expectation of receiving more than one gives, of making a profit from it, is almost axiomatic. By contrast, Jesus’ injunction sets religious criteria for understanding what it means for us to receive and share but not to claim to possess the common life support systems of the whole community of life on Earth. His injunction to his disciples lays bare the radical, anarchic nature of relationships within the kingdom of God, whose mysterious truth we are called upon to realize. This is not the simple-minded, street-corner anarchy that reigns in kingdoms where lawlessness and unchecked violence rule. It does, however, run contrary to the laws that generally govern relationships between givers and receivers in the kingdoms of this world. It is one where the only ‘object’ in view is due attention to the relationships between receiver, gift and giver, and therefore to the intention of giving and to the mode of giving. From that perspective, the gift or object given doesn’t ‘count’: it is not taken into account.17 Jean-Luc Marion, in conversation with Derrida on the question of ‘what is the gift?’, agreed that we cannot explain it, nor do we have access to its meaning if we keep it within the horizon of the world’s economy. Indeed we could, he said, put aside at least one, or even two, of the most abstract and common patterns of gift-giving: a giver, a receiver and an object given. For there are situations where the giver is absent, or the receiver is unknown, or when nothing, no-thing is given.

16   Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), p. 97. 17   Ibid., p. 112.

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This happens when we give time, when we give our life, when we give death or when someone is given power to act.18 This reminds us that a gift does not belong within a series of objects. From an ecological even more than from a philosophical perspective, it can be perceived as a ‘living thread’. It is one spun from the Earth’s materials by a myriad of givers and receivers who are themselves bound into complex networks through mutualistic, asymmetric interrelationships. From a theological perspective, the same thread can be seen as being woven into, and throughout, no less essential patterns of relationships between receivers and givers within the mystery of the kingdom of God. The Kingdom of the God of Jesus For there are kingdoms and there are kingdoms, says John Caputo. A ‘kingdom’ is nothing in itself, apart from its historic context, its natural environment and the web of relationships that hold it together. Within the context and environment of Jesus’ own life, death and teaching, what reigns over relationships there is the justice of the Roman Empire, maintained through force or terror and sustained through the use of overwhelming power. Within God’s kingdom, however, things are organized around the ‘weak’ power of the powerless and freely shared among the dispossessed. Those within this kingdom are therefore ruled by an unconditional summons to stay open to the call of justice, to the claim or appeal of those without force.19 The similarity could not be greater between God’s kingdom and one based on the recognition of the gratuitous interrelatedness of all being. This kingdom, totally at odds with the prevailing economic one, is where we now act and know that, whatever we do to the least powerful among us, to the smallest and apparently most insignificant member of the community of life on Earth, ultimately affects all we are and do to each other. The contributions of ocean algae, of subvisible and intangible organisms in the air as well as of those visible on Earth but generally discounted – such as beetles and earthworms – are recognized with gratitude. Perhaps Meister Eckhart had this in mind when he said: ‘If, in your whole life, the only prayer you say is “thank you”, that is enough.’ This acknowledges the actuality of the oneness of all God’s relationships with the world. In this theological climate, violence against any living being, the use of force against those who do not conform to accepted rules of conduct or the use of religious sanctions to legitimize a lack of compassion, is automatically ruled out. For this is the climate of a kingdom whose laws are organized around the needs of the weak, the poor and the powerless. Its laws embody concern for those excluded from the 18

  Jean-Luc Marion, ‘On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion’, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlan (eds), God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999), pp. 62–3. 19   John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2006), pp. 24–9.

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benefits of the laws of this world and encourage unconditional giving as a way of responding to their needs. This means that they take us ‘outside of sense’: outside of what makes sense according to the reckoning of the dominant culture today. Given this difference, we then have to ask: what kind of God reigns within a kingdom whose relationships exemplify the mystery of giving? What, in particular, can we properly expect of the God who gives us the gift of Jesus? What rules of giving apply here? For they emerge not from the economic systems of this world but from that economy of the mystery of God through which, we are told, God so loved the world that He gave us His Son (Ephesians 3: 9; John 3: 16). And it is this love, given without reserve, that is at the heart of the mystery of giving within the kingdom of God. Jesus established the character of this God as one who loves without reserve by citing the command to love one’s enemies. Commenting on this, Derrida remarks that, if you love only those who love you and to the extent that they love you, if you hold strictly to this symmetry of mutuality and reciprocity, then you give nothing.20 This theological perspective on our relationships is completely at odds with a worldview in which religion is used to define an enemy as an object of justified hate, worthy only of violence, death or rejection. But such an apocalyptic vision fits well, alas, with the image of a wrathful, punitive God. From ‘outside’ that violent theological climate, however, Jesus specifically offers us an image of divine love without reserve – and therefore without violence: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. Because he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love them that love you, what reward have you? Do not even tax-collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? (Matt: 5: 43–6)

Because of this ‘mad’ precondition of divine unconditionality, the a priori of this kingdom is that we too take no account (literally) of worthiness or unworthiness; of thanks or future recompense. This emphasizes the radical, anarchic nature of the manner in which we are to live out the mystery of giving. If theological weather systems do not discriminate in favour of the good or deprive those who are unjust of their necessary share of sunshine and rain, then neither may we. The divine economic system that reigns here leaves us nothing to bargain with: nothing to give us an advantage in ‘free’ market exchanges. For if this is the kingdom which

20   Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), p. 106.

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is at hand, that hand is as empty, soft and vulnerable as that of a child. It is not the sort the world is used to seeing or grasping.21 This is in fact a Christian globalism that from the start translates into a counterimperial ecology of love. It signals the end of a particular kind of bounded, political and religiously destructive spatiality by exposing and acknowledging the new global climate of mutually assured vulnerability.22 This binds together Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God with the growing awareness, indeed assurance, of our vulnerability to the effects of climate change. By doing this it reveals another religious, if equally inconvenient, truth: namely that the kingdom of God is organized around an earthly and divine economy of love which takes no account of worthiness or unworthiness. Luther’s insight rings true. Human love seeks a loveworthy object; divine love creates one.23 This transforms our notion of a ‘kingdom’ into one of a kingdom to which we are invited, not coerced: one ruled only by the indiscriminate, unreserved love of God. Within it, the one community of life on Earth is organized around a divine economy which takes particular account of the smallest, weakest and most needy of its members. As countless research findings have shown in this time of climate change, these are the women, the children, the indigenous people and the poor. Within this kingdom our attentiveness to God is indistinguishable from our attentiveness to each other. For whoever knows the world as something to be used, says Buber, knows God the same way. And if we use violence-of-God traditions to justify violent relationships with others, then we are abusing God.24 This relational model of the mystery of giving is made even more specific in Orthodox theologian Dumitru Stăniloae’s image of ‘the gift of the world’. For him, as for Buber, this gift signifies less a thing than a process of personal interaction and disclosure: one in which the world itself becomes the very stuff of the dialogue of love between God and the world.25 Viewing gift as an expanding and expansive dialogue also allows Stăniloae to claim that Nature is ‘plainly involved’ in inter-human dialogue, indeed supplies the very ‘stuff’ of that dialogue. This leads Stăniloae to the empoweringly spiritual conclusion that it is these interactions that are also the ‘very stuff’ of the ‘dialogue of love’ between God and us. Woven, I would add, out of ‘living threads’. In its quality as gift, therefore, the world attains to a centrality in that process whereby humanity experiences personal communion with God. As the medium for such a ‘dialogue of the gift’, the world is much more than an impersonal context   John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2006), p. 26. 22  Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys, (Minneapolis: Fortress 2005), p. 116. 23  Martin Luther, ‘Disputatio Heidelbergae habita 1518 XXVIII’ in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, (Weimar 1883), p. 365. 24  Martin Buber, I And Thou, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark 1970), pp. 155–7. 25  Charles Miller, The Gift of the World (Edinburgh: T & T Clark 2000), pp. 58f. 21

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of divine–human communication. Instead, it is the very stuff of the ‘dialogue of love’ between God and us.26 Stuff, threads, relationships, dialogue. However we describe the mystery of giving, we are reminded that the gift relationship in its human manifestation is not in I or You, but between I and You: between us and God. It is not like the blood that circulates in You or I, but like the air in which we breathe. Breathing in, we receive: breathing out, we give.

26

  Ibid., p. 59.

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Bibliography Buber, Martin, I And Thou (Edinburgh: T & T Clark 1970). Caputo, John D., The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2006). Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995). Donaldson, Laura and Pui-Lan Kwok (eds), Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse (New York: Routledge 2002). Hallman, David (ed.), Ecotheology: Voices from South and North (New York: Maryknoll 1994). Henson, Robert, The Rough Guide to Climate Change (London: Rough Guides Ltd 2006). Hughes, Johnson Donald, An Environmental History of the World (London and New York: Routledge 2001). Keller, Catherine, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress 2005). Kennelly, Brendan, Familiar Strangers (Northumberland: Bloodaxe 2004). Lovelock, James, ‘Foreword’, in Mary Midgley, Earthy Realism (Exeter: Imprint Academic 2007), pp. 1–2. Luther, Martin, ‘Disputatio Heidelbergae habita 1518 XXVIII’, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar 1883), pp. 353–65. Marion, Jean-Luc, ‘On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and JeanLuc Marion’, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlan (eds), God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999), pp. 54–79. McNeill, John, Something New Under The Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York and London: W. W. Norton 2000). Miller, Charles, The Gift of the World (Edinburgh: T & T Clark 2000). Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack, ‘Another Inconvenient Truth: Violence within the “Sacred” Texts’, The Fourth R, 20 (2007), pp. 9–15. Primavesi, Anne, ‘The Preoriginal Gift and our Response to It’, in Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (eds), Ecospirit: Religion, Philosophy and the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press 2007), pp. 217–32. — Gaia’s Gift (London and New York: Routledge 2003). — Sacred Gaia (London and New York: Routledge 2000). Yeats, William Butler, ‘Easter 1916’, in L. Robinson (ed), The Golden Treasury of Irish Verse (London: Macmillan 1930), pp. 155–7.

Chapter 4

The Whole Household of God: The Use of the Oikos Metaphor in the Built and the Non-Built Environment Ernst M. Conradie

1. Introduction: Ecumenical Discourse on the Household of God In recent ecumenical discourse the notion of the ‘whole household (oikos) of God’ has been employed as a new theological root metaphor. The power of this metaphor lies in its ability to integrate especially three core ecumenical themes on the basis of derivatives of the ancient Greek verb oikein (‘to dwell’) – which forms the etymological root of the modern terms designating the quests for ‘economic’ justice (the nomoi or regulations within the household), for ‘ecological’ sustain­ability (the logos or underlying principles of the household) and for ‘ecumenical’ fellowship (oikoumene – participating as members of the whole household of God). Ecumenical discourse on the whole household of God is best understood within the context of the whole work of God (creation, providence, redemption, completion), which has traditionally been described as the ‘economy (oikonomia) of the triune God’, from which the phrase ‘economic trinity’ has also been derived. Christian communities live from the conviction that the whole household (oikos) belongs to God and has to answer to God’s economy.    See especially John B. Cobb (jr), Economics, ecology and justice (New York: Orbis Books 1992), Ernst M. Conradie, An Ecological Christian Anthropology: At Home on Earth? (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005), Douglas M. Meeks, God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1989), Lewis S. Mudge, ‘Towards a Hermeneutic of the Household: Ecclesiology and Ethics after Harare’, Ecumenical Review 51.3 (1999), 243–55, Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, God’s Spirit Transforming a World in Crisis (New York: Continuum 1995), Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1996) and Konrad Raiser, Ecumenism in Transition: A Paradigm Shift in the Ecumenical Movement? (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1991). See also the unpublished doctoral thesis by Andrew Warmback, ‘Constructing an Oikotheology: The Environment, Poverty and the Church in South Africa’ (Pietermaritzburg 2006), which explores resources for the construction of an ‘oiko­theology’, drawing especially from the earthkeeping initiatives in the Anglican diocese of Umzimvubu in South Africa.    See Meeks, God the Economist (above, n. 1), p. 33.

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On this basis, the notion of the whole household of God may serve as a theological root metaphor for current discourse on a wide variety of theological themes. It has been employed for an ecological doctrine of creation based on the indwelling of God’s Spirit in creation and in the ecclesial community; for an anthropology of steward­ship (the function of the oikonomos) or of being ‘at – home on Earth’; for a soteriology and an ecumenical ecclesiology focusing on the way of becoming members of the ‘household of God’ (Ephesians 2:19–22); for an eschatology expressing the hope that the house which we, as humans, inhabit (the Earth) will indeed become God’s home; for a pastoral theology toward the   Behind much of the current ecumenical discourse on the oikos metaphor lurks the ecological doctrine of creation of Jürgen Moltmann developed in his seminal work God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (London: SCM Press 1985). Moltmann emphasizes the indwelling of God in creation through the Spirit. He notes that ‘[h]uman beings already experience the indwellings of God in the Spirit here in history, even if as yet only partially and provisionally’ (p. 5). Christian hope for the con­sum­mation of creation is a hope that creation will become the home and dwelling place of God’s glory (see section 3 below).   For one example, see Arnold Van Ruler’s essay ‘Structural Differences between the Christological and Pneumatological Perspectives’, in his Calvinist Trinitarianism and Theocentric Politics: Essays towards a Public Theology, translated and introduced by John Bolt (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press 1989, 27–46. Christ is Immanuel (God within us), while the inhabitation of the Spirit suggests that God is also in us.   Larry Rasmussen observes that, ‘if English had adopted the Greek word for steward (oikonomos), we would immedi­ately recognize the steward as the trustee, the caretaker of creation imaged as oikos’. See his essay ‘Theology of Life and Ecumenical Ethics’, in David Hallman (ed.), Ecotheology: Voices from South and North (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1994), pp. 112–29. See also the contributions by Douglas John Hall on stewardship where the oikos metaphor is also employed, especially The Steward: A Biblical Model Come of Age (Grand Rapids: WB Eerdmans 1990).    There are numerous contributions toward a theological anthropology which focus on the need for humans to recognize that they are ‘at home on Earth’. For an overview and a critical engagement with such discourse, while staying with the root metaphor of the household of God, see my Ecological Christian Anthropology (above, n. 1), pp. 6–7, 26–40.   For brief comments on the soteriological and ecclesiological dimensions of the metaphor of God’s household, see Meeks, God the Economist (above, n. 1), pp. 33–6. Meeks speaks of God as ‘the Economist’ to describe the way in which God is redeeming the world (through the nomoi of Torah and gospel) and its implications for world economy. See also my essay on ‘The whole Household of God (oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives’, Scriptura 94, 2007, pp. 1–28) for a detailed assessment of the place of the church in the larger household of God. In that essay I discussed the confusing ways in which the notion of the household is employed in ecumenical discourse. More specifically, I investigated the place and mission of the church within the larger household of God.    See especially Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1996) and my Hope for the Earth – Vistas on a New Century 

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edification of the household (oikodomein); for and an ethics of eco-justice,10 inhabitation,11 homemaking, hospitality12 and sufficient nourishment.13 Although one may also develop a Christology on the basis of the notion of the household of God (Christ being the cornerstone of this house according to Ephesians 2: 20), there is a tendency in ecumenical discourse for the oikos metaphor to move away from a Christological focus towards a pneumato­logical orientation.14 (Eugene: Wipf and Stock 2005), which employs the distinction between ‘house’ and ‘home’, suggesting that the Earth is the house which we inhabit as humans, but that it is not our home yet. Christian hope may be interpreted as the hope to be at home with God, on Earth as in heaven.    See Müller-Fahrenholz, God’s Spirit Transforming a World in Crisis (above, n. 1), but also various contributions on the notion of the church as ‘resident aliens’ (paroikia). MüllerFahrenholz regards an emphasis on the paroikía character of the church as an important corrective, which becomes necessary whenever what Müller-Fahrenholz calls the primary ‘ecodomical task’ of the church is threatened. He says: ‘There is an undeniable tension between oikodomé and paroikía. Whereas the former implies purpose and creativity, the latter tends towards separation of earth and heaven and fosters an escapist spirituality. But this need not be the case. The notion of paroikía is useful in underscoring that the followers of Christ can only be strangers in a world that rejects them. ... Ecodomical communities cannot be at peace with the violent powers that threaten to throw the world into chaos; rather they must seek to correct and transform a world in crisis’ (p. 110). 10  The term ‘ecojustice’ is often used in ecumenical discourse to capture the need for a comprehen­sive sense of justice which can respond both to economic injustice and to eco­lo­gical degradation. It is for example employed in the important study document on Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth, produced by the Justice, Peace and Creation team of the World Council of Churches (2005) – in which the household of God also operates as the theological root metaphor. The term ‘ecojustice’ was coined by William Gibson and popularized by Dieter Hessel. Hessel identifies the following basic norms for an ecojustice ethics: solidarity with other creatures, ecological sustainability, sufficiency and socially just participation. See his studies in Hessel (ed.), After Nature’s Revolt: Eco-Justice and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1992) and Theology for Earth Community: A Field Guide (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1996). 11   See the contributions on a theology of the built environment by Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Space and Spirit: Towards a Theology of Inhabitation’, in Sigurd Bergmann (ed.), Architecture, Aesth/ethics and Religion (Göttingen: KO – Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation 2005), pp. 45–103 and by Tim Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment (Cambridge 2002). 12   See Raiser, Ecumenism in Transition (above, n. 1), pp. 109–111. 13   See the eloquent description of what ‘home’ entails undertaken by Meeks in God the Economist (above, n. 1), p. 36: ‘Home is where everyone knows your name. Home is where you can always count on being confronted, forgiven, loved, and cared for. Home is where there is always a place for you at the table. And, finally, home is where you can count on sharing what is on the table.’ 14   This is especially evident in the influential work of Konrad Raiser. In his Ecumenism in Transition (above, n. 1). Raiser explores the need for a paradigm shift in ecumenical

34

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In ecumenical discourse on ‘Life and Work’ and on ‘Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation’, the household of God serves as a theological root metaphor prompting one to reflect on a number of aspects: the integrity of the biophysical foundations of this house (the Earth’s biosphere); the economic management of the household’s affairs; the need for peace and reconciliation amidst ethnic, religious and domestic violence within this single household; a concern for issues of health and education; the place of women and children within it; and an ecumenical sense of the unity not only of the church, but also of the whole humankind and of all of God’s creation, the whole inhabited world (oikoumene).15 Given this strong ethical emphasis, it is not always entirely clear from ecumenical discourse what difference it makes to describe the planetary household as the household of God, that is, in terms of God’s inhabitation. There is indeed a danger of talking about the household of God without talking about (or to) God. It should be evident that the household of God as a theological root metaphor has considerable strengths. It builds on and provides impetus for the widespread recognition (especially in indigenous and ecological theologies) of the theological significance of place (and not only of time) and locality.16 The metaphor of the household of God will appeal to families who treasure a sense of homeliness and to people (often women) for whom homemaking constitutes a major part of their daily lives.17 Perhaps it will also appeal to those, for example in Africa, who have been denied a home: (environ­ment­al) refu­gees, the homeless waiting upon some housing scheme, those who were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes (also under apartheid in South Africa), street children, battered women, (potential) rape victims for whom ‘home’ is indeed a dangerous place, and all those who have not found a place where they can feel at home. It may also be applicable to countless species whose habitat has been invaded for the sake of human interests. Clearly, although the Earth does not provide a home for all yet, the yearning of Christian hope is that all God’s creatures will find a lasting home in God’s household. theology, from a ‘narrow’ Christological focus towards a ‘broader’ pneumatological orientation, which would supple­ment (but not replace) the earlier paradigm. As I have argued elsewhere, this calls for renewed theological reflection on the filioque controversy. See my Christianity and Ecological Theology: Resources for Further Research (Stellenbosch: SUN Press 2006). 15   Konrad Raiser, To be the Church: Challenges and Hopes for a New Millennium (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1997), p. 49. 16   See Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Theology in its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God’, Religion Compass 1 (2007), and George Tinker, ‘The Full Circle of Liberation: An American Indian Theology of Place’, in Hallman (ed,), Ecotheology (above, n. 5), pp. 218–25. The category of space/place emphasizes the rootedness of all forms of life and highlights the relationship between the issues of ecology (inhabited space) and justice (control over space). 17   See Mercy Amba Oduoye, Introducing African Women’s Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 2005), p. 78.

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Like all metaphors, the notion of the ‘household of God’ has certain limita­ tions. Since any concept of household is necessarily a form of social construction, it can easily be employed to serve the inter­ests of patriarchs and posses­s­ive parents (the proverbial patresfamilias, the propa­gation of precon­ceived ‘family values’, the restriction of slaves, women and children to the private sphere, or the domestic­a­tion (!) of eman­ci­patory struggles.18 Moreover, many a dictator has tried to portray himself as a ‘family man’. In pluralist industrial societies the influence of the household is often restricted to the sphere of the private or to recrea­tion after hours. The use of the oikos metaphor may therefore unwit­tingly reinforce the marginalization and privatization of Christian testimony in society. The use of household imagery in ecological, economic and ecumenical discourse has led to considerable confusion concerning the parameters of such a household. Is the house we are called to inhabit that of the Christian family, conceived of as a household of faith; or is it the (local) church, the ecumenical church, the ‘wider ecumenism’ of the unity of all humankind, the management of the house in the global economy, or the whole biosphere as a household of life? Although the etymon (oikos) is present at all these levels, it is not clear what the ‘house’ includes and excludes in each case and how it is constituted: by God, by faith, through ecumenical fellowship, by society, by offering a planetary habitat for humans, and so on. In this contribution I will therefore reflect on the relative adequacy of this theological root metaphor when the latter is extended from the built environment to the non-built environment. In the next section I will offer a general discussion in this regard. In the third section I will explore Jürgen Moltmann’s seminal exposition of the metaphor of the household of God in greater detail. 2. The Household of God in the Built and Non-Built Environment As I noted above, one of the strengths of ecumenical discourse on the household of God as a whole is its ability to integrate ecumenical, economic and ecological concerns. However, such integration comes at the price of a lack of conceptual clarity. In this section I will focus on the use of this metaphor in ecological theology, that is, in the course of attempts to reflect on the well-being of the whole biosphere in the context of environmental degradation. It should be immediately obvious that a metaphor from the human environment and, more specifically, from the built environment is employed in this way to express ecological concerns, that is, concerns which are extended towards the nonhuman and non-built environment. The strength of this metaphorical extension lies in the fact that the biosphere does offer a ‘hospitable’ ‘home’ for countless living  The crucial question is therefore how oikos and polis (which involves political power and rule) are related to one another and how both are related to kosmos. See Meeks, God the Economist (above, n. 1), p. 8. 18

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organisms in those places where they can flourish. Strictly speaking, the ecological term ‘habitat’ instead of ‘home’ would perhaps be more precise in accounting for this ecological space. It is a space where living organisms can find a habitus, where they can exercise their regular habits. That the biosphere does offer such a habitat is a truism, but one that remains breathtaking if one follows the evolution of life on Earth through the contributions emerging from geology, meteorology, biology and palaeontology. On this basis it becomes possible to express concerns wherever a suitable habitat is no longer available for living organisms to flourish. As Holmes Rolston argues, it is not so much the stability or integrity of such ecosystems that is significant, but their ‘projective thrust’, that is, their ability despite changing circumstances to allow multiple forms of life to emerge and flourish.19 Despite such clear strengths, the metaphorical extension will have to take account of various ways in which the non-human and non-built environment is dissimilar to a human house/home. The following aspects may be mentioned in this regard: Firstly, an anthropomorphic notion of home is in this way applied to nonhuman species. This is not by itself problematic, since other species also engage in house-building activities. Here one may mention the nests of birds, the hives of bees and ants, the holes of snakes, rabbits and mongoose and the shelter of hibernating animals such as bears. Human houses are similar to the results of such house-building activities in that they provide shelter and they draw building materials from the biophysical environment. The problem is that the notion of ‘house’ or ‘home’ is typically extended to larger ecosystems, which are said to provide a home/habitat for living organisms. Often the notion of home is taken to refer to the whole Earth, or at least to the biosphere as a whole. However, such larger ecosystems do not strictly provide a house for species, but a habitat to thrive in. As Michael Welker observes, the image of the Earth as a house does not take the self-productive activity of the Earth into account. This is, in fact, already evident from the Earth’s own agency according to the first creation narrative in Genesis. The Earth (’eretz) is portrayed not so much as a house, but rather as an active empowering agent which brings forth life.20 Secondly, the differences between a house and a habitat may be described in terms of stability. A crucial characteristic of a house, for humans and animals, is indeed its stability. It is the stability of a stable that provides protection for the horse against fluctuations in the outside weather or in the movements of predators. Even though such stability is, necessarily, only temporary, a house offers protection precisely on the basis of such relative stability. This also applies to temporary houses (tents) or mobile houses (caravans, boat houses). For humans and other home-building animals such stability has to be relative, since an adequate house   See his Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1988), pp. 186–8, and Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press 1994), pp. 171–7. 20  Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1999), p. 41. 19

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has also to be adaptable in order to accommodate the changing needs of its inhabitants. Nevertheless, too much adaptability and flexibility can hamper a sense of homeliness. Anyone who has slept in a tent on a windy night would be able to attest to that! Of course ecosystems too are characterized by a certain stability, but this is understood within the context of the regularity of the rhythm of day and night, summer and winter, rain and drought. Thirdly, (human) houses require a clear sense of boundaries. If a household can offer no sense of belonging inside and can exclude nothing on the outside, then it would become virtually meaningless and would no longer offer any sense of being at home. The household, with its fenced vegetable and fruit garden, epitomizes the human need for a surrounded social and moral space. Indeed, housing typically precedes birth. The enclosure does not only define and protect; it also demarcates a frontier describing the identity of the household – but also, and on that same basis, the possibility of communication with what lies outside the enclosure.21 The enclosure is therefore not meant to be exclusive but to demarcate an open frontier. If the boundaries of the household are rigid and closed, the inhabitants will wither away and die. Or, as Konrad Raiser suggests, the ecumenical household ‘constantly displays this duality between boundary and openness, independence and relationship, rest and movement, the familiar and the alien, continuity and discontinuity.’22 Nevertheless, the extension of the metaphor of the household to larger ecosystems becomes problematic when the inclusiveness of the notion of house­hold is expanded to such an extent that the latter has no boundaries – unlike any particular house­hold. Such a metaphorical extension may well come at the cost of a sense of homeliness. Fourthly, it should be noted that the construction of human houses is both aimed at synergy with the biophysical environment outside the house and at protecting the inhabitants from such an environment. Humans build houses to find shelter from the cold, the heat and the rain, to protect themselves from dangerous animals and to create a zone of comfort in the house and in the garden – which is evidently not provided by the environment outside of it. The art of architecture is both to exclude and to make use of the natural environment so as to serve such purposes in a creative way. Such (acts of) exclusion apply, in a derivative sense, also to larger ecosystems of the biosphere. Ecosystems require boundary lines between sea and land, between water and soil – as the first creation narrative in Genesis recognizes. The thin layer of the biosphere, likewise, sets boundaries between the Earth’s crust and the benevolent but also dangerous impact of the sun. Nevertheless, to speak of the Earth as a house which humans and other living organisms can inhabit would not do justice to the intentional agency involved in house-building. On this basis one may argue that, even though there are sufficient similarities between human houses and the habitat provided by ecosystems to justify using 21   Jürgen Moltmann, Science and Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2003), p. 113–14; also, God in creation, p. 144. 22  Raiser, Ecumenism in Transition (above, n. 1), p. 88.

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the metaphor of the ‘household of God’ to describe the Earth community, the undeniable differences between a house and a habitat require some theological circumspection. In the next section I will discuss the use of the notion of the household of God by Jürgen Moltmann, whose God in Creation probably remains the main theological source for ecumenical discourse on the household of God. Remarkably, Moltmann’s earlier interests in questions about time and Christian hope are in this way complemented by theological reflections on space and place. The core question for Moltmann is how God can be regarded as the living space of creation and how creation can be regarded as a living space for God, which would be epitomized in the Sabbath feast. 3. Jürgen Moltmann on the Metaphor of the Household of God In the preface to God in Creation, Moltmann comments on the subtitle of his work: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation. He notes that, in a deeper sense of the word, ‘ecology’ here refers to ‘the doctrine of the house’. The core insight is a pneumatological one, namely the indwelling of God’s Spirit in creation. He says: ‘The inner secret of creation is the indwelling of God, just as the inner secret of the sabbath of creation is God’s rest.’23 He adds that the purpose of God’s indwelling (Shekinah) is to make the whole creation the house of God.24 God’s creation is, from the beginning, an open creation, and in the consummation of all things it will become the home and dwelling place of God’s glory. This indwelling is already experienced in history, though only in part and provisionally. The Christian hope is that God will dwell entirely, wholly and for ever in God’s own creation and that God will allow all the created beings to participate in the fullness of God’s eternal life.25 This is anticipated in the celebration of the Sabbath as a sign of God’s indwelling presence and blessing. The Sabbath is the consummation of creation and the prefiguration of creation’s redemption – the redemption that would enable the world to participate in God’s manifested presence.26 This leads Moltmann to the following programmatic formulation: ‘If the creative God himself dwells in his creation, then he is making it his own home, “on earth as it is in heaven”. All created beings then find in nearness to him, the inexhaustible wellspring of their life, and for their part find home and rest in God.’27 The indwelling of God is therefore, according to Moltmann, primarily an indwelling through God’s Spirit. One may identify a spatial and a temporal dimension of such an indwelling. One may note that, viewed spatially, the human  Moltmann, God in Creation (above, n. 3), p. xii.   Ibid., p. xiii. 25   Ibid., p. 5. 26   Ibid., p. 277. 27   Ibid., p. 5. 23

24

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body is described as a temple of the Spirit; the indwelling of the Spirit becomes visible in the church through the gifts of the Spirit, and the whole of creation is infused by the indwelling of God’s Spirit. Viewed temporally, the Spirit hovers over the deep from the beginning, is active throughout history and the whole creation awaits the coming of God to dwell among us (Revelations 21: 3). The Spirit’s engagement with the world can therefore be described through a range of concepts, including creating, preserving, renewing, consummating and indwelling. Moltmann suggests that the incarnation of the Logos (the pattern according to which everything was made in God’s wisdom) may be distinguished from the indwelling of the Spirit. The Word ‘becomes flesh’ but the Spirit ‘indwells’.28 The Spirit dwells in every individual creature and in the community of creation. What does such ‘indwelling’ entail? Moltmann’s answer is ‘that the presence of the infinite in the finite imbues every finite thing, and the community of all finite beings, with self-transcendence’.29 The abstract terminology employed here suggests a shift away from the concrete imagery of a house in which the Spirit dwells, making a home for God and for all creatures. Such a shift is perhaps understandable. In the biblical witnesses, the engagement of the Spirit with creation is described in terms of different metaphors. These include the fountain, the wind, a fire, a breath of life, a mother bird and a builder.30 Such metaphorical richness is clearly attractive, but it does call for circumspection in terms of how the image of indwelling and of the Earth as God’s house is to be understood. An unreflective mixing of metaphors may be disastrous. In crude terms: the house will be on fire! The house may become flooded by a fountain underneath. The house is built precisely for protection from a strong wind. Moltmann himself employs several of these images. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he understands the Spirit’s engagement with the world in terms of twin foci, namely one of energizing and one of indwelling. Divine activity is understood in a pneumatic way, as an unceasing inflow of energies and potentialities through the Spirit.31 This may correlate with the images of the Spirit as Wind, as Wellspring and as Breath of Life. Moltmann emphasizes that such energizing should not be understood in a unilateral way, in terms of causation (and certainly not in an interventionist manner32). Instead, this energizing is reciprocal in nature. It resonates with the energies unleashed within each creature. The Spirit therefore can act in and through God’s creatures. The Spirit, one could say,

28

  Ibid., p. 102.   Ibid., p. 101. 30   See Mark I. Wallace, Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2005), pp. 36–9, who relates these pneumatological images to earth, fire, water and air. 31  Moltmann, God in Creation (above, n. 3), p. 9. 32   Ibid., p. 211. 29

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energizes matter.33 The Spirit’s work may therefore be described through formal categories such as anticipation and communication,34 or through human categories such as sympathizing, participating, accompanying, enduring, delighting and glorifying.35 It is precisely this resonance that allows for the indwelling of the Spirit and its mutual interpenetration with the world (perichoresis).36 God creates the world and enters into it. The world lives from the creative power of the Spirit, and yet the Spirit dwells in it.37 It is this indwelling that allows creatures to become footprints of God (vestigia Dei): ‘God’s signature is on the whole of nature. All creatures are love letters from God to us.’38 We are able to see in nature a mirror image that reflects God’s beauty. Such divine activities of energizing and indwelling correlate with the human activities of work (labour) and habitation. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s notion of ‘home country’, Moltmann describes ‘home’ as a network of social relationships which sustains a person and relieves one from struggle and anxiety. He adds that the natural environment does not offer such a home for humans by itself. It has to be adapted by humans. Nature’s habitability indicates that it has the capacity to offer such a home, but only if the natural environment is used without being destroyed.39 The Spirit’s work may therefore be understood both as home-making and as indwelling – as work and as festive rest. The human reception of the Spirit’s work is eucharistic in orientation and may be understood in a complementary way, as the (passive) experience of grace (for the home received) and the (more active) expression of gratitude (preparing the house).40 4. Can the ‘Whole Household of God’ Serve as an Ecumenical Root Metaphor? How should the relationship between God, humans and the non-built environment be imagined? In the discussion above, we have seen the strengths but also the ambiguities of the notion of the household of God in this regard. One may, of course, argue that no single (theological) metaphor could ever be sufficient and that metaphors should not be taken too literally. One may suggest instead the need for a variety of metaphors, for example to describe the Spirit’s engagement with creation.

33

  Ibid., p. 212: ‘Creation contains neither spirit-less matter nor non-material spirit; there is only informed matter.’ 34   Ibid., pp. 264–70. 35   Ibid., p. 14. 36   Ibid., pp. 258 f. 37   Ibid., p. 15. 38  Moltmann, God in creation, p. 63–4, drawing on a formulation by Ernesto Cardenal. 39  Moltmann, God in Creation, p. 46. 40   Ibid., pp. 69–71.

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However, simply switching from one metaphor to another would not facilitate, and may actually evade, detailed critical investigation. This would also underestimate the staying power of theological root metaphors. Root metaphors, like scientific paradigms, cannot be simply invented. They provide an integrating power and a sense of stability to entire theological discourses by suggesting a deep connection between the biblical roots of Christianity, its subsequent history and the contemporary situation. Examples would include soteriological concepts such as ‘Christ’s victory’, ‘justification’, ‘liberation’, ‘reconstruction’, or ‘the imitation of Christ’. The question is therefore whether the notion of the whole household of God could provide such a root metaphor for ecumenical Christianity in this century. The best way to salvage the metaphor of the household of God may be to employ the soteriological and eschatological tension between ‘house’ and ‘home’. The Earth itself may provide a ‘house’ for human beings and other living creatures in the sense that it is indeed a habitable planet and that the atmosphere protects us from harmful radiation and most asteroids. However, it does not by itself provide a place to be at home in. This is partly due to a sense of mortality and transience, to what has been described as ‘natural suffering’. Moreover, the destructive legacy of human sin has thwarted attempts to exercise our human vocation and responsibility, to structure this household in such a way that it would provide a habitable home for other humans and for other living creatures. Instead, we tend to destroy one another’s houses, for example with forced removals under apartheid, but also in the cases of millions who have become environmental refugees. Likewise, through what we say and do to one another, we often destroy opportunities for homeliness and flourishing co-habitation, even in cases where we live in luxurious houses. It requires the home-making engagement of God’s Spirit to create a true home. Moreover, it requires the redemptive work of the Spirit to create a home for the homeless amidst the destruction of habitat, of houses and of homes. Such redemptive work should be related more explicitly than has been done in ecumenical contributions thus far to the person and work of Jesus Christ as the cornerstone upon which the house of God is constructed. Only on this basis can humans be called by the Spirit to inhabit the house in such a way that it will provide a home for themselves and, in a derivative sense, also for other creatures.

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Bibliography Bergmann, Sigurd, ‘Space and Spirit: Towards a Theology of Inhabitation’, in Sigurd Bergmann (ed.), Architecture, Aesth/ethics and Religion (Göttingen: IKO – Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation 2005), 45–103. — ‘Theology in its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God’, Religion Compass 1 (2007), 10.1111/ j.1749–8171.2007.00025.x. Best, Thomas F. and Martin Robra (eds), Ecclesiology and Ethics: Ecumenical Ethical Engagement, Moral Formation and the Nature of the Church (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1997). Cobb, John B. (jr), Sustainability: Economics, Ecology and Justice (New York: Orbis Books 1992). Conradie, Ernst M., Hope for the Earth – Vistas on a New Century (Eugene: Wipf and Stock 2005). — An Ecological Christian Anthropology: At Home on Earth? (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005). — ‘Reformed Perspectives from the South African Context on an Agenda for Ecological Theology’, Ecotheology: The Journal of Religion, Nature and the Environment 10/3 (2005), 281–314. — Christianity and Ecological Theology: Resources for Further Research, Study Guides in Religion and Theology 11 (Stellenbosch: SUN Press 2006). — ‘The Whole Household of God (oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives’ (Parts I and II), Scriptura 94 (2007), 1–28. Gorringe, Timothy, A Theology of the Built Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002). Hall, Douglas John, The Steward: A Biblical Model Come of Age (Grand Rapids: WB Eerdmans 1990). Hessel, Dieter T. (ed.), After Nature’s Revolt: Eco-Justice and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1992). — (ed.), Theology for Earth Community: A Field Guide (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1996). Justice, Peace and Creation team, WCC, Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth (AGAPE): A Background Document (Geneva: World Council of Churches 2005). Meeks, Douglas M., God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1989). Moltmann, Jürgen, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (London: SCM Press 1985). — The Coming of God. Christian Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1996). — Science and Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2003). Mudge, Lewis S., ‘Towards a Hermeneutic of the Household: Ecclesiology and Ethics after Harare’, Ecumenical Review 51/3 (1999), 243–55.

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Müller-Fahrenholz, Geiko, God’s Spirit Transforming a World in Crisis (New York: Continuum 1995). Oduoye, Mercy Amba, Introducing African Women’s Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 2005). Raiser, Konrad, Ecumenism in Transition: A Paradigm Shift in the Ecumenical Movement? (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1991). — To be the Church. Challenges and Hopes for a New Millennium (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1997). Rasmussen, Larry, ‘Theology of Life and Ecumenical Ethics’, in David G. Hallman (ed.), Ecotheology. Voices from South and North (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1994), pp. 112–29. — Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1996). Rolston, Holmes (III), Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1988). — Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press 1994). Tinker, George, ‘The Full Circle of Liberation: An American Indian Theology of Place’, in David G. Hallman (ed.), Ecotheology. Voices from South and North (Geneva: World Council of Churches 1994), pp. 218–25. Van Ruler, Arnold A., ‘Structuurverschillen tussen het Christologische en het Pneumatologische gezichtspunt’, in Theologisch werk Deel I (Nijkerk: GF Callenbach 1969), 175–90. (Translated as ‘Structural Differences between the Christological and Pneumatological Perspectives’, in idem, Calvinist Trinitarianism and Theocentric Politics: Essays Towards a Public Theology, translated and introduced by John Bolt (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press 1989), 27–46. Wallace, Mark I., Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2005). Warmback, Andrew E. ‘Constructing an Oikotheology: The Environment, Poverty and the Church in South Africa’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal (2006). Welker, Michael, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1999).

Chapter 5

Interpreting Heaven and Earth: The Theological Construction of Nature, Place, and the Built Environment Forrest Clingerman

Can humans ‘build Heaven’? This might appear to be a simple question to answer. But an answer – at least from the perspective of Christian theology – requires thinking through a sense of how humans encounter place and building in life, as well as of how Christianity navigates between place and placelessness. This simple question, in other words, marks the place where theology can reflect on the intersection between nature, space, and the sacred. Using the example of Heaven as the paradigmatic religious re-imaging of place, I will argue that any manifestation of place can illuminate the sacred. Thus Heaven is built by engaging in the practice of recognizing the placeless depth of every interpretation and reinterpretation of place. Emplacement and Interpreting Place ‘Building Heaven’ emerges as a possibility only by first understanding what it means to build, which in turn rests on the conception of place. Discovering – and building – our sense of place is critical to our constitution as humans, and thus emerges in a variety of ways. For example, think of how quickly small hands find ways to manipulate cubes of wood. Approximating the themes discovered in lived experience, toy blocks are squarely cut and shorn of their previous association with organic roots. In the hands of children, blocks present the first opportunity to partition space, and thus these simple toys become the basis for the human engagement with the endless play of demarcating and domesticating space. Playing is often the first process through which we come to understand place. Exploring such playful interactions with space, we see that place emerges when we interpret (and reinterpret) space in the light of our imagination, hopes, 

  I am self-consciously using ‘Heaven’ as a Christian theological concept. A comparison between the ways in which other religions might use this concept would enlighten the present essay, but such a comparison is beyond the scope of what can be accomplished here.

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and dreams for meaning. By focusing on the ways in which we hermeneutically build place, we move beyond the realist–constructivist debate which Kingsley Goodwin discusses in his essay ‘Deep Ecology as Phenomenology’. ‘Building place’ marks out the process of interpreting space, however simple. Starting from a single point, a single cube in space, small fingers use blocks to build outward, across the floor. Blocks are placed side by side to create walls or fences, to trace out a stable for a toy horse, or to mark a square that will become the foundation for a doll’s house. Evoking the biblical story, a child’s babbling is a trace of the human urge to build upward as well; hands stack and balance the wood blocks, seeking to construct places which conquer the horizon. Modeling ancient stories of towers, flights of fancy, and human pride, blocks balance one atop of another, to make an earthly sign of our desire to push to the heavens. Showing depth and height, expansion and transcendence, the grain on the face of children’s blocks is the point where we discover how ingrained in the human psyche building – that is, interpreting – place is. Not only is place an important feature of human life, it also is essential for our theological understanding of nature: an adequate theological model of nature starts with place. Place opens a pathway into what is understood as ‘nature’: it is in the encounter with a ‘somewhere’ – a place – that we initially find the actuality of nature. But, paradoxically, place emerges when humans fashion each ‘somewhere’ of nature as particular, unique, and different from the surrounding space. Thus our encounters with nature contain both an immediacy of encounter and a mediation of production. In fact ‘nature’ is always and exclusively found in such interactions with place – or, better, in the encounter – and it builds a place both as a unique experience and as an abstract concept. If nature is always already found in place, then our understanding of nature arises in the act of interpretation which sets apart a place (in time, space, use, and communal membership, among other things) from other places. For example, my own conception of nature occurs in conversation with a myriad of places: the scaly spine of the Iowa loess hills, with grasses and yucca growing on steep slopes; Keet’s Brook, with its ferns and shallow rocky bottom in western Massachusetts; a snowy Green Mountain Lake in   My assumption is that modeling is the most fruitful way to present a theological understanding of nature. There is a sizeable literature on theological modeling by authors such as Sallie McFague, Ian Barbour, David Klemm and William Klink. Further, there are important similarities between models and metaphors in theology, a situation which ties the present essay with that of Ernst Conradie in this volume. Conradie suggests that we view the ‘whole household of God’ or oikos as a theological metaphor – akin to a model. As Conradie notes, there is not one single model or metaphor which is fully adequate. Given the need for a multiplicity of models, his argument for the use of the oikos metaphor corrects some elements of the present essay. Of particular note is the strength with which he brings forward the concern for justice and the ecumenical concerns in our models and metaphors of nature – things which I believe to be complementary to my discussion, but are left undeveloped here. At the same time, there are points of consonance as well: for instance the oikos metaphor also examines the issue of place through the discussion of ‘home’ and ‘house’.

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May. These places and others provide a facet of the thing called nature. Each place is nature, showing that the question of nature provides another illustration of the hermeneutical circle of parts and wholes. As Glenn Deliège suggests elsewhere in this volume, particular places present meaning – in his words, it is the particular ‘storied landscape’ that has the possibility of ‘giving meaning to life’. Thus, rather than identifying ‘nature’ as the domain of study of an ecological theology, such theologies are most forceful when they focus on understanding nature through the concept of ‘emplacement’,  defined as the mediation between the concept of place, the experience of particular places, and the sense of our interpretation of ‘emplacement in place’. The definition of ‘emplacement’ is rooted in a hermeneutical account wherein nature arises from the mediation between human, nature, and place. Emplacement suggests a form of interaction between the human being and nature. More specifically, ‘emplacement’ is the mediation between (1) a general conceptual framework of place (the conceptual manifestation of ‘nature’); (2) a concrete instantiation of a particular place (the manifestation of nature as lived or embodied); and (3) our place in place (the existential manifestation of our relation to the previous two facets). This echoes a concept which comes from Paul Ricoeur’s description of narrativity: ‘emplotment’. ‘Emplotment’ identifies the ways in which a narrative resolves the tensions between discordant and concordant elements, especially those found in the temporal components of a story. Analogously, emplacement adds to time the human presence and absence within spatial dimensions. The concept of emplacement is a way to envision the meaning of nature as it is found in our everyday experience. As should be evident in the present context, how place is understood is what is at issue, not how space is demarcated. Emplacement offers a way of understanding the relationship between natural and built environments, among other things. Regardless of whether a place is natural or built, place is defined through the interpretation of space. Thus, if there is a difference between the built and the natural, it is found in the fact that the task of building is a task of reinterpretation; building takes what is already interpreted as a place, and reinterprets it, representing the meaning that the place holds. Rather than assume that building is simply a physical change, I am suggesting that a hermeneutical alteration is at the heart of our definitions of both natural and built places. Dividing natural spaces from built ones is often simply a matter of degree, the placing of a place 

  See Forrest Clingerman, ‘Beyond the Flowers and the Stones: “Emplacement” and the Modeling of Nature’, Philosophy in the Contemporary World 11 (2004), 17–24.    See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984), Vol. 1, pp. 21 ff.   According to Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, ‘An Introduction to Places’, Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 2 (1998), p. 176, ‘The inclination needed to see a place is an expectation of the observing subject to become involved in an autonomous space of meanings. The space of meanings is established by the relationships of the beings living at a place and by the history of those relationships. A place presents itself as an open space

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on a continuum between an interpretation of immediacy and a sense of human mediation and intentionality. Finding the Sacred in the Reinterpretation of Place While ‘emplacement’ helps in conceptualizing our hermeneutical interaction with nature, the concept of emplacement alone does not offer a theological understanding. Rather, God is found in the ‘depth’ of emplacement. But asking about the depth of emplacement raises an interesting question within Christianity: Is there a qualitative difference between the places deemed religious and those deemed secular? Or, as John Inge asks the question: ‘Is the Christian faith, the Christian tradition, about people or places? In other words, how are places related to crossing the threshold into the divine, if at all?’ Such questions are more than scholastic; they protrude into the ethical and theological fabric of the everyday. On the one hand, Christianity is a religion of place that focuses on Heaven as the kingdom of perfection and fulfilment. Faith is found in the desire to dwell in a place, Heaven, defined in its absolute distinction from every imperfect, finite place. But, on the other hand, this perfection of place forces us to move toward defining Christianity as a religion of placelessness. Insofar as Christians seek a place of refuge, this heavenly refuge is not defined by its spatial features or inhabitants. Instead, Heaven is an undelineated place; it is a place that simply does not fit the genus ‘place’. Heaven is no-where, transcending the very category of place and all its manifestations. Thus the goal of Christianity is to find a place of refuge in no place at all – we are to be placed in a union with divine placelessness. If we define building as the reinterpretation of place, to ask if we can build Heaven is to ask whether we can build a place which is fundamentally different from any particular spatial existence. But it is also to ask how we can build such a place through the interpretations and reinterpretations of place. It is now glaring that certain traditional parameters of ‘building place’ are not easily associated with ‘Heaven’. The places we build are changeable, corruptible, finite and located in space and time. Such places are dwelling locales of what is irreducibly fragmentary in space and time. The Christian tradition thus speaks in forceful terms: An immanent manifestation of eternal indwelling can only be present in its absence – the transcendent is not of meanings. And with that space of meanings we as participants can enter hermeneutic interactions.’   This places nature and culture on a continuum, without arguing that nature is socially constructed. The position is akin to the one expressed by Mark Wallace in chapter 6 of Finding God in the Singing River (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2005): we are between the socially constructed and the objectivist, accepting that nature is socially conditioned, yet also ‘out there’.    John Inge, ‘Towards a Theology of Place,’ Modern Believing n.s. 40 (1999), 42.

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occasioned at any time, by any thing, in any place at all. However, Christianity does see this indwelling as immanent, sensing the divine in the concreteness of place and history – God is not absently present but actively indwelling everywhere. For Christianity to retain its connection both to place and to placelessness, we are presented at the same time with an obstacle to, and a possibility of, understanding ‘Heaven’. At the root of both is the way we approach the topic – rather than ask if Heaven is a place, we must ask how does Heaven become a place? We certainly will not find Heaven by discovering a mythological garden; the paradise lost is not a material state of affairs – it rather indicates the sense of place in which we desire and seek to find ourselves. Yet if we find Heaven by focusing on its existence, we will be journeying toward a place which is constructed within our own limitations. What if ‘Heaven’ is understood reflexively and in terms of the practice of thinking itself? If we can build Heaven, it will not be fashioned, from the substance of doctrines and creeds, theological statements and confessional attitudes. Only indirectly can we find this locale, by asking: How do we, in and through our interpretation of place, envision the depth of the lives inhabited? What if Heaven is found when we illuminate the depth of our reinterpretations of place, seeking a prayerful practice of emplacement? Heaven as Religious Practice Can we build Heaven? If Heaven is the paradigmatic sacred place of western religion, then the answer is unequivocally ‘no’. Heaven cannot exist through human construction and dwelling, and thus the idea of ‘building Heaven’ makes no sense if we take this to be the human construction of the eternal. Even in the manufacture of Raphael’s angelic putti and of Michelangelo’s chapel, the possibility of ‘building Heaven’ – at least a Heaven that is the reward of paradise, the place of peace of our soteriological understanding – seems to point toward a Sisyphean drama through which the Christian context cannot satisfactorily labor. However, at this stage we can make two comments about ‘building Heaven’. First, an alternative answer to the question emerges if Heaven is not an accumulation of clouds and harps. Rather, philosophical theology can equate building Heaven with the spiritually embodied task of thinking itself. Jeff Malpas has argued that philosophy is ‘topographical’, meaning that place and our thinking of the meaning of being human are intertwined. ‘Finding place is thus a matter of finding ourselves, and to find ourselves we need first to rethink the question of the nature and significance of place.’ Theology also orients itself by focusing on relationality and place, found at the intersection of humanity and God, world and the divine. 

  Jeff Malpas, ‘Finding Place: Spatiality, Locality, and Subjectivity,’ in Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (eds), Philosophies of Place III (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 1998), 39.

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Theology is a practice of thinking, and so ‘finding our place’ in theology highlights a religious practice rather than doctrine. Theology constructs Heaven through the religious practice of seeking the depth of thinking about emplacement. If building is founded upon reinterpretation, then ‘building Heaven’ is the reinterpretation which occurs when we discover the spiritual depth present in every place, and finally in any enactment of place wherein we find ultimate meaning. Such a depth is not discovered apart from the everyday experience of place; we build Heaven through the reflexive practice of thinking about how we are emplaced in place, something potentially present in any place wherein we dwell. Heaven is the reinterpretation of a place in the light of its depth of meaning. Heaven is built when we discover the depth of our own emplacement – that is to say, the unity and difference that founds the dimensions of our mediation of place as human beings in place. We have moved past our initial negative answer, therefore, because the question of building Heaven is not a question of belief and existence; it is a question of a practice. If this is so, we can understand ‘building Heaven’ as simultaneously an impossibility and a necessity, a task never completed but always undertaken in the fulfilment of life. The impossibility of such a practice is due in part to the difficulty of finding a site for constructing the question of place in a single discipline or genre. Is this finally a theological question, an architectural task, a philosophical inquiry, or can it be understood as opening onto the scientific? Is the heart of this question anthropological or cosmological? Do we differentiate between building the heavens and building Heaven, between the starry skies above and the paradise within? Thus even asking the question brings difficulty, because before it is answered we must acknowledge that Heaven can never be completed by human hands alone. If we think of it to be brought to fruition, Heaven becomes finite. The finite is a place among other places, constructed in the light of the changing narrative of residents and visitors: constitutive building blocks and delimited spaces. To build the infinite, the unthought, and the indescribable is beyond the human condition, at least when this is left to its own devices. As already noted, place is central to humanity and to our theological reflection. John Inge recalls Heidegger’s evaluation that place is ‘the locale of the truth of Being’, and notes that this should be echoed in theology. Therefore



  Such reflection can occur in many ways, but eventually it points toward the relationship between religion, ethics, and public policy. While space does not permit further analysis here, a fruitful dialogue can occur between the present philosophical theology and the approach of public theology as seen e.g. in Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, ‘Tilling and Caring for the Earth: Public Theology and Ecology,’ International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007), 230–48. Using the example of the Upper Main valley, Bedford-Strom examines the specific ethical and theological understandings present in our interaction with nature, to be used to advocate for specific policy measures in concrete cases.

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The incarnation is the chosen path of God’s rationality in which he interacts with the world. This does not mean that God is limited by space and time but rather asserts the reality of space and time for God in the actuality of His relations with us, and at the same time binds us to space and time in our relations with Him. Places are the seat of relations or the place of meeting and activity in the interaction between God and the world...10

From this vantage point, we must acknowledge that in every place there is the immanence of the sacred; in every act of interpreting place we have the opportunity to build the sacredness of place by seeking its manifestation as builders. If this question of building Heaven is impossible, it becomes necessary. Heaven is the practice of manifesting the placeless place. It is thereby the Otherness of place, the ever-present overplus of the built. It is the rendering of all that is still undone and dissipated. It is, in sum, the sacredness that might emerge in whatever practice of interpretation of place we do. ‘Building Heaven’ becomes the practice of recognizing the sacredness which exists in our secular places; it is the labor of seeking the truly necessary completion of the task of thinking in embodied, spatial ways. We can summarize this section by adapting Paul Tillich’s terms: Heaven is the ‘depth and abyss’ of our experiences of place. Tillich’s insight was that God is the ground and abyss of Being; God is both being and not-being, which means that God is truly Being Itself. But what is the ‘depth and abyss of place’? It is the religious dimension of every place, the indwelling of the sacred in the secular, the true meaning of divine omnipresence. In a section of Volume I of his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich discusses this understanding of omnipresence – that is to say, ‘God’s relation to space’.11 God isn’t extended, but neither is this personal God apart from space. For Tillich, space and God are symbolically related; the former is not a literal description of the latter. ‘“God is in heaven”; this means that his life is qualitatively different from creaturely existence. But it does not mean that he “lives in” or “descends from” a special place.’12 Tillich continues by saying: Omnipresence, finally, is not spacelessness. We must reject punctuality in the divine life as much as simultaneity and timelessness. God creates extension in the ground of his life, in which everything spatial is rooted. But God is not subject to it; he transcends it and participates in it. God’s omnipresence is his creative participation in the spatial existence of his creatures.13

If God infuses and deepens our understanding of place while transcending any possible entanglement in it, then 10

  Inge, ‘Theology of Place’ (above, n. 7), 46.  Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951), Vol. 1, 276. 12   Ibid., 277. 13   Ibid. 11

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God’s omnipresence overcomes the anxiety of not having a space for one’s self. It provides the courage to accept the insecurities and anxieties of spatial existence. In the certainty of the omnipresent God we are always at home and not at home, rooted and uprooted, resting and wandering, being placed and displaced, known by one place and not known by any place.14

In sum, with this understanding of the depth and abyss of place, we see that ‘building Heaven’ is the practice of recognizing which interpretation of place describes the depth of being. The construction of place is a practice of re-inscribing the meanings of a place. This practice can contain a reflexivity which produces an awareness of depth in such a re-inscription – the building of the sacred dimension of every built and natural environment. Conclusion: The Theological and Ethical Practice of Finding the Depth of Place Sigurd Bergmann has argued that contemporary architecture itself has not given up the quest for finding ‘the spiritual in art’, or the depth, of built places. Bergmann points to the example of Christian Norberg-Schulz, whose phenomenology of architecture ‘[claims] that every space possesses its own unique spiritual attributes. According to him, the existence of a genius loci should be respected, and every architect should relate to it.’15 Both Le Corbusier and Norberg-Schulz, Bergmann goes on to say, see that architecture is more than the sum of its parts – there is always a sort of ‘metaphysical surplus’ in good architecture. Whether Heaven is identified with the ‘metaphysical surplus’ or with the ‘depth and abyss of place’, we now reach a second important point: I would like to claim that Heaven should be present in every practice of building. Because this understanding of Heaven is tied to the practice of reinterpreting place, then any building – as a reinterpretation of a place in the world – holds the promise of engaging the depth of place, of becoming the site of Heaven itself. For the very same reason, the impossibility of building Heaven ensures that no site can ever be considered a final or complete heavenly place. In other words, the theological task of building Heaven is also the name of an ethical practice which can exist as the response embedded in every spatial interaction individuals and communities have. ‘Building Heaven’ is truly a spiritual practice, insofar as it names the theological and ethical dimensions of human emplacement. 16 14

  Ibid., 278.   Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Space and Spirit: Towards a Theology of Inhabitation’, in Sigurd Bergmann (ed.), Architecture, Aesth/Ethics and Religion (Frankfurt am Main: IKOVerlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation2005), p. 52. 16   We might turn to Jürgen Moltmann’s discussion of ‘Shekinah theology’ in ‘Shekinah: The Home of the Homeless God’, in Leroy Rouner (ed.), The Longing for Home (Notre Dame, IN: University Of Notre Dame Press, 1996), pp. 170–84. ‘Shekinah 15

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To return where we began, perhaps a child’s building is the best example of how the theological and ethical task of building Heaven can be glimpsed. Eyes filled with concentration, dedicated to the task at hand; small fingers place one block beside another, building upward and outward in the imagination, as well as on the floor. Contented, unconcerned wooden blocks are placed. The constraints of utility are appropriately placed in conversation with dreams and visions, desires and possibilities. Rather than seeking to master, a child builds in a way that explores the world. The mystery of discovery and of reinterpreting the world is perhaps intellectually lost – something that urban planners, theologians, architects and artists must consciously foster. But, finally, we might see God reveal himself in such mundane pleasures. Between the blocks and toys, hidden in the woodgrain and brightly colored paint, is the impossible possibility of Heaven. These mere toys illuminate what Paul Ricoeur has pronounced: ‘The God who reveals himself is a hidden God and hidden things belong to him.’17 Likewise, a revealing God is found in the most mundane, placed in the unlikeliest of places.

means the descent and special indwelling of God in the midst of Israel and in his temple on Zion. The concept of the Shekinah links the infinite God, whom even the countless heavens cannot contain, with a historical people and an earthly, limited space’ (p. 174). There were two traditions related to the Shekinah. In one, God lives in Heaven, which meant a place separated from creation and its inhabitants. In the other, Moltmann states that ‘God’s indwelling presence in the temple went into exile with the people’ (p. 175). If we build with a sense that God infuses the places of our lives, the response is to seek to build a place appropriate to God’s indwelling. 17  Paul Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Hermeneutics of the Idea of Revelation’, in his Essays on Biblical Interpretation, (Philadelphia: Fortress 1980), p. 93.

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Bibliography Barbour, Ian G., Myths, Models, and Paradigms; A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (New York: Harper and Row1974). Bedford-Strohm, Heinrich, ‘Tilling and Caring for the Earth: Public Theology and Ecology’, International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007), 230–48. Bergmann, Sigurd, ‘Space and Spirit: Towards a Theology of Inhabitation’, in Sigurd Bergmann (ed.), Architecture, Aesth/Ethics and Religion (Frankfurt am Main: IKO-Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation 2005). Clingerman, Forrest, ‘Beyond the Flowers and the Stones: “Emplacement” and the Modeling of Nature’, Philosophy in the Contemporary World 11 (2004), 17–24. — “The Intimate Distance of Herons: Theological Travels through Nature, Place, and Migration.” Ethics, Place and Environment: A Journal of Philosophy and Geography 11, no. 3 (October 2008): 315–327. Haigis, Peter, ‘Paul Tillich and the Post-Modern Debate on Culture’, North American Paul Tillich Society Newsletter 27 (2002), 17–24. Inge, John, ‘Towards a Theology of Place’, Modern Believing n.s. 40 (1999), 42–50. Klemm, David E. and William Klink, ‘Constructing and Testing Theological Models’, Zygon 38 (2003), 495–528. Malpas, Jeff, ‘Finding Place: Spatiality, Locality, and Subjectivity’, in Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (eds), Philosophy and Geography III: Philosophies of Place (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 1998). McFague, Sallie, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress 1982). — Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress 1987). — The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress 1993). Moltmann, Jürgen, ‘Shekinah: The Home of the Homeless God’, in Leroy Rouner (ed.), The Longing for Home (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1996). Rehmann-Sutter, Christoph, ‘An Introduction to Places’, Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 2 (1998), 171–7. Ricoeur, Paul, Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress 1980). — Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984). — ‘The Text as Dynamic Identity,’ in Mario J. Valdés and Owen Miller (eds), Identity of the Literary Text (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985).‘Narrative Identity,’ in David Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (New York: Routledge1991). Scharlemann, Robert. ‘A Theological Model of Nature.’ Bucknell Review 20 (1972), 95–112. Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press1951). Wallace, Mark I., Finding God in the Singing River (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2005).

PART B ETHICS IN NATURAL AND BUILT SPACE

Chapter 6

Atmospheric Space, Climate Change and the Communion of Saints Michael S. Northcott

Anthropogenic climate change is most often described in temporal terms as a threat to future generations. However, climate change is already a real and present spatial threat to generations and species as extreme climate events and rising land and ocean temperatures are already harming the spaces of humans and other species in equatorial and sub-equatorial Africa and Asia and in parts of the Americas and Australasia. In Bangladesh, temperatures have risen by two degrees centigrade in the last thirty years, reflecting a rise in the temperature of the Indian Ocean in the same period. This rise has seen reductions in the former four-season pattern to two. And, as the dry season has lengthened, the land bakes and, when more intensive rains fall in a heavier monsoon, the land cannot absorb the rain. Combined with strengthening storms, this is leading to growing numbers of people displaced or killed by rising flood waters in the wet season. Glacial melting of the Himalayan glaciers threatens even more flooding. These glaciers store one quarter of the world’s fresh water, and one fifth of the world’s peoples drink and irrigate their crops with the melt water. As the glaciers melt faster, they bring increased flooding. This will be followed by reduced river flow, drought, and declines in crop production across much of South Asia. The rise in the temperature of the Indian Ocean is also responsible for the present drying of large areas of the African continent. As rain clouds decline in countries from Mali to Malawi, farmers are seeing dramatic reductions in crop output, rising malnutrition in their own children; and their countries are increasingly dependent on foreign food aid. While deforestation has caused local climate change in some areas, rising ocean temperatures are playing a larger role in a climate-related humanitarian crisis in Africa.

  Alex McClean, Sylvester Halder and Ben Thurley, ‘Heed Bangladesh: Responding to Climate Change’, Harambee: Tear Australia (September 2007), 22–4.    S. Levitus, J. I. Antonov et. al., ‘Warming of the World Ocean’, Science 287 (2000), 2225–9.   David S. G. Thomas, Melanie Knight and Giles F. S. Wiggs, ‘Remobilization of Southern African Desert Dune Systems by Twenty-First Century Global Warming’, Science 435 (30 June 2005), 1218–21.

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Conventional economic analysis of anthropogenic climate change suggests that it is primarily a problem of the inter-generational distribution of costs and benefits. Thus Howard Stern, in his report for the British government on the economics of climate change, argues that it will cost the world 3.7 trillion dollars to adjust to climate change in 2030, while it will cost only 1 per cent of present world GDP (gross domestic product) over the next ten years for the developed world to reduce its growing emissions by decarbonizing the economy. However, in calculating the relative benefits of acting now or in the future on climate change, Stern neglects the extent to which climate change is harming people in the present. Critics of Stern’s figures have resisted the urgency of mitigation by disputing the discount rate with which he compares present and future costs. The focus in such sums is not on the impacts of climate change on the already degraded spaces in which poor people live now, but on future rich people who, it is argued, will be richer than present people because of continuing economic growth and new technologies, which will make responses to climate change cheaper. Refocusing the economics on present poor people dramatically changes the cost equations. Despite the economic case made by Stern and others for mitigating climate change, there has been a global rise of 3 per cent per annum since 2000 in the use of fossil fuel and declining efficiency in the proportion of fossil fuels converted into usable energy. The major proportion of this growth in greenhouse gases comes not from the developing but the developed world. The last thirty years have seen considerable growth in household incomes and corporate wealth and consequent growing consumption of built space, cars, clothes, electronic goods and planes by the rich, in both north and south. Africans and South Asians have hardly seen any increase in their use of fossil fuels and presently the African per capita consumption stands at .04 tonnes compared to consumption of between 18 and 22 tonnes per person in Australia, Canada, Luxemburg, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Singapore and Taiwan. Thus the luxury emissions of rich people who live mostly in urban places in the Northern hemisphere are being visited spatially on people who live in poor countries and who only emit subsistence levels of greenhouse gases. The climate system turns the flows of

  Nicholas Stern, Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006).   Eduardo Porter, ‘Are the Grandkids Worth the Money? Calculating How Much to Spend to Keep the Future from Boiling Over’, New York Times, 15 March 2008.   Michael R. Raupach, Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais et. al., ‘Global and Regional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emissions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (12 June 2007), 10288–93. On the limitations of cost-benefit calculations in relation to climate change, see also Clive Spash, Greenhouse Economics: Values and Ethics (London: Routledge 2002), 189–91.   Henry Shue, ‘Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions’, Law and Policy 15 (1993), 39–59. 

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money and consumer goods into a physical and spatial simulacrum, as these flows have delayed, yet real, physical effects across less monied spaces of the globe. Cost-benefit assessments of the impacts of climate change neglect the reality, and the injustice, of present spatial disbenefits arising from gases emitted in other places on the spaces of subsistence peoples. They also undermine the likelihood that carbon will be priced at a rate at which real physical reductions in fossil fuel use – as against the offsetting of such use in carbon markets – will actually take place. For this reason it is highly unlikely that present or future negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will motivate change sufficiently quickly to mitigate climate change before the Himalayan glaciers melt, and before much of Africa, Australia, the American southwest and southern Europe are reduced to desert. Already in Australia agricultural water sources are becoming infected with salt, and Australian cities are locking themselves into a future in which energy-hungry desalinization of water will become a necessity. Michaels and Bailing argue that there is nothing sacred or morally significant about the pre-industrial atmospheric proportion of greenhouse gases and that the planet has had higher concentrations of these gases at different stages in its history. However this proportion of greenhouse gases was crucial to the evolution of Homo sapiens. Until sufficient carbon was locked into the Earth’s crust by shellfish and decayed biomass, it was not possible for humans to evolve as a warm-blooded, large-brained, upright and hairless species. Read theologically the pre-industrial proportion of greenhouse gases of 260–80 parts per million in the atmosphere represented a providential proportion, without which humans made in the divine image could not have evolved. Analogously, the era of climate stability of the last 12,000 years has enabled human beings to develop agriculture and so to support the urban cultures in which the revealed events and stories of Christian civilization – from the stories of Abraham and Noah and the giving of the Ten Commandments, to the coming of Christ and the suffering witness of the early Christians, to Christendom – could not have been preserved. Moses was born approximately 8,000 years into the present extended period of climate stability. Christ was born 10,000 years into this period. All of the apostles and saints, who have witnessed to the faith and passed it on to their successors in the form of artefacts, doctrines, liturgies, practices, stories and texts, represent a cloud of witnesses whose presence on earth has given rise to the present historical eventuality in which more people living worship the divine trinity than was the case at any given period in human history. This theological interpretation of the present stability of the climate in the Holocene era finds a biblical warrant in the Noah saga, which indicates that the stable relationship between oceans and dry land is providential. The Noah  Pat Michaels and Robert C. Bailing, The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air About Global Warming (Washington, DC: Cato Institute 2000). In similar vein, see Denis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 2007). 

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saga, like the Gilgamesh epic and other ancient flood myths, reflects a primordial memory of the effects of the last deglaciation event, in which areas that had once been dry land – such as the Black Sea and most of what is now the Red Sea – were inundated by the effects of glacial melt water on ocean levels. In the case of the Black Sea, in the region of which it seems likely that Noah (assuming that he was a historical personage) would have lived, the Mediterranean overflowed at the Bospherous because of glacial melt waters approximately 12,000 years ago. After the great Flood, Yahweh promises to Noah that he will not make the earth flood again, and the rainbow is set in the sky as a sign of a covenant between the Creator and the descendants of Noah. The covenant which was established after the Flood offered the promise that the fruitfulness of the Earth would not be threatened again by the bursting forth of the chaotic waters and that Noah and his children would themselves be blessed. It is a covenant made between God on the one hand, humans ‘and living things of every kind’ (Genesis 9: 12) on the other, and it affirms that the stability of creation, including the temperature of the Earth’s surface, would be secured by the Creator: While the earth lasts seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease. (Genesis 8: 22)

Some suggest that, if this is the case, then to give credence to the scientific account of anthropogenic climate change shows a lack of trust in divine providence. However, the Noahic covenant only indicates that God will not cause the Earth to be flooded again. It does not indicate that human beings might not one day be capable of achieving this result. The providential significance of the relationship between land and ocean is further elaborated upon in the prophecies of Jeremiah: Have you no fear of me, says the Lord, will you not tremble before me, who set the sand as bounds for the sea, a limit it never can pass? Its waves may heave and toss, but they are powerless; roar as they may, they cannot pass. (Jeremiah 5: 21–2)

Jeremiah links the stable relationship between land and sea with the human observance of divine law.10 And he goes on to argue that, when human beings

   William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discovery About the Event that Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster 1999). 10   See further Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant (London: Sheed and Ward, 1992).

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neglect the divine law and live in ways which neglect God’s providential ordering of creation, they also threaten the stability of created order: But this people has a rebellious and defiant heart, they have rebelled and gone their own way. They did not say to themselves, ‘Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives us the rains of autumn and spring showers in their turn, who brings us unfailingly fixed seasons of harvest.’ But your wrongdoing has upset nature’s order, and your sins have kept from you her kindly gifts. (Jeremiah 18: 14–16)

The same word for covenant is used of the divine ordering of night and day as it is of the divine blessing of the line of David: ‘if you could annul my covenant of the day and my covenant of the night, so that daytime and night would not come at their due times, then might my covenant with David my servant be annulled.’ (Jeremiah 33: 20–1).11 Jeremiah was writing at a time in Israel’s post-exilic history when the people of God could look back on the despoliation of the promised land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ – despoliation resulting from excessive ploughing and over-grazing. The topsoil had been poorly managed and the forests on the hills had been cut down as a result of the demands of kings and merchants for luxury and excess. According to Isaiah, it was those ‘who added house to house and joined field to field’ (Isaiah 5: 8), and not the self-sufficient farmers mandated by the Mosaic covenant, who had imposed excessive burdens on marginal lands and forests which caused the erosion of topsoil, the drying of rivers and the eventual decline in the fertility of the promised land spoken of by both major and minor Hebrew prophets. According to the Old Testament, and as interpreted by the fathers of the church, human sin is not limited in its effects to the moral and social spheres. It is not only inter-human and inter-generational, but inter-spatial and inter-species in its consequences. The ecological effects of sin are not confined to those described in the Genesis account of exile from the Garden of Eden and the subsequent alienation of humans from the soil. Nor are they confined to the divine permission, given to the descendants of Noah on account of sin, that they might eat by shedding the blood of other animals, who share the same spiritual force of life (or nephesh) which enlivens human bodies. All Earth’s spaces – atmosphere, forests, oceans, rivers, topsoil – are capable of being degraded and polluted by sinful human beings, and in such ways as to pass on the resultant defects to peoples and species distant in time and space. Anthropogenic climate change represents this spreading ecological infection of sin. 11   See, together with Murray, Cosmic Covenant (above, n. 10), Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996).

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What is novel in the case of the present climate emergency is that the defects of this infection are on a spatial scale never before experienced in the history of creation, so that even the gases in the upper atmosphere – and not just the air which humans and other mammals breathe – are marked by the taint of human sin. Also novel is the potential irreversibility of these effects. Some previous disasters were ecologically irreversible, such as the loss of topsoil in ancient Palestine and Mesopotamia, or in the Roman Mediterranean. But the present human interference in the climate system represents the first global-scale, systemic change that is irreversible. Even if modern humans act prudentially to prevent the Earth’s temperature warming beyond two degrees, this warming will represent an ongoing mark in the Earth system whose effects will be experienced by every creature and visited on every ecosystem, not only in the present century but in many subsequent ones. Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Benedict XVI have both suggested that anthropogenic climate change is indicative of human sin. In his first sermon as pope in 2005, Benedict used the metaphor of the desert to link ecological destruction with the spiritual vacuity of materialism and consumerism; as he put it, the external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore the earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction. The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance.12

In this first homily, Benedict XVI indicates that the changing climate manifest in spreading deserts is a spatial manifestation of the moral and spiritual malaise of modern humans. Luxury emissions emanating from the monied economy represent a spatial mark in the atmosphere, and subsequently on the land, of sinful devotion to objects of consumer culture such as cars, planes and meat-heavy diets, which are clearly implicated in climate change. If sin is the cause of climate change, then actions to mitigate anthropogenic climate change are part of Christian witness to the redemption of creation that is made known in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In these events, and above all in the Resurrection of Christ from the dead, Christians recognize the divine vindication of the original ordering of creation toward communion with God, and the healing of that original relation. It is the calling of the church in history to witness to those healed relations, both among men and women and in the larger care of the creation. Saint Benedict of Nursia, who was one of the inspirations for Ratzinger’s choice of the Papal name Benedict, is a pivotal figure 12

 Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI St. Peter’s Square, Sunday, 24 April 2005; accessed at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2005/documents/hf_ ben-xvi_hom_20050424_inizio-pontificato_en.html.

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in the church’s witness in this respect. His monastic rule is the first text in which it is suggested that human work on the soil is redeemed from the infection of sin by the Christ events. The moral and spiritual community ordered by the divine rule gave effect to salvation through the redemption of work in the study, in the sanctuary and on the soil. The monk who works on the land is already participating in the spatial manifestation of the new creation, and hence in the divine project begun by Jesus Christ to redeem the Earth as well as human society from sin. For others in Christian history, including the desert fathers, Trappist monks, and most Catholics on Fridays, abstaining from meat becomes a sign of salvation on Earth given that eating the flesh of mammals is also indicated as a mark of humanity’s fall from grace in Genesis.13 Recognition of the ecological effects of the ‘new creation’ does not elide, but reaffirms, the pivotal place which human beings have in the created order, as is first indicated in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. Humans are the only creatures made in the divine image and, as such, they are called to subdue the Earth or, literally, to ‘put the Earth under their feet’. Now putting the Earth under one’s feet does not imply, as some have suggested, a harsh or overpowering dominion.14 It implies instead a right and just relation: though humans are made from the dust of the Earth, and though they return to dust before the resurrection, they none the less are uniquely called upon to walk upright on the earth, to till the soil, and to develop a culture whose first task is to name, and subsequently to care for, the other animals with whom they share the land. The image of God, and the command to subdue, also indicate the human priesthood of the creation. When humans worship God in truth and subordinate their desires to the will of God, they flourish and they cause the Earth to flourish, so that the Earth does not subdue them. On the contrary, the Earth and all its creatures join human beings – both kings and commoners – in praising the Creator, as the Psalmist indicates. But the shadow-side of this priesthood is that, when humans fail to worship God aright and human relationships are marred by hate, violence and war, the Earth is prevented from realizing its spatial and spiritual ordering to praise God alongside humans. The central and determinative action of the new creation is therefore divine worship: when humans worship God in spirit and truth, they already anticipate and bring near the worship of humans with all other creatures and the shalom of all creation, presaged in the birth of the Christ child among oxen and sheep. In this perspective, preventing dangerous climate change is not just a technical or political project. It is not just about the survival of the present numbers of human 13  On original vegetarianism, see further Michael S. Northcott, ‘Eucharistic Eating: The Moral Economy of Food’, in Lukas Vischer (ed.), The Eucharist and Creation Spirituality (Geneva: Centre International Reformé John Knox 2007). 14   See further Michael Northcott, ‘Apocalyptic Christians and the Morality of Dominion’, in Kyle Vanhoutan and Michael Northcott (eds.), Dominion and Diversity (Eugene, ON: Wipf and Stock, forthcoming).

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beings on the planet. It becomes instead a part of the Church’s witness to the divine plan of salvation within human history, since anthropogenic climate change is the spatial result of the fallen character of human agency on the Earth. And it is therefore significant that the churches, through the World Council of Churches (WCC), were the first global non-governmental organization to call upon the United Nations to establish a climate change treaty. This call led to the inauguration of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which committed the nations to find ways to prevent human greenhouse gas emissions from bringing about ‘dangerous climate change’.15 The WCC and its member churches have a programme of witness to justice and peace in creation whose officers in the 1970s came to realize that global warming represented a major challenge to the nations of the Earth and a particular challenge to the world’s poor, who send many representatives to international ecumenical gatherings. This is because the effects of dangerous climate change are magnified in tropical regions, where many of the world’s poorest people live. Climate change is not only a spatial consequence of human sin. The emissions involved in climate change are propagated in ways which reflect human sin and profound injustices in the structures of the modern global economy. So we have seen Africans on average emit 0.4 tonnes per capita of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since the majority of Africans, to this day, are still subsistence farmers who live within the available biological resources of solar and wind energy, biomass and soil on their respective farms. By contrast, the inhabitants of those cities or regions of the Earth which emit between 8 and 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita – and these include the rich inhabitants of cities in the South and North – are drawing unequally upon the planet’s atmospheric and oceanic carbon sinks. And at the same time their consumption is sustained by remote resource allocation chains, so that the ecological footprint of their lives exceeds the land area of their cities many times. As the industrial era has complexified relations between the peoples of the Earth, liberation theologians in the developing and developed world have suggested that sin is present in distinctive ways in the complex procedures and structures which mark industrial civilization. And this idea of structural sin is taken up in the late twentieth-century social teaching of the major Christian denominations. Thus Pope John Paul II, while critical of some features of the liberationist account of structural sin, nonetheless affirmed the existence of ‘structures of sin’ in the modern world and suggested that the existence of these structures enhanced rather than diminished personal responsibility for sin, understood in terms of a refusal to love God and neighbour.16 The recognition of structures of sin indicates the way in which governmental and corporate agencies in a global economy draw upon 15

 David Hallman, ‘The WCC Climate Change Programme: History, Lessons and Challenges’, in Martin Robra (ed.), Climate Change (Geneva: World Council of Churches Justice Peace and Creation Team 2005), 13. 16   John Paul II, Solicitudio Rei Socialis (Vatican City: Holy See 1988), 36.

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resources and human labour often located in places far distant from the sites of material consumption and use of what is made. Structural sin thus has significant spatial dimensions, which are enhanced by anthropogenic climate change. Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics recognizes that the long supply chains of the modern post-imperial political order create new spatial dimensions to the foundational command to Christians to love one’s ‘near and distant neighbours’.17 And global warming enhances the remote spatial consequences of modern political economy. The command to love near and distant neighbours is therefore the primary place in Christian ethics where we can discern a clear mandate to act so as to reduce excess emissions of greenhouse gases, which will bring real material harm to many people now living in distant places, as well as to people not yet born. Principal among the arguments of those who oppose real caps on greenhouse gas emissions is the proposition that there remain uncertainties about the precise relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and climate heating. The sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to humanly made greenhouse gases is still not fully understood, and may never be entirely predictable. And yet the four assessments issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which represent the scientific work of more than 2,000 scientists on every continent – have been remarkably accurate, although actually observed temperature rises have always been at the highest end of their predictions to date. The quest for certainty is in any case a distraction, and it is indicative of the problematic nature of modern secular reason for, as John Dewey argued, it reflects the influence of mathematical forms of logic which are inappropriate in moral and political deliberation.18 For more than twenty years, the balance of probabilities has been on the side of the risk that rising levels of greenhouse gases will harm the life chances of present and future peoples. In situations of moral uncertainty what Aristotle called phronesis, or practical wisdom, is required. And those capable of phronesis in situations requiring prudential moral judgment are those who are formed by the virtues of justice and prudence.19 But there was no justice or prudence in the efforts of the American negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol to prevent international agreement to significant restraints on national production of greenhouse gas emissions. In a seminal paper, Henry Shue suggests that the sinks of the oceans and of the atmosphere in which newly mobile carbon dioxide comes to reside are a common spatial resource to which, under widely held understandings of natural justice shared by Catholic, Protestant, Islamic and Buddhist ethics, all individuals, present and future, ought to have an equal share, in the same way in which all   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 trans. G. Bromiley et. al. (Edinburgh: T and T Clark 1982). 18   John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (London: George Allen and Unwin 1930). 19  Michael Northcott, A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (London: Christian Aid and Darton Longman and Todd 2007), 22–6. 17

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individuals need an equivalent amount of oxygen in their lungs.20 Not even the most ardent neoliberal economist will argue that individuals ought to pay for air. And yet, despite general agreement that air ought to be free, the North American position in the UNFCC treaty negotiations has been that North Americans should not accept any restraint on their rights to pollute the free air of others with excess greenhouse gas emissions, although the Obama administration has signaled that it will take a different approach in the post-Kyoto talks in Copenhagen in 2009. The problem is that advocates of the private property regimen, which legitimates resistance to the recognition of a global common good in respect of the atmosphere, refuse to admit that carbon emissions from North America do not stay in North American air space, but infect the whole climate system. On the most conservative estimates, North America – or the residents and corporations of the United States and Canada combined – produces more CO2 than any other country, including China or India. In fact, roughly 380 million people in North America utilize 25 per cent of the carbon sinks of the planet, though these people represent less than 5 per cent of the human population. And this figure neglects the external emissions generated by American corporations and governmental agencies on other continents. In a detailed study of such external emissions in the UK economy, researchers found that they exceeded declared domestic emissions by a factor of 5. Thus, whereas the UK admits to a domestic budget of greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 2 per cent of the world’s total, when the activities of all UK corporations, investment banks and other agencies are taken into account, it turns out that 12 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions originate from activities based in the UK. Given the quantity of goods and services shipped and flown to North America from other continents, it is inevitable that, were a full accounting of North American emissions to be made, these would represent at least three times declared domestic emissions. China is typically invoked by North Americans as the reason why they do not believe they should act to reduce their own emissions. However, approximately 35 per cent of Chinese domestic emissions are displaced emissions, shifted to China by American and other global corporations which now use this country as their principal manufacturing base. Furthermore, present country-by-country emissions do not take account of historic emissions, which are still present in the climate system. In a true accounting of the present spatial infection of greenhouse gas emissions, those countries which have burned coal and oil in the largest quantities in the last century – the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France– are therefore far ahead of developing countries such as China and India, whose historic emissions have been very low.21

 Henry Shue, ‘Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions’, Law and Policy 15 (1993), 39–59. 21  Eric Neumayer, ‘In Defence of Historical Accountability for Greenhouse Gas Emissions’, Ecological Economics 33 (2000), 185–92. 20

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Large historic emitters of carbon have reached levels of economic and infrastructure development far in advance of countries such as China and India, that are only now beginning to emit on levels still far below those of the United States and northern Europe on a per capita basis. Because of inertia in the climate system, the emissions of the last fifty years, the vast majority of which originated in developed countries, have yet to produce the full extent of their impact on the climate. It is for this reason that negotiators at the Conference of the Parties which negotiated the Kyoto Protocol into international law argued that natural justice required that the heaviest and longest emitters should be the first to take action in reducing their emissions, ahead of developing countries. This position was, however, strongly resisted by Al Gore and the other American negotiators. Gore also opposed the modest European proposal of a 15 per cent cut in 1990 emissions by 2012 for developed countries. And he also insisted that the much smaller agreed goal of 5 per cent average cuts should be tradeable against carbon offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism and other carbon trading arrangements. These arrangements enable rich countries effectively to buy their way to proposed emissions reduction targets without actually, physically reducing their emissions. In many cases the claimed emissions reductions overseas, which are offset against domestic emissions, are for energy conservation and anti-pollution measures which would have occurred in any case and without the market in carbon permits that carbon trading has promoted.22 When we look at the history of climate change negotiations we see that the political process has been infected by self-interested arguments from individual nations which have trumped the willingness of other nations to cooperate in protecting the common and indivisible space of the atmosphere and in promoting the global common good of climate stability. If we take the equitable division of access to the spatial carbon sinks of the planet advanced by Shue, we find that the climate system can bear approximately 18 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually, whereas human beings are presently emitting approximately 60 billion tonnes. If we divide the figure of the human population by the total emissions which the planet can bear without threatening climate stability, we arrive at the figure of 3 tonnes per person. Presently many people in Africa, Asia and Latin America do not emit even one tenth of this quantity, while in Australia, Canada, North America, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates the per capita domestic output is already around 22 tonnes per person, leaving aside external emissions. The only fair course is for the rich countries to reduce their luxury emissions and to substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels, while developing countries should be permitted to raise their below average emissions to emissions of 3 tonnes per person by mid-century. This is an approach

22  Fiona Harvey and Stephen Fidler, ‘Industry Caught in Carbon Smokescreen’, Financial Times, 25 April 2007.

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known as ‘contraction and convergence’, which was first advanced by Aubrey Meyer at the Global Commons Institute.23 In his moral deliberations on the international problem of the shared space of the oceans in the seventeenth century, the Dutch natural lawyer Hugo Grotius suggested that, beyond territorial waters of 12 miles around the coastline of nations, the oceans ought to be considered a commonly shared resource, towards which natural justice permitted each nation free access for its shipping, and that such access ought not to be threatened by the military or piratical interference of other nations. Grotius’ reflections on the use of the sea led to the first international law governing a shared commons in the form of the law of the sea.24 However, the libertarian solution that Grotius proposed for the sharing of oceanic space is no longer appropriate for oceans whose biodiversity is being wrecked by industrial trawlers. It is also inappropriate for the sharing of atmospheric space, when excessive greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere represent real spatial harms to present and future others. The excessive use of the atmosphere as a carbon dump for the luxury emissions of the rich is against natural justice. The sphere of international law which is most relevant to spatial harms coercively imposed upon the spaces of some nations and peoples by others is the law of war. Greenhouse gas concentrations one third higher than pre-industrial levels infect the skies above nation–states which have played no part in, and are entirely innocent of, the generation of these emissions. Such gases are in effect a form of spatial invasion of the terrains of the innocent. I am not proposing that nations ought to take up arms against others to purloin more than their fare share of atmospheric space for their activities; but it is already being mooted that, in some national and international jurisdictions, nations which suffer significant ecological damage as a result of climate change might have a legal case against those corporations and government agencies which have neglected to restrain their greenhouse gas emissions. If we think of climate changing greenhouse gases by analogy with the spatial invasion of the lands of the innocent, then another element of Christian moral teaching which becomes pertinent is the doctrine of just war. Thomas Aquinas set the discussion of ius in bello in the Summa Theologiae in the context of his discussion of the theological virtue of love. He did this because the first premise of the possibility of a war being just – despite the Dominican proscription of violent resistance to evil – is that such resistance is only justified in defence of, and out of love for, the innocent whose lands and persons are being invaded or violently attacked by others. Those who are already suffering from increased annual flooding in Bangladesh, or from drought and increased risk of malarial disease in Africa, are innocent in the matter of greenhouse gas emissions, since they are so poor that, as I have already explained, their annual greenhouse gas emissions are near zero.. In 23  Aubrey Meyer, Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change (Totnes, Devon: Schumacher College 2000). 24   See Northcott, Moral Climate (above, n. 19), 171–3.

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the light of Aquinas’ advocacy of just war, military sanctions, or even a blockade of American shipping and air space, might be suggested as appropriate and just spatial sanctions against the United States if its government and corporations continue to refuse to reduce their invisible but spatially real carbon emissions, thereby harming millions of innocent peoples on other continents. In the context of continuing corporate emissions far in excess of domestic emissions in countries such as Britain and the United States, personal reductions in greenhouse gas emissions seem inadequate. They do, however, represent a significant form of climate witness to natural justice and, as in the case of internationally traded food and clothing – I have in mind recent moves against sweat shops and the growth in fair trade products – it may be that virtuous individuals and communities who choose to do right with respect to their planetary neighbours will provide an important (or even essential) prophetic goad to those agencies – both governmental and corporate – which continue to resist the need for significant reductions in carbon emissions. The agent who chooses to replace personal interest with justice and love of the neighbour will be prepared to sacrifice some of the comforts and conveniences associated with excess carbon use in order to protect the innocent from dangerous climate change. Focus on the virtuous actions of individuals may, however, be said to be inadequate, given the extent of corporate and collective activities in which individual decision-making procedures are caught up as a result of the fossil fuel production and energy supply grids and networks. Here again it seems appropriate to speak of structural sin, since the changes which individuals can make in their own consumption pale into insignificance compared to corporate and governmental emissions. And yet the virtuous action is not right because it is effective, but because it is right. Furthermore, individual action and action at the level of the congregation, neighbourhood, village and workplace provide an important counter to the sense of powerlessness which the power grids and pipelines of the modern economy can otherwise foster. When individuals and small groups take moral responsibility for their own contribution to climate change by contracting together to reduce their use of emissions and to source more of their energy demands from renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass, they become part of the solution instead of being part of the problem. In so doing they resist passivity and create hope, both in themselves and in the wider community. Hope may be the resource that Christians have to offer above all others in relation to the climate change conundrum. Christians do not pin their hopes for salvation on their own works, or on human progress in virtue, but on the reorientation of creation and human history towards redemption, a process which was set in train by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Churches which have put solar panels on the sanctuary, households who have committed together to stop driving, to share cars or to generate their electricity locally through solar panels, wind turbines or combined heat and power plants represent forms of climate witness that shape a more hopeful future.

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Through such actions, individuals and communities are able to demonstrate that the steps which need to be taken in the shift to a lower-carbon civilization do not reduce the quality of life, but on the contrary increase it by promoting community, cooperation and moral responsibility in societies where anomie, individualism and passivity are increasing markers of the human condition. The networks and grids which deliver fossil fuel energy to consumers and householders from distant places over which they have no sense of control subvert the moral responsibility of citizens towards essential material transactions in their daily lives. By contrast, a society in which individuals take subsidiary responsibility for conserving energy and for generating what they do use locally and renewably will be one in which they also recover moral responsibility, and hence moral agency. While Christian hope originates in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, it also takes its rise from the Christian teaching of the communion of saints. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews argues that Christians seeking to become faithful witnesses to the truth of Christ and to live the Christian way are surrounded by a great ‘cloud of witnesses’ who have gone before them in the life of faith. These witnesses represent a communion of saints, who have opened up the path on which it becomes possible for all Christians to walk hopefully in the life of faith. The saints are said to be especially present in the prayer and worship of Christians, both individual and collective. The doctrine of the communion of saints indicates that the communion between persons and the divine, made possible in a new way, by the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a spiritual reality existing beyond time and space. In this new reality all individual acts of faith, hope and love are caught up in a larger moral and spiritual nexus, that transcends generations and territories. Memory is a crucial component of this nexus. The great, chapter-long rehearsal of the acts of faith of the saints is the occasion for the first reference to the communion of saints in the Epistle to the Hebrews. And, by the fifth century ad, the collective memory of those acts is enhanced by the pantheon of new saints, including the apostles, the evangelists and the teachers of the Church. The lives of these saints are celebrated along with those of Abraham, Moses and the prophets, in mosaics and reliefs in church buildings from the fifth century which show the saints gathered around the throne of God and present in the worship of Christians. The invisible presence of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere and its visible mark in the changing behaviour of clouds in the sky is a physical memory of past actions and a spatial analogy of the communion of saints. When precipitation declines over Africa, Australia, the southwest United States and southern Europe so that droughts of exceptional severity dry great rivers, denude lands of grass and shrub and provoke wild fires, these global spaces are witnessing to the two-hundred-year legacy of the burning of the subterranean forest that the

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industrial empire has spread around the earth in the form of carbon dioxide.25 The subterranean forest was a geomorphic memory of the providential way in which plants and shellfish had synthesized sunlight before being buried under the Earth’s surface. In so doing they drew down sufficient carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere to make the planet beneficent for mammalian life. They also played a crucial role in the emergence of the long period of climate stability which its inhabitants have enjoyed for the last 12,000 years. The burning of this subterranean store of carbon threatens the stability of the climate and its beneficence for future generations, because it puts the carbon under the earth in the wrong place. This displacement of carbon from terrestrial to atmospheric space was begun in ignorance, although there were many at the time of the industrial revolution who believed that mining coal and other substances from beneath the surface of the earth was a form of sacrilege against ‘mother earth’ which would not be without consequences. But in the age of Newton and the steam engine, these protests, many of them theological in nature, were ignored. The earth, Newton argued, was a machine operating according to certain fixed laws, which are set into the nature of things by the Creator and which do not vary whatever humans may do. The steam engine utilized these laws in an appropriate way, and this is why it worked. Global warming is now teaching human beings that those who protested against the first coal mines and steam driven factories, like those who resisted Newton, knew a more profound truth than Newton did. The clouds also witness to this truth. And it is a truth already witnessed to in the Book of Genesis and in the prophecies of Jeremiah – as well as in the prophetic protests of William Blake, who claimed that coal-fired power stations were desecrating the ‘divine energy’ that fuelled the earth.26 James Lovelock describes the relational nature of cosmological space, which Newtonian mechanism trained moderns to forget, as ‘Gaian’ space.27 When first propounded, the Gaia theory was fiercely disputed, but it forms the conceptual basis of the climate models run on super-computers at the British meteorological institute in Exeter, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change and at NASA. Lovelock argues that the Earth is not a machine, but a relational nexus. Living beings and dead beings have all played roles in making the balance of gases in the atmosphere, in the oceans and in the soil spatially beneficent for life. The climate system is even more borderless than the oceans and, even though the cycling of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is limited between the northern and the southern hemisphere, the rise in temperature these increases precipitate affects the whole planet. The borderless climate system therefore requires a new, cosmo-political, system for the mediation and negotiation of the ecological costs visited on some parts of the globe by the excess emissions of others. So far the Kyoto regime has failed to produce such an outcome. This is primarily because 25  R. Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, trans. Michael Osmann (Cambridge: White Horse Press 2001). 26   Northcott, Moral Climate (above, n. 19), 68. 27   James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Allen Lane 2006).

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the neoliberal trade regime imposed on the global economy under the auspices of the World Trade Organization in the last twenty years has promoted a significant expansion of interstate trade, the lengthening of supply chains, increased global movement of goods and resources, and hence of greenhouse gas emissions, while disallowing consideration of the trans-border environmental and social costs in the regulation of trade. At the core of the current global economic regime is a cosmopolitical model of governance which entirely neglects the borderless nature of greenhouse gases.28 As Ulrich Beck suggests, the regimen of world trade represents an illusory form of control, which feigns ‘control over the uncontrollable’.29 The dangers of the global risks inherent in such uncontrollability produce a range of political as well as ecological interactions between strangers across borders. And these interactions undermine the modern claim to the foundational sovereignty of the nation–state. Effective collective governance of borderless greenhouse gases requires a new conception of the world, which is more genuinely a cosmopolis than previous conceptualizations of international relations.30 In this perspective, the nation–state is no longer the foundational horizon of the world as it has been since the birth of the nation–state regime in Reformation Europe. Preventing dangerous climate change will require the recovery of a conception of international communion as the foundational ontological and biopolitical reality of human and even inter-species existence. Before the Reformation, the spatial form of this communion was the Holy Roman Empire. And the doctrine of the communion of saints associated with that empire remains as a guide to the moral and spiritual order which this new biopolitical reality is now recreating in space and time. This doctrine makes conceivable the kind of new cosmopolis, across nations, citizens and corporations, which borderless greenhouse gases now require. For it is certain that, without this new cosmopolis, the climate system will lead to the collapse of industrial civilization, as presently ordered around the sovereign power of nation–states which are individually unwilling to incur the costs of reducing their dependence on fossil fuels and so mitigate the infection of their greenhouse gas emissions on the spaces and lives of those who are innocent of such pollution.

28

 Ronnie D. Lipschutz, ‘Crossing Borders: Global Civil Society and the Reconfiguration of Transnational Political Space’, GeoJournal 52 (2000), 17–23. 29  Ulrich Beck, ‘Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction between Cosmopolitanism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks 4 (2004), 131–56. 30   Beck, ‘Cosmopolitical Realism’ (above, n. 29), 141–3.

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Bibliography Avery, Denis T. and S. Fred Singer, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 2007). Beck, Ulrich, ‘Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction between Cosmopolitanism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks 4 (2004), 131–56. Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, Vol. III.2, translated by G. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T and T Clark 1982). Benedict XVI, Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI, St Peter’s Square, Sunday, 24 April 2005, available at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ homilies/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050424_inizio-pontificato_ en.html (accessed on 28 April 2009). Dewey, John, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (London: George Allen and Unwin 1930). Hallman, David, ‘The WCC Climate Change Programme: History, Lessons and Challenges’, in Martin Robra (ed.), Climate Change (Geneva: World Council of Churches Justice Peace and Creation Team 2005), 13. Harvey, Fiona and Stephen Fidler, ‘Industry Caught in Carbon Smokescreen’, Financial Times, 25 April 2007. Lovelock, James, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Allen Lane 2006). Lipschutz, Ronnie D., ‘Crossing Borders: Global Civil Society and the Reconfiguration of Transnational Political Space’, GeoJournal 52 (2000), 17–23. Levitus, S., J. I. Antonov and T. Boyer, ‘Warming of the World Ocean’, Science 287 (2000), 2225–9. John Paul II, Solicitudio Rei Socialis (Vatican City: Holy See 1988), 36. McClean, Alex, Sylvester Halder and Ben Thurley, ‘Heed Bangladesh: Responding to Climate Change’, Harambee: Tear Australia (September 2007), 22–4. Meyer, Aubrey, Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change (Totnes, Devon: Schumacher College 2000). Michaels, Pat and Robert C. Bailing, The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air About Global Warming (Washington, DC: Cato Institute 2000). Murray, Robert, The Cosmic Covenant (London: Sheed and Ward, 1992). Neumayer, Eric, ‘In Defence of Historical Accountability for Greenhouse Gas Emissions’, Ecological Economics 33 (2000), 185–92. Northcott, Michael S., The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996). — ‘Eucharistic Eating: The Moral Economy of Food’, in Lukas Vischer (ed.), The Eucharist and Creation Spirituality (Geneva: Centre International Reformé John Knox 2007). — A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (London: Darton Longman and Todd 2007), 22–6.

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— ‘Apocalyptic Christians and the Morality of Dominion’, in Kyle Vanhoutan and Michael S. Northcott (eds), Dominion and Diversity ( Eugene, ON: Wipf and Stock, forthcoming). Porter, Eduardo, ‘Are the Grandkids Worth the Money? Calculating How Much to Spend to Keep the Future from Boiling Over’, New York Times, 15 March 2008. Raupach, Michael R., Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quere, Josep G. Canadell, Gernot Klepper and Christopher B. Field , ‘Global and Regional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emissions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (12 June 2007), 10288–93. Ryan, William and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discovery about the Event that Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster 1999). Spash, Clive, Greenhouse Economics: Values and Ethics (London: Routledge 2002), 189–91. Shue, Henry, ‘Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions’, Law and Policy 15 (1993), 39–59. Sieferle, R., The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, translated by Michael Osmann (Cambridge: White Horse Press 2001). Stern, Nicholas, Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006). Thomas, David S. G., Melanie Knight and Giles F. S. Wiggs, ‘Remobilization of Southern African Desert Dune Systems by Twenty-First Century Global Warming’, Science 435 (30 June 2005), 1218–21.

Chapter 7

Biodiversity and Christian Ethics: A Critical Discussion Anders Melin

Introduction Especially after the UN conference in Rio in 1992, the preservation of biodiversity has become a central element in environmental politics, both at the national and the international level. This is an issue which has also been discussed within theological ethics. Contrary to policy documents, which mainly emphasize the anthropocentric reasons for preserving biodiversity, most contemporary ecological theologians claim that species deserve moral consideration and that we have a duty towards nature itself to preserve biodiversity. The ecofeminists Rosemary Radford Ruether and Sallie McFague are two of the most influential theologians who have defended this viewpoint. Their ecological theologies have, however, been criticized for being incompatible with evolutionary biology – for example by Lisa Sideris. In this article I start by briefly describing Ruether’s and McFague’s ethical standpoints. Then I present and evaluate Sideris’s critique. Afterwards I discuss the theology of nature put forward by Niels Henrik Gregersen, which I think is more convincing than the ecotheologies of Ruether, McFague and Sideris. Finally, I outline my own proposal for a Christian response to the issue of biodiversity. The Ecofeminist Contributions of Ruether and McFague The theologies of Ruether and McFague share some fundamental features, since they both question a dualistic view of the human–nature relationship and defend the idea that natural entities are also to be considered morally. Ruether discusses her view of environmental ethics in the greatest detail in Gaia and God. In this book she endorses a conception of the covenant between God and humanity that encompasses nature. Ruether questions the sharp dualism between history and nature which has been prevalent in Protestant theology. According to this dualism, history is the realm where humans can experience the presence of God, while nature is seen as something that humans must transcend in order to reach true humanness and freedom. Ruether argues that new exegetical analyses show that the dualism of modern western Protestantism distorts the biblical perspective. According to the Hebrew understanding of God, history is not opposed to nature.

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Instead, God is seen as the Lord of both heaven and earth, and God’s power is experienced in all realms of life. With the concept of the covenant as a starting point, Ruether claims that both individual animals and plants and species of animals and plants are to be morally considered. She argues that the covenantal vision of the relationship between humans and other forms of life gives humans a special place as caretakers. We do not own the rest of life but we are accountable for its welfare to God, the source of life. Humans and other living beings are part of one community of interdependence. We should acknowledge both the ‘otherness’ of non-human life forms and our kinship with them. We have limited rights to use other life forms, but not to wipe them out. Each life form has its own independent relation with God and ought not to be treated as a thing; in other words, each life form has intrinsic value. Ruether is critical of social Darwinism and of its tendency to portray nature as a competitive system where only the fittest survive. She argues instead that interdependence and cooperation are the fundamental principles of ecosystems. Competition is only a subcategory, which serves to maintain the cooperation. She argues that the interdependence in nature should be a model for human ethics. We should strive to develop our compassion for others and see to it that our interaction becomes cooperative instead of competitive. Ethical issues are discussed by McFague at length in Super, Natural Christians. In this work she proposes a model of the human–nature relationship which she describes as ‘the subject–subjects’ model. McFague claims that our current understanding of the world is formed by ‘the subject–object’ model. According to this model, those beings connected with reason are regarded as subjects, while beings or entities connected with nature are regarded as objects. White, educated and wealthy western men have been seen as rational, while coloured men, women, children and poor people have been seen as irrational. McFague argues, as many other ecofeminists, that nature has been used as a political category in order to justify exploitation. McFague states that we should shift to a subject–subjects model of the world, according to which every natural entity is a subject. She claims that the subject– subjects model fits our current understanding of the world better. According to the postmodern view, all aspects of reality – humans, animals, plants, mountains and the earth as a whole – are characterized by agency and activity. To understand everything as being alive and active is closer to our view of the world than to

 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God. An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperOne 1994), pp. 207–10.    Ibid., p. 227.    Ibid., pp. 55–6.    Ibid., p. 57.    Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians. How We Should Love Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1997), pp. 88–9. 

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understand only humans as being alive and the rest of the world as dead and passive.  McFague claims that the model she proposes leads to an ethics built on care for all who belong in the community. Since we all exist together and since we are all subjects, we should treat all natural entities as community members. We should therefore first of all respect everything in nature, in the sense that we should acknowledge that all living beings exist for their own sake and have their own life goals, which are different from ours. Moreover, McFague states that the model of community entails an ethics of care. Since we exist in a relationship of mutual influence with other living beings, we also ought to care for them. According to McFague, Christianity has something to add to a community ethics: the concern for the neediest. Christians should give priority to those humans and non-human life forms that are mostly in need of help. Critique from the Viewpoint of Evolutionary Biology Both Ruether’s and McFague’s version of a Christian environmental ethics have been influential, but they have, of course, also been objects of criticism. One of the most cogent example is found in Lisa H. Sideris’s Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology and Natural Selection. Sideris’s main point is that contemporary ecotheologians often base their moral reasoning on a misleading account of science. She argues that both McFague and Ruether only acknowledge certain selected theories from ecology, but neglect important Darwinian theories and perspectives. They underscore the interconnectedness of life forms, but ignore the predation and competition in nature.10 According to Sideris, Ruether neglects the aspects of evolution which are connected with conflict and competition. When Ruether describes competition, this is regarded only as a subcategory which serves to maintain the cooperation.11 As the book title indicates, the Gaia hypothesis is a main source of inspiration for Ruether. Sideris points out, however, that Ruether overlooks the aspects of the Gaia hypothesis which are not in line with her own ‘natural ethic’.12 As for McFague, she asserts that her ethical approach, the subject–subjects model, is consistent with ecological science; but Sideris is sceptical about this claim. She argues that McFague, in much the same way as Ruether, selects certain aspects of science 

         

Ibid., pp. 95–6. Ibid., pp. 151–2. Ibid., pp. 153–5. Ibid., pp. 169–70. 10  Lisa H. Sideris, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology and Natural Selection (New York: Columbia University Press 2003), pp. 45–6. 11   Ibid., pp. 46–51. 12   Ibid., pp. 52–6. 

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which seem to confirm her own ethical model. McFague contends that nature, according to the modern ecological model, is characterized by relationality and interdependence. Everything in nature has a value in itself. However, according to Sideris McFague does not take account of evolutionary theories in an appropriate way. She regards competition in nature only as a marginal phenomenon, which does not interfere with the general view of nature as a cooperative community. Since McFague assumes that a scientific account of nature should be able to support her ethics of love for the oppressed, she has to exclude competition and the ‘survival of the fittest’ from her account of nature.13 Sideris concludes that the ethical proposals put forward so far within ecotheology are often too anthropocentrically grounded, since they focus too much on the alleged similarities between humans and animals. Instead she advocates an approach that concentrates on larger wholes such as species rather than on individuals. Sideris claims that the land ethics, first proposed by Aldo Leopold and later developed by Baird J. Callicott and Holmes Rolston III, is a valuable starting-point for a Christian environmental ethics. It is also compatible with James Gustafson’s theocentric approach to environmental ethics. According to Sideris, both these approaches are based on respect for the processes in nature and do not try to impose human standards on them.14 Gustafson rejects what he describes as the anthropocentric orientation within contemporary theology. Religion is commonly understood as an instrument for achieving human ends. The focus is on personal repression and oppression rather than on sin and guilt. God is conceived of solely from the viewpoint of individual human needs. Gustafson claims instead that God should be viewed as the Other, the ultimate reality. He proposes that ethics and theology should be oriented to the good for large wholes such as the human species, other species and nature as a whole. Our role as humans is to adapt to an objective order which is larger than ourselves. Our dependence on this order evokes in religious people a sense of the divine. Sideris claims that many versions of ecotheology are characterized by a similar form of anthropocentrism as the one Gustafson rejects. Even though ecotheologians aim to broaden the scope of theology in order to include non-humans, they seldom succeed in valuing non-human life in a nonanthropocentric way. Ecotheologians inspired by liberation theology, for example McFague, understands nature from a viewpoint which is mainly human. Natural beings are conceived of as an ‘oppressed class’, and nature’s otherness is thereby forgotten.15 Sideris believes that love should be extended to nature, but we have to discriminate in the way we apply this love. There are morally relevant distinctions between wild and domesticated animals. To show compassion for individual wild animals is problematic, since this can have counterproductive effects on the 13

  Ibid., pp. 68–70.   Ibid., pp. 168–9. 15   Ibid., pp. 201–11. 14

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ecosystem. We should proceed with caution in our contact with wild nature. In order to preserve the patterns of interdependence, we should focus on species more than on individual organisms.16 Sideris seems to be right when she claims that there is a tendency in the writings of Ruether and McFague to disregard those aspects of evolutionary biology that do not fit with their ethical theories. However, I think that Sideris’s own theological interpretation of nature is problematic, since it assumes that God does not show moral concern for individual living beings but only for the natural world as a whole. In her attempt to avoid the tendency, within ecotheology, to portray nature as a harmonious community, she ends up with a view of God as rather distant from the creation. Her view of God emphasizes the transcendent aspects at the expense of the immanent ones. Therefore it is questionable whether this view is compatible with the Christian doctrine of incarnation. The belief in Jesus Christ is the belief in a God who shows concern for the suffering of individuals. Moreover, Sideris has a tendency to accept uncritically all the aspects of Darwinism, which I find problematic from a theological viewpoint: Darwinism is connected with a materialist philosophy which is hard to reconcile with the fundamental tenets of Christian belief. A critical dialogue is necessary instead.17 In my view, a more appropriate starting-point for a Christian response to the issue of biodiversity whould be a view of God which stresses both his transcendence and his immanence, but also takes into account the empirical facts of evolutionary history. Such a theology of nature has been formulated by Niels Henrik Gregersen, and in the following section I discuss his proposal. Gregersen’s Notion of God as ‘the Creator of Creativity’ Gregersen’s theology of nature builds on the notion of God as ‘the Creator of creativity’. He argues that such a conception of God is in line with the scientific view of nature as self-organizing and self-creative. Gregersen intends to describe how we can discern the creative presence of God in a world which seems to be self-regulative. According to Gregersen, ‘we should take leave of the persistent thought model that God’s glory is magnified when nature is conceived as purely passive, and that God’s power, correspondingly, is diminished if God’s creatures are empowered’.18 Instead we should see the natural self-enfolding of life forms as an expression of God’s creativity.19

16

  Ibid., pp. 253–5.   An influential example of such a dialogue can be found in John F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press 2000). 18   Niels Henrik Griegersen, ‘The Creation of Creativity and the Flourishing of Creation’, Currents in Theology and Mission, 28.3–4 (June–August 2001), 404. 19   Ibid., p. 405. 17

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Gregersen’s aim is to overcome the apparent contradiction between the belief that nature is created by God and the scientific hypothesis that it is selfdeveloped. In order to accomplish this, he makes use of the scientific notion of autopoiesis, which denotes the ability of both abiotic and biotic systems to recreate themselves continuously. According to the theory of autopoiesis, living systems have the capacity to form themselves in response to changing environmental circumstances. Gregersen’s main thesis is that ‘God is creative by supporting and stimulating autopoietic processes’.20 Although he recognizes that living beings have self-creative capacities, he still maintains that God has priority in his relation with autopoietic processes in nature, since it is God who constitutes them. God both supports autopoietic processes by constituting their inner dynamics and stimulates them in particular directions as they develop.21 With inspiration both from the natural sciences and from the current theological debate, Gregersen outlines a theology of nature which is intended to be consistent with autopoietic theory. He asserts that chance is a part of God’s plan for creation, but that the distributions of chance are established by God. The purpose of God is expressed in the aggregate effects of random happenings. Gregersen states that God as Creator of the self-evolving world is acting amorally, since the effects of chance are not determined by any distinction between good and evil. However, God does not act immorally, since his actions support the autonomous character of the world.22 In order to avoid a ‘statistical deism’, Gregersen supplements his understanding of evolutionary history as the outcome of chance by three additional theological modes of interpretation. First, he asserts that God has an infinite power of selfconsistency and self-relativization. God has the capability to understand all creatures from within themselves. According to Gregersen, Christian faith asserts that God communicates to mortal humans as a mortal human. Through the incarnation as Christ and the inhabiting of the world as Spirit, God is both distant from and near to the creation. Since God is both personally self-consistent throughout time and capable of infinite self-relativization, he can maintain his own transcendence at the same time as he can understand each living being from that being’s own viewpoint.23 Second, Gregersen describes God as a compassionate partaker of nature. According to Gregersen ‘it belongs to the core of the Christian faith that God in the birth, trials, and death of Jesus has exposed divine nature to the experience of suffering’.24 In Christ God takes on the suffering of all creatures. Gregersen states that Christ did not only die the death of human sinners, he also died the 20   Niels Henrik Gregersen, ‘The Idea of Creation and the Theory of Autopoietic Processes’, Zygon, 33.3 (September 1998), 334. 21   Ibid., pp. 334–5. 22   Ibid., pp. 354–5. 23   Ibid., p. 356. 24   Ibid., p. 357.

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death of all living beings.25 Third, Gregersen contends that divine action should be understood as a structuring cause. He makes a distinction between structuring and triggering causes and explains it by taking the example of typing on a computer. The triggering cause is a pressure on the keyboard which moves the cursor, while the structuring cause is the hardware conditions. According to Gregersen, God’s actions do not replace the workings of nature, which are the only triggering causes. Instead, God is the underlying causality which makes the actions of living creatures possible. However, God’s structuring actions are not the same in all circumstances, according to Gregersen. God adapts Godself to the different spatio-temporal contexts of living beings and reshapes their possibilities as history evolves.26 Gregersen’s idea that the self-development of life forms has its origin in the creativity of God is an interesting attempt to formulate a theology of nature which pays attention to scientific facts. I think he succeeds better than Ruether, McFague and Sideris in developing a theological view of nature which is consistent both with science and with the Christian belief in a God who cares for creation. However, it is still questionable if his theological viewpoint takes account of the suffering and violence in nature in a reasonable way. If we assert that God is the Creator of creativity because he lets all life forms develop according to their own will, must we not also maintain that God is the Creator of the destructivity in nature? The question is whether the idea that the evolutionary process is in accordance with God’s will is compatible with the Christian doctrine that this world is fallen. Furthermore, we must ask ourselves if a loving God would just take part in the suffering of living creatures without trying to eliminate it. Does it not lead to a passive view of God to conclude that he just accepts the suffering which is a result of the struggle between different living creatures? The idea that the natural world is created by God is difficult to reconcile with the insight that the evolutionary process is characterized by suffering and violence. Finally, we must admit that we have no certain knowledge of whether the struggle for life in the natural world is in accordance with, or against, God’s will. Still, we should show respect for other creatures insofar as they are created by God, although they are not moral in a human sense. With this in mind, I proceed to outline a Christian response to the issue of biodiversity in the next section. An Outline of a Christian Response to the Issue of Biodiversity The first and most central principle is that we should regard biodiversity as valuable in itself. We should acknowledge that nature is not created only for our sake. Although nature is not a moral community in the human sense, we should still show moral concern for it. The diverse life forms have their origin in the divine creativity. Therefore we should show moral concern also for species which 25

  Ibid., p. 358.   Ibid., pp. 358–9.

26

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are considered ugly or useless from a human viewpoint. The evolutionary history should not be shaped only in accordance with human needs. The second principle is that the responsibility to preserve biodiversity above all should be understood as a negative duty, one of refraining from actions which may lead to the extinction of species. We should distinguish between natural and anthropogenic extinction. Even if we believe that the current evolutionary process is against God’s will, it is highly questionable whether we should try to save species which are becoming extinct for reasons not created by humans. First, we cannot know for certain what God’s original plan for creation is. Second, even if we assume that we know it, the question is still whether we have the ecological knowledge to bring it about. Human actions to save a species may have detrimental effects on the ecosystem as a whole. The third principle is that we, in spite of the intrinsic value of biodiversity, are justified in performing actions which lead to the extinction of species if this is necessary in order to satisfy basic human needs. The duty to avoid the extinction of species should be understood as a prima facie duty, which can be overridden by the duty to satisfy basic human needs. If we assume that there is a divine will behind the creation of humanity and human culture, actions which satisfy basic human needs can be regarded as morally legitimate. For the sake of developing human culture we are often forced to restrict the reproduction of other species. During the history of humanity, extinction created by humans has always occurred. In order to satisfy basic human needs we can be compelled to act in a way that will lead to the extinction of species also in the future. However, we must be aware that such actions are morally problematic and can only be justified in situations where they are necessary for the satisfaction of vital human interests. We should also take into account that it is a greater moral evil to cause certain kinds of species rather than others to become extinct. For instance, it is worse to cause the extinction of a mammal or a bird species rather than that of an insect species, both because mammals and birds have a higher degree of sentience and because a very large number of insect species exists. Conclusions I agree with the main thrust of Sideris’s critique of Ruether and McFague, namely that both tend to overlook those aspects of evolutionary biology which conflict with their ecological theologies. However, I am more sceptical of Sideris’s own theological and ethical standpoint, since it seems to presuppose a transcendent view of God that does not take account of God’s immanent aspects. God is portrayed as showing concern only for the natural world as a whole, and not for individual living beings. I think that a more appropriate starting-point for a Christian response to the issue of biodiversity would be a theology of nature which also acknowledges God’s concern for nature and his continuous interaction with it. Such a view has been presented by Niels Henrik Gregersen, who builds

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his theology of nature on the notion of God as ‘the Creator of creativity’. He formulates a theological view of nature which is intended to be consistent with the scientific understanding of nature as self-regulative. Gregersen’s main thesis is that God continuously creates by supporting autopoietic processes. Although I am sceptical as to whether Gregersen takes account of the suffering and violence in nature in a reasonable way, I still think he succeeds better than Ruether, McFague and Sideris in creating a theology of nature which is consistent both with natural science and with the Christian belief in a God who cares for creation. Finally, I outline a proposal for a Christian response to the issue of biodiversity consisting of the following three principles: one, we should regard biodiversity as valuable in itself; two, the responsibility to preserve biodiversity should above all be understood as a negative duty to refrain from actions which lead to the extinction of species; three, we are justified in performing actions which lead to the extinction of species if this is necessary in order to satisfy basic human needs, in other words the duty to avoid the extinction of species is only a prima facie duty, which can be overridden by the duty to satisfy basic human needs. Acknowledgement This article has been written as part of a research project on biodiversity and ethics financed by the Swedish Research Council.

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Bibliography Gregersen, Niels Henrik, ‘The Idea of Creation and the Theory of Autopoietic Processes’, Zygon 33.3 (September 1998), 333–67. — ‘The Creation of Creativity and the Flourishing of Creation’, Currents in Theology and Mission 28.3–4 (June/August 2001), 400–10. Haught, John F., God After Darwin. A Theology of Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press 2000). McFague, Sallie, Super, Natural Christians. How We Should Love Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1997). Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Gaia and God. An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperOne 1994). Sideris, Lisa H., Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology and Natural Selection (New York: Columbia University Press 2003).

Chapter 8

Master of the Universe or the Humble Servant: How the Concept of Sustainable Development is Affecting Our Understanding of Humanity and Nature Björn Vikström

There is today a strong feeling of urgency in environmental issues. This is quite understandable, and even unavoidable, given the widespread knowledge about the risks of an ecological breakdown on our planet. But at the same time here lies a temptation: the urgent need to find and implement solutions to the current problems tends to give all other matters only an instrumental value in relation to the task of promoting a ‘sustainable development’. This concept was formulated in the 1980s with the ambition to defend the possibility of a constructive cooperation between economic growth and environmental protection and thus to propose an alternative to the ‘zero-growth’ recommended by the ‘Club of Rome’ in Limits to Growth (1972). The introduction of the concept of sustainable development in the scientific discourse on environmental issues was not just a question of a change in vocabulary. The gradual shift during the 1980s and 1990s from ‘ecological research’ to ‘sustainable development’ meant that a normative element was introduced: it was not any more just a question of neutral descriptions of the interplay between humanity and nature, but an urgent need to accomplish certain goals. This shift is an expression of a new attitude towards the role of science in society. According to this view, the results of scientific research should have relevance not only for the scientific community, but also for the whole society, by serving political decisionmaking. There are some postmodern traits in this new understanding of the relationship between science and society. One of these traits is the pragmatism which follows from the epistemological scepticism towards all kind of absolutism in sciences: since we cannot know anything for sure, the most important question is not if a certain theory or scientific explanation is true, but whether it works. If a desirable change can be achieved by using a certain model or theory, then that model or theory should be adopted. This kind of pragmatic argumentation is closely related to an anthropocentric utilitarianism: actions can be measured on the basis of their consequences for the human beings involved. Whether humankind actually has

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the right to rule nature and use it as a resource for its own benefit is seldom put into question. The focus is on forming a more responsible and sustainable management of these resources and on aiming at a more just distribution of welfare, both globally and in relation to future generations. The manipulative attitude towards nature is not condemned as such – only its short-sightedness. There are many environmentalists who oppose these presuppositions. Thus not all of them have endorsed the concept of sustainable development, and many are deeply suspicious of its underlying assumption – namely that human beings can and ought to manage the environment. Dick Richardson argues that the concept of sustainable development has to be redefined along purely ecological lines – otherwise the concept will be only a rhetorical device used by politicians and the market. In an ecocentric perspective, the human being is not seen as the ruler of nature, but as a part of it; a part whose interests should be subordinated to the interests of larger ecological entities such as ecosystems. This implies that the relation between humans and nature shouldn’t primarily be characterized by management, but by participation and mutual dependence. As a theologian, it is tempting for me to point out that the existence of fundamental links between humanity and the rest of nature is a common feature of many religious traditions – an archaic feature, which has been acknowledged by many ecologically oriented environmental thinkers. But these religious traditions, and not least my own Christian tradition, have also been used as providers of arguments for elevating the human being to the status of a ruler of the Creation. As a consequence, the tension between anthropocentric and holistic convictions concerning humanity’s relation to nature is a burning issue in the current theological debate, where the ecotheologians are critically re-evaluating the content of their own traditions in order to make possible a creative interaction between religious convictions and ecological insights. The first part of my chapter deals with the role that the conception of humanity as a responsible technician plays in the discourse on sustainable development, and I actualize the critical voices of those who argue that this notion might lead to a rule of experts at the expense of the participation of local inhabitants. The following section deals with different approaches where the proper role of the human in relation to nature could be described with the help of the notion ‘a humble servant’. The function of religious convictions, of trust in the scientific status of ecology and of the role of personal experiences are discussed. In the final    Susan Baker, Maria Kousis, Dick Richardson and Stephen Young, ‘The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development in EU Perspective’, in Susan Baker et al. (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development: Theory, Policy and Practice within the European Union (London: Routledge 1997), p. 17.   Dick Richardson, ‘The Politics of Sustainable Development’, in Baker et al. (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development (above, n. 1), p. 43.   Mary Evelyn Tucker, Wordly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase (Chicago: Open Court 2003), pp. 18–26.

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section I present some building blocks for the development of an environmental ethics based on cross-cultural discussions where representatives of different cultures come together – not least the ‘cultures’ of scientific research and local, non-scientifically informed inhabitants. A Critical Assessment of the Notion ‘Sustainable Development’ There are at least two different ways of understanding the concept of sustainable development, which according to Susan Baker are mirrored in two dominant types of environmental policy: The first tries to preserve the quality of nature within the prevailing economic, political and social system by only proposing slight adjustments. The second is more radical and involves ambitions to change our habits of consumption, to redistribute the use of the resources, and to reform the current structures. The first mentioned type of policy, which is equivalent to a ‘weak’ interpretation of sustainable development, is focused on finding solutions to current problems. Its defenders believe that it is possible to maintain our current standard of living: humankind has the right to continue to use the resources of the Earth as long as this is done on a long-term basis. According to this optimistic vision, the development of a more energy-efficient technology will enable the existing resources to last longer, and new alternative resources will be found before the old are totally exhausted. As a consequence, the weak understanding of sustainability advocates confidence in scientific experts at the expense of the participation of the citizens. Characteristic of the alleged neutrality of the weak interpretation of sustainable development is the lack of anthropological considerations. Humanity’s position as the ruler of the earth, responsible for a sound global development, is presupposed. Economic growth is considered a precondition of environmental protection, because without growth there will be no financial resources for a global sustainable development. But it is obvious that this anthropocentric approach to nature downplays the sense of wonder, reverence and responsibility that are characteristic of more holistic and ecocentric perspectives. Finally, the policy of those following the weak definition of sustainable development is mainly reactive, which means that they react to problems which already have arosen. In its strong form, on the other hand, sustainable development involves proactive measures taken in order to prevent future disasters. Environmental management has focused until now on recovery after damages: reforestation, reclaiming desert land, rebuilding urban environments and restoring 

  Susan Baker, ‘The Evolution of European Union Environmental Policy: From Growth to Sustainable Development?’, in Baker et al. (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development (above, n. 1), pp. 101–102.    Baker et al., ‘Theory and Practice’ (above, n. 1), p. 11; Timothy O’Riordan, Environmentalism (2nd edn, London: Pion Press 1981), p. 12.

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the local ecosystems. The new perspective is to avoid the adverse effects of human operations and to integrate the environmental concerns at an early stage in every plan and every process of the society. According to the strong version of sustainable development, environmental protection is a precondition of sound economic development. While the market is given an important and rather independent role in the weak form of sustainable development, the use of legal and economic policy instruments plays a decisive role in the strong form. Those who follow a strong interpretation of sustainable development tend to stress the importance of a democratic participation ‘bottom-up’ in processes of decision-making. This indicates that other insights are valued beside the knowledge that scientific experts represent. Characteristic of the strong version of sustainable development is also the fact that it is accompanied by a vision of how life is meant to be. It’s not just a question of finding practical solutions to current problems, but also of expressing at a deeper level what a good human life and a good relationship to nature would look like. These visions can take the form either of a nostalgic yearning for a previous un-fallen state or of an utopia projected into the future. In the weak version of sustainable development, humanity is considered something separate from the rest of nature; but in the stronger interpretations of the concept this anthropocentrism is balanced by a more humble awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness of humanity and nature. A common trait, however, in both the weak and the strong interpretations of sustainable development is that economic growth is desirable: in the former, this growth is seen as a prerequirement of environmental protection, and in the later this relation is inversed. But is it possible to integrate this notion of growth with an ecological point of view? Ecosystems change all the time, but their intrinsic resources do not grow – at least not in the sense presupposed by those who believe in the possibility of a continuous economic growth on Earth. This idea of desirable economic growth is relevant only from an exclusively anthropocentric point of view, because no other species than humanity has had or will have any lasting benefit from economic growth. As a consequence, the notion of the human being presupposed by sustainable development is that of a ruler of the Earth; hopefully a wise and responsible ruler, but all the same a supreme care-taker who knows what is best for the rest of nature.



 Tage Sundström and Lars Rydén, ‘The Prospect of Sustainable Development’, in Lars Rydén et al. (eds), Environmental Science: Understanding, Protecting, and Managing the Environment in the Baltic Sea Region (Uppsala: Baltic University Press 2003), p. 793.    Baker et al., ‘Theory and Practice’ (above, n. 1), pp. 13–16.

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Ecocentrism: The Interconnectedness of All Living Beings Ecocentric perspectives have been developed as an alternative to anthropocentrism. The basic idea is that we cannot understand the interplay in nature if we only look at it from the angle of the individuals, be it human beings (anthropocentrism) or members of other species (biocentrism). Therefore ecocentrism is characterized by a holistic view: the function of an ecosystem cannot be understood only by explaining how its parts function. Ecocentric ethics, ecocentric environmental philosophy and ecotheology are all highly dependent upon ecology as the science which studies the interaction of living organisms with each other and with their environments. In comparision with the comprehension of humanity inherited in the concept of sustainable development as described in the former section, the ecocentric perspective stresses much more strongly that humanity is a part of nature. Therefore the interests of humanity should not automatically be given priority over the interests of other species. The idea of a continuous economic growth is considered profoundly foreign to thev way ecosystems function because this growth is dependent upon the spending of resources which are not self-renewing. Reliance on ecology as a scientific, and presumably objective, basis for environmental policy isn’t as unproblematic as it may sound. There seem to be two main options to choose between: Either we rely heavily on the expert knowledge of scientists, because these are the only ones who understand the complicated interplay in nature, or we try to leave nature in peace and interfere with it as little as possible, relying on nature’s inherent capability to repair damages. Against the first alternative it can be stated that the possibility to go directly from ecological explanations to ethical guidelines is highly uncertain, and that trust in experts tends to overlook the practical knowledge of local inhabitants. Against the second option it can be argued that this strategy of non-involvement is too late to introduce now, when the human impact on nature has already lead to such disastrous and irreversal consequences. We have to take responsibility for these by trying to reduce the damages already caused and by preventing future catastrophies. When common westerners today look for arguments for a holistic and ecocentric view of nature, they can find it in religious traditions (for example in Christianity, in Judaism or in influences from eastern religions); but, as a consequence of secularization and of the current strong trust in scientific results, it is probable that presently ecology has a more decisive role to play. In former times, religion and philosophy provided all-embracing patterns for understanding the universe and the meaning of individual lives. Today many people are hoping that science would shoulder this burden. According to empirical surveys, ecology has quite an influential place in the world-view of many contemporary westerners. Like   Joseph R. DesJardins, Environmental Ethics. An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy (4th edn, Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth 2006), p. 151.    Nils Uddenberg, Det stora sammanhanget. Moderna svenskars syn på människans plats i naturen (Nora: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa 1995), pp. 160–61. 

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the theological and philosophical narratives of the past, ecology is offering an explanation of how everything on this Earth is interconnected and interdependent, and it is also considered, at least indirectly, as a normative source of information concerning how life should be organized. Visions of the untouched nature, of the venerable wilderness and of harmonious ecosystems played an important role in the writings of the early environmental activists, and continue to do the same today. It is interesting to notice that many of the influential environmental thinkers have found inspiration in various religious conceptions and have integrated secular versions of these conceptions in their own evolutionary and ecological world-views. The points of connection between religion and ecology are not unexpected, if we consider that ecology has some of its roots in natural theology and in the idea of a ‘divine economy’ in God’s creation. According to Carl von Linné, the pioneering Swedish scientist of the eighteenth century, this divine economy implies that the universe is a harmonious totality, where every individual entity has its proper function and its proper role to play. The human being is considered to be a part of the system, even though one placed at the top of it. This conception of a divine economy was a stepping stone between premodern and modern thought. An important element of this world-view was the idea of a divine power floating through all living beings. The step from this ‘divine power’ to a de-personalized conception of God, or to some kind of pantheism, is not too wide. It is interesting to notice that many of the most prominent representatives of early environmental philosophy and environmental ethics were fascinated by various expressions of pantheism, which they tried to unite with the fundamental convictions of Darwinism and evolutionism. Ernst Haeckel found inspiration in Buddhism, holism and traditional German ethnic religions, but despite this he argued that society should be ruled by the neutral reason of the scientists. John Muir combined elements of both pantheism and evolutionism. Henry Thoreau proposed a theological economy where God was described as ‘the Universal Being’: a non-personal power and an ultimate intelligence, which kept the world together in an organic unity. According to Thoreau, nature has both a body and a spirit. These convictions led him to renounce traditional Christianity and seek inspiration in old druidic cults.10 The conception of Earth as a living being has stubbornly remained an option for environmentally oriented thinkers of different ages. This idea can be found for example in James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia hypothesis, or in some ecofeminists’ actualizations of old nature religions. The Gaia hypothesis could be described as a secularized worship of Mother Earth where the harmony of nature is underlined, whereas the struggle and competition between individuals and species are ignored.11   Sverker Sörlin, Naturkontraktet. Om naturumgängets idéhistoria. (Stockholm: Carlssons 1991), pp. 134, 169. 11  Robert Kirkman, Skeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophy and Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002), pp. 97–8. 10

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When ecology emerged as a scientific discipline, the idea of a divine economy was secularized. Linné and his contemporaries believed that, through science, humanity could learn to know God better and still preserve a humble reverence in relation to nature. In modernity, on the other hand, science is considered as a way towards dominion and control: nature can be understood and controlled because it is subordinated to the human mind. This assumption is called in question today. Ecologists are now pointing out aspects of discontinuity and unpredictability rather than stressing the harmony of ecosystems. When the ideal of a harmonious interplay in nature has been abandoned, the focus is directed more and more towards the need of preserving biological diversity. What, then, is the role of humanity in this ecologically influenced perspective? Generally it could be stated that humanity functions according to the same laws as other species. The guideline for human ecology was, above all in its intial phase, that human society can be explained with the help of ecological discoveries concerning the interaction among the populations of other species. The ambition was to create a solid scientific basis for an understanding of human beings and of their interaction with the environment. But, as philosopher Robert Kirkman argues, it is problematic that writers in environmental ethics and environmental philosophy sometimes try to borrow the authority of the natural sciences, and thus pretend to give their understanding of ethics an ‘objective’ base.12 This conception appears even more problematic if we try to move directly from ecology to ethics. Already Darwin stressed that evolution, and therefore also nature as such, was not characterized by cooperation, but by struggle. Nature was not to be considered a harmonious economic system, but a place where creative and violent change occurred continuously. If we conceive of environmental ethics as a direct consequence of ecology and evolution, it is hard to avoid a fatalist position whereby everything is seen as determined by forces outside the control of the individual. According to Kirkman, environmental ethics destroys its own foundation, if the freedom of will is eliminated by subordinating ethics to ecology. Current ecological theory does not provide some sort of natural moral standard against which one could measure human activities.13 In ecologically inspired thinking there is a tension between a humble reverence towards nature and a confidence in scientific knowledge. This tension is obvious, for example, in the ‘deep ecology’ movement founded by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Both Naess and his followers – Warwick Fox and others – elaborate the idea of a spontaneous identification between the ecologist and nature. According to them, this unmediated experience of nature, laden with 12   ‘The natural sciences now wear the mantle of authority in all matters concerning knowledge of the material world. Environmental philosophers often borrow elements of scientific theory, apparently hoping that some of the authority of the natural sciences will rub off on their metaphysical and ethical claims.’ Kirkman, Skeptical Environmentalism (above, n. 11), p. 75. 13   Ibid., pp. 103–104, 152.

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emotions and values, should be given equal weight to that of scientific results.14 Although deep ecologists draw heavily on ecological insights, they are at the same time critical towards the scientific ideals of modernity, because these presuppose the split between a perceiving subject and a perceived object, which is explicitly rejected by deep ecology. But the epistemological status of the intuitive grasping of a totality remains uncertain. Robert Kirkman asks the critical question: Are holistic, organic world-views true in an ontological sense, or are they just useful? Are they not validated only through the consequences they might lead to, which would imply that they come close to the pragmatic aims of postmodern ethics?15 There is no explicit environmental ethics of deep ecology, since the focus in this movement is on securing a radical change in world-view, not on forming certain rules for our behaviour. Fox argues that ethics actually becomes superfluous when a self-realization in the deep ecologist’s sense has been achieved: when we have understood our profound participation in the totality of life, a reverential and humble behavior will follow automatically.16 From the intuitive grasp of the totality comes an intuitive grasping of the right and proper way to live. The problem with this way of reasoning on ethical matters is well known in theology: if the right way to live is accessible only to those who have achieved the right insights (that is, those who confess to the right faith, are ‘born again’, or something like that), any dialogue with the ‘unfaithful’ becomes impossible. A radical conversion becomes a prerequisite for a mutual understanding, since our understanding of reality is, in an inevitable sense, determined by our convictions. The Inter-Cultural Dialogue as a Model for Environmental Ethics One thesis of my chapter is that our current postmodern society is characterized by a considerable pragmatism. This pragmatic attitude towards science, education and ethics is understandable when we consider the current environmental crisis: there exists undoubtedly an urgent need to change our western life-style, to decrease consumption, and to repair the damages already caused to the environment. The goaldirected approach can also be understood as a result of the current epistemological scepticism and pluralism: since we lack confidence in the possibility of achieving consensus on scientific matters, it is easier to concentrate on the desirable results. During the last decades, this understanding has been the guideline for the political decisions directing the funding of scientific research, a situation which has resulted in a strong emphasis on the relevance that the projects in question might have for the society.

14  DesJardins, Environmental Ethics (above, n. 8), pp. 213–14. See also Kingsley Goodwin in this volume (Chapter 13). 15   Kirkman, Skeptical Environmentalism (above, n. 11), p. 22. 16   Ibid., p. 125.

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This pragmatic goal-directedness is a fundamental feature of the concept of sustainable development, both in its weak and in its strong interpretations. In these conceptions, the manipulative and technological dimensions of the relation between humanity and nature are stressed. Although the seriousness of the situation is highlighted, the solutions proposed seldom represent a radical challenge to current financial structures. In order to get political support for a sustainable policy, economic growth is not put in question. In the ecocentric perspectives, on the other hand, the fundamental interconnectedness between humanity and nature is presupposed. From a religious point of view humanity is considered part of God’s creation, whereas ecologists are emphasizing the fundamental biological, genetical and ecological similarities between humanity and other species. The key role played by ecology in ecocentric perspectives brings the question of the relation betwen science and ethics to the fore. The strong confidence in the scientific achievements of ecology might lead to an exaggerated trust in experts as the only persons capable of finding the solutions needed – a conception familiar from the weak interpretation of sustainable development. At the same time, however, most politicians and environmentalists involved in the implementation of sustainable development agree that the fulfilment of this task requires political decentralization and strong local participation. Therefore, there is unavoidably a need for a dialogue aiming at an integration of scientific knowledge with local experiences.17 A dialogue between representatives of different cultures, world-views and convictions is difficult to achieve if we, like deep ecologist Warwick Fox, jump to the conclusion that ethics becomes superfluous when a true self-realization is achieved, because then there seems to be no basis for communicating with those who do not share this understanding. The conception of a contextual relativism might offer a temptation to interrupt the discussion between different view-points precisely at the moment where we should sharpen our argumentation. To resign oneself to diversified convictions and pre-understandings is to deny the possibility of a meaningful interaction across the borders that separate us.18 An important question in environmental ethics is whether the world today needs a global ethics, or if a more realistic and modest aim would be to reflect upon how different culturally and socially rooted ethical systems could be made to cooperate. Because the environmental crisis is global, there is accordingly an unavoidable need to reach international understanding and agreements upon commitments concerning the available solutions. Therefore we cannot be satisfied by a contextual relativism which excludes mutual understanding. Arne Naess tries to handle this problem by stressing the role of the deep ecology platform which ecological activists from a wide range of traditions may subscribe 17

  Baker, ‘Evolution of European Union Environmental Policy’ (above, n. 4), p. 99. See also Rydén, Environmental Science (above, n. 6), ch. 23; and Glenn Deliège in this volume (Chapter 15). 18  DesJardins, Environmental Ethics (above, n. 8), p. 22.

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to. Other contributors to the current environmental discussion highlight in a similar way the need to express an environmental ethics which leaves room for pluralism both within and between different communities. The common goal could be described as a communicative global ethics, which involves transnational conversations that don’t erase cultural differences.19 Since there are no universally accepted norms, the content and the validity of ethical assertions cannot be defined in advance: a global ethics is formed during the process where different actors are given the possibility to take part in the dialogue. This does not, however, indicate that the underlying convictions are unimportant, or that they can be ignored. This kind of contextually rooted dialogue presupposes the possibility of finding a common language, or at least, more modestly, ‘a room for talk’. DesJardins proposes that the aim of environmetal ethics should be to provide such a common language, which we could use in environmental controversies.20 But does not this concept of a common language bring us back to the modern idea of a universal rationality, which would encompass all contextual perspectives? Philosopher Peter Galison argues for an alternative view. Relying on anthropology, he argues that ‘trading zones’ can be established between representatives of different paradigms – zones comparable to the meeting points between members of different tribes. In these trading zones, specialized ‘pidgin languages’ may arise, with a terminology suited for the negotiations in question. These pidgin languages may or may not evolve later on into some kind of independent ‘creole language’.21 An application of this theory to the field of environmental ethics would be that the language born and used in specific dialogues between representatives of conflicting interests is contextual and guided by functional aims, like a pidgin language. The ethical theory that these discussions eventually might lead to is, on the other hand, comparable to a creole language with a more general applicability. The grammar and semantics of this ethical language are, however, never fixed once and for all. They undergo continual change, as the language is used in new circumstances. We shouldn’t let contextual relativism silence the uncertainty which is awoken when competing perspectives clash. The relativist might argue that I do not have to open up my ‘holy rooms’ for other people and expose them to their critique, since it is impossible for them to understand my point of view. But if we, on the contrary, venture to take this risk, we might get involved into a fruitful dialogue, characterized by giving and sharing. The precondition of a promising dialogue is respect for the other and a sincere will to make progress. The democratic   See Kirkman, Skeptical Environmentalism (above, n. 11), p. 174; Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty–First Century (Cambridge: Polity 2003), pp. 172, 183. 20  DesJardins, Environmental Ethics (above, n. 8), p. 21. 21  Peter Galison, ‘Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief’, in Mario Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader (New York: Routledge 1999). 19

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development has made us understand that discussion and broad participation constitute a better foundation for a society than subordination and fear. It is time for us to adopt these insights also in our interaction with our common natural environment.

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Bibliography Attfield, Robin, Environmental Ethics. An Overview for the Twenty–First Century (Cambridge: Polity 2003). Baker, Susan, ‘The Evolution of European Union Environmental Policy. From Growth to Sustainable Development?’, in Susan Baker, Maria Kousis and Dick Richardson (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development: Theory, Policy and Practice within the European Union (London: Routledge 1997). — Maria Kousis, Dick Richardson and Stephen Young, ‘The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development in EU Perspective’, in Susan Baker, Maria Kousis and Dick Richardson (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development: Theory, Policy and Practice within the European Union (London: Routledge 1997). DesJardins, Joseph R., Environmental Ethics. An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy (4th edn, Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth 2006). Devall, Bill and George Sessions, Deep Ecology. Living as if Nature Mattered (Layton: Gibbs Smith Inc. 1985). Galison, Peter, ‘Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief’, in Mario Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader (New York: Routledge 1999). Gottlieb, Roger S., A Greener Faith. Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future (New York: Oxford University Press 2006). Kirkman, Robert, Skeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophy and Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002). Naess, Arne, ‘Sustainable Development and the Deep Ecology Movement’, in Susan Baker et al. (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development: Theory, Policy and Practice within the European Union (London: Routledge 1997). O’Riordan, Timothy, Environmentalism (2nd edn, London: Pion Press 1981). Richardson, Dick, ‘The Politics of Sustainable Development’, in Susan Baker et al. (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development. Theory, Policy and Practice within the European Union (London: Routledge 1997). Sundström, Tage and Rydén, Lars, ‘The Prospect of Sustainable Development’, in Lars Rydén et al. (eds), Environmental Science. Understanding, Protecting, and Managing the Environment in the Baltic Sea Region (Uppsala: Baltic University Press 2003). Sörlin, Sverker, Naturkontraktet. Om naturumgängets idéhistoria (Stockholm: Carlssons 1991). Tucker, Mary Evelyn, Wordly Wonder. Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase (Chicago: Open Court 2003). Uddenberg, Nils, Det stora sammanhanget. Moderna svenskars syn på människans plats i naturen (Nora: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa 1995).

Chapter 9

The Proper Praise for an Architecture of the Improper – Joseph Beuys: Building with Butter Annette Homann

Fig. 9.1

Joseph Beuys, Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts [The End of the Twentieth Century], 1982, 21. Basalt rocks and various other elements.

Psychosomatic Concept of Art The famous German artist Joseph Beuys intended to heal and reconnect human thinking with the animal kingdom and a spiritual–material world where nature is in command. His intentions correspond to the understanding of many non-western cultures to conceive of art, religion and medicine as a single activity.

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Given the conference quest ‘to map out a new agenda for the study of the spatial dimensions of interactions between religion, nature and culture’, Beuys’s oeuvre presents itself as a valuable departure point. Such an approach of course is also extremely challenging, because it means to engage with performative practices and therefore puts an element on the agenda that, if taken seriously, affects our life in the most profound sense. Performative practices play a key role in the processing of knowledge, but they also deeply shape our behavioural patterns, be it regarding the appreciation of play, the contemplation of nature or the dialogue with religious truths. Often, in fact, in western academic parlance, ‘ritual’ has been designated – and denigrated – as a kind of emotion-driven, bodily and sensuous ‘thoughtless action’, and then it has been counterpoised to supposedly more responsible, disciplined, intellectualized (that is, more rationalized and Protestant-like) exercises of religiosity. Our modern life focuses on the possession of objects and seems alien to ritual concepts. Nevertheless there are rituals involved in the reproduction of such a materialistic condition – for example rituals of abstract conceptualizing which continuously re-establish the tragical gap between theory and the more-thanhuman sensuality of the phenomenological world. The artist therefore seeks provocation and disruption, potentially allowing an imaginative and subversive interaction with the symbolic order which is meant to affect simultaneously the nature of the dialogue itself. Thereby the symbolic in Beuys’s work has little in common with the notion of the symbolic as redefined with nominalism and fully established in the nineteenth century. Quite to the contrary, this art seems closely related to the Neoplatonic understanding of a participation of the sign in the idea – only that Beuys would reject an orthodox Platonic dematerialization of his work. Fat edges, layers of felt, copper antennas, energy generators and honey pumps are anything but deliberate choices. Instead, they correspond to an ethical program and evoke an existential–mental bond between devine influences in the environment and humans, reflecting a profound interest in the anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. A scholar might (w)rite instead of writing and reading a paper, adding for example a white horse to their distinguished audience as another intelligent dialogue 

  See Sigurd Bergmann’s introductory remarks to this volume, ‘Nature, Space and the Sacred’ in this volume.   Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000), p. 210.    Kirstin Faupel-Drevs, Vom Rechten Gebrauch der Bilder im Liturgischen Raum: Mittelalterliche Funktionsbestimmungen bildender Kunst im Rationale Divinorum Officiorum des Durandes von Mende (Leiden: Brill 2000).   Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1985). Ulmer explores the genesis from ‘riting’ to writing and the programmatic reversal of this evolution.

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partner, and such choreography certainly is essential to our perception. By doing so, by adding horses or dead hares, Beuys redefined and broadened the concept of art as something radical, just as Derrida redefined the stage for philosophy. Often the work has a visceral dimension, which in early years was handled very provocatively and later transformed into less abrasive statements. Beuys’s secret was the ability, so to speak, ‘to make shit beautiful’. Or, as Richard Demarco

Fig. 9.2

Joseph Beuys, Infiltration – Homogen für Cello [Infiltration], 1967/85. Cello, felt, linen, glass cabinet.

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put it, his art achieved such particular otherness that it established a ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’. The aim here, however, is not to add to the vast number of essays published by art historians about Beuys’s opus: the interest is in the educational qualities of this work regarding a more responsible, trans-human relation to space and spacemaking. The Call of the Architect towards Nature This interest could come from a theologian or a philosopher, but in this case it is pursued by someone teaching architecture and aiming at a ‘spell of the sensuous’ that transcends the egos of my hedonistic students of the twenty-first-century. The question to be explored presents itself as how to introduce a mature world-view such as the one of Beuys to a suburban kid who has never experienced anything like food, money or energy restrictions. For this reason, a design studio at the Carleton School of Architecture in Ottawa was chosen as an experimental ground. The students, in addition to lectures and readings on the subject, received the description of three works by Beuys and were asked to celebrate and integrate them in their design project. The program called for a thermal bath with a public library, obviously a hybrid building exploring fertile dichotomies. Inescapable like a shadow, there followed the questions of beauty, truth and method. Our relation to architecture yearns for corporeal empathy and reconciliation, whereas Beuys seems somehow too provocative, deconstructive and salty for such sweet endeavours. The pedagogical agenda was manifold: How can one open doors into psychoanalysis and religion? How can one implement material wit? Would butter make it beautiful? Beuys’s extended concept of art, his interest in ‘thinking as form’ and performance, epitomizes the heart and myth of architecture. Of course, forms of dwellings are triggered by world-views, by ecological theologies, by obsessions about health and safety issues or by daydreams about a decisive Valentine’s Day. Form-making is deemed to be a cosmological and philosophical practice even in the negative, and architects should always be evaluated in their two roles: as 

 Richard Demarco in an interview with Tate Modern Online.  David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World (New York: Vintage Books 1997).   Hans–Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press 1975), p. 113: ‘Precisely that in which he loses himself as a spectator requires his own continuity. It is the truth of this own world, the religious and moral world in which he lives, which presents itself to him and in which he recognises himself. … so the absolute moment in which a spectator stands is at once self-forgetfulness and reconciliation with self.’ 

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practitioners with a handy know-how and as theoreticians who demonstrate their world-views by delivering architecture. The spaces we make always desire to be more than utilitarian shelters. They are instead the third skin for naked humans who, in their desire for cover, first invented cloth and later architecture. Housing oneself is necessarily a poetic and transcending activity, as Heidegger has shown in sufficient depth. Unfortunately, though, not least the Christian religion counteracts this activity with a caring and preserving relation to the earth. The current misery not only reflects aesthetic ignorance caused by economical constraints, but is reinforced by logo-centric religious imprints which run deep in western subconsciousness. As Lindsay Jones has put it, a certain ambivalence or condescending attitude toward art-assisted spirituality is evident in the writings not only of religious figures … but also of many contemporary academics (e.g., those whose work reflects, either explicitly or inadvertently, Protestant suspicions concerning the value of art as an aid to worship).

Beuys’s strange installations, by contrast, are morphing the perspective cone of the Renaissance, folding it to make it open once again towards the subject of representation. Beuys’s objects are certainly ‘looking back’. They demand the reawakening of a full perceptual sensorium and at the same time they play with a multitude of associations. They force us to look up and down at the same moment, reconciling heaven and earth, the symbolic and the real. In architecture, too, such reconciliation is of course an invaluable objective, and there are comparable necessary ethical and artistic decisions. The sources, processing and final surface treatment of matter adds to its embodied in-formation. Space and matter immediately create atmospheres and trigger memories, perhaps even before any more complex semiotic ‘reading’ of architecture can take place. Interpretation comes later, almost as an afterthought. Space commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and distances to be covered. … The ‘reading’ of space is thus merely a secondary and practically irrelevant upshot, a rather superfluous reward to the individual for the blind, spontaneous and lived obedience. Just as we distinguish fruits and vegetables by their seasons and by the morphological realms they belong to as roots, leaves, fruits or seeds, building materials carry analogous associations. They need very different amounts of energy to be produced, processed, put into place or maintained, and consequently they should taste to a trained architect as differently as milk, butter and a two-yearold parmesan.

  Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture (above, n. 2), Vol. 2, p. 323.  Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1991), p. 143.  

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Architecture can be understood as a material organization that regulates and brings order to energy flows; and, simultaneously and inseparably, as an energetic organization that stabilizes and maintains material forms.10 There is, for example, a company which fishes century-old lumber out of the Ottawa River. The river was used as a major transport route for thousands of logs in the nineteenth century of which hundreds were lost and sank to the river bottom. Showing the students this history, the risks, the work forces involved and the recapturing today provided a bridge to some of the more profound issues of Beuys’s agenda. Two more examples from the field of bio-chemistry helped the students to evaluate the potential coalescence of the phenomenological and the symbolic realms. One came in with the choice of Beuys’s art work Tallow, a gigantic cast of a sore urban spot, made out of twenty tons of mutton fat granules. In the concrete underpass to the new auditorium of the university he found an outstanding example of modern architectural folly, a socio-political metaphor if ever there was one. Under the access ramp was a dead corner, a deep wedgeshaped acute angle in which nothing but dirt could collect.11 Fats are pure energy, and all oils burn at a particular temperature. Precious oils were used for anointments and ethereal oils evaporate giving out a beautiful redolence. We also still have the saying: ‘to add fuel to the fire’. Beuys used the warm character of fat to demonstrate his theory of sculpture – most prominently maybe in his ‘Fat-Corners’. Through the persistent use of right angles he evokes a healing process, while at the same time conveying their complex and different meanings of crystallization and formation. By using tallow, the artist also transformed a waste consumer-good and restated its added value. The other exploration emerged from the hybrid program of Library and Thermal Bath and concerned the nature of salt-water as an electrolyte. Again, the matter itself speaks volumes. Salt is a key example in cases where a bridge is to be built between the real and the symbolic; it is enough to think of the chilling transformation of Lot’s wife. Much to the contrary, brine – as a solution – heals and revitalizes vital osmotic exchanges in the body. The students were thereby not only encouraged to take a closer look into the nature of matter, the Aristotelian hyle, but also to consider the brief as programmatic.

 Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2000), p. 4. 11  Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York: The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum 1979), pp. 248–53. 10

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The Narrative Dialogue of Poetic Architecture In a church the orientation of altar, baptistery, pews and chairs is crucial to the possible experience of a dialogical space. That holds for any so-called (but never true) ‘profane’ intention of space-making, and the education of the architect necessarily includes the politics of space. It should therefore be possible, for example, to imagine a courtroom where the judge, the accused and all other parties sit at a round table and artists certainly help students to develop independent thinking and to see the broader pictures. Organic analogies fail to embrace the world of architecture fully because human cultures, like cities and architecture, are collective works of art. The biological realm of necessity, and the cultural realm of choice, complement and oppose one another: the fact that architecture belongs to the cultural domain ought to serve as a warning against biologistic forms of reductionism, always tempted as they are to formulate the sort of organic analogies which are otherwise enlightening and stimulating on their own terms.12 Hence architecture is meant to reflect characteristic ideas in whole and in detail while employing a narrative, analogical or post-metaphorical (anasemic) translation process. With such premise, the microcosmos–macrocosmos bonding is still valuable and fertile, informing truly significant architecture, nurtured by rhetorical knowledge and the similarities between the built text and the written text. In fact architects are still potential healers. But they need to be reminded regularly about their potential, as they are among those caught in the unfortunate petrified condition that Beuys attacked. Beuys was not averse to taking on unusual roles, the shaman being one of them. As a pre-modern psychoanalyst, he knew he would not reach the patient with a rational approach to address irrational behaviour. He referred to objects and, taking advantage of the manifold complexity of his materials, he manipulated their context and state of warmth. By choosing the role of the traditional healer, the artist fully participated with his body, acting out the cure, often until exhaustion. According to a classic example, the verb ‘to sacrifice (ritually)’ is active if the priest sacrifices the victim in my place for me, and it is in the middle voice (an equivalent of the modern reflexive) if, taking the knife from the priest’s hands, I make the sacrifice for myself. In the case of the active, the action is accomplished outside the subject, because, although the priest makes the sacrifice, he is not affected by it. In the case of the middle voice, on the contrary, the subject affects herself in acting; she always remains inside the action, even if an object is involved. The middle voice does not therefore exclude transitivity.13 Thus Bernhard Rudofsky was somewhat right to promote an ‘architecture without architects’ and to argue that we would not need a new technology, but a new way of living. Participation, however, calls for the user as artist and, although Beuys claimed  Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory (above, n. 10), p. 7.  Ulmer, Applied Grammatology (above, n. 4), p. 231.

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that everybody is an artist, not every artist is equally gifted, just as not every tenor can sing up to the high C. Therefore to promote participation is not a cure as such. The narrative transformation of significant architectural signs via metonymical displacement or other rhetorical devices invites the embodied and enminded14 human being into dialogical participation and metamorphosis. Such work obviously is most promising with a theory of images which successfully corresponds to the organization of memory. The knots of an edifice, as keystones or corners and capitals, join elements and reflect anthropomorphic and textual bounds; hence they work with corporeal memory. Any such potentially monstrous dialogue calls at all times for the haptic and visceral realm, the eyes and ears of the skin. The perceptual sensorium should always directly interlace with the threads of the invisible world. Design Studio as Laboratory The studio outline, as mentioned, featured a double program in order to address the day-and-night dichotomy of space making, the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of happiness. The first weeks’ aim was a systematic site-analysis, an anamnesis, reminding the young doctors to scrutinize and listen to the patient, as context, before diagnosing, as designing. Students were asked to work through the morphological grammar of the urban text, to describe the imprint of the topography, major transport ways, property lines, monuments and the sociological framework. In addition, they traced their individual perceptions, feelings and intuition, regarding the particular site, its slope, the proximity of the river or its distinctive linearity. The studio did not exclusively focus on a phenomenological or ‘visceral’ mapping of the site, as Beuys did not just ‘feel’ essences but he studied animals and plants with great care and patience. Rejecting the empirical abstractions of modern science, the artist intended to broaden such research spiritually and phenomenologically, but not simply to abandon careful mapping and description. Reams of fine morphological study-drawings document his interest in the development of plants, and various movies in collaboration with the famous German animal researcher Heinz Sielman trace his insistence. Thus the recent celebration of phenomenology and hermeneutics in architecture is fully justified from a humanistic point of view and as a reaction to the damage that modern science has done to the field; but this shift to individual perspective in the education of architects calls for balance with the collective–symbolic realm and for accurate philosophical reflection. An outstanding interpretation still starts with an insight into the matter at hand, and our recent Google-geared student 14

  I am alluding here to the enchanting conference presentation of the anthropologist Tim Imgold, who argued quite amusingly that, if people constantly talk about embodiment, he would like to hear equally about ‘enmindment’.

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generation is barely scratching surfaces when it comes to historical research into the genesis of forms. Hence it sometimes seems as if the phenomenological approach is easily banalized into an individualistic, nearly narcisistic enterprise – a selective perception, which is masking defeat vis-à-vis capitalistic demolition of the earth. Heidegger stated that ‘the decisive question is not in what way being can be understood, but in what way understanding is being’.15 To experience ‘the other’ occurs on alien ground, by sharing a collective clearing. One way, certainly, is the transfer into a tribal low-tech culture, as the young Beuys experienced it in Russia. One’s self-understanding suffers change in the process of understanding … This is why historians of religions insist on the value of hermeneutics, the knowledge that comes from the act of interpreting.16 Beuys surfaces collective and personal memory. Often his objects relate to suppressed feelings or fears, and through manipulation they function as powerful healing tools. They complement our humanity with a fragile mirror, addressing the beauty of imperfection. Comparing such ‘active’ images with the work and reflections of Carola Wingren concerning memory and meaning, we might remark that Beuys would hardly use the terms ‘pastoral’ or ‘ideal landscapes’. Even though his iconography touches on what Richard Demarco terms a ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’, there is no temptation to call his work Arcadian, as it engages us so decidedly with the leftovers, the repressed and the wounds of our cultural and individual landscapes. When dealing with nature, space and the sacred, the use of a nineteenth-century aesthetic vocabulary which associates beauty with particular formal attributes seems anyway misleading. Beauty and the sublime cannot be divorced. Of course, it is also hard to imagine Beuys working for municipalities with the objective of beautifying roads or roundabouts, even if such appointment would include the actual configuration of the road and a possible more modest and decelerating perception and celebration of valleys and rolling hills. However, and that was indeed the reason why I termed my own reflections ‘Building with Butter’, the architect has a different role from the artist, and a public road or public space demands a different political approach from a private gallery. Architecture’s ulterior motive, also in my eyes, is to create paradises and to glorify ‘Arcadian’ landscapes. Whether the work is successful and moving depends ultimately on the character of the signs employed and not on any post-structural or mystical terminology used for their interpretation. But, as Alberto Pérez-Gómez argues, ‘architecture had always conveyed wonder and existential safety through seduction and disorientation’17, until modern philosophy seriously discouraged this tradition of architecture as

15

  Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture (above, n. 2), Vol. 1, p. 9.  Lawrence Sullivan, Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York: MacMillan 1988), p. 16. 17  Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006), p. 61. 16

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thaumata. Hence to rebuild architecture as thaumata is a notion which involves balancing disorientation and orientation. Processing Architectural Passion Certainly I should not close this chapter without some summary about the findings of the Carleton School of Architecture design studio. The combination of a bath with a library eventually sounded rather avantgarde to some librarians. We explained to them that the Romans had already done it. That books might be afraid of water clearly did not bother the Romans. The students responded to the paradox, but also searched for complementary associations. Water was identified as an ambiguous and complementary element, associated with eternal memory as much as with the flux of information. Both programs, library and bath, triggered famous typological predecessors and the iconography of vaults and domes. Students balanced re-imagining such images with more independent phenomenological explorations. The prescription concerning how to build with butter might be (w)ritten as follows: Matter inspires form. Artists or architects do not start from ‘nothingness’ but from surrendering to the manifold phenomena of hyle. Unfortunately the religions of the West have often devalued the spell of the sensuous and nature’s immanent ontological realm. Because the body participates in any dialogue with space, any demand for sensitivity regarding the energy of matter, surface, structure or detail starts with an awareness of one’s own body in space and in dialogue with nature. Moreover, it requires profound research, intuition and experience, hence an awareness of the mysterious synchronicity between microcosm and macrocosm. Even in the standard twenty-first-century urban centre there are hidden stories to be excavated and remembered. To degrade the context with the argument of its Cartesian and profane condition only perpetuates the crisis of modern humanity through the immanent eschatological notion of a visionary agenda. Instead we need a demystification of visions and a full remystification of the everyday other, including the left-overs. As Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ is heavily infecting most social relations, Beuys prescribed a warmth therapy with fat and felt for a more trans-human and passionate world. There seems to be little fun without a ‘will to butter’. As architecture is more than art and is meant to be inhabited, architecture calls for butter. Acknowledgement I thank John and Rosemary Williams (Ottawa) for their generous English editing.

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Bibliography Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World (New York: Vintage Books 1997). Faupel-Drevs, Kirstin, Vom Rechten Gebrauch der Bilder im Liturgischen Raum: Mittelalterliche Funktionsbestimmungen bildender Kunst im Rationale Divinorum Officiorum des Durandes von Mende (Leiden: Brill 2000). Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press 1975). Fernández-Galiano, Luis, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2000). Jones, Lindsay, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000). Lefèbvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1991). Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, Built upon Love (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006). Sullivan, Lawrence, Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York: MacMillan 1988). Tisdall, Caroline, Joseph Beuys, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1979). Ulmer, Gregory, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1985).

Chapter 10

Ideal Landscapes – Landscape Design Between Beauty and Meaning Carola Wingren

The traces of modernistic planning, which peaked in the 1960s, have left a landscape where people’s lives are separated into spaces for working, dwelling, travelling, and dying. In between these areas – especially along large roads – there are gaps, or spaces that we cannot define, often called ‘a no man’s land’ or ‘nonplaces’. Opened up to more dirt, refuse or even vandalism, these untidy areas create anxiety about urban decline and decreasing real estate prices. These areas are often regarded as places of loss, or space lost by planners as well as by citizens. There are many public calls for a better, a more useful and especially a more beautiful landscape in these non-places. But is beauty always the right answer to this quest? In my practical work as a landscape architect I have often found that it is not the ugliness of spaces that is in most cases the problem. Instead, it is their meaninglessness. In this chapter I deal with the quest for beauty, which, I have found, has very much to do with meaning. Instead of using the word ‘beauty’, I introduce a concept which I call ‘ideal landscape’. This represents something that my clients often call beauty, but I – through practice – have found is about something else. An ideal landscape responds to a quest for the best solution for a space, and is completely related to the person who thinks of it, the client, the user or the architect. In the best situations, these visions of the ideal landscape for a certain space coincide, and all the participants in the process will feel satisfaction. However, this is seldom the case, and therefore it is interesting to reflect on, and discuss, the relationship between beauty, meaning and ideal landscape – which in every situation are considerations for those involved. My way of dealing with this subject here is to present a chronological story about the experiences and knowledge I have gained in the cumulative process of my own practice as landscape architect. This story of accumulated knowledge starts in the lost landscapes of the road environment’s ‘buffer zones’ in the mid1990s. It continues with the example of a landscape architect’s work of finding a solution to this sense of loss and the associated quest for meaning. And it concludes with a new project, which deals with memory and meaning as such and draws on the experiences of road environment projects. This last project, ‘Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in Contemporary Urban Landscapes’, is a three-year Swedish research project financed by FORMAS. In this project – with inspiration

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Fig. 10.1 A so-called ‘No man’s land’ created by the road system, Parc Trinita, Barcelona. from private ways of mourning relatives and landscapes – we try to find new ways of dealing with memorial sites in a contemporary and secularized society, ways that correspond to the needs of today’s urbanized citizens. Even if spirituality of the traditional and religious sorts has lost importance in today’s society, many people search for new and private ways of involving things such as contemplation or the sacred in their lives, especially in times of loss. And initially we have found indications of the importance of nature, landscape and the environment to people in their daily life, and especially in moments of loss and sorrow. So this story takes place in two different kinds of landscapes of loss, which nevertheless share similarities: the motorway landscape and the memorial site. What they have in common is their character as spaces ‘to pass through’, which may be a prerequisite for their becoming a place of loss. The very meaning of these landscapes is the rite or action of passage. This is also the reason why I call them landscapes of passage, each comprising different worlds with different velocities. In the passage landscape of the road environment, very little is done to symbolize this passage. Instead, the road environment is often characterized by its untidiness and lack of symbols and meaning. By contrast, in the burial or memorial site it is common to introduce objects or symbols in order to give meaning to this place of passage. In this article I let different projects tell a story about introducing or not introducing symbols and making meaningful actions as a planner and architect.

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And even if the passage landscape is not the principal concern of this article, it is the place where everything happens: the lack of maintenance, the absence of a feeling of place, the need to change this and to fill the landscape with meaning, felt especially by the architect. That is why this story has two elements. One is that of beauty, meaning and ideal landscape where I involve the subconscious, the unknown, the dark and the contradictory. The other is that of the undefined inbetween landscape: landscape-as-passage, as a spatial phenomenon. Reflective Attitudes towards the Commissioning of Beautiful Landscapes My task as a practising landscape architect is often to respond to a quest for ideals such as beauty, harmony and comfort. In dwelling areas, schoolyards, city places, museum yards and so on, I have tried to deal with these kinds of commission in a reflective way. Getting input and inspiration from the users as well as from historical and contemporary design of similar projects, I have developed a repertoire to pick from when forming new solutions that could suit clients, users and me as the architect. Starting with road planning and design in urban areas at the beginning of the 1990s – a time when ‘beauty’ became almost a mantra for the Swedish Road Administration – I needed to ask myself what this concept of beauty represented. My repertoire in this field was very small, and, when I looked around for more, it was difficult to find good examples. Mostly the roadside areas were left over land, where nothing was really taken care of. And if it was taken care of, I mostly found small decorations of plants which were not at all adjusted to the scale and the character of the road. Why couldn’t road landscape design and planning be good landscape architecture, as it was for other areas in the city? Was the problem in a commission for ‘beautiful roads’ that was never really defined or equipped with a precise budget, or was it the lack of knowledge among architects in this new field? I started to work from my position, first by observing and trying to understand, and then by changing my way of working. The lack of ‘best practice’ was obvious, and an immediate problem in this process. Best practice could be described as the forefront of a field, like the most important research articles. Such projects offer new knowledge that will be used and reused in the profession, in turn creating new knowledge in the field. In architecture, the most important exploration and development of the core of the field are still done in practice and not in academia, and this is the reason why it is important to develop this common, best-practice, front-line architecture. It is an expression, or a product, of accepted expertise in the field of practitioners. The lack of best practice in the field of road landscape planning and design turned this field into an experimental studio for design methods for many architects, and especially for artists. For artists, the road landscape was of course a tempting place, which offered exposure to many people. Landscape architects, who more usually have an idea of being in the service of nature, often happened

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instead to be very defensive or passive towards a possible change of the existing landscape. Their addition could be some tending of bushes or fields, or making small additions such as tree rows along the road. The result of these attitudes towards change in the landscape – based more on other kinds of project than on knowledge in the field – has often been that the road was left as a strange, 40-metre wide alien band running through the existing structures. What was once defined as a beautiful rural or urban landscape became a strange and disturbing location. It could also become a location which diminished natural and historical structures and undermined understanding of the place, as well as removing the meaning of the landscape itself. I was not happy with this, so my attitude when trying to give good answers to the beauty commission, without imposed limits or definitions, was to look behind the commission of beauty, to try to understand what people really asked for and how it would be possible to fulfil this need – to operationalize the request for beautiful roads. To do this, I reflected on my own practice. I started this story in the mid-1990s, with a set of different city access road projects in which I participated as project leader, designer, and exhibitor. These have become my empirical base from which to develop my knowledge of, and to write about, issues of road and landscape. First came some city access road projects ordered as beauty commissions by municipalities. In cities like Norrköping and Skövde, with inspiration from a project in Helsingborg, we worked on sequences of characteristic landscape types along the road, which were influenced by the city areas close to it. These were projects which dealt with cleaning up between signs and poles in the roadscape itself, together with reinforcing different design idioms along the road. The two aims were achieved both by introducing a kind of ‘grammar’ in the use of road equipment and by reinforcing interesting or attractive characteristics of the landscape along the road. The commission for beauty became in many ways an answer of beauty, but also of meaning. These projects were very important to me and became the basis of my future ones. Almost at the same time I received the chance to work as consultant with a project called ‘Trafikantupplevelse på väg’ [‘Motorists’ experiences as road users’]. This work resulted in a book defining elements of the concept of ‘landscape scenery’ – an important issue in environmental impact assessments. In this book we discovered concepts such as practicability, understanding and orientation, variation and rhythm lying behind the quest for beauty. In the documents and literature we surveyed, it was observed how features of the landscape such as rivers, fences, stone walls, and houses were presented so as to tell something about the landscape and to give an experience of interest to the road user. Of course the beauty was there, but the meaning of things seemed to us to be even more important. My thinking about beauty, landscape and meaning had of course begun earlier than with these projects. One way of approaching the subject of people’s  C. Wingren, ‘Die Schwelle der Stadt’, Topos 24 (1998).   E. Bucht, Y. Pålstam and C. Wingren, ‘Trafikantupplevelse på väg’, Stad o Landrapport 142 (1996).  

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Photo collage showing how a baled silage landscape can influence the visual experience in the monastery garden of Varnhem, Sweden.

experiences of the landscape from the road went through an architecture criticism competition by ARKUs, where I dealt with the white baled silages then entering the landscape. Not only writing about agricultural expressions and change in a rural landscape as a phenomenon of architecture and art, but also winning the first prize with the essay showed me that the white baled silages in the landscape was an issue affecting everybody, even the urbanized Swedish people living far from the countryside. The discussion among people had very much to do at that time with the ugliness of those baled silages, and especially with their influence on a well-known and loved agricultural landscape. Even if the use of silage as food for animals was not new, the way of treating it was. And even if the pattern – made as it was in a practical way, by the machines dropping all the silage over the field in what I called a ‘starry sky’ – was similar to the old-fashioned method of putting hay on poles, this new addition of plastic bales to the landscape seemed strange to people. The shape of the bales, their plastic material, as well as their colour may have been the reasons why many Swedish people could still not accept them. It probably confronted their idea of an agricultural landscape based on memories, traditions and culture. In my essay, in order to problematize this change, I tried to see the landscape and the work of the farmer from another perspective than that of a cultural landscape. I proposed that the farmer didn’t only have practical reasons for his disposition of the baled silages in a special pattern, but also an artistic one. Land artists such as Cristo, Jeanne Claude and Walter de Maria might compare it with a minimalistic solution which I proposed as a strategy for the farmer to activities.   C. Wingren, ‘Sträckfilmsarkitektur’, in idem, Sex Arkitekturessäer (Stockholm: Arkus and Byggförlaget 1993); C. Wingren, ‘Baled Silage Landscape in Sweden’, Topos 8 (September 1994). 

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This opened a discussion about who has the right to design the landscape and with what incentives. It also led to a debate about where such changes should be permitted and where they should not, depending on their visual effect or on precious and shared landscape memories. The minimalistic addition of baled silages to the landscape, made by the farmer, was for me positive as a road user, in my experience of Road 49 between the cities of Skara and Skövde in Sweden. It told something about what was happening in the landscape, something which we, as citizens, needed to know and understand. Through a photo-montage, I also put forward an idea as to how this installation by the farmer could – albeit differently – influence another field, closer to the ruined monastery of Varnhem – a cultural heritage of the area. Its pattern of white plastic balls spread over a field would compete with the architectural pattern of columns in the ruins of the monastery itself. In the article I proposed no answer as to what should or should not be permitted. But I gave an indication about the need to look beyond discussing beauty and to see what ‘beauty’ itself stands for. Working on the article about the baled silage landscape opened my eyes to two things. One was the importance of the road landscape experience; it was important to connect the contemporary function of the landscape as a productive area with our history and knowledge of the environment. The other was the importance of people’s own memories from earlier experiences of landscapes and the influence of these memories on the idea of beauty in making decisions about landscape changes. In a way, the baled silage landscape essay reveals the importance of the rural for the urban mindset and the intertwining between the two, even in spaces very far from the city itself. This landscape is a place where life is going on beside the road as well as on it, and at two different speeds. There are two different worlds or spaces here, which can be compared and described in the words of Manuel Castells: as the ‘space of place’ and the ‘space of flows’. People look at each other and contemplate the other world. Castells describes what makes it important in architecture to create a strong feeling of place for the people in the space of flow. A landscape architect who has tried to do this is Bernard Lassus. By creating resting areas along large roads, Lassus has exaggerated and reformulated the history of the place to an extent where the roadside has become an interesting garden – and not only a thing of functional use. Instead of being satisfied with the excavation of the site ‘the Quarries’ at Crazannes, on a highway in France, he went further to elaborate the existing relics and even to create more, making the already interesting landscape even more so. Lassus’s landscape design has been debated, and not always loved, in a France influenced by modernity as much as Sweden is. I believe that Lassus, by introducing to architecture a more elaborate language,

 M. Castells, Informationsåldern: ekonomi, samhälle och kultur: Bd 1: Nätverkssamhällets framväxt (Göteborg: Daidalos 1999).    B. Lassus, The Landscape Approach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1998). 

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filled with symbols, memories, stories and otherness, may have become a trendsetter in landscape architecture. From Beauty to the Sublime

Fig. 10.3 Photo collage showing the idea of the Filter project. In a project called the ‘Filter’, my engagement and preoccupations with city access road projects and with the difficulties of finding solutions for the landscape were given a new turn in the direction of Lassus’s ideas. After several years of working with city access road projects principally concerned with cleaning up the road environment and of using the existing landscape for road user experiences, I found that this was not enough. The landscape stayed rather uninteresting and undefined. The strength of the road, its size, its noise and its precedence made it difficult for me to make the landscape become important enough. Thinking, writing and applying for research money to study the subject, I finally got the chance to show my raw ideas in an exhibition at the Architecture Museum in Stockholm in 1998. I made a proposal for the undefined prototype of city access road, or the city’s ‘threshold’, as I called it. The new and raw idea was to let the landscape around the road be a world, different from the road as well as different from the city itself – a world which was strong and broad enough to become a place of its own. It should be of a sufficient size to give people time to adapt to the city or to the rural landscape while travelling from one world to the other. This world should be wide, which would allow it to influence the flow of people travelling on the road, and also to provide a place for local residents to use for a recreation of a different kind than in the wellplanned city park. In such a place, humans interested in the wilderness could feel at home, as well as frogs and birds of different kinds. In the exhibition I presented

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the Filter Project as the multi-dimensional installation of an imagined future city access road situation where road users are framed by large and wild wetlands. The situation was ordered only by some rows of trees, which offer orientation and velocity adjustment to the road user. With images, sound, smell, water, plants, earth and tactile sensations from humans, the visitor could pass on a metallic grid floor through a semi-transparent box, to get the feeling of the difference between a wet surrounding land – an otherness – and the structured and almost sterile road. This wild and ‘unplanned’ otherness should be something of its own, contrasting with the rest of the city and with the road. Through this contrasting landscape, the road user should filter into the city or out of it, being cleaned from impressions of the old side and helped to absorb others, of the new one. When I look back at the Filter Project, I can detect two lines of inspirations. The first consists in a pattern describing the surface and the extension of the Filter land. This formal or structural line is an inspiration linked rather to the professional knowledge I gained through my own education in the early 1980s, where form and pattern dominated as design strategies. The second line has more to do with the meaning of the place and with what I have found lacking in many projects through my own practical experience. This line of inspiration is related to a suppressed need for personal expression which runs deeper and which I had not been aware of at the beginning of my career, as it was not taught or articulated during the early years of my studies and professional practice. Most directly, the structural inspiration came from a project in Barcelona called ‘Fossar de la Pedrera’, which is a burial place in a former quarry from the time of Franco’s dictatorship. Redesigned by the well-known landscape architect Beth Gali when he was making it a memorial site in the 1980s, it became a sacred place with a very simple, mostly modernist, design. What I found especially interesting when visiting the site for the first time in 1989 was its entrance. When I arrived at the cemetery, there was an open wall – or filter zone – composed of high and thin cypresses and stone pillars with all the names of the dead written on them. The idea of the composition was to let people ‘filter in’ from the world outside, allowing them time to acclimatize and get an understanding of another world – that of the burial site. This influenced me when I made a filter area, between rural and urban, around the road. Common to the cemetery and to the road is the meeting, or confrontation, between two velocities or states, where one is slow and the other fast. In the cemetery, the slow state is that of the dead, whose names are put on the pillars, and the fast state is that of the visitors, passing through the filter area in and out from the cemetery. In the road, the people living beside it and using the wetlands for recreation are the slow ones, or the dwellers. And it is the people driving in cars who are the fast ones – that is,the passers-by. They can observe but never really be part of the place around the road, as they are moving too fast. And the dwellers cannot be part of the space on the road, as they are moving too slowly. And even if they are very close in location, these places are far away from each other because of their contrast in state, quality, velocity and character. It is again possible to use

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the terminology of ‘the space of place’ and ‘the space of flows’ from Castells. This lack of contact between spaces needs to be elaborated through architecture, Castells says. Beth Gali tries to do so through a landscape design filled with pillars and cypresses – and not only through a real distance. The road department and the cities have too often used only a noise barrier or some ‘buffer zones’, instead of designing this landscape with architecture. In the Filter Project, its extension and its patterns of tree lines or axes in the form of a folding fan is one of the answers to this need for design. This answer is very formal, related to the change of velocity that I as designer wanted to introduce in the road user’s behaviour, from fast to slow in coming to the city, or from slow to fast in leaving it. The other answer has more to do with the unknown, the unconscious, or the dark. What I am doing by introducing the wild into the Filter Project, within its limits and together with a formal design, is to make room for the idea of real nature – or,in the words of J. D. Hunt, of ‘the first nature’ – along the road. But I do it as a kind of garden or, as Hunt puts it, ‘a third nature’. It is a play in contemporary time, with its lack of contact with the first nature, the unknown, the secret, the sublime and maybe even the sacred. It can be compared to the planning of national parks, where authorities from a certain time decide to keep the place as a relic or as a garden, as close as possible to the idea of a first nature. What differs in the Filter Project is that it would be totally new and created by human hand. The Filter Project was very different from my earlier work in Norrköping or Skövde, where we had stuck to the place as it was and worked within the existing landscape instead of creating a new one. In the Filter Project I took my inspiration from fantastic landscapes encountered in literature and reality; the project sprang not so much from my practice as a landscape architect as from my own process of knowing landscapes different from each other – a process which goes on throughout a whole lifetime. There was inspiration from wetlands close to my hometown Skövde in southern Sweden, as well as from the hiking I undertook during my youth in northern Sweden. The most important source of inspiration, however, was a book written by Birgitta Trotzig – a story about a girl and her life in the wetlands outside the city of Kristianstad in the south–east of Sweden. The feelings of fear, tension and disgust that I experienced when reading this book, together with the understanding of the importance of those wetlands to the people living there, have stayed in my mind as part of a discussion about meaning and beauty. In the same way in which the novel of Trotzig was very physical, the Filter Project also involved inspiration from experiences of ‘secret places’, felt as the sacredness of the living body or organism. In the proposal at the museum, the filter zone became an elongated threshold of the city, a limit to be passed in coming into the city or leaving it, and yet something composed as a whole world. Instead of letting order and orientation,    J. D. Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (London: Thames and Hudson 2000).    B. Trotzig, Dykungens dotter (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag 1994).

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understanding, functionality and rhythm take the principal place, like in the former works of Skövde and Norrköping, I let disorder invade the place when I reintegrated uncontrolled nature into the city. So what did this introducing of the wild and wet into the city represent? Why was it so important to me? First, it was an ecological act intended to keep water in the city at a time when the groundwater level was threatened. Second, I wanted to introduce another kind of world, which corresponded to the darker side of the human being or of the landscape – something which had been described by Birgitta Trotzig and which I knew in my mind to be important to human beings. Among many other philosophers, Burke has written about these darker aspects, which we often avoid or put away but which we nevertheless seem to need. In the book Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama we read about these darker aspects too – especially in the last chapter, ‘Arcadia redesigned’, where Schama seeks to argue that Arcadia can be both harmonious and dark or sublime and that we, as humans, need both these sides: The urban context of this little drama is important. Arguably, ‘both’ kinds of arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild, are landscapes of the urban imagination, though clearly answering to different needs […] civility and harmony or integrity and unruliness?

Schama describes Burke as the godfather of the aesthetics of awefulness and writes that, according to Burke, anything that threatens self-preservation is a source of the sublime. In terms of inspiration for the Filter Project and of the wild, unknown otherness that I introduced for the first time in my road planning and design at that time, I would say that this is a practice guided by the sublime. Inside the frame of the city, close to civilization and close to security, these kinds of challenge are possible, or maybe even necessary. In the interrelation between structure and nonstructure, between harmony and disorder, between light and dark, and between the grassy and the wet, people can be given experiences to fulfil their need for an Arcadia redesigned, as described by Schama. It is interesting to see, in the description of this book by the architect Annette Homann, how she chooses a transition landscape as well, this time between park and city in Ottawa, to try to introduce otherness beside form in architecture. Like an inescapable shadow, the concept of beauty remains, she says – even when she introduces, into the students’ work, the task of using Joseph Beuys as a shepherd. When she proposes ‘fat’ as a material, she forces her students to get into the world of Joseph Beuys, filled as it is with questions and concepts other than those typically used in ‘clean’ and ‘beautiful’ architecture. Homann’s methods of work open up an architectural discussion where the body, together with the erotic, the sacred and the subconscious, has a definitive and important place in the creation of architecture and where symbolic    S. Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: First Vintage Books Edition 1996).

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orders and imaginary processes are related through comparison with those in art, for instance in the work of Joseph Beuys. The Filter Project was a raw idea, something which was never prepared to become a real, physical, outdoors environment but remained an argument in the debate about what a city access road landscape could and should be; and it did not accept the unbalanced commission for beauty alone. My idea was to turn the disadvantages of the buffer zone – noise and polluted air – into advantages by using the precious land along the roads into the city to give an ecological answer to the lack of wild and wetland, as well as an experiential answer to the lack of the unplanned and the sublime. My achievement was to leave the commission for beauty behind, and instead to give other answers to a commission which I was not ready to define at that time. Now, after years of practice and collaboration with clients, planners, designers and even users, I would describe the commission I was then trying to give an answer to as a commission for the unarticulated meaning hidden behind the commission for beauty. Design Attitudes towards the Commission for Beauty: The Borås Project The Filter Project was the beginning of a serious restructuring of my professional approach to road landscape planning and design. Several more projects ensued in the following years and, in all of these, one of the most important issues in giving a solution to a client’s quest for beauty was the concept of meaning. This meaning was often expressed through what my colleagues and I felt naturally for the site – what architects usually call the genius loci (or genius of place). What we usually picked up was the place’s natural or human history, or even its actual human activities. Sometimes we just revealed the values at work in a place, which is the most common way of dealing with landscapes in road planning and design in Sweden. But sometimes we gave a more elaborate answer by creating a new or different genius loci on the site. That was the case for a project in the city of Borås in Sweden organized by the municipality together with the National Art Council. I participated in this project as a landscape architect, but I also worked closely with an artist. Our task was to beautify the landscape of a roundabout in a commercial area on the periphery of the city of Borås. It was, in all its parts, an artistic work where design principles had to be elaborated on the basis of an agreement between the two professionals involved – landscape architect and artist – and where the contributions of landscape and art had to be totally integrated and inseparable. The working methods of the landscape architect and of the artist were not very different from each other, by virtue of their looking for inspiration in the place itself. The need to hook on to  C. Norberg—Schultz, Fenomenets plats: Arkitekturteorier, Skriftserien Kairos, 5 (Stockholm: Raster Förlag 1999); C. Norberg-Schultz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli 1980). 

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something when they were acting creatively seemed to be a common concern. We looked for inspiration in the symbols of the city of Borås, for instance in the textile industry together with its well-known postal order companies, which were rooted in the old tradition of this region with travellers selling fabric. We remembered the zoological garden, which we visited as children, and we searched for hidden values in the natural landscape. One such value was the forest, which we could see on the hills to the west and which may have covered the area a long time ago. Another one was the River Viskan, which was flowing only ten metres away from the roundabout but was hidden under a large number of infrastructural installations. The city itself, with its beautiful red-brick industrial architecture, was hidden behind new commercial barns, built in steel and without windows. A final but important hidden value of these external commercial areas was the people living there, buying and selling, communicating life and messages to each other. The only sign of them being there was the cars on the big parking plots outside and around the buildings.

Fig. 10.4 The architectural illustration of the project in the Borås commercial area by Carola Wingren Landskap in collaboration with O. Bergman. In the commission, the roundabout was supposed to be the gateway or the front door to this world; but we wanted it to be part of the landscape. We gave different colours to the hidden values that we had decided to work with. We used green for the forest, blue for the River Viskan, red for the brick industry buildings, and yellow for the commercial activity and its messages of publicity, which represented the communication between people. Then we started our sketching

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process, each of us with our own sketching procedures. I used the plan and the section with defined spatial scales, but also with manipulated pictures. The artist, Robert Moreau, used a model, but always without a measurable scale. He used instead a scale based on meaning. At the time this seemed to me something new and different, which I wanted to try in the future. Today I can see a correspondence between this procedure and those of contemporary architects, who attempt to describe architecture both through diagrams and through other means, in order to get in touch with the meaning behind architecture. Finally, all these hidden values assumed a place in our proposal. The proposal was composed of standing firs and whortleberry wire on the ground, which invaded all possible spots of the area as far as one could see. The river was represented by wooden planks placed in the asphalt to make a ‘dunk-dunk’ sound, like the one you can hear when you drive on a wooden bridge. The bricks were proposed as a minor part of the installation. Finally, the communication and messages between people and the businesses marketing textile inside these commercial barns were arranged as advertisements, on boards which invaded the place. On the boards one could read messages or discussions constructed in a humorous way – telling stories which could make you smile, laugh, or – when they were at their best – could make the laughter get caught in the throat and become something serious.

Fig. 10.5 The artist Robert Moreau’s illustration: meaningful messages between spruce trees.

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This was a way of dealing with meaning and permanence in a place where the elusive and fugitive seemed to rule. We wanted to compete with the lightness and superficiality of the publicity messages, but at the same time deal with deeper values. Robert’s skill in creating these messages placed on boards – almost like adverts – was immense. Placing them close to groups of firs made them function like balloons in a cartoon and rendered the firs almost human. The most special relationship in this proposal was perhaps that between a longing male fir, situated in the roundabout itself and turning like a bear in a cage, and a small lady fir making a mourning sound on a podium of brick beside a bench outside the roundabout. This relationship was inspired by the well-known poet Edith Södergran (gran means ‘fir’ in Swedish). This kind of playing – with the place itself, with meaning and memory – took the client by storm. Unfortunately the project has still not come to fulfilment because of financial problems. In the Borås project nature, history, and also human activity have become important in giving meaning to a place where the city architect and the planners are asking for beauty. In the commission, we were asked to put something in the roundabout itself. We went far away from the commission and proposed something different, filled with meaning and associations, taking in the whole space as far as we could see. This was, again, a spatial answer to a commission for an object. The answer was not to build new houses or walls to encircle the place, nor to give it a central force by putting an object in the middle. Instead, the answer was to create a place like a ‘garden’, the kind of project described by Hunt: The garden will thus be distinguished in various ways from the adjacent territories in which it is set. Either it will have some precise boundary, or it will be set apart by the greater extent, scope, and variety of its design and internal organization: more usually both will serve to designate its space and its actual or implied enclosure.10

The boundary was in this case the horizon as well as the façades, and the design was formulated and inspired by the hidden natural landscape of the place itself. And, with the boards of messages, this commercial park design was particularly inspired by the actions of people in the area – their moving back and forth in the buildings, their buying and their communicating. It was an expression of the architect’s and of the artist’s shared interest in private expressions in space. Michel de Certeau stresses the importance of private people’s actions in creating place.11 De Certeau suggests that the planner can only make space – it is people who, by their moving and acting, make a living place out of this space. The project in Borås brings to the forefront these ideas about people’s movements, actions and communication; hence the project could be seen as a step towards another  Hunt, Greater Perfections (above, n. 6).  M. de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien (Paris : Gallimard 1990).

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understanding of the personal or ‘vernacular’, and even as a homage to de Certeau and his ideas. Ideal Landscapes, Artifice and the Natural In the road project described above, which had its starting point in a commission for beauty, I found meaning to be more important – meaning which is dependent on the individual experiences and expectations of the person seeking it, as well as on those of the person designing a landscape or using it. I am trying to say that this meaning changes according to different factors such as personal experience, place, and time. The decision about which meanings should be ruling a certain architectural action related to a landscape belongs therefore in the situation and needs to be processed in every project in a different way. Earlier in this article I have introduced the concept of ‘ideal landscapes’ as something which, in a specific situation, is found to be the ‘best’ solution for changing a place. The reason for introducing it is to avoid the concept of beauty, which influences too much, and too early, the answer to a question which seems to be more open – a question about meaning as well as about other ideals. As a landscape architect, I try in my work, in every situation, to define the ideal landscape as a response to this quest for the best. In the project of Borås we proposed an ideal landscape which had very much to do with nature, but a nature gone. It also had to do with the movements and actions of people living in that place. Both these parts – the one corresponding to nature and the one corresponding to people’s actions – were created artefacts, but only the second stands for the artificial; the first was about reintegrating a lost nature into a place. It seems that what we, as human beings, recognize as natural is often regarded as beautiful in a landscape. Often enough, either nature or old cultural landscapes are chosen as ideal landscapes in proposals for change, for example along roadsides. But our idea of what is natural can differ from person to person, especially when we come from different cultural backgrounds. In the middle of the 1990s, an outer ring road was built in Malmö in southern Sweden. This ring road was placed not very far from the multi-storey housing areas, which were populated mostly by people of foreign origin. When the road was almost finished, the Road Administration and the municipalities along the road commissioned a design programme for the surrounding landscape to prevent the free establishment of petrol stations, publicity boards and so forth.12 The programme not only forbade these kinds of thing outside the ring road, but also proposed an harmonious, hilly, and pastoral landscape with grazing sheep. This proposal had very much to do with the actual landscape, but also with the image of an Arcadian landscape based on Swedish

12   Kvalitetsprogram för Yttre Ringvägens närområde (2nd edn, Kristianstad: Vägverket 2000).

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traditions of landscape scenery and on similar traditions of eighteenth-century landscape parks, especially from England. In this artificial ideal landscape on the outer side of the ring road, only the ‘natural’ has been permitted. And the natural in this case is not the ‘first nature’ of John Dixon Hunt, neither the ‘second nature’ that Hunt describes as the landscape representing what is necessary, like agricultural land or cityscape. It is a ‘third nature’, which is based on these planners’ and decision-makers’ own ideas of beauty or what is natural – a landscape based on today’s agricultural Swedish landscape, which will be old-fashioned tomorrow. In an article about beauty and road planning I call this landscape ‘a cultural landscape park’, because the agricultural landscape – or second nature – is lost when land use is decided on account of an idea about a visual landscape rather than its practical use.13 If the commission of this project would have been concerned not with ugliness or beauty but with meaning and use, maybe the discussion could have been more open-minded. If the commission had been for an ideal landscape, it would have been necessary to ask: ‘Which one?’ This would have made it possible to take stock of a situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century where more that 25 per cent of the population in Malmö consists of people coming from other countries and where nature is almost absent. Several different answers would have been possible, each one articulating a part of the discussion about an ideal landscape in this actual situation on the outer ring road of Malmö. Maybe even controlling the uncontrolled would be a possibility for the common notion of an ideal landscape where the other, shaggier, darker and uncontrolled side of the beautiful Arcadian landscape described by Schama could become materialized and give the opportunity for private additions without disturbing a too harmonious composition. Public and Private Expressions of Meaning Where artificial landscapes are difficult to accept, minor additions or objects can be accepted more easily. Art objects in a roundabout, rock cuttings and the façade lighting can be seen as tools contributing meaning to a landscape. It is often a matter of taste when and which artificial elements are allowed to take place. This taste is related to people’s cultural, professional and personal background. Again, it is a question of experiences and expectations; an architect’s ideas of taste very often differ from vernacular ones. So how could we find the ideal landscape? The large road is one of the most organized areas in the city, principally because of security, but also because it is a result of the modernist movement. In the closed environment of the road, good taste often means straight lines of steel, thin glass and white, well-shaped concrete walls. No private expressions are  C. Wingren, ‘Spegel, spegel på väggen där…?’, in O. Reiter, (ed.), Synvändor – en antologi om landskapsplaneringens teori och praktik (Alnarp: Institut för landskapsplanering, SLU 2004). 13

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normally permitted. Exceptions can be personal memorials after a car accident, where crosses, stones and flowers represent a totally different aesthetics from that of the road equipment. Anna Petersson describes how private road memorials

Fig. 10.6 Model dog on a roundabout at Malmö, by an unknown artist, may represent an effort to create an environment richer in meanings.

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can be kept by the road for long time, even if they are formally forbidden as such.14 This probably has to do with the meaning of these objects even to persons and authorities forbidding them. Other artificial objects assuming a place in the road environment in Sweden are the ‘roundabout dogs’. This is a phenomenon similar to that of the garden goblins, put up by unknown persons, in the same way the goblins are moved around the world. These dogs seem to represent a loss of vernacular elements in the road environment and are introducing a notion of other ideals than the established one. We can find other examples of a similar search towards vernacular ways of expression in art, literature and so on. One such example is the contemporary Swedish artist and art professor Ernst Billgren, who investigates the idea of nature and of the vernacular in his art, producing paintings with natural features like firs or foxes in his artistic creations. The landscape architect Ann Whiston Spirn compares different ways of making memorials.15 She points out that amateurs use more ‘local materials’ and ‘folk tradition’ for personal memorials by comparison with trained professionals, whose memorials involve more ‘formal language’ drawn from precedents or models of the past. But, if I look at my own work for road landscapes, I can see a change in my way of dealing with meaning. New tools that are less based on visual form and pattern are used. There might be a change going on with a breaking up of old architectural cultures of taste; and in the future vernacular kinds of expression (such as the roundabout dog) may even become part of the professional repertoire in landscape architecture. A landscape architect who has been working in this direction since long is Bernard Lassus, whom I have already mentioned, and who for many years has looked for inspiration in vernacular expressions such as the stone garden of Facteur Cheval or the gardens of Charles Pecqueur. In these gardens personal ‘narratives’ are important parts of the project. In projects by Bernard Lassus we can find the usual architectural search for the genius loci of a site, but fantasy and dramatization play a more important role in his project, with inspiration from private forms of expression. From one Landscape to Another The profession of landscape architect is one in which exploration and imagination are important ingredients. New knowledge in the field of practice is mostly found through project-making and drawing. This article is a description of an exploratory 14  A. Petersson, ‘A Proper Place of Death’, paper presented at the Annual Symposium of the Nordic Association for Architectural Research ‘Agents of Change in the Twenty-First Century’, Copenhagen, 2006); A. Petersson, ‘The Production of a Proper Place of Death’, paper presented at the Seventh Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal, Bath, 2005. 15  A. W. Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1998).

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process focused on beauty, meaning and ideal landscape in the field of two types of transition landscapes, both within history and within modernity. There is an interplay between the extremely designed and planned space and its main activity of uncontrolled processes – disobedience in the case of the road and decomposition in the case of the memorial site.16 And, even if in road projects memories have more to do with the loss of landscapes (and in the cemetery more to do with the loss of humans), the landscape, especially the landscape that we feel to be natural, seems to be a common issue to use in a kind of healing process. One example of a healing action might be when a dead person’s ashes are brought to the most loved place during their lifetime, or when a memorial ceremony takes place there. Another example might be the placing of items from the domestic landscape on a grave. It can be a stone, some flowers or something else. Often the thing used has to do with nature, or with what we feel to be nature. It could also be something that we feel to be natural, like memories of things we are used to. In the same way in which an object can help to memorize a loved landscape that has been changed or destroyed by a road, or a wind mill park, a stone from the summer house’s beach can be kept at home during winter, to hold an image of last summer or to make a hint of the next. Different ways of dealing with loss constitute important knowledge which can probably be used for other kinds of loss too – for instance the feeling of loss that can be felt by people moving away from the place where they lived and where their relatives and friends are still living or parents are buried or spread, and away from the landscape they feel as their own. To deal with this kind of loss in the secular society, where people are moving far away from their roots, is an important issue both for the road environment projects and for those of memorial sites. In the transdisciplinary project ‘Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in Contemporary Urban Landscapes’, four researchers – sociologists, designer and landscape architect – will for three years search for new ways of dealing with memory, meaning and loss in a fast changing urban landscape. My part in this work will be, among other things, to use in this new context my findings from the road projects in a process of accumulating design knowledge. In the project we suggest that a process of normalization is noticeable in memorial places that rather goes against the modernistic and still current demand for rational and efficient public environments, free from religious, political, and persona-oriented symbols.17 In the road-planning field described above there are indications of a need to make individual imprints into the public and common space of the road, but also of a need for professionals to search for inspiration in these individual expressions. The purpose for the latter is to get new tools for giving a sense of place and a genius loci to an environment in collaboration with individuals. In the project concerned with places for memory and meaning, one idea is to investigate the mutual use 16   Å. Klintborg, Ahlklo, Mellan trädkrans och minneslund – Svensk kyrkogårdsarkitektur i utveckling 1940–1990, 167 (Alnarp: Movium, SLU 2001). 17  Petersson, ‘Production’ (above, n. 14).

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of the urban landscapes and the possibility of integrating the places of memory as parts of the city life, in housing areas and parks. This process may serve as a bridge towards forming new landscapes comprising places for the simultaneous contemplation of outer and inner worlds and new situations for the expression of grief, private as well as public. Such landscapes can of course include the city access road. In the future we may again see burial places along the city access roads, as in ancient Rome – but in a new form, elaborated by interdisciplinary teams which deal with mobility and nature as well as with the sacred. Maybe these areas could be used as transition landscapes for a mobility of different kinds: they could be wetland resources both for ecological and for recreational use – places where the inhabitants of a city can experience nature and wilderness side by side with the sacred or the sublime, in an Arcadian landscape redesigned between the urban and the rural.

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Bibliography Bucht, E., Pålstam, Y. and Wingren, C., Trafikantupplevelse på väg, Stad o Landrapport, 142 (1996). Castells, M., Informationsåldern: ekonomi, samhälle och kultur: Bd 1: Nätverkssamhällets framväxt (Göteborg: Daidalos 1999). Certeau, M. de, L’Invention du quotidien: 1’ art de faire (Paris: Gallimard 1990). Hunt, J. D., Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (London: Thames and Hudson 2000). Klintborg, Ahlklo, Å., Mellan trädkrans och minneslund – Svensk kyrkogårdsarkitektur i utveckling 1940–1990, Stad & Land nr 167 (Alnarp: Movium, SLU 2001). Kvalitetsprogram för Yttre Ringvägens närområde (2nd edn, Kristianstad: Vägverket 2000). Lassus, B, The Landscape Approach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1998). Norberg,-Schultz, C., Fenomenets plats: Arkitekturteorier, Skriftserien Kairos, 5 (Stockholm: Raster Förlag 1999). — Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli 1980). Petersson A., ‘A Proper Place of Death’ (Paper presented at the Annual Symposium of the Nordic Association for Architectural Research ‘Agents of Change in the Twenty-First Century’, Copenhagen, 20–2 April 2006). — ‘The Production of a Proper Place of Death’ (Paper presented at the seventh conference on ‘The Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal’, Bath, 2005). Schama, S., Landscape and Memory (New York: First Vintage Books Edition 1996). Spirn, A. W., The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1998). Trotzig, B., Dykungens dotter (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag 1994). Wingren, C., ‘Sträckfilmsarkitektur’, in idem, Sex Arkitekturessäer (Stockholm: Arkus and Byggförlaget 1993). — ‘Baled Silage Landscape in Sweden’, Topos 8 (September 1994). — ‘Die Schwelle der Stadt’, Topos 24 (1998). — ‘Spegel, spegel på väggen där…?’, in Reiter, O. (ed.), Synvändor – en antologi om landskapsplaneringens teori och praktik (Alnarp: Institut för landskapsplanering, SLU 2004).

Chapter 11

The Altar of the Dead: A Temporal Space for Memory and Meaning in the Contemporary Urban Landscape Anna Petersson

The week following Halloween in 2006, a cultural event called ‘The altar of the dead’ was held in an urban park in the centre of the Swedish city of Malmö. Encouraging people to contemplate a deceased loved one by leaving gifts, by reciting poems, or simply by reminiscing at a confessionless altar placed in the public park, this event invited an inquiry into the relation between nature, space, and the sacred paying heed to people’s diverse cultures, religious beliefs and practices. As an introduction to such an inquiry, this chapter will start by presenting a few findings from an interview study of recent Swedish roadside memorialization in which the practice of placing material things associated with the deceased by the gravesite, the accident site or in the home may be seen as a way for the surviving relatives to generate a presence of the deceased, charging the memorial place with remembrance and giving it meaning. In the present study, such activities may be held to support the bereaved in their grief work, but the materialized practices also reveal contradictions between private and public space as well as between people’s different experiences and beliefs. These findings will be further explored in this chapter through an examination of the design, location and practices of the event previously referred to as ‘The altar of the dead’. As a concluding remark to this discussion, I will reflect on the notion of praesentia as a presence of the absent, and I will deal with this theme by taking account of the

  This inquiry was made by the author in 2007 for the research project ‘Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in the Contemporary Urban Landscape’, in which professor and landscape architect Carola Wingren (see Chapter 10 in this volume) also took part.   This interview study was taken in 2005, as part of the author’s ongoing PhD project, and aims at some strategically chosen interviewees’ conceptions and experiences of recent roadside memorials in Sweden. Its focus is on the meaning of places and things as links to the deceased and it includes in-depth interviews with surviving relatives and family members of traffic victims, different categories of professional drivers, as well as employees at the Swedish Road Administration. Quotations from these sources in this essay are my own translations of the informants’ original Swedish.

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way material things and physical places may serve as links between the living and the dead. Memorials and Places of Death Places of death such as funeral monuments, roadside memorials and cemeteries can be said to reveal the politics of religious space – as in the tension between sacred and secular or between private and public interests. At the same time they reflect a given society’s religious structures, cultural differences and social orderings, as well as changes in these matters over time. New ways of dealing with the deceased continuously leave traces in these places of death, from the churchyard – the ‘sacred heart of the city’ – to anonymous gardens of remembrance in extra-urban cemeteries and, more recently, to the placing of ashes outside the borders of the cemetery, in a setting which is specific to the deceased. Some researchers even speak of a shift from an institutional to an individual notion of death, one which leaves its mark on ritual activity, memorials and places of death. Further, this individualization of death is clearly visible in what is commonly known as ‘spontaneous memorialization’, which refers to the placing of flowers, candles, photos and personal things like poems and teddy bears at the sites of motor vehicle accidents, murders, catastrophes, terrorist attacks and the like.   Lily Kong, ‘Cemeteries and Columbaria, Memorials and Mausoleums: Narrative and Interpretation in the Study of Deathscapes in Geography’, Australian Geographical Studies 37/1 (1999), 1–10.   Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16/1 (Spring 1986), 22–7.   Philippe Ariés, The Hour of Death, translated by Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1983), p. 51.   Douglas J. Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites (London and New York: Continuum 2002); Curt Dahlgren, När döden skiljer oss åt… Anonymitet och individualisering i dödsannonser: 1945–1999 (Stockholm: Databokförlaget AB 2000); Göran Gustavsson, När det sociala kapitalet växlas in: om begravningar och deltagandet i begravningar, Lund Studies in Sociology of Religion 4 (Lund: Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, University of Lund 2003); Curt Dahlgren and Jan Hermanson, ‘Kremation och spridning av aska: förändrade begravningsseder i Sverige under sent 1990–tal?’, RIT Religionsvetenskaplig Internettidskrift 6 (27 November 2003), available at: http://www.teol.lu.se/rit/pdf/6/jh1.pdf (accessed on 13 March 2006); Anna Petersson, The Presence of the Absent. Memorials and Places of Ritual. PhLic diss. (Lund: Department of Architecture, University of Lund 2004).   C. Allen Haney, Christina Leimer and Juliann Lowery, ‘Spontaneous Memorialisation: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual’, Omega – Journal of Death and Dying 35 (1997), 159–71; Jennifer Clark and Ashley Cheshire, ‘RIP by the Roadside: A Comparative Study of Roadside Memorials in New South Wales, Australia, and Texas,

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In Sweden we have seen spontaneous memorials created at the murder sites of Prime Minister Olof Palme and, later, of Foreign Minister Anna Lind in Stockholm – as well as after the large fire at a discothèque in Gothenburg. Spontaneous memorials have also been created in Sweden in connection with catastrophes occurring abroad, such as after the wreckage of the ship MS Estonia, sailing the Baltic Sea, and the disaster of the Tsunami in south–east Asia. The Personalized Memorial Why the practice of spontaneous memorialization seems to be increasing is a question asked by many researchers – the cultural geographers Kate Hartig and Kevin Dunn among them.10 In a survey on roadside memorials in Newcastle (New South Wales, Australia), Hartig and Dunne suggest that roadside memorials may be filling a gap in the trend towards gardens of remembrance and plaque-gardens, leaving the mourning with no personalized space to visit.11 The formality and strict United States’, Omega – Journal of Death and Dying 48/3 (2003/2004), 229–48; Sylvia Grider, ‘Spontaneous Shrines and Public Memorialization’, in Kathleen Garces-Foley (ed.), Death and Religion in a Changing World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe 2005), pp. 246–64.    SOU 2000, 113; SOU 2004, 108. See also Tuija Nieminen Kristofersson, ‘Places of Dying, Rituals of Mourning’ (Paper for the Inaugural Nordic Geographers Meeting ‘Power over Time–Space’, 10–14 May 2005, Lund); Tuija Nieminen Kristofersson, ’Från olycksplats till minnesplats’, in Thomas Lundén (ed.), Katastrof! Olyckans geografi och antropologi, Svenska sällskapet för antropologi och geografi, Ymer 126 (Motala: 2006), pp. 269–80.    SOU 1999, 48; SOU 2005, 60. See also: Per Pettersson, ‘Implicit Religious Relations Turned Explicit. The Church of Sweden as Service Provider in the Context of the Estonia Disaster’ (Paper for the Conference of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR), 7–11 July 1997, Toulouse); Per Pettersson, ‘Ten Years after the M/s Estonia Disaster. The Development of the Church of Sweden as Public Provider of Rituals – A Complementary Welfare Function’ (Paper for the Seventeenth Nordic Conference in Sociology of Religion (NCSR), 19–22 August 2004, Reykjavik). 10  Cynthia Henzel, ‘Cruces in the Roadside Landscape of Northeastern New Mexico’, Journal of Cultural Geography 11/2 (1995), 93–106; Haney, Leimer and Lowery, ‘Spontaneous Memorialisation’ (above, n. 7); George Monger, ‘Modern Wayside Shrines’, Folklore 108 (1997), 113–14; Kate V. Hartig and Kevin M. Dunn, ‘Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales’, Australian Geographical Studies 36/1 (1998), 5–20; Holly Everett, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture (Texas, Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002); Petersson, The Presence of the Absent (above, n. 6), pp. 49–57; Clark and Cheshire, ‘RIP by the Roadside’ (above, n. 7); Grider, ‘Spontaneous Shrines and Public Memorialization’ (above, n. 7); Jennifer Clark and Majella Franzmann, ‘Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in the Making of Roadside Memorials’, Death Studies 30 (2006), 579–99. 11  The wish, or need, to personalize death is of course not the only suggestion proposed for a source of the dissemination of roadside memorials, just as the individualization of

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requirements and regulations of official cemeteries concerning both gravestones and decorations may be an additional cause for the increase in roadside memorials, state Hartig and Dunn.12 The same suggestion is made by the researchers in classics, history and religion Jennifer Clark and Majella Franzmann.13 In other words, for some mourners, the cemetery’s standardized and formal places of death seem to hinder the process of grief – whereas the construction, maintenance and ritual visits to a more personalized memorial, for instance one by the roadside, may serve towards ensuring a feeling of closure on a tragic event.14 However, for the surviving relatives of victims of traffic accidents in the previously mentioned interview study of Swedish roadside memorialization, the traditional gravesite in the cemetery has not lost its function and meaning.15 In this study, the bereaved see roadside and domestic memorials as supplementary places of ritual, endowed with slightly different functions from those of the memorial place in the cemetery, rather than as opposed or counterbalanced to the gravesite.16 death is not the only explanation offered for the dissemination of spontaneous memorials. Other proposals are: increased and globalized media coverage; the distancing of death from modern society; the mixing of various cultures and traditions due to immigration and long-distance travelling; an international and collective experience of motoring and media culture; as well as more local modes of drawing on cultures and religions inherent to a specific area. For references, see the previous footnote. 12  Hartig and Dunn, ‘Roadside Memorials’ (above, n. 10). 13  Clark and Franzmann, ‘Authority from Grief’ (above, n. 10). 14  David J. de L. Horne, ‘Treatment of Pain, Fear and Loss following a Road Accident: A Case Study’, in Margaret Mitchell (ed.), The Aftermath of Road Accidents: Psychological, Social and Legal Consequences of an Everyday Trauma (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 194–5; Chris Ross, ‘Roadside Memorials: Public Policy vs. Private Expression’, American City & County 1998 (1 May), available at: http://americancityandcounty.com/ mag/government_roadside_memorials_public/ (accessed on 31 January 2006); Anna Petersson, ‘A Proper Place of Death?’, in Ken Rivad (ed.), Architects in the Twenty-First Century – Agents of Change?, Nordic Association for Architectural Research Annual Symposium 2006 (Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture 2006), pp. 110–17. 15  Although most of the bereaved whom I interviewed rate the gravesite as the most important memorial place, the domestic memorial (or, simply, the home at large) stands out as a central place for remembrance, the memorial at the accident site being considered to be the least important. Anna Petersson, ‘Swedish Offerkast and Recent Roadside Memorials’, Folklore 120 (April 2009), 75–91. A similar valuation is noticed in Texas, USA where the memorial at the gravesite is seen as more important than that at the accident site. Holly Everett, ‘Roadside Crosses and Memorial Complexes in Texas’, Folklore 111 (April 2000), 91–103. However, in an Australian study, the memorial at the accident site is seen as more important than the memorial in the cemetery. Clark and Franzmann, ‘Authority from Grief’ (above, n. 10). 16  The living relatives and friends of the deceased state that the site where the death has occurred continues to have importance after the initial mourning period has passed

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Yet for some of these relatives the presence of the deceased cannot be felt in the cemetery ‘since this is not where he lived’, as one person stated. One bereaved mother told me that ‘she is with us here, not dug down in the cemetery’. Other places where the absent person, according to the testimonials, is still present are a common favourite restaurant, a summer house, a special glade for picking mushrooms or a day nursery.17 In line with this, to leave personal notes at the accident site or to place things associated with the deceased by the gravesite, such as an inherited handkerchief, some perfume belonging to the deceased or pebbles collected from the accident site, as well as collect and save things at home – for instance jewelry and strands of hair belonging to the deceased, or splinters of glass and fallen leaves from the fatal site – may perhaps be seen as a way of creating a presence of the deceased and of supporting the memorial place with memory and meaning. This kind of actions may perhaps also be held to create a potential field of care, in the geographer YiFu Tuan’s sense of the term.18 Moreover, practices like these may also facilitate a graspable connection between what the Swedish ethnologist Lynn Åkesson calls the symbolic and the diabolic realities, where the phrase symbolic reality stands for feelings of unity and meaning of life, whereas diabolic reality stands for feelings of disruption and disillusion.19 With these terms in mind, we might propose that bereaved people are aided in their struggle towards the acceptance of what happened by juxtaposing objects from the symbolic and the diabolic realities, from life and death, from the past and the present.20 and it often serves as a place for commemorating the death day of the departed. However, the roadside memorial seems to be most important before the memorial at the grave site has been constructed. At the domestic memorial candles are lighted almost every day in connection to ordinary family activities like eating. One of the bereaved mothers in my study also told me that she lighted candles at night in her deceased son’s bedroom. Another mother told me that she moved the domestic memorial with her when she walked from the kitchen, where they had dinner, to the room where they watched television afterwards. Petersson, ‘A Proper Place of Death?’ (above, n. 14); Petersson, ‘Swedish Offerkast and Recent Roadside Memorials’ (above, n. 15). 17  This kind of emotional attachment to a material setting, with which one has repetitive contact and where one creates networks of interpersonal concern, is also typical of what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls fields of care. Yi–Fu Tuan, ‘Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective’, Progress in Geography: International Reviews of Current Research 6 (London: Edward Arnold and New York: St Martin’s Press 1974), pp. 211–52; Nieminen Kristofersson, ‘Från olycksplats till minnesplats’ (above, n. 8), pp. 271. Petersson, ‘Swedish Offerkast and Recent Roadside Memorials’ (above, n. 15). 18  Tuan, ‘Space and Place’ (above, n. 17), pp. 236–45. Petersson, ‘Swedish Offerkast and Recent Roadside Memorials’ (above, n. 15). Nieminen Kristofersson, ‘Från olycksplats till minnesplats’ (above, n. 8), p. 275. 19  Lynn Åkesson, Mellan levande och döda: föreställningar om kropp och ritual (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, Forskningsrådsnämnden 1997), pp. 112–13, 149–50. 20  Petersson, ‘Swedish Offerkast and Recent Roadside Memorials’ (above, n. 15).

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Nevertheless, while this juxtaposition is constructive for some, for others it may constitute a negative experience. An unconstructive outcome of the practices mentioned may for instance be that they aim at binding the dead to the world of the living through privatizing and individualizing death, something which might actually hinder the process of grief.21 Another concern is that an unpredictable mixture between life and death, as in the form of a spontaneous memorial placed outside the borders of the cemetery or in memorial decorations from the ‘living world’ (like toys or personal notes), may for some people reveal the ever-present powers of death and turn everyday life upside down by exposing its transience and fragility. 22 For other people, to drive past a roadside memorial on their way to and from work may seem ‘almost like going to the cemetery every day’.23 However, while you can consciously avoid a visit to the cemetery or at least prepare yourself for an expected encounter with it, the unpredicted sight of a roadside memorial may suddenly bring about repressed feelings of pain and anger.24 Between the Sacred and the Secular, the Private and the Public Apart from triggering existential questions about life and death, spontaneous memorials may also set off struggles between sacred and secular or private and public interests.25 Alternatively, the problem may be that, as an article on roadside memorialization in the magazine American City and County declares: ‘In fact, in probably no other area of public life does public practice diverge so dramatically from official policy.’26 As an example of the former process, Ellen Johnson, president of the society American Atheists, sees roadside memorials as a growing problem across the country. ‘We end up with these little Christian shrines everywhere,’ says Johnson.27 By the same token, the removal of roadside crosses by the US Oregon Department

  Åkesson, Mellan levande och döda (above, n. 19), pp. 122–3.   Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York, 1982), pp. 3–4; Petersson, The Presence of the Absent (above, n. 6), pp. 59, 61–2, 87–8. 23  Ross, ‘Roadside Memorials’ (above, n. 14). 24   Kristeva, Powers of Horror (above, n. 22), pp. 3–4; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2002), pp. 87–8; Petersson, ‘A Proper Place of Death?’ (above, n. 14). 25  Petersson, ‘A Proper Place of Death?’ (above, n. 14). For a similar discussion, see Zemfira Inogamova’s text in Chapter 20 in this volume. 26  Ross, ‘Roadside Memorials’ (above, n. 14). 27   ‘The (Unconstitutional) Cross by the Side of the Road – Atheists in Court to Remove Christian Highway Memorials’, American Atheists (5 December 2005), available at: http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/utah12.htm (accessed on 31 January 2006). 21

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of Transportation was interpreted by some Oregonians as an antireligious act,28 although the Oregon Department of Transportation made sure to explain that it was removing all kinds of unofficial signs because according to state highway regulations it was illegal to erect private signs on public roads.29 Spontaneous memorials like the ones described in this paper often trigger a subsequent process of formalization. This puts you in mind of a discussion from the theorist Michel de Certeau: namely how tactics, which belongs to the common people, in turn may produce strategies, which are connected to the ruling forces in society.30 If you think of a spontaneous memorial created around the death of a famous person, or around one where the numbers of deceased were reasonably high, all of you will probably recognize the process I am referring to. Soon enough an official monument arranged according to economic, political, religious or scientific standards is constructed, turning the spontaneous memorial space into a proper public memorial place.31 The Altar of the Dead These presented findings seem all to come together in the cultural event described earlier as ‘The altar of the dead’. ‘The altar of the dead’ was one of many features during ‘The festival of the dead’, produced by the cultural association Rárika with Alejandra Pizarro and Oyuki Matsumoto as the main producers. Miriam Myrtell, the designer of the altar, wanted it to be confessionless in order for people with various cultural and religious backgrounds to feel all welcome to visit. To reach this goal, Myrtell designed the altar without characteristics belonging to a specific religious faith. Consisting of three walls supporting a small roof and decorated with strands of vegetation, the altar appeared a bit like a small shelter. Inside the shelter three long shelves of different height, looking like benches covered in moss, carried flowers, burning candles and incense. In front of the shelves, a natural stone from the park, also covered in moss, served as a space for visitors to leave gifts and light candles. In addition to this space, the altar also had an adjoining blackboard wall, where visitors were encouraged, with the help of a white pen, to leave messages, drawings and the like.

28

  Karen Schmidt, ‘Roadside Memorials Spark Religious Freedom Dispute’, Christianity Today (3 April 2000), available at: http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2000/ april3/13.20.html (accessed on 31 January 2006). 29   Schmidt, ‘Roadside Memorials Spark Religious Freedom Dispute’ (above, n. 28). 30  De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (above, n. 24), pp. 29–42. 31  Petersson, The Presence of the Absent (above, n. 6), pp. 49–59; ‘A Proper Place of Death?’ (above, n. 14).

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Combination and Contradiction In addressing people of different cultures and with different religious beliefs and practices, ‘The altar of the dead’ is designed with the combined aim of being confessionless, so as to suit all visitors, and yet of appearing to be sacred to a certain extent, in order to suggest a specific place for the display of reverence and grief. This difficult assignment is obvious in the design of the altar, which mixes well known but religiously unspecific ritual props such as flowers, candles and incense with nature, conceived of as an indicator of spirituality and tranquility – as in the strands of vegetation and in the natural stone covered in moss. To this design is also added a mixture of public and private, as in the material gifts left at the altar and consisting of framed photographs, postcards, private notes, children’s drawings and jewelry, of which some where hidden and others left in sight. The same kind of mixture can be found in the messages and drawings made on the blackboard wall, which express both private and public thoughts.32 When it comes to the placement of the altar, similar juxtapositions could be pointed out. The location of the altar in an urban park and next to the public library in the centre of Malmö put it forward as a public event. Posters, mail circulars, newspaper announcements and other kinds of formal advertising material added to this appearance. At the same time, the proposed and encouraged grieving practices enacted at the altar – such as the offering of gifts or the reminiscing of a loved one who has passed away – could be seen, socially and culturally, as an established private business in Sweden. The altar’s placement in the evening park, which during daytime is full of leisure activities such as picnics, strolls and exercises, could perhaps also be seen as establishing a night-time counterpart to such activities and as offering a peaceful and contemplative space for grief work. As an experimental production generated in space and in time which have been set apart for leisure activities, ‘The altar of the dead’ comes close to the anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of liminoid phenomena and their spaces.33 It exemplifies the way liminoid phenomena cut across spaces and activities designed for work and for play/leisure instead of ritually and spatially drawing a distinction between profane and sacred work, as liminal phenomena do.34 In a similar way, the philosopher Michel Foucault discusses certain oppositions, ‘nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred’, which our presentday society has not yet dared to 32

  For a discussion on the use of nature as indicator of spirituality and infinity in western cemetery construction, see: Petersson, The Presence of the Absent (above, n. 6), pp. 32–47. For a discussion of stones as creators of sacred space in Chinese and Japanese parks and gardens, see Graham Parkes’s text in Chapter 22 of the present volume. 33   Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications 1982), pp. 20–60. 34  According to Turner, liminoid spaces are set aside from productive labour and are privileged and neutral spaces where experiments and ‘all kinds of freewheeling’ are allowed to take place. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre (above, n. 33), p. 32.

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break down, such as private space versus public space, family space versus social space, cultural space versus useful space, and ‘between the space of leisure and that of work’.35 A somewhat more critical view of the relationship between the space of work and that of play/leisure comes from the sociologist Henri Lefèbvre, who speaks of space as being divided up into specialized areas as well as into areas prohibited for this or that group.36 A critical comment on the placing of the altar, leaning on Lefèbvre, could perhaps be that the chosen location, situated in the centre of Malmö, somewhat segregates the altar’s visitors through its distance from the suburban sprawl, where most of the city’s immigrants live. Hence an interesting continuation of the event would be to place ‘The altar of the dead’ in a park which has closer contact with the multicultural side of Malmö. This is in fact a future aim of the producers of the present altar. People’s Experiences of The Altar of the Dead According to Pizarro and Matsumoto, ‘The altar of the dead’ was a very popular event which attracted visitors of all ages, with varying cultural and religious backgrounds, out of which a few even revisited the altar. One reason for this may be that, just as the cross at a roadside memorial rather functions as a general marker of death and sacredness than as a symbol of a specific religious faith, the combination of nature, space and the sacred in the design of the altar may be seen as having contributed to an aura of reverence and grief without addressing a particular group of people.37 Additionally, to involve a current and everyday object which is well known to most people, like the blackboard wall, may perhaps be seen as having heightened the feeling of togetherness and unity across cultures, religions and practices among the visitors to ‘The altar of the dead’. For Pizarro and Matsumoto it was also obvious that some of the altar’s visitors seemed to go through a transformation during their stay, appearing to be relieved by the leaving of personal gifts and taking the opportunity to talk to and about the deceased.38 The practice of placing a material gift associated with the deceased 35

 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (above, n. 4).  Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1991), pp. 319–20. 37  Clark and Franzmann, ‘Authority from Grief’ (above, n. 10); Petersson, ‘A Proper Place of Death?’ (above, n. 14). 38   Such a transformation, enabled by the re-enactment, internalization and domestication of a difficult experience in the past through actions, depictions or words, is also evident in the field of psychoanalysis, as in the theory of symbolization, and in psychotherapeutic methods such as expressive therapy. Jean–Pierre Warnier, ‘A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World’, Journal of Material Culture 6.1 (2001), 5–24. Andrea Gilroy, Art Therapy, Research and Evidence-Based Practice (London: Sage 2006). Anna Petersson, ‘Materiality and Grief’ (unpublished research paper, Lund University, 2007). 36

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Fig. 11.1 Remaining pieces of the blackboard wall. at ‘The altar of the dead’ may not only establish the space as a memorial place, thus giving it a particular meaning; the act may also help people to let go of some of their distress by tying it to a material thing which they physically leave behind, as Matsumoto suggested. Other visitors were provoked and enraged by the producers’ verbal and printed suggestion to treat death as a natural part of life, which was strengthened by the location of the altar in a public park. These two opposite reactions may perhaps be linked to the earlier discussion, where it became evident that for some people a relation between the space of life and the space of death is constructive while for others it constitutes a negative experience. Yet, contrary to spontaneous memorials, which are directly connected to the cause of death, or to a burial place in the cemetery, which actually contains a dead body, the altar of the dead could be seen as somewhat disconnected from the proximity of death. On the other hand, the design and props of the altar, as well as the word ‘death’ in its name, do suggest a connection which may be obvious enough to some of the visitors. A Presence of the Absent In this chapter the material expressions generated by people in grief, as well as our conceived experiences of these manifestations, have guided an inquiry into the interplay between the material environment and people’s beliefs and practices.39

 For a fruitful discussion on the interplay of lived religion in and with lived space, see Sigurd Bergmann’s paper ‘Lived Religion in Lived Space’, in Heinz Streib, Astrid Dinter and Kerstin Söderblom (eds), Lived Religion – Conceptual, Empirical and 39

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A concluding reflection worth formulating in this investigation is offered by the social anthropologist Peter Brown’s interpretation of the religious notion of praesentia, conceived of as a social encounter with the presence of the absent.40 This notion is linked to the way Christ is held to be present in the Eucharist and to the way saints are held to be present in holy relics and sacred places.41 The reflection, and the chapter, will now be brought to a close with an important thought, presented by the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, suggesting that things with ‘a reference to the other’ – that is, places trampled by beings, things held by beings, written as well as spoken language, vestiges and relics, in short, all the things touched by man – have the capacity to open up for a recognition of the absent other as a mortal human being akin to our self.42 This ethical and existential recognition of the absent other, enabled by a material thing, could ultimately be seen as a revelation of the presence of infinity.43 By encountering personal items left at ‘The altar of the dead’ in the form of necklaces, photographs and letters with reference to loved ones who have passed away, visitors become engaged in a meeting with the absent other – an act which brings forth the very presence of infinity. For a week in November, for a predestined moment, a public place is arranged as private space, material things function as links to the deceased, and death is connected to the infinity of life.

Practical–Theological Approaches: Essays in Honor of Hans–Günter Heimbrock (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2008), pp. 197–209. 40  Peter Robert Lamont Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (London: University of Chicago Press 1981), p. 88; Petersson, The Presence of the Absent (above, n. 6), p. 121. 41   Brown, The Cult of the Saints (above, n. 40), p. 88. 42  Emmanuel Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1987), p. 119. 43  Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (above, n. 42), p. 121. Petersson, The Presence of the Absent (above, n. 6), pp. 121–4.

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Bibliography Published Sources Ariés, Philippe, The Hour of Death, translated by Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1983). Bergmann, Sigurd, ‘Lived Religion in Lived Space’, in Heinz Streib, Astrid Dinter and Kerstin Söderblom (eds), Lived Religion – Conceptual, Empirical and Practical–Theological Approaches: Essays in Honor of Hans-Günter Heimbrock (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2008). Brown, Peter Robert Lamont, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (London: University of Chicago Press 1981). Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (new edn, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2002). Clark, Jennifer and Ashley Cheshire, ‘RIP by the Roadside: A Comparative Study of Roadside Memorials in New South Wales, Australia, and Texas, United States’, Omega – Journal of Death and Dying 48/3 (2003/2004), 229–48. Clark, Jennifer and Majella Franzmann, ‘Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in the Making of Roadside Memorials’, Death Studies 30 (2006), 579–99. Dahlgren, Curt, När döden skiljer oss åt… Anonymitet och individualisering i dödsannonser: 1945–1999 (Stockholm: Databokförlaget AB 2000). Dahlgren, Curt and Jan Hermanson, ‘Kremation och spridning av aska: Förändrade begravningsseder i Sverige under sent 1990–tal?’, RIT religionsvetenskaplig Internettidskrift 6 (27 November 2003), available at: http://www.teol.lu.se/rit/ pdf/6/jh1.pdf (accessed on 13 March 2006). Davies, Douglas J., Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites, 2nd edn (London and New York: Continuum 2002). Everett, Holly, ‘Roadside Crosses and Memorial Complexes in Texas’, Folklore 111 (April 2000), 91–103. — Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture (Texas: University of North Texas Press 2002). Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces’, translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16/1 (Spring 1986), 22–7. Gilroy, Andrea, Art therapy, research and evidence-based practice (London: Sage 2006). Grider, Sylvia, ‘Spontaneous Shrines and Public Memorialization’, in Kathleen Garces-Foley (ed.), Death and Religion in a Changing World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe 2005). Gustavsson, Göran, När det sociala kapitalet växlas in: om begravningar och deltagandet i begravningar. Lund Studies in Sociology of Religion 4 (Lund: Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, University of Lund 2003). Haney, C. Allen, Christina Leimer and Juliann Lowery, ‘Spontaneous Memorialisation: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual’, Omega – Journal of Death and Dying 35 (1997), 159–71.

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Hartig, Kate V. and Kevin M. Dunn, ‘Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales’, Australian Geographical Studies 36/1 (1998), 5–20. Henzel, Cynthia, ‘Cruces in the Roadside Landscape of Northeastern New Mexico’, Journal of Cultural Geography 11/2 (1995), 93–106. Horne, David J. de L., ‘Treatment of Pain, Fear and Loss following a Road Accident: A Case Study’, in Margaret Mitchell (ed.), The Aftermath of Road Accidents: Psychological, Social and Legal Consequences of an Everyday Trauma (London and New York: Routledge 1997). Kong, Lily, ‘Cemeteries and Columbaria, Memorials and Mausoleums: Narrative and Interpretation in the Study of Deathscapes in Geography’, Australian Geographical Studies 37/1 (1999), 1–10. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press 1982). Kristofersson, Tuija Nieminen, ’Från olycksplats till minnesplats’, in Thomas Lundén (ed.), Katastrof! Olyckans geografi och antropologi, Svenska sällskapet för antropologi och geografi, Ymer 126 (Motala: 2006). Lefèbvre, Henri, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1991). Lévinas, Emmanuel, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1987). Monger, George, ‘Modern Wayside Shrines’, Folklore 108 (1997), 113–14. Petersson, Anna, The Presence of the Absent. Memorials and Places of Ritual, PhLic diss. (Lund: Department of Architecture, University of Lund 2004). — ‘A Proper Place of Death?’, in Ken Rivad (ed.), Architects in the Twenty-First Century – Agents of Change?, Nordic Association for Architectural Research Annual Symposium 2006 (Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture 2006). — ‘Swedish Offerkast and Recent Roadside Memorials’, Folklore 120 (April 2009), 75–91. Ross, Chris, ‘Roadside Memorials: Public Policy vs. Private Expression’, American City and County (1 May 1998), available at: http://americancityandcounty. com/mag/government_roadside_memorials_public/ (accessed on 31 January 2006). Schmidt, Karen, ‘Roadside Memorials Spark Religious Freedom Dispute’, Christianity Today (3 April 2000), available at: http://www.ctlibrary.com/ ct/2000/april3/13.20.html (accessed on 31 January 2006). ‘The (Unconstitutional) Cross by the Side of the Road – Atheists in Court to Remove Christian Highway Memorials’, American Atheists (5 December 2005), available at: http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/utah12.htm (accessed on 31 January 2006). Tuan, Yi-Fu, ‘Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective’, Progress in Geography: International Reviews of Current Research 6 (London: Edward Arnold and New York: St Martin’s Press 1974).

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Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications 1982). Warnier, Jean-Pierre, ‘A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World’, Journal of Material Culture 6/1 (2001), 5–24. Åkesson, Lynn, Mellan levande och döda: föreställningar om kropp och ritual (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, Forskningsrådsnämnden 1997). Unpublished Sources Kristofersson, Tuija Nieminen, ‘Places of Dying, Rituals of Mourning’ (paper for the Inaugural Nordic Geographers Meeting ‘Power over Time–Space’, 10–14 May 2005, Lund). Petersson, Anna, ‘Materiality and Grief’ (unpublished research paper, Lund University, 2007). Pettersson, Per, ‘Implicit Religious Relations Turned Explicit. The Church of Sweden as Service Provider in the Context of the Estonia Disaster’ (paper for the Conference of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR), 7–11 July 1997, Toulouse). Pettersson, Per, ‘Ten Years after the M/s Estonia Disaster. The Development of the Church of Sweden as Public Provider of Rituals – A Complementary Welfare Function’ (paper for the Seventeenth Nordic Conference in Sociology of Religion, 19–22 August 2004, Reykjavik). Abbreviations SOU: Statens Offentliga Utredningar (The Swedish Government’s Public Inquiries). — SOU 1999:48, Lära av Estonia, Näringsdepartementet, Analysgruppen för granskning av Estoniakatastrofen och dess följder (April 1999), available at: http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/108/a/2392 (accessed on 1 April 2009). — SOU 2000:113, Branden i Göteborg den 29-30 oktober 1998 – En sammanfattning, Försvarsdepartementet, Betänkande av Utredningen om erfarenheter av branden i Göteborg (December 2000), available at: http://www. regeringen.se/sb/d/538/a/3909 (accessed on 1 April 2009). — SOU 2004:108, Personskyddet för den centrala ledningen, Justitiedepartementet, Personskyddsutredningen (9 November 2004), available at: http://www. regeringen.se/sb/d/108/a/33204 (accessed on 1 April 2009). — SOU 2005:60, Efter flodvågen – det första halvåret, Försvarsdepartementet (30 juni 2005), available at: http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/108/a/47226 (accessed on 1 April 2009).

PART C NATURE AS ENTANGLEMENT

Chapter 12

The Wedge and the Knot: Hammering and Stitching the Face of Nature Tim Ingold

Encircling Life I should like to begin with a simple experiment. Take a pen and a sheet of plain paper (or a piece of chalk and a blackboard) and draw a rough circle. How should we interpret this line? Strictly speaking, it is the trace left by the gesture of your hand as, holding the pen (or chalk), it alighted on the surface and took a turn around before continuing on its way to wherever it would go and whatever it would do next. However, viewing the line as a totality, ready-drawn on the surface, we might be inclined to reinterpret it quite differently – not as a trajectory of movement but as a static perimeter, delineating the figure of the circle against the ground of an otherwise empty plane. With this figure we seem to have set up a division between what is on the ‘inside’ and what is on the ‘outside’. Now this interpretation, I contend, results from the operation of a particular logic, which has a central place in the structure of modern thought. I call it the logic of inversion. In a nutshell, what it does is to turn the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is contained. Life, according to this logic, is reduced to an internal property of things which occupy the world but do not properly inhabit it. A world which is occupied, I argue, is furnished with already existing things. But one which is inhabited is woven from the strands of their continual cominginto-being. My purpose is to recover the sense of what it means to inhabit the world. To achieve this, I propose to put the logic of inversion into reverse. Life having been, as it were, installed inside things, I now want to restore these things to life by returning to the currents of their formation. Much of the inspiration for this move comes from the philosophy of Henri Bergson. In his Creative Evolution of 1911 Bergson argued that every living being is cast like an eddy in the current of life. Yet so well does it feign immobility that we are readily deceived into treating each one ‘as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of



 T. Ingold, ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous World’, in G. Pálsson (ed.), Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse (Oxford: Berg 1993), 210–30.

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its form is only the outline of a movement’. Like the gesture of the hand in our experiment, so the living being in its development, according to Bergson, describes ‘a kind of circle’. But just as we are tempted to reinterpret the drawn line not as the trace of a gestural movement but as the perimeter of a geometrical form, so, says Bergson, are we inclined to treat the organism which has thus turned in upon itself as an externally bounded object, or as a container for life. Yet life, Bergson insisted, is not contained in things. It is movement itself, wherein every organism emerges as a peculiar disturbance that interrupts the linear flow, binding it into the forms we see. It would be wrong, then, to compare the living organism to an object, for ‘the organism that lives is a thing that endures’. Like a growing root or fibre, it creates itself endlessly, trailing its history behind it as the past presses against the present. Where Bergson was comparing the organism to an eddy, Charles Darwin had earlier compared it to a wedge. Introducing his idea of the struggle for existence in The Origin of Species, Darwin famously likened the face of nature to a surface riven by innumerable wedges, ‘packed close together and driven inward by incessant blows’. In subsequent ecological thinking, the language of Darwin rather than that of Bergson has overwhelmingly prevailed. Living things are imagined as externally bounded, solid objects in a carpentered world, competing for limited space along the lines of their adjacency. Like a wedge, every organism – as the philosopher Martin Heidegger would go on to say of objects in general – is ‘over against’ its neighbours. In this image of struggle, it is the very objectness or ‘over-againstness’ of organisms that defines their existence. Thus every organism is portrayed as externally circumscribed, set over against a surrounding world – an environment – with which it is destined to interact according to its nature. The organism is ‘in here’; the environment is ‘out there’. The logic of inversion, it seems, has turned the generative movement of life into boundaries of exclusion. But what if – overturning this logic – we were to revert to the original line, described by a twisting movement? Beginning with the line, there is initially no inside or outside, and no boundary separating two domains. Rather, there is a trail of movement or growth.

  H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, translated by A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan 1911), p. 135; original emphasis.    Ibid., p. 134.    Ibid., p. 16; original emphasis.    Ibid., p. 29.   C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: Watts 1950; original publication 1859), p. 58.   M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row 1971), p. 167.

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Entangled Lines Every such trail discloses a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and another – between the organism ‘here’ and the environment ‘there’. It is rather a trail along which life is lived. Yet each trail is but one strand in a tissue of trails that together comprise the texture of the land. This texture is what I mean when I speak of organisms being constituted within a relational field. It is a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines, not a network but a meshwork. The distinction is critical. Network images have become commonplace across a broad spectrum of disciplines, from the ‘webs of life’ of ecology, through the ‘social networks’ of sociology and social anthropology, to the ‘agent–object’ networks of material culture studies. Across all these fields, proponents of network thinking argue that it encourages us to focus, in the first place, not on things, organisms or persons but on the connections between them, and thereby to adopt what is often called a relational perspective. Connections between, however, presuppose the differentiation and separation of the entities they relate, as though the constitutive movements of each were turned in upon themselves prior to the establishment of the connecting link. That is to say, they presuppose an operation of inversion. To undo this inversion is to think of every living being itself as not just one but a whole bundle of lines. Each line – each relation – is a path of growth and movement. It is not, then, that things are entangled in relations. Rather, every thing is itself an entanglement, a tissue of knots whose constituent strands, as they become tied up with other strands, in other bundles, comprise the meshwork. As Heidegger showed through one of his characteristic excursions into the ancient meanings of words, a ‘thing’ was originally not an object but a gathering, a particular binding together of the threads of life.10 In a quite material sense, lines are what things are made of. Indeed anatomists have always known this, as they have spoken of the ‘tissues’ of organisms. For the tissue is a texture formed of myriads of fine threads tightly interlaced, presenting all the appearance, to a casual observer, of a coherent, continuous surface. To the anatomical gaze, however, the organic tissue becomes – as J. Arthur Thomson wrote in 1911 – ‘in a quite remarkable way translucent’, resolving into its constituent threads of nerve, muscle and so on.11 What is the nervous system, Bergson asked, if not ‘an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the centre, and from the centre to the periphery’?12

 T. Ingold, ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re–Animating Thought’, Ethnos 71.1 (2006), 1–12.   T. Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge 2007), p. 80. 10  M. Heidegger, Poetry (above, n. 7), pp. 175–7. 11   J. A. Thomson, Introduction to Science (London: Williams and Norgate 1911), p. 27. 12  H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books 1991), p. 45. 

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Let us imagine the living being, then, not as a self-contained object like a block of wood, but as an ever-ramifying bundle of lines of growth. The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously likened this bundle to a rhizome,13 though I prefer the image of the fungal mycelium.14 A mycologist friend once remarked to me that the whole of biology would be different, had it taken the mycelium as the prototypical exemplar of a living organism.15 For it forces us to a radical reconceptualization of the environment. Literally, of course, an environment is that which surrounds the organism. But you cannot surround a bundle without drawing a boundary that would enclose it, and this would immediately be to effect an inversion, converting those relations along which a being lives its life in the world into internal properties of which its life is but the outward expression.16 Such has long been the strategy of mainstream biological science, which insists that, in its manifest form and behaviour, the organism lives to realize a set of genetically transmitted specifications that have been installed even before it sets out on its path through the world. According to what many students are told is the ‘first law of biology’, every living thing is a product of the interaction between genes and environment – that is, between a received set of interior specifications and its exterior conditions of existence. For an alternative view, however, we can return to Darwin, who at one point imagines himself observing ‘the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank’.17 It is a compelling image. In the tangled bank, lines of growth issuing from multiple sources become comprehensively bound up with one another, just as do the vines and creepers of a dense patch of tropical forest, or the tangled root systems that you cut through with your spade every time you dig your garden. Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the architects of the so-called new synthesis of twentieth century evolutionary biology, liked to describe life as a process of ‘groping’.18 Literally ‘pervading everything so as to try everything, and trying everything so as to find everything’,19 life will not be contained within a boundary but rather threads its way through the world along the myriad lines of its relations, probing every crack or crevice that might potentially afford growth and movement.  G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, On the Line, translated by J. Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e) 1983). 14   T. Ingold, ‘Two Reflections on Ecological Knowledge’, in G. Sanga and G. Ortalli. (eds), Nature Knowledge: Ethnoscience, Cognition, Identity (New York: Berghahn 2003), 302–11. 15  A. D. M. Rayner, Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries (London: Imperial College Press 1997). See also K.A. Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge 1999), pp. 166–8 . 16   Ingold, ‘Rethinking the Animate’ (above, n. 8), p. 12. 17  Darwin, Origin of Species (above, n. 6), p. 64. 18  T. Dobzhansky, ‘Mendelism, Darwinism, and Evolutionism’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 109.4 (1965), 205–15. 19   Ibid., p. 214. 13

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Nothing, it seems, escapes its tentacles. What we have been accustomed to call ‘the environment’ might, then, be better envisaged as a zone of entanglement. Within this tangle of interlaced trails, continually ravelling here and unravelling there, beings grow or ‘issue forth’ along the lines of their relationships. This tangle is the texture of the world. It has no insides or outsides, only openings and ‘ways through’. Scientists often stress the importance of ‘carving nature at the joints’, as though the world were built from solid blocks. I want to show that the world we inhabit, to the contrary, is not carpentered but textured. An ecology of life, therefore, must be about the weaving and stitching of lines, not the hammering of blocks. As an ecology of threads and traces, it must deal not with the relations between organisms and their external environments but with the relations along their severally enmeshed ways of life. Ecology, in short, is the study of the life of lines.20 The Tree and the Globe My purpose is to suggest what such an ecology would look like. Before doing so, however, I would like to take a step back in order to revisit, albeit briefly, the mainstream conception of the unity of life. This is, overwhelmingly, a genealogical one. It is said that we share our world with other creatures because – or to the extent that – we are related to them along lines of descent from putative common ancestors. When primatologist Jane Goodall famously shook hands with the chimpanzee David Graybeard, the popular press proclaimed it as ‘the handshake that spanned five million years’.21 I wonder how many million years you span, quite unremarkably, every time you stroke your cat! The answer, of course, is irrelevant. The degree of relatedness, or genetic connection, has absolutely no bearing upon our material involvements with fellow inhabitants of the lifeworld, including not only non-human animals of all sorts but also things (or gatherings) like trees, rivers, mountains and earth. An understanding of the unity of life in terms of genealogical relatedness is bought at the cost of cutting out every single organism from the relational matrix of its entanglement in the lifeworld. In this understanding, life presents itself to our awareness not as the interlaced meshwork of the tangled bank but rather as an immense scheme of classification – nowadays going by the name of ‘biodiversity’ – in which every individual is assigned to a specific taxon (species, genus) on the basis of virtual attributes which it is deemed to possess by virtue of genetic transmission, independently and in advance of its life in the world.22   Ingold, Lines (above, n. 9), p. 103.   J. Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (New York: Houghton Mifflin 1990). 22  T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge 2000), p. 217. 20

21

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If the unity of life can be understood in genealogical terms only by treating every living thing as a virtual object, abstracted from the world it inhabits, then how does modern thought understand the unity of the world? To life excised from the world, the world presents itself not as a field of habitation but as a surface to be occupied. We owe this conception to Immanuel Kant. ‘The world’, wrote Kant, ‘is the substratum and the stage on which the play of our skills proceeds.’23 Whereas, in a chart of phylogenetic descent, living things are arrayed on the axis of time, on the surface of the world they are arrayed on the coordinates of space, the first giving us the opposition between the particular and the general, the second, the opposition between the local and the global. Crucially, Kant supposed that, while the mind identifies all possible objects by fitting them within the compartments of an overarching classification, it identifies all possible locations by fitting them into what he called ‘an extended concept of the whole surface of the earth’, a concept which assumes this surface to be spherical in form.24 At once continuous and finite in extent, the spherical topology of the earth’s surface then comes to stand for the fundamental idea, which the mind is said to bring to experience, of the unity of the natural world.25 That is why, still today, the phylogenetic tree-diagrams of biological taxonomy readily coexist with images of the world as a solid globe surrounded by space. The tree and the globe are complementary images: each, indeed, presupposes the other. What is crucial for our present purposes, however, is that in this Kantian conception, life can only be lived all around on the outside of the spherical earth that provides the stage or platform for their activities. Creatures, in short, cannot inhabit the world. They are not inhabitants but exhabitants. Earth and Sky Now the task I set myself at the outset of this essay was to recover the sense of what it means to inhabit the world. In tackling this task I found initial inspiration in the work of the pioneer of ecological psychology, James Gibson.26 For Gibson positions the living being not on the outer surface of a solid sphere or globe but at the very core of what he calls ‘an unbounded spherical field’.27 This field comprises two hemispheres: of the sky above and the earth below. At the interface between 23   I. Kant, ‘A Translation of the Introduction to Kant’s Physische Geographie’, in J. A. May (ed.), Kant’s Concept of Geography and its Relation to Recent Geographical Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), p. 257. 24   Ibid., p. 262. 25  P. Richards, ‘Kant’s Geography and Mental Maps’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (N.S.), 11 (1974), p. 11; Ingold, Perception of the Environment (above, n. 22), p. 212. 26   J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1979). 27   Ibid., p. 66.

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upper and lower hemispheres and stretching out to the ‘great circle’ of the horizon lies the ground on which the inhabitant stands.28 The ground is a surface; indeed for terrestrial animals it is the most important of surfaces, since it provides their basic support.29 But it is a surface in the world, not of it. With their feet planted in the ground and their lungs inhaling the air, inhabitants straddle a division not between the natural world and the world of ideas, but between the more or less solid substances of the earth and the ambient, volatile medium in which they are immersed.30 Every surface in the inhabited environment, according to Gibson, is established by the separation of substances from the medium. Like surfaces of all sorts, the ground has a characteristic, non–homogeneous texture which enables us to tell what it is a surface of: whether, for example, it is of bare rock, sand, soil or concrete.31 We can recognize the texture visually because of the characteristic scatter pattern in the light reflected from the surface. Conversely, however, if there is no discernible pattern in the ambient light, then there is no identifiable texture, and instead of perceiving a surface we see an empty void.32 The perception of the sky is a case in point. Suppose that we cast our eyes upwards, from the ground on which we stand to the clear blue sky of a summer’s day. As our gaze rises above the line of the horizon, it is not as though another surface comes into view. Rather, the textureless blue of the sky signifies boundless emptiness. Nothing is there. Amidst this void, of course, there may exist textured regions that specify the surfaces, for example, of clouds in the sky. From a shower cloud rain falls, leaving puddles on the ground. When the sun comes out again and the puddle dries up, the surface of water gives way to reveal another one, of dry mud, in its place. But when the cloud, drained of moisture, eventually disperses, it vanishes to leave no surface at all.33 For the sky has no surface. It is open. Thus life lived under the sky is lived in the open, not within the confines of a hollow hemisphere with a flat base and a domed top. But, having said that, Gibson goes on to acknowledge that ‘an open environment is seldom or never realised’ and that life within such an environment would be all but impossible. Imagine an absolutely level earth, extending in all directions to the horizon without any obstruction, under a cloudless sky. It would be a desolate place indeed! ‘It would not be quite as lifeless as geometrical space’, Gibson admits, ‘but almost’. You could stand up in it, walk and breathe, but not much else.34 No ordinary environment is like that, however. Rather, it is ‘cluttered’ with every kind of thing, from hills and mountains to animals and plants, objects and artefacts. Or, to put it another way, the environment is furnished. ‘The furniture 28

    30   31   32   33   34   29

Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., pp. 10, 33. Ibid., pp. 16–22. Ibid., pp. 16–22. Ibid., pp. 51–2. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 78.

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of the earth’, Gibson continues, ‘like the furnishings of a room, is what makes it liveable.’ A cloudless sky, in these terms, would be uninhabitable, and could not therefore form any part of the environment for a living being. Birds could not fly in it. And an empty earth provides a terrestrial animal with nothing more than basic support; ‘the furniture of the earth’, as Gibson puts it, ‘affords all the rest of behaviour’.35 Indeed it seems that, so long as they are stranded in the open, Gibsonian perceivers are as much exhabitants of the world as is the Kantian traveller who roams its outer surface. Like actors on the stage, they can only make their entrance once the surface has been furnished with the properties and scenery which make it possible for the play to proceed. Roaming around as on a set, or like a householder in the attic, they are fated to pick their way amidst the clutter of the world. It seems that, for all his efforts to describe the world from an inhabitant’s point of view, Gibson is drawn to the conclusion that the terrestrial environment becomes habitable only to the extent that it is no longer open but enclosed. Such enclosure may never be more than partial, but, for just that reason, the inhabitant inevitably remains, to an extent, an exile. A World without Objects Gibson is adamant that the inhabited environment does not just comprise the furniture of the world, any more than it comprises just earth and sky, empty of content. It must rather comprise both together, consisting – in his words – ‘of the earth and the sky with objects on the earth and in the sky, of mountains and clouds, fires and sunsets, pebbles and stars’.36 It is worth pausing to consider some of the things he takes to be objects: on the earth there are mountains, pebbles and fires; in the sky there are clouds, sunsets and stars. Of the things on the earth, perhaps only pebbles can be regarded as objects in any ordinary sense, and even then, only if we consider each individual stone in isolation from its neighbours, from the ground on which it lies, and from the processes that brought it there. The hill is not an object on the earth’s surface but a formation of that surface, which can only appear as an object through its artificial excision from the landscape of which it is an integral part. And the fire is not an object but a manifestation of the process of combustion. Turning to the sky: stars, whatever their astronomical significance, are perceived not as objects but as points of light, and sunsets as the momentary glow of the sky as the sun vanishes beneath the horizon. Nor are clouds objects. Each is rather an incoherent, vaporous tumescence that swells and is carried along in the currents of the medium. To observe the clouds is not to view the furniture of the sky but to catch a fleeting glimpse of a sky-in-formation, never the same from one moment to the next. 35

  Ibid., p. 78   Ibid., p. 66; original emphasis.

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Indeed in a world which is truly open there are no objects as such. For the object, having closed in on itself, has turned its back on the world, cutting itself off from the paths along which it came into being, and presenting only its congealed, outer surfaces for inspection. That is to say, the ‘objectness’ of things, their ‘overagainstness’,37 is the result of an inversion which turns the lines of their generation into boundaries of exclusion. The open world, however, has no such boundaries, no insides or outsides, only comings and goings. Such productive movements may generate formations, swellings, growths, protuberances and occurrences, but not objects. Thus in the open world hills rise up, as one can experience by climbing them or, from a distance, by following their contours with one’s eyes. Fires burn, as we know from their flickering flames, the swirling of smoke and the warming of the body. And pebbles grate. It is of course this grating that gives rise to their rounded forms; tread on them, and that is what you hear underfoot. In the sky, the sun shines by day and the moon and stars by night, and clouds billow. They are, respectively, their shining and billowing, just as the hills are their rising, the fire is its burning and the pebbles are their grating. In short, and contrary to Gibson’s contention, it is not through being furnished with objects that the open sphere of sky and earth is turned into a habitable environment. The furnished world is a full-scale model – a world brought indoors and reconstructed within a dedicated, enclosed space. As in a stage set, hills are placed on the ground, while stars, clouds and the sun and moon are hung from the sky. In this as if world hills do not rise, nor do fires burn or pebbles grate, nor do the sun, moon and stars shine or the clouds billow They may be made to look as though they do, but the appearance is an illusion. Absolutely nothing is going on. Only once the stage is set and everything made ready can the action begin. But the open world which creatures inhabit is not prepared for them in advance. It is continually coming into being around them. It is a world, that is, of formative and transformative processes. If such processes are of the essence of perception, then they are also of the essence of what is perceived. To understand how beings can inhabit this world means attending to the dynamic processes of world-formation in which both perceivers and the phenomena they perceive are necessarily immersed. And to achieve this we must think again about the relations between surfaces, substances and the medium. Contending with the Weather To make a start, let me return to Heidegger. Like Gibson, Heidegger also recognizes that people live ‘on the earth’ and ‘under the sky’. But his description of earth and sky could hardly be more different from Gibson’s. In place of nouns describing objects of furniture, Heidegger’s description is replete with verbs of growth and motion. Earth, writes Heidegger, ‘is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting,  Heidegger, Poetry (above, n. 7), p. 167.

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spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal’.38 And of the sky he writes that it ‘is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of the day, the gloom and glow of the night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether’.39 Moreover, one cannot speak of the earth without already thinking also of the sky, and vice versa. But if we are to think of earth and sky thus, not as mutually exclusive domains but as manifolds of movement which are directly implicated in one another, then how should we go about it? How can we progress beyond the idea that life is played out upon the surface of a carpentered world which is already furnished with objects? It is perhaps because we are so used to thinking and writing indoors that we find it so difficult to imagine the inhabited environment as anything other than an enclosed, interior space. What would happen if, instead, we were to take our inquiry out of doors? First and foremost, we would have to contend with those fluxes of the medium that we call weather.40 Compared with the amount of attention devoted to the solid forms of the landscape, the virtual absence of weather from philosophical debates about the nature and constitution of the environment is extraordinary. This absence, I believe, is the result of a logic of inversion that places occupation before habitation, closure before movement, and surface before medium. In the terms of this logic, the weather is simply unthinkable.41 Between what the archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen calls ‘the hard physicality of the world’ and the realms of abstract thought in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’,42 no conceptual space remains for the circulations of the actual air we breathe and on which life depends. In the alternative view I propose – a view from the open – what is unthinkable is the idea that life is played out upon the inanimate surface of a ready-made world. Inhabitants, I contend, make their way through a world-in-formation rather than across its pre-formed surface. As they do so, and depending on the circumstances, they may experience wind and rain, sunshine and mist, frost and snow, and a host of other conditions, all of which fundamentally affect their moods and motivations, their movements and their possibilities of subsistence, even as they sculpt and erode the plethora of surfaces upon which they tread. Now, for Gibson43 the weather is simply what is going on in the medium and, beyond noting that it calls for various kinds of adaptation or behavioural adjustment on the part of inhabitants, he has no more to say about it. For the substances of the 38

  Ibid., p. 149.   Ibid., p. 149. 40  T. Ingold, ‘The Eye of the Storm: Visual Perception and the Weather’, Visual Studies 20.2 (2005), 97–104. 41   Ingold, ‘Rethinking the Animate’ (above, n. 8), p. 17. 42   B. Olsen, ‘Material Culture after Text: Re–Membering Things’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 36.2 (2003), p. 88. 43  Gibson, Ecological Approach (above, n. 26), p. 19. 39

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earth, in his view, are impervious to these goings-on. The terrestrial surface, which is taken to be relatively rigid and non-porous, ensures that the aerial medium and earthly substances keep to their respective domains and do not mix. It is as though, in the forms of the land, the earth had turned its back on the sky, refusing further intercourse with it. Thus the weather swirls about on top of the land, but does not participate further in its formation. Yet, as every inhabitant knows, rainfall can turn a ploughed field into a sea of mud, frost can shatter solid rocks, lightning can ignite forest fires on land parched by summer heat, and the wind can whip sand into dunes, snow into drifts and the water of lakes and oceans into waves. As the anthropologist Richard Nelson puts it in his study of how Koyukon people in Alaska perceive their surroundings, ‘weather is the hammer and the land is the anvil’.44 There are other, more subtle and delicate ways in which the land responds to fluxes in the medium. Think of the pearls of dew that pick out the tendrils of plants and spiders’ webs on a cool summer’s morning, or of the little trails left by a passing gust of wind in the dry leaves and broken twigs of a woodland floor. Living in the Land Seasoned inhabitants know how to read the land as an intimate register of wind and weather. Like the Koyukon, they can sense the approach of a storm in the sudden burst of flame in a campfire, or – as the Yup’ik elder Fred George explains – they can read the direction of the prevailing wind in the orientation of tufts of frozen grass sticking out from the snow, or of snow ‘waves’ on ice-bound lakes.45 Yet the more one reads into the land, the more difficult it becomes to ascertain with any certainty where substances end and where the medium begins. For it is precisely through the binding of medium and substances that wind and weather leave their mark. Thus the land itself no longer appears as an interface separating the two, but as a vaguely defined zone of admixture and intermingling. Indeed anyone who has walked through the boreal forest in summer knows that the ‘ground’ is not really a coherent surface at all, but a more or less impenetrable mass of tangled undergrowth, leaf litter and detritus, mosses and lichens, stones and boulders, split by cracks and crevasses, threaded by tree roots, and interspersed with swamps and marshes overgrown with rafts of vegetation which are liable to give way underfoot. Somewhere beneath it all is solid rock, and somewhere above is the clear sky, but it is in this intermediate zone that life is lived, at depths depending 44  R. K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983), p. 33. 45  C. Bradley, ‘Travelling with Fred George: The Changing Ways of Yup’ik Star Navigation in Akiachak, Western Alaska’, in I. Krupnik and D. Jolly (eds), The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change (Fairbanks, Alaska: Arctic Research Consortium of the United States 2002), p. 249; Nelson, Make Prayers (above, n. 44), p. 41.

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upon the scale of the creature and its capacity to penetrate an environment which is ever more tightly woven. It is in this sense that creatures live in the land and not on it. There could be no life in a world where medium and substances did not mix, or where the earth was locked inside – and the sky locked out – of a solid sphere. Wherever there is life and habitation, the interfacial separation of substance and medium is disrupted, to give way to mutual permeability and binding. For it is in the nature of living beings themselves that, by way of their own processes of respiration, of breathing in and out, they bind the medium with substances in forging their own growth and movement through the world. And in this growth and movement they contribute to its ever-evolving weave. As Heidegger noted in his description of the earth, to which I have already referred, earthly substances ‘rise up’ into the forms of plants and animals.46 The land, we could say, is continually growing over, which is why archaeologists have to dig in order to recover the traces of past lives. And what hold it all together are the tangled and tangible life–lines of its inhabitants.47 The wind, too, mingles with substance as it blows through the land, leaving traces of its passing in tracks or trails. We could say of the wind that ‘it winds’, wending its way along twisted paths, as do terrestrial travellers. Precisely because of the indeterminacy of the interface between substances and the medium, the same line of movement can register on the ground as a trace as well as in the air as a thread – as when an animal is linked to the hunter both by its track and by its scent. ‘The first track’, explains the American tracker Tom Brown, ‘is the end of a string’.48 Breaking through the Surface As this powerful metaphor suggests, the relation between land and weather does not cut across an impermeable interface between earth and sky, but is rather one between the binding and unbinding of the world. In the open world, the task of habitation is to bind substances and the medium into living forms. But bindings are not boundaries, and they no more contain the world, or enclose it, than does a knot contain the threads from which it is tied. To inhabit the open is not, then, to be stranded on a closed surface but to be immersed in the fluxes of the medium, in the incessant movements of wind and weather. In this weather-world there is no distinct surface separating earth and sky. Life is rather lived in a zone wherin substance and medium are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, participate in stitching the textures of the land. Yet for all that, human history – and above all the history of the western world – is studded with attempts to bring closure to life, or to ‘put it inside’, by means of projects of construction  Heidegger, Poetry (above, n. 7), p. 149.   Ingold, Lines (above, n. 9), pp. 80–81. 48  T. Brown, The Tracker: The Story of Tom Brown, Jr. as Told by William Jon Watkins (New York, 1978: Prentice Hall), p. 1; Ingold, Lines (above, n. 9), pp. 50–51. 46 47

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that would seek to convert the world we inhabit into furnished accommodation, made ready to be occupied. Under the rubric of the ‘built environment’, human industry has created an infrastructure of hard surfaces, fitted out with objects of all sorts, upon which the play of life is supposed to be enacted. The rigid separation of substances from the medium, which Gibson took to be a natural state of affairs, has in fact been engineered in an attempt to get the world to conform to our expectations of it and to provide it with the coherent surface we always thought it had. Yet, while designed to ease the transport of occupants across it, the hard surfacing of the earth actually blocks the very intermingling of substances with the medium that is essential to life, growth and habitation. Earth that has been surfaced cannot ‘rise up’, as Heidegger put it,49 into the plant or animal. Nothing can grow there. The blockage is only provisional, however. For wherever anything lives the infrastructure of the occupied world is breaking up or wearing away, ceaselessly eroded by the disorderly groping of inhabitants, both human and nonhuman, as they reincorporate and rearrange its crumbling fragments into their own ways of life.50 For me, not only the futility of hard surfacing but also the sheer irrepressibility of life have been nowhere better dramatized than in a recent work by the German artist Klaus Weber.51 Having acquired an allotment in Berlin, Weber persuaded the Roads Department to coat it in a thick layer of motorwaygrade asphalt. But, before the machines rolled in, he sprinkled the area with the spores of a certain fungus. Once the asphalt had been laid, he built a shed on one side of the plot in which he lived as he watched what happened. After a while, bell-shaped bumps appeared, the asphalt began to crack and eventually fungi burst forth in great white blobs. Weber collected the fungus and fried it in his shed; apparently it tasted delicious! The mycelium had triumphed. And so too, in an open world, the creeping entanglements of life will always and inevitably triumph over our attempts to box them in. Note Much of the material presented in this paper is reproduced from two other, recently published articles.52

 Heidegger, Poetry (above, n. 7), p. 149.   Ingold, Lines (above, n. 9), p. 103. 51   K. Weber, Unfold! You Cul-de-Sac (Frankfurt: Revolver Verlag 2004), pp. 45–63. 52  T. Ingold, ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, in E. Hsu and C. Low (eds), Wind, Life, Health (Oxford: Blackwell 2008), pp. 17–35 and idem, ‘Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World’, Environment and Planning A, 40 (2008), pp. 1796–810. 49 50

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Bibliography Bergson, H., Creative Evolution, translated by A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan 1911). — Matter and Memory, translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books 1991). Bradley, C., ‘Travelling with Fred George: The Changing Ways of Yup’ik Star Navigation in Akiachak, Western Alaska’, in I. Krupnik and D. Jolly (eds), The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change (Fairbanks, Alaska: Arctic Research Consortium of the United States 2002), 240–65. Brown, T., The Tracker: The Story of Tom Brown, Jr. as Told by William Jon Watkins (New York: Prentice Hall 1978). Darwin, C., On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: Watts 1950; original publication 1859). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, On the Line, translated by J. Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e) 1983). Dobzhansky, T., ‘Mendelism, Darwinism, and Evolutionism’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 109.4 (1965), 205–15. Gibson, J. J., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1979). Goodall, J., Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (New York: Houghton Mifflin 1990). Heidegger, M., Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row 1971). Ingold, T., ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous World’, in G. Pálsson (ed.), Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse (Oxford: Berg 1993), 210–30. — The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge 2000). — ‘Two Reflections on Ecological Knowledge’, in G. Sanga and G. Ortalli (eds), Nature Knowledge: Ethnoscience, Cognition, Identity (New York: Berghahn 2003), pp. 301–11. — ‘The Eye of the Storm: Visual Perception and the Weather’, Visual Studies 20.2 (2005), 97–104. — ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re–Animating Thought’, Ethnos 71.1 (2006), 1–12. — Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge 2007). — ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, in E. Hsu and C. Low (eds), Wind, Life, Health (Oxford: Blackwell 2008), 17–35. — ‘Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World’, Environment and Planning A 40 (2008), 1796–810.

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Kant, I., ‘A Translation of the Introduction to Kant’s Physische Geographie’, in J. A. May (ed.), Kant’s Concept of Geography and its Relation to Recent Geographical Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), 255–64. Nelson, R. K., Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983). Olsen, B., ‘Material Culture after Text: Re-Membering Things, Norwegian Archaeological Review 36.2 (2003), 87–104. Pearson, K.A., Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge 1999). Rayner, A. D. M., Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries (London: Imperial College Press 1997). Richards, P., ‘Kant’s Geography and Mental Maps’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (N.S.) 11 (1974), 1–16. Thomson, J. A., Introduction to Science (London: Williams and Norgate 1911). Weber, K., Unfold! You Cul-de-Sac (Frankfurt: Revolver Verlag 2004).

Chapter 13

Knowing Natural Spaces: Reinterpreting Deep Ecology as Phenomenology Kingsley Goodwin

Environmental activism has been provoked by deep concern about deteriorating conditions for life on Earth. The list of problems, from global warming through loss of biodiversity and pollution to fraying life support systems, is now well known, and much of the concern is fuelled by scientific data and models of nature. What happens if we deconstruct words like ‘nature’, ‘Earth’, ‘environment’ and ‘wilderness’ in a way which radically questions their status as referents to anything in the world, and then we call into question all our models of reality, including the scientific ones, to concentrate instead on such things as the role of these models in privileging certain social groups? For some, all you are doing is standing in the way of the growing momentum of environmental concern and playing into the hands of anti-environmental forces. This constructivist–realist debate has become a central theme in environmental philosophy. In this chapter I will challenge the common assumption that deep ecology requires a realist account of nature to justify its value claims about nature. Drawing on Arne Naess’s ontology, understood as a phenomenological perspective, I will argue that deep ecology largely bypasses the realist–constructivist debate and presents instead a different, phenomenologically grounded approach. This allows deep ecology both to draw from science and to remain open to a plurality of conceptions of nature, including sacred and religious ones, but always from a place-based experience of nature. Constructivism versus Realism What I am calling metaphysical realism is described by Lease and Soulé as the view which ‘assumes that the world, including its living components, really does exist apart from humanity’s perceptions and beliefs about it … [and] that we can gain dependable, scientific knowledge about this independent, natural world, in spite of differences in class, culture, gender, and historical perspective’. Lease and Soulé contrast this kind of view to what they call ‘postmodern constructionism’ (what   Preface, in Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease (eds), Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press 1995), xv–xvi.

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I am calling constructivism), which ‘asserts that all we can ever perceive about the world are shadows, and that we can never escape our particular biases and fixed historical–cultural positions’. Another view, this time from a constructivist perspective, starts from the ‘key insight’ ‘that “nature” is a human idea, with a long and complicated cultural history which has led different human beings to conceive of the natural world in very different ways’. The question is particularly sharp around the status of science: constructivists highlight its roots as a capitalist, white, European, colonial and patriarchal project, while realists point out its success in providing hard data on the state of the environment and in being increasingly at the forefront of popular concern for the environment. Most realists acknowledge the limitations, cultural biases and difficulties of science, and most constructivists allow for ‘something’ on which our constructions are built. However, the problem for realists is how to account for our access to objectivity, given the success of constructivists in highlighting the cultural subtext of all knowledge; whereas for constructivists the problem is to point to an adequate basis for caring for the environment, given that ‘all we have are culturally tainted reports, texts or words, including scientific studies about the world, none of which is more valid than any other’. There is an additional suspicion that constructivism lends force to anti-environmental interests, a claim strongly contested by Cronon but recently restated by Sessions. 

  Ibid., p. xv.  Foreword, in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), p. 20.   For arguments along these lines, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the scientific Revoloution (San Francisco: Harper Collins 1980). See also Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed 1988) and Stolen Harvest : The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (London: Zed 2001).    Sessions, George, ‘Wildness, Cyborgs, and our Ecological Future: Reassessing the Deep Ecology Movement’, The Trumpeter 22.2 (2006), 121–82.    Soulé, Michael E., ‘The Social Siege of Nature?’, in Michael E Soulé and Gary Lease (eds), Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press 1995).    Ibid., p. 137: ‘The overt siege [of living nature] is physical; it is carried out by increasing multitudes of human beings equipped and accompanied by bulldozers, chainsaws, plows, and livestock. The covert assault is ideological and therefore social; it serves to justify, where useful, the physical assault. A principal tool of the social assault is deconstruction.’ Soulé uses ‘deconstruction to mean what I am calling constructivism, that is, questioning the “existence and essential reality” of “nature and wilderness”’.   Cronon, Uncommon Ground (above, n. 3), in particular the foreword to the paperback edition.    ‘[I]n attempting to undermine the impartiality and objectivity of the natural and biological sciences, the postmodern social constructivist position undermines the credibility of the world’s scientist’s warnings about the ecological state of the world’,: Sessions, ‘Wildness, Cyborgs, and our Ecological Future’ (above, n. 5), p. 129. 

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Attempts at a compromise revolve around acknowledging constructivist arguments while nevertheless finding a way to distinguish between ‘better’ and ‘worse’ ways of looking at nature. Hayles10 develops a position which she calls ‘constrained constructivism’ – the constraint being ‘whether a representation is consistent with our experience’.11 As in Popper’s bold conjectures followed by refutations, we imagine representations of reality and then try to falsify them (as being inconsistent with our experience). Hayles has no need for a belief in an objective reality; she refers instead to ‘the flux’. Our experience emerges out of our relationship to the flux, and it is through this relationship that our ‘knowledge’ of the world is grounded.12 What is Deep Ecology? The label ‘deep ecology’ has been used to describe several different and related things, but I am using it here to refer specifically to the experiential basis in Naess’s philosophical ontology.13 This is established with his concepts of ‘spontaneous experience’ and the ‘concrete contents of reality’. Naess asks: ‘Is not the value-laden, spontaneous and emotional realm of experience as genuine a source of knowledge of reality as mathematical physics?’14 Spontaneous experience is the immediate experience we have of reality before we begin to conceptualize it or to discriminate about it. It is the phenomenological outlook where we ‘bracket’ our concepts of what reality is and how it is structured and we begin with what we actually do experience. What we experience, Naess calls the concrete contents of reality:15 the bedrock on which all our knowledge of the world is based. At this level there is no distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary qualities; no plausible process by which some of the concrete contents are placed into reality by a subject and some are really 10   N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Searching for Common Ground’, in Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease (eds), Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press 1995), 47–64. A similar, Nietzschean approach is developed by Ralplh A. Acampora in his paper ‘The Joyful Wisdom of Ecology. On Perspectival and Relational Contact with Nature and Animality’, New Nietzsche Studies 5.3/4 and 6.1/2 (2003), 22–34. 11  Hayles, ‘Searching for Common Ground’ (above, n. 10), p. 53. 12  Acampora, ‘Joyful Wisdom’ (above, n. 10), offers a similar strategy from a Nietzschean perspective. 13   Warick Fox, Towards a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Devon: Resurgence 1995). Fox gives an account of the different uses of deep ecology. 14  Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, translated by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), p. 32. 15  Arne Naess, ‘The World of Concrete Contents’, Inquiry 28.4 (1985), 417–28.

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there, external to the subject. To imagine that there are such distinctions is already to impose conceptions and models of reality onto fundamental experience.16 Naess believes that the reality we experience spontaneously is genuine reality. He is in this sense a realist,17 and he has indeed criticized constructivist accounts of nature. However, this is not to say that the reality of our spontaneous experience can be easily translated into the ‘abstract structures’ by which we conceive reality, discuss it or build knowledge about it. The structures by which we explain reality are not ‘in’ reality at all, but they are models which we create about it. Recently, George Sessions has claimed that Naess gives equal validity to the knowledge of concrete contents and to the knowledge of abstract structures, and that therefore he offers a realist account of nature similar to his own.18 This is not borne out by a reading of Naess, where we find that the status of his abstract structures is more ambivalent.19 Referring to current debates in the science of ecology, for example, he distinguishes between conceptual models and the contents of the real world. Even if the models are negated, the fact ‘does not imply the negation of any content of the world we live in’.20 What then, grounds the knowledge of abstract structures for Naess, if these have no clear justification in the genuine reality of the concrete contents? If our abstract structures are human creations which have, at best, a tenuous link with the reality we have access to, this seems to open the door to constructivist arguments about nature, and Naess concedes that there are convincing arguments along these lines.21 Constructivists problematize our ability to know the world on account of our reliance on human concepts when we represent nature to ourselves. For example, Cronon22 highlights how values and images of nature draw on cultural narratives which predispose people to think about nature and to act towards it in very different ways. Developers and environmentalists, he claims, are motivated by the Edenic imagery of an idealized nature. Naess would like to defend environmentalist 16  Forrest Clingerman (Chapter 5 in this volume) provides an understanding of ‘heaven’ which ties it to the experience of place despite its traditional association with being outside space. Applied to nature, such an approach opens up the possibility of a Christian concrete, contents-based sense of the sacred, although the sacred dimension of place would be something pre-rational and pre-reflective rather than the product of rational reflection. 17  Arne Naess, ‘Avalanches as Social Constructions’, Environmental Ethics 22 (2000), 335–6. 18   Sessions, ‘Wildness, Cyborgs, and Our Ecological Future’ (above, n. 5), p. 128. 19   See Naess, ‘The World of Concrete Contents’ (above, n. 15). 20   Ibid., p. 427. 21  Although he does not think that this is a very important issue: ‘Nature is vanishing; we do not have any different conceptions of nature but only a myriad of constructions. Where is true nature? This is a pointless question. The search for truth reveals that we are stuck in the modern morass.’ Arne Naess, ‘Living a Life That Reflects Evolutionary Insight’, Conservation Biology 10.6 (1996), p. 1558. 22   W. Cronon, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Uncommon Ground (above, n. 3).

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values such as richness and diversity of life; but, if the abstract structures by which we conceive of these things are human constructions with no adequate claim to represent ‘true’ reality, it seems that he can claim nothing more than to prefer one human construction over another. The basis for the deep ecological values as formulated by Naess must lie somewhere else. Does Deep Ecology Support Scientific Realism? Sessions has argued that scientists have contributed most to a growing concern for the environment and that constructivists undermine the scientific claims that environments have become dangerously compromised. Leaving aside the question of whether science needs scientific realism,23 can Naess’s articulation of deep ecology provide a realist basis for science, as Sessions assumes? While Naess does believe in the existence of the external world, this in itself hardly answers the constructivist challenge. At issue is our ability to say or think anything about this external world which can claim to be more than just one out of many arbitrary human constructions. Naess’s position on science draws from Husserl’s critique of Galilean science and, in particular, from the sense in which its abstract structures ‘are of the world but not in the world’.24 However, Naess is also willing to draw heavily from natural science – especially the science of ecology, which would seem to align him to the scientific realism that Husserl was at pains to critique.25 Naess shares Husserl’s phenomenological outlook on our basic access to reality, and also his critique of the objectifying and reductive nature of the sciences. However, the abstract structures of science are important and need to be taken seriously. The difference between the two comes from Naess’s pessimism as to whether the world of concrete contents can provide a basis or new footing for the sciences – as Husserl had hoped. Naess rejects Husserl’s belief in the possibility of apodictic knowledge – which, Husserl imagined, would set the sciences on a secure footing. Not even logic can claim to reach beyond the realms of human discourse: ‘The products of logicians are human products and whatever their aspirations, the adequateness of their relations to the entities of the realm of the

23  Tomassi provides an interesting discussion on this, arguing that, without realism, science cannot even support the environmentalists anticipation of future harm. Paul Tomassi, ‘On the Metaphysics of Informed Environmental Concern’, American Philosophical Quarterly 40.4 (2003). 24   Naess, ‘The World of Concrete Contents’ (above, n. 15), p. 421. 25  Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David Carr. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1970).

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ideal is not apodictically evident. They must be established inductively.’26 There is the fundamental problem of stepping outside the systems of human language and thought to establish incontrovertible truth: Human thinking sometimes seems to be, sometimes seems not to be adequate to the tasks at hand. There is no one to tell when adequate, and when not. The judges are members of our own species. We may actually have a great deal of apodictic knowledge, but it cannot be known (in the strict sense of Husserl) that we have.27

For Naess, as for the constructivists, the only alternative is to acquire ‘social and abstract structural knowledge’28 as guides for action, even if those structures are always human constructions which are not in reality. Left with only our spontaneous experience, we have no good guide as to how to act. This clearly does not make Naess or deep ecology wedded to a scientific realist position,29 even if he is a realist about the world’s concrete contents as experienced phenomenologically.30 Even the science of ecology, which helps to define deep ecology, is secondary to the concrete contents as experienced directly. Naess has linked his ontology to the science of ecology because the latter construes ‘the relationship between entities as an essential component of what these entities are in themselves’.31 For Naess, this resonates with his own description of the fundamental reality of the concrete contents in which the world is experienced – their reality, that is, as relational fields, without a clear distinction even between subject and world; but the concrete contents are still prior to, and not dependent on, changing ecological models. Changes in ecological theory do not imply changes ‘of any content of the world we live in’.32 Naess is prepared to criticize, among other things, various features of modern science: its elitism, its corruption by power, its narrow intellectualism, its limited conception of rationality, its reductionism and positivism, its view of nature which 26

 Arne Naess ‘Husserl on the Apodictic Evidence of Ideal Laws’, in J. N. Mohanty (ed.), Readings on Edmund Husserls Logical Investigations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1977), p. 71. 27   Ibid., p. 75. 28   Arne Naess, ‘Reflections on Gestalt Ontology’, The Trumpeter 21. 1 (2005), p. 126. 29   See for example Mick Smith, ‘To Speak of Trees: Social Constructivism, Environmental Values, and the Future of Deep Ecology’, Environmental Ethics 21. 4 (1999). Smith criticizes a perceived tendency among deep ecologists to be overly reliant on an imagined scientific ‘truth’. 30   See for example Arne Naess, ‘Heidegger, Postmodern Theory and Deep Ecology’, The Trumpeter 14. 4 (1997), 2–7. 31   Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (above, n. 14). p. 36. 32   Naess, ‘The World of Concrete Contents’ (above, n. 15), p. 427.

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invites dominance and rape,33 and also ‘the illusion that scientific theories are inferred by some kind of inductive logic from indisputable data’.34 However, a great deal of science is just a more formalized version of ‘finding things out’, without need for great methodological pretensions. Scientific investigation is something carried out ‘a little more systematically, with somewhat more explicit assumptions, and care taken to some extent to what has been done by others in the field’.35 This more modest type of science will not deliver us objective truths about the world, but it is sufficient, from a pragmatic point of view, for us to take seriously the growing scientific literature on things like pollution, species extinction and the vulnerability of life support systems. Deep Ecology and Epistemological Realism If deep ecology cannot support scientific realism, is there necessarily an epistemological realist position in the deep ecological advocacy for the intrinsic value of nature? Naess again seems vulnerable to the constructivist challenge, since he cannot explain our values or our knowledge without drawing from a culturally constructed conception of nature. He hopes that a greater experience of the richness and complexity of reality’s concrete contents will encourage others to sense value where he does; in life’s diversity and beauty. However, he cannot appeal to realism to achieve this, because anything he might say must be said in the context of a socially definable ‘something’, and therefore in the context of a constructed abstract structure. Toadvine has pointed out that ‘to suggest that nature as experienced by a subject is thereby “sullied” or reduced to a subjective construction is to resort to the bi-polar human versus nature model’.36 The model of the perceiving subject constituting the world is also a construction which needs to be justified, and is rejected by Naess as not being derivable from concrete contents. This is a departure from Husserl’s philosophy, which centres on the idea of the transcendental ego or the ‘radical and absolute originality of consciousness’.37 For Naess, when one is absorbed in contemplation of a concrete natural thing, there is no experience of a subject/object relation.38 He sees the transcendental ego not as a phenomenological discovery, but as a postulate lacking a solid basis in the experienced lifeworld. 33

 Arne Naess, ‘Why Not Science for Anarchists Too? A Reply to Feyerabend’, Inquiry 18.2 (1975), 192–3. 34   Ibid., p. 186. 35   Ibid. 36  T. Toadvine, ‘Naturalizing Phenomenology’, Philosophy Today 43 (SPEP Supplement) (1999), p. 126. 37   Naess, Reflections on Gestalt Ontology’ (above, n. 28), p. 126. 38   Naess, ‘The World of Concrete Contents’ (above, n. 15), p. 423.

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Presumably with Husserl in mind, Rothenberg argues that deep ecology goes beyond phenomenology, which ‘gets back to the things themselves but always from the point of view of the subject’.39 This may not be true in the case of Merleau-Ponty, whose idea of primordial being ‘is not yet the subject being nor the object being’40 and ‘affirms the prereflective, prepersonal dialogue between the phenomenal body and the preobjective world’.41 Merleau-Ponty approached phenomenology through a detailed analysis of perception, and set this out most comprehensively in his perhaps best known book, Phenomenology of Perception – although it is his later work that has generated more interest among environmental philosophers,42 and it is also there that the similarities with Naess can most clearly be seen.43 Phenomenology of Perception opens up and explores the theme of the inherence of the body in the world, but Merleau-Ponty pursues his analysis further in his later work, in particular through his ontology of the ‘flesh’. In works such as ‘Eye and Mind’44 and The Visible and the Invisible,45 Merleau-Ponty abandons the idea of even a ‘tacit’ ego being present in primordial perception; ‘this is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same “consciousness” the primordial definition of sensibility, and as soon as we rather understand it as a return of the visible upon itself, a carnal 39

 Rothenberg, David, ‘No World but in Things: The Poetry of Naess’s Concrete Contents’, in Eric Katz, Andrew Light and David Rothenberg (eds), Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology (London: The MIT Press 2000), p. 156. 40  Monika Langer, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology’, in Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (eds), Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1990). 41   Ibid. p. 124. 42  For a recent sample of work on the relevance of Merleau-Ponty for environmental philosophy, see Sue L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press 2007). 43  Those who have linked it to Naess in particular are: Langer, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology’ (above, n. 40); Sally Fischer, ‘Ecology of the Flesh: Gestalt Ontology in Merleau-Ponty and Naess’, International Studies in Philosophy 34.1 (2002), 53–67; Christian Diehm, Deep Ecology and Phenomenology’, Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004): 20– 27; Carol Bigwood, ‘Standing and Stooping to Tiny Flowers: An Ecophemnomenological Response to Arne Naess’, Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004). 28–45; Glen A. Mazis, ‘Deep Ecology, the Reversibility of the Flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word: A Response to Arne Naess’, Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004), 46–61. 44  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ’Eye and Mind’, in James M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1964), 159–90. 45  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1968).

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adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient’.46 At our most basic level of perception of the world, there is no longer any individual subject experiencing a world, not even one who is complexly inhered in it; for Merleau-Ponty there is just a generalized flesh, part of it ‘turned back upon itself’ through the capacity of sense perception. Madison47 distinguishes between the ‘subject’ of the Phenomenology of Perception, who ‘at his most basic level is already a consciousness of himself and is defined by his (dialectical) opposition to the world’, and the ‘there is’ of The Visible and the Invisible, which ‘is no longer the tacit cogito of the Phenomenology’. In the working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes it thus: The I, really, is nobody, is the anonymous; it must be so, prior to all objectification, denomination, in order to be the operator, or the one to whom all this occurs. The named I, the I named … is an object. The primary I, of which this one is an objectification, is the unknown to whom all is given to see or to think, to whom everything appeals, before whom … there is something. It is therefore negativity – ungraspable in person, of course, since it is nothing.48

As we construct our world out of primordial experience, we build ‘a self presence that is absence from self’49 on the basis of the experience of a ‘visible body’ participating in a ‘visible world’. This is the same insight as expressed by Naess, but MerleauPonty goes on to offer a fuller account of how ‘the individual reasserts itself’ in the midst of this apparent indistinguishability. At one level the ego, or the ‘named I’, is an objectification – or an abstract structure in Naess’s terminology – but this is not grounded in primordial reality, where the ‘I’ is not experienced at all. This is much closer to what Naess50 is suggesting when he talks about there not being a subject/object distinction in the concrete contents of reality. Naess cannot be called a realist in the sense of offering knowledge clearly derivable from reality as such, but neither can constructivists presume a subject creating a world. This in itself is also a construction which needs to be justified. 46

  Ibid., p. 142.  Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press 1981), p. 179. 48  Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible (above, n. 45), p. 246 49   Ibid., p. 250. 50   Naess has questioned this perceived similarity between himself and Merleay-Ponty by saying ‘that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is not adequate to deduce what I do’: in Christian Diehm and Arne Naess, ‘Here I Stand: An Interview with Arne Naess’, Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004), p. 8. Although it is not clear why he says this, see Diehm, ‘Deep Ecology and Phenomenology’ (above, n. 43), p. 23, and all of Mazis, ‘Deep Ecology, the Reversibility of the flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word: A Response to Arne Naess’ (above, n. 43). 47

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A Naessian Phenomenology of Place The problem, then, has never been to find a realist account of nature to ground deep ecological values, but rather, in Toadvine’s words, to provide a ‘phenomenology of phenomenology’51 or an account of the relation between reflective and prereflective experience. For Naess there will always be a gap between these – a gap admitting of a plurality of conceptions of nature but always grounded in the concrete contents of nature itself. Claims such as for nature’s intrinsic value should be seen as attempts to articulate the primordial experience of nature rather than assertions of identifiable properties in it. ‘Intrinsic value’ may or may not prove to be an adequate formulation, but it does refer to a concrete content of experience in nature.

51

 Toadvine, ‘Naturalizing Phenomenology’ (above, n. ), p. 125.

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Bibliography Acampora, Ralph R., ‘The Joyful Wisdom of Ecology. On Perspectival and Relational Contact with Nature and Animality’, New Nietzsche Studies 5.3/4 and 6.1/2 (2003), 22–34. Bigwood, Carol, ‘Standing and Stooping toTiny Flowers:An Ecophemnomenological Response to Arne Naess’, Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004), 28–45. Cataldi, Sue L., and William S. Hamrick, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press 2007). Cronon, William (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (London: W. W. Norton and Company 1996). Diehm, Christian, ‘Deep Ecology and Phenomenology’, Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004): 2—27. Diehm, Christian, and Arne Naess, ‘Here I Stand: An Interview with Arne Naess’, Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004), 6–19. Fischer, Sally, ‘Ecology of the Flesh: Gestalt Ontology in Merleau-Ponty and Naess’, International Studies in Philosophy 34.1 (2002), 53–67. Fox, W., Towards a Transpersonal Ecology; Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Devon: Resurgence 1995). Hayles, N. Katherine, ‘Searching for Common Ground’, in Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease (eds), Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press 1995), 47–64. Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1970). Langer, Monika, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology’, in Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (eds), Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1990). Madison, Gary Brent, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty : A Search for the Limits of Consciousness (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press 1981). Mazis, Glen A., ‘Deep Ecology, the Reversibility of the Flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word: A Response to Arne Naess’ Environmental Philosophy 1 2 (2004), 46–61. Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper Collins 1980). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, ‘Eye and Mind’, in James M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1964), 159–90. — Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (Oxford: Routledge 1962).

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— The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1968). Naess, Arne, ‘Avalanches as Social Constructions’, Environmental Ethics 22 (2000), 335–6. — Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, translated by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989). — ‘Heidegger, Postmodern Theory and Deep Ecology’, The Trumpeter 14. 4 (1997), 2–7. — ‘Husserl on the Apodictic Evidence of Ideal Laws’, in J. N. Mohanty (ed.), Readings on Edmund Husserls Logical Investigations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1977), 67–75. — ‘Living a Life that Reflects Evolutionary Insight’, Conservation Biology 10.6 (1996), 1557–9. — ‘Reflections on Gestalt Ontology’, The Trumpeter 21.1 (2005), 119–28. — ‘Why Not Science for Anarchists Too? A Reply to Feyerabend’, Inquiry 18.2 (1975), 183–94. — ‘The World of Concrete Contents’, Inquiry 28.4 (1985), 417–28. Rothenberg, David, ‘No World but in Things: The Poetry of Naess’s Concrete Contents’, in Eric Katz, Andrew Light and David Rothenberg (eds), Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology (London: The MIT Press 2000), 151–68. Sessions, George, ‘Wildness, Cyborgs, and our Ecological Future: Reassessing the Deep Ecology Movement’, The Trumpeter 22.2 (2006), 121–82. Shiva, Vandana, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed 1988). — Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (London: Zed 2001). Smith, Mick, ‘To Speak of Trees: Social Constructivism, Environmental Values, and the Future of Deep Ecology’, Environmental Ethics 21. 4 (1999), 359–76. Soulé, Michael E., ‘The Social Siege of Nature?’, in Michael E Soulé and Gary Lease (eds), Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press 1995). Soulé, Michael E., and Gary Lease (eds), Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press 1995). Toadvine, Ted, ‘Naturalizing Phenomenology’, Philosophy Today 43 (SPEP Supplement) (1999), 124–30. Tomassi, Paul, ‘On the Metaphysics of Informed Environmental Concern’, American Philosophical Quarterly 40.4 (2003), 333–43.

Chapter 14

Seeking Transformation in a Consumer World: Can We Achieve a Unity of Ends and Means? Anna Duhon and Lisa M. Jokivirta

[Our environmental crisis] is in part a spiritual crisis. It’s a crisis of our own selfdefinition – who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not. We are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny […] The protection of Earth’s vitality, diversity, and beauty is a sacred trust.

We live in a quickening time. Global environmental crises are accelerating and phenomena such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and fresh water shortages have increasingly become part of our common vocabulary. There is abundant talk of the need for change amidst a plethora of information, predictions, and everyday tips being pushed upon the average consumer. This points to another trend – daily life in a consumer world is increasingly fast-paced. Consumers are bombarded with an ever-greater array of media stimuli and ever more things to buy. With this, the kinds of impact that humans are having on the Earth are growing broader, and the fragmentation of the human community is growing deeper. It is hardly surprising, then, that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness abound in the modern consumerist world. The impact of individual actions can seem more trivial than ever when one is confronted with the urgent need for massive global change. Yet there is, of course, an intimate connection between the individual actions of millions of consumers and global environmental crises. This is why there is such a profound need for widespread change at the locus of the individual. Indeed, effectively linking the personal and the global – addressing global environmental issues while encompassing a space for individual action, connection, and   Al Gore, ‘Growing beyond Green’, San Antonio Express: speech delivered at the 2007 National Convention for the American Institute of Architects, San Antonio, Texas, 5 May 2007, available at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA050607.01B. gore.35aecd4.html (accessed on 8 February 2008).    ‘Earth Charter’, Earth Charter in Action (28 October 2007), available at: http://www. earthcharterinaction.org/2000/10/the_earth_charter.html (accessed on 28 October 2007).

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transformation – can be considered the pivotal challenge of our times. But how can this challenge be addressed? As Mary Evelyn Tucker elaborates in her text, alarming news and ‘dire facts’ are hardly enough to inspire or sustain individuals to adopt more ecologically viable lifestyles. There is a growing realization that scientific progress and environmental policies aimed at tackling global environmental issues are also insufficient at addressing the realm of human actions. As Tucker suggests, what is needed is a shift beyond the conventional frame of environmental science and policy, towards a re-conceptualization of those values which reside at the very root of individual lifestyle choices and global environmental crises, and have the power to transform human consciousness and behaviour. This is, at heart, a spiritual task. Indeed the project of linking the personal and the global is a ‘spiritual’ one, in that it centres on how we are and on how we act in relation to the surrounding world – whether neighbours, ants, or the Earth as a whole. Spiritual traditions and philosophies of all kinds have long taught and celebrated the interrelatedness of the world, as a guiding principle for our daily actions and way of being within it. In every era, such spiritual traditions have offered a radical alternative to relationships of domination, exploitation, alienation, and destruction engrained in prevailing structures and processes. Anne Primavesi describes how the ‘Kingdom of God’ offered by the Gospels stood in contrast to the Roman Empire with its relationships based on force, terror, and power. Their teachings were founded on the principle of interrelationship, which amounted to saying that one should love one’s enemies because they are a part of oneself and that anything done to the least powerful living being is ultimately done to God. Similarly, Mary Evelyn Tucker describes the Neo-Confucianist Wang Yangming’s teachings on the innate knowledge of nature and on the human relationship with all things, conceived of as one single body. Tucker writes how Wang’s approach ‘encourages reciprocity rather than dominion, communion rather than exploitation’. This approach contrasted with the dominant structures of his time – but also stands in contrast with those of our own. There are countless other similar examples, but at the core of all such spiritual teachings lies the opening of an alternative way of being and acting in the world, born out of the knowledge of an underlying interrelationship or oneness. Perhaps this is most succinctly stated by Gandhi’s famous prescription, ‘you must be the change you wish to see in the world’. ‘Being the change’ recognizes the inescapable fact of the importance of how we live in relation to the world around us at every moment and offers a spiritual alternative for seeking personal transformation in order to enact global change. 

 Mary Evelyn Tucker, ‘Touching the Depth of Things’ (Chapter 21 of the present volume), pp. 283–302..    Ibid., pp. 284–5.    Ibid., pp. 285–6.   Anne Primavesi, ‘Transforming the Theological Climate in Response to Climate Change: Jesus and the Mystery of Giving’ (Ch. 3 of the present volume), p. 26.   Tucker, ‘Touching the Depth of Things’ (above, n. 3), p. 299.

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The (Eco)Spiritual Alternative – in Action? In nature there is fundamental unity running through all the diversity we see about us. Religions are given to mankind so as to accelerate the process of realization of fundamental unity.

Spiritual teachings have always offered an alternative path of knowledge and action to those deemed successful by dominant structures of power. The broad movement termed ‘ecospirituality’ is rich in its potential to carry on this tradition in response to global environmental problems. ‘Ecospirituality’ is used here in the same spirit as in Jay McDaniel’s exploration of ‘ecotheology’ – ‘as an orientation towards life and a way of living that can be embodied from many different religious points of view by people who seek a creative alternative to consumerism and fundamentalism’. Common to this orientation is a perception of the world as a ‘living whole’, infused with the sacred – or, as McDaniel writes, ‘the hunger to be connected to something more than machines’.10 Ecospirituality in this sense is largely encompassing. Whether or not people use the term ecospirituality, many yearn for such connection, or already live in ways which honour the sacred in the world around them. The concept itself can be engaged with in different ways, both as a set of appealing transcendent ethical principles and as the process of living these in practice – being the change. Ecospirituality therefore has a natural and potentially powerful role to play in addressing the project of linking personal lives to global change through its ability to encourage, both in ethical theory and in practice, an alternative human orientation to nature which is rooted in interconnection rather than in domination. As discussed by Bjorn Vikström, this type of alternative framework would help to re-position human beings as humble servants rather than as masters of the universe, and thereby it would expand our ethics of care and compassion for all living beings.11 A framework of ecospirituality is being increasingly used by environmental movements. How is such a framework being incorporated? Is ecospirituality’s promise to offer a ‘creative alternative’ being fulfilled? Is its rhetoric of global wholeness and interrelatedness actually inspiring and sustaining individual actions towards a better world? These questions remain largely unexplored. In an attempt   Mohandes Ghandi, cited in Shalu Bhalla, Quotes of Gandhi (New Delhi: UBS Publishers 2002), p. 48.    Jay McDaniel, ‘Ecotheology and World Religions’, in L. Kearns and C. Keller (eds), Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press 2006), p. 26. 10   Ibid., p. 23. 11   Björn Vikström, ‘The Master of the Universe or the Humble Servant: How the Concept of Sustainable Development is Affecting Our Understanding of Humanity and Nature’ (Chapter 8 in the present volume), pp. 85–96.

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to begin a dialogue on such themes, this paper briefly examines two examples of contemporary environmental movements which incorporate ecospirituality: Al Gore’s mass campaign against climate change and the international grassrootslevel Earth Charter movement designed to create an ‘earth community’. Both are seeking the same end – to engage individuals in personal change for global benefit – through the use of widely differing means. Gore’s Global Appeal Much of our success in rescuing the global ecological system will depend upon whether we can find a new reverence for the environment as a whole – not just its parts.12

Through his 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, Al Gore became one of the first public figures to define the environmental crisis expressly as, ‘for lack of a better word, spiritual’.13 Here Gore uses the term ‘spiritual’ in much the same way as ecospirituality does – without reference to a specific religion, but rather as ‘the collection of values and assumptions that determine our basic understanding of how we fit into the universe’.14 In a chapter entitled ‘Environmentalism of the Spirit’ he explores the need for an inner spiritual change which can deeply transform our relationship with and connection to the Earth.15 Within weeks of its release, Earth in the Balance climbed to the top of the New York Times bestsellers’ list; and thus emerged Gore’s epithet ‘the environmental Evangelist’ for bringing the spiritual dimension of environmental issues to the attention of mainstream America.16 Since 1992, Gore has incorporated ecospiritual language into his speeches, writings, campaign activities, and media appearances – which include (most recently) Gore’s acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.17 This incorporation has been in line with a global effort to re-imagine the human beings’ place in nature as part of a sacred and interconnected whole, and to tie the concept of this whole to the pressing problem of climate change. In reconnecting humans 12  Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: [Rodale Books 1992), pp. 204–205. 13   Ibid., p. 34. 14   Ibid., p. 12. 15   Ibid., pp. 239–65. 16  Claire Shipman, ‘Will Al Gore Run in 2008?’, ABC News Online (23 May 2006), available at: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?id=1993393 (accessed on 8 February 2008). 17  Al Gore, ‘Nobel Lecture’, The Nobel Foundation (10 December 2007), available at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/gore–lecture_en.html (accessed on 6 February 2008).

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with nature, Gore has worked to reintroduce a sense of environmental ethics that can guide human action on a mass scale. The question, then, becomes: Does Gore’s use of an ecospirituality framework hold the promise of personal change and transformation, and thus a response to massive environmental crises? This is no simple question, but it is one worth exploring. What has been particularly interesting about Gore’s more recent focus on the issue of climate change is his commitment to reaching the mainstream public through many different avenues. Surely this is, in part, a reflection of an increasing urgency to act. The environmental crises that Gore pointed to in 1992 have only worsened, and in particular the graph of carbon in the atmosphere has accelerated on a steep upwards trajectory. Millions of people around the planet saw this graph in Gore’s 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which lays out compelling, scientific evidence of human-induced climate change and of the global urgency of addressing it.18 Climate change is still presented as a moral issue, but also one of simple self-preservation and world preservation. This led to Gore’s contributions to the launch in February 2007, alongside a host of celebrities, of a new kind of global appeal – ‘Save Our Selves – The Campaign for a Climate in Crisis’.19 The peak of this campaign was ‘Live Earth’, a series of seven starstudded rock concerts on seven continents which took place, not surprisingly, on 7 July 2007. This series was conceived of as a way to use the ‘global reach of music to engage people on a mass scale to combat our climate crisis’.20 Such efforts have indeed had a widespread impact. ‘Live Earth’ became the ‘largest global entertainment event ever held’, reaching an estimated 2 billion people worldwide.21 An Inconvenient Truth became the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time – an incredible feat, as many point out, for a documentary about a slide show on climate change. These approaches have impressively succeeded in delivering a far-reaching scientific and moral call to the population. The call has been coupled with practical tips for individual actions to reduce carbon impacts – from using more energy-efficient light bulbs to walking and, yes, even to praying. Is this the perfect combination of practical engagement, scientific awareness, moral/spiritual underpinnings, and mass appeal? The kind of space which such outreaches open inside each person is perhaps the most telling measure of the outreaches. The rhetoric of global crisis can all too easily open up spaces for fear, helplessness, hopelessness, and negativity. What is at the root of this? Gore grapples with exactly this question in Earth in the Balance – why do some images produce a kind of ‘paralysis’, which shifts the focus to more convenient distractions? He writes that people do not react to the image, ‘but [rather] to the pain it now produces, severing a … basic link in our  D. Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth (United States: Paramount 2006).   ‘Save Our Selves: Live Earth’ (28 October 2007), available at: http://www.liveearth. org (accessed on 28 October 2007). 20   Ibid. 21   Ibid. 18

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relationship to the world: the link between our senses and our emotions’.22 This is perhaps why Gore has ceaselessly focused on presenting the climate crisis in a way which creates a lasting emotional impact. But this, too, can have a negative effect. When humanity is conceived of as the perpetrator of a global crisis, an emotional response might easily slide into a kind of collective self-hatred, or simply lack of caring. Instead of having a place, or belonging, in a beautiful world, we become ‘world destroyers’ inhabiting spaces destined for desolation. The Humanity–Nature Paradox This is the paradox, then, that emerges, and one which Gore undoubtedly recognizes all too well: in order to transform our destructive way of relating to the world, we must recognize our own power to destroy, yet also place ourselves humbly within nature. This is where ecospirituality might be most useful as a mediator of a new, responsible, and intimate relationship with nature. And perhaps this is why Gore counterbalances dire predictions with ecospiritual summons: to renew among individuals a sense of universal responsibility towards the sacred but endangered whole of which they are a part. However, something falls flat in a campaign entitled ‘Save Our Selves’. Perhaps self-hatred has been shuttled to the side, but only by self-interest. The ego remains strong. Humanity’s god-like role as world destroyer is countered by an equally god-like role – that of world saviour – though it would seem that the world is saved only as a by-product of self-rescue. The ecospiritual notion of a ‘sacred whole’, found throughout Gore’s movement, contrasts with a mediated separation between humans as masterful actors and nature as a vulnerable subject of exploitation. While this is a familiar dichotomy,23 it does not fulfil the longing for a world in which humans are humble participants in a complex and beautiful web of a nature full of its own being.24 This points perhaps to the most serious flaw of such large-scale campaigns: their messages, whether of global climate crisis or of global connectedness, remain abstract. The yearning for connection does not stop at the language of connection, for people are ultimately seeking the experience of being connected to a world of other beings. This comes from the specificity of place, where relationships are forged and lived. The danger of abstract messages of connection is precisely that these are not grounded in experience. As such, they risk furthering the very fragmentation that people seek to avoid, and they do it by creating a split between a consumed idea and the experience of a contradictory reality. This is not to say  Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (above, n. 12), p. 28.   See Vikström, ‘Master of the Universe’ (above, n. 11), pp. 85–96, and Richard Thimer Kover’s contribution in the present volume, Chapter 13, pp. 163–74. 24   Vikström, ‘Master of the Universe’ (above, n. 11); Kover, Ch. 13 in the present volume. 22 23

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that we should cease to care about global crises: we must extend our care to all of creation, but perhaps we can only do so by caring first about the world we see around us and by experiencing the interrelatedness recognized at the heart of so many spiritual traditions. Perhaps what is most striking about the Live Earth campaign is its conscious use of the channels of consumerism to deliver its message. As was clearly stated, the aim of this campaign is to reach a broad consumer audience. Indeed expensive concert tickets, celebrity endorsements, merchandise for sale, and streaming web videos are all designed to appeal to a consumer consciousness. Yet the consumer world, with its endless choices of things sold through every appeal, is perhaps the hallmark of modern fragmentation. There seems to be something quite wrong when the same stimuli that drive shopping sprees and self-gratification are used to get people to tune in to a message of climate in crisis and of global oneness –delivered by rock stars, who exemplify a lifestyle of over-consumption. This situation is perhaps best summarized by a streaming video featured on the main page of the Live Earth website in the Fall of 2007: smoothly speaking cartoon characters introduce ‘how to do something about [climate change] without really changing what we do normally’.25 We are suddenly reminded of Albert Einstein’s famous quote, ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’,26 and we may wonder whether this should not be extended to say that no problem can be solved by using the same means that created it. Life as Message: The Unity of Ends and Means Be the change that you want to see in this world.27

More than half a century ago, Gandhi embodied a simple principle, which flows naturally from ecospiritualty’s conception of the world as an interconnected whole: the unity of ends and means. For Gandhi, this stemmed from a religious understanding, available in his Hindu tradition, that ultimately the ends are not in our control: We are merely the instrument of the Almighty’s will and therefore ignorant of what helps us forward and what acts as an impediment. We must thus rest satisfied with the knowledge only of the means and if these are pure, we can fearlessly leave the end to take care of itself.28

25

  ‘Save Our Selves’ (above, n. 19).  Albert Einstein, cited in Learning Organization, Quotes (30 October 2007); available at: http://www.learning–org.com/02.04/0205.html (accessed on 30 October 2007). 27  Ghandi, cuted in Bhalla, Quotes of Gandhi (above, n. 8), p. 72. 28   Ibid., p. 56. 26

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This is not an abandonment of larger visions, but rather the living of such visions in the moment: if you want a non-violent world, live non-violently; if you want independence, live independently.29 For in so doing, even if the larger goal is not fully realized, it has already been lived, and the rightness of this way of living is its own sufficiency.30 This alternative, spiritually grounded conception of means embodying ends is what is deeply missing from the ‘Save Our Selves’ campaign against climate change. Although Gore initially framed environmental crises in ecospiritual terms, this means of expression gave way to a mass movement channeled through scientific rationalism and consumerism. Understandably, An Inconvenient Truth and the ‘Save Our Selves’ campaign are acting out of a sense of urgency, but the unity of ends and means offers a powerful critique: if you want to create a sustainable world, you must adopt a sustainable lifestyle. Such an injunction is about far more than simply avoiding hypocrisy – it speaks to how transformative change actually happens and how it is sustained. Global campaigns cannot force lifestyle changes upon individuals; instead, individuals must view and experience sustainability as a lived reality – one which inspires them towards personal change. The spaces people inhabit must themselves be transformed, not reinforced, if individuals are to be moved deeply enough to change and if new possibilities are to take hold. The Earth Charter as Practice-Based Ecospirituality Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.31

As a set of ethical principles, the Earth Charter is a promising example of how a more practice-based ecospirituality might be achieved. The Charter itself is a framework of ethical principles which seek to inspire a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for a sustainable ‘earth community’.32 Created by the most inclusive and participatory process ever associated with an international declaration, the document has been endorsed by thousands of civil society members, including religious, spiritual, and inter-faith leaders and organizations. The Earth Charter does not make any explicit references to God or the Creator, but is embedded in spiritual affirmations about the community of life and the human role therein. 29   Johan Galtung, The Way Is the Goal: Gandhi Today (Ahmedabad: Gandhi Literature Centre 1992), p. 187. 30   Ibid., p. 79. 31   ‘Earth Charter’ (above, n. 2). 32   Ibid.

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The Charter can be seen as directly corresponding to ecospirituality’s conception of the world as a living whole – or, in its own words, as ‘one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny’.33 There is a direct call to re-think the human–Earth relationship – ‘[to] live with reverence for the mystery of being, gratitude for the gift of life, and humility regarding the human place in nature’ – and to realize that ‘the protection of Earth’s vitality, diversity and beauty is a sacred trust’. Like Gore in his 1992 book, the Earth Charter emphasizes the interconnectedness of the environmental crises we increasingly face and calls for action on a global scale. However, unlike the ‘Save Our Selves’ campaign, the Earth Charter acknowledges that global efforts such as Gore’s mass appeal to ‘help solve the climate crisis’ require a radical disruption of the global status quo.34 To achieve transformative change, what is ultimately needed is transformative means and contexts. This can only be achieved through a ‘change of mind and of heart’ – a deconstruction of our present-day beliefs, values, and principles, as well as concrete counter-cultural change.35 Inherent in the document is the urgent need to move away from self-interest and over-consumption, to understand that, ‘when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more’.36 The underlying tone of the Earth Charter is one of reverence, humility, and gratitude, so as to inspire rather than coerce individuals to adopt more modest and spiritually grounded ways of life on a global scale. The challenge of a global movement such as the Earth Charter, however, resides precisely in its global nature and focus. It can be difficult to feel connected to a ‘global community’ if this is not directly rooted in local place or experience, and the Earth Charter principles risk becoming abstract or idealistic if individuals fail to see them being lived out in practice. The true potential of the Earth Charter lies in its recent push towards a more decentralized approach to implementation – empowering local communities to claim ownership of the Charter and to initiate, support, and carry out community efforts towards a more sustainable world.37

33

  Ibid.  For a more detailed discussion of the Earth Charter, please refer to: Mary Evelyn Tucker, ‘Ethics and Ecology: A Primary Challenge of the Dialogue of Civilizations’, in L. Kearns and C. Keller (eds), Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (New York, 2006), pp. 495–503. 35   Ibid. 36   ‘Earth Charter’ (above, n. 2). 37   ‘Action Guidelines for Decentralized Expansion of the Earth Charter Initiative’, Earth Charter in Action (3 February 2008), available at: http://www.earthcharterinaction. org/2000/10/action_guidelines_for_decentra.html (accessed on 3 February 2008). 34

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As a ‘Living Document’ At its essence, this quest affirms the unity of ends and means through its shifted focus on being rather than attaining; acting versus preaching; celebrating instead of sacrificing. In a chapter entitled ‘The Gandhian Way, the Spiritual Way’ in the Earth Charter in Action book, Kamla Chowdry writes: We know from Gandhi, if the voice of the Earth Charter is to become a living reality, then the starting point of change is with oneself. If we cannot change ourselves, we cannot change the world. We need the inner strength to be able to say to ourselves and to the world, ‘My life is my message’.38

The real promise of the Earth Charter, then, does not reside in its visions of global unity, but rather in its value as a ‘living document’. The principles and values of the Charter have already inspired thousands of individuals and organizations to create transformative spaces from which to act towards a more sustainable society. An inspiring range of community-based projects, from tree-planting programs through awareness-raising campaigns in schools to using art or music for sustainability, have sprouted around the globe under the decentralized framework of the global Earth Charter movement. The impetus for change has come from within: individuals are moved to integrate the idea of ecospirituality, as encompassed by the Charter principles, into their everyday lives. This then enables others to view sustainability as a lived reality. This process of inspiring change is enhanced by the Earth Charter’s strong affirmation of the ‘intellectual, artistic, ethical, and spiritual potential of humanity’. The Charter offers a framework which positions human beings neither as ‘world destroyers’ nor as god-like saviours of nature. Rather it counterbalances a recognition of the gravity of human-induced environmental damage with an ethical framework for deepening relationships and with a movement for empowered action and change. The Unity of Ends and Means Revisited It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of the imagination, to keep on conjuring futures alternative to the one that presents itself as the only thinkable one.39

38

  Kamla Chowdhry, ‘The Spiritual Way, the Gandhian Way’, in Peter Blaze Corcoran, Mirian Vilela and Alide Roerink (eds), Earth Charter in Action (Amsterdam: Kit Publishers 2006), pp. 181–2. 39  Gary Gardener, Inspiring Progress: Religions’ Contributions to Sustainable Development (New York: W.W. Norton & Company 2006), p. 175.

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Ecospirituality has great value in linking the human connection to nature with a practice-oriented environmental ethics. However, in drawing this conclusion, we find ourselves still failing to reflect on the full potential of the unity of ends and means. Up until this point, we have still been focusing on ends: how to change people’s practices and lifestyles effectively, so as to solve environmental crises. Even in its most benevolent form, this kind of focus echoes the consumer society’s processing of people for its ends, and hence it exerts a kind of violence, however unintended.40 At the root of this orientation is a rational, scientific belief in the way the world works – that the world is subject to human control, and that crises like climate change are purely physical processes, which require humans to change in whatever ways are necessary for accommodating physical solutions. Ultimately, we see ecospirituality as a challenge to move beyond this mindset, and not simply as one more means to be employed to hasten change. There is no single ecospiritual perspective, but ecospirituality might incorporate a host of alternative beliefs – for instance that climate change is perhaps not only a physical process, but one which is also responsive to other human inputs such as prayer, love, and meditation; or that the natural world is in essence still a mystery, not totally within human power to predict or control; or, as Anne Primavesi describes in Sacred Gaia and again in Gaia’s Gift, that life is bound and connected in a web of gifts – ‘the mystery of giving’.41 Such beliefs have the power to form the basis of new ways of acting in the world, which recognize the interrelatedness of all beings and our own impact on these relationships. Spiritual traditions have always been a rich source of guidance on how to be in relationship with the world. For Gandhi, the unity of ends and means was motivated from a particular spiritual positioning, which placed humans humbly before a transcendent divinity. This is the true gift which spirituality can offer environmental movements: a wholly different way of conceiving of humanity’s position in the world, and thus a wholly different focus. From such spiritual perspectives, living a life of connection and humility becomes more than just a means towards ‘saving the world’, but an end in itself. Individuals are inspired rather than pressured to change. Adopting a more modest lifestyle becomes more of a joy than of a sacrifice. In the words of Gandhi, ‘no sacrifice is worth the name unless it is a joy’, as Gandhi explains that ‘sacrifice is “making sacred”’.42 To sustain sustainable living patterns, ultimately, there is a need to sustain our hope and action for an alternative way of living in the world. One might argue that it is beyond the scope of environmental movements to put into practice such a principle as the unity of ends and means, as there are urgent   Johan Galtung, ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research 27.3 (August 1990), 291–305. 41  Anne Primavesi, Gaia’s Gift: Earth, Ourselves and God after Copernicus (New York and London: Routledge 2003) and eadem, Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science (New York and London: Routledge 2000). 42   Bhalla, Quotes of Gandhi (above, n. 8), p. 72. 40

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problems, which need to be addressed with clear goals. We would counter that, in this age of global concerns, environmental goals cannot be pursued without involving all of humanity, and that this task requires a new conception of ends as united with means. Ecospirituality can embody such a conception and offer an alternative space from which to experience human relationships with the world. We need alternative spaces to engage in the process of re-imagining and renewing our sense of place and relationship. Those who are attracted to the concept of ecospirituality need to be offered spaces in which that message is being lived, and that vision enacted. Mainstream consumer culture will only cede to the ‘just, sustainable, and peaceful global society’ envisioned by the Earth Charter when individuals are offered an alternative which can fill the fissures running through it: a richer, more abundant way of life, steeped in connection and belonging.

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Bibliography ‘Action Guidelines for Decentralized Expansion of the Earth Charter Initiative’, Earth Charter in Action (3 February 2008), available at: http://www. earthcharterinaction.org/2000/10/action_guidelines_for_decentra.html (accessed on 3 February 2008). Brueggemann, Walter cited in Gary Gardner, Inspiring Progress: Religions’ Contributions to Sustainable Development (New York: W.W. Norton & Company 2006). Chowdhry, Kamla, ‘The Spiritual Way, the Gandhian Way’, in Peter Blaze Corcoran, Mirian Vilela and Alide Roerink (eds), Earth Charter in Action (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers 2006), pp. 181–2. [is this the full article? If not, plse give all pages] ‘Earth Charter’, Earth Charter in Action (28 October 2007), available at: http:// www.earthcharterinaction.org/2000/10/the_earth_charter.html (accessed on 28 October 2007). Einstein, Albert cited in Learning Organization, Quotes (30 October 2007); available at: http://www.learning–org.com/02.04/0205.html (accessed on 30 October 2007). Galtung, Johan, ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research 27.3 (August 1990), 291–305. — The Way Is the Goal: Gandhi Today (Ahmedabad: Gandhi Literature Centre 1992). Ghandi, Mohandas cited in Bhalla, Shalu, Quotes of Gandhi (New Delhi: UBS Publishers 2002). Gore, Al, ‘Growing beyond Green’, San Antonio Express: Speech delivered at the 2007 National Convention for the American Institute of Architects, San Antonio, Texas, 5 May 2007, available at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/ news/metro/stories/MYSA050607.01B.gore.35aecd4.html (accessed on 8 February 2008). — Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Rodale Books 1992). — ‘Nobel Lecture’, The Nobel Foundation (10 December 2007), available at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/gore–lecture_en.html (accessed on 6 February 2008). Guggenheim, Davis, An Inconvenient Truth (United States: Paramount 2006). Kover, Richard Thimer, ‘The Domestic Order and its Feral Threat’ in S. Bergmann, P.M. Scott, M. Jansdotter Samuelsson and H. Bedford-Strohm (eds.), Nature, Space and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (London and New York: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 235–48. McDaniel, Jay, ‘Ecotheology and World Religions’, in L. Kearns and C. Keller (eds), Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 26.

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Primavesi, Anne, Gaia’s Gift: Earth, Ourselves and God after Copernicus (New York and London: Routledge 2003). — Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science (New York and London: Routledge 2000). ‘Save our Selves: Live Earth’ (28 October 2007), available at: http://www.liveearth. org (accessed on 28 October 2007). Shipman, Claire, ‘Will Al Gore Run in 2008?’, ABC News Online (23 May 2006), available at: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?id=1993393 (accessed on 8 February 2008). Tucker, Mary Evelyn, ‘Ethics and Ecology: A Primary Challenge of the Dialogue of Civilizations’, in L. Kearns and C. Keller (eds), Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (New York, 2006), pp. 495–503. Vikström, Björn, ‘The Master of the Universe or the Humble Servant’ in S. Bergmann, P.M. Scott, M. Jansdotter and H. Bedford-Strohm (eds.), Nature, Space and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (London and New York: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 85–96.

Chapter 15

Restoring or Restorying Nature?



Glenn Deliège

1. The Dominance of the Techno-Scientific Discourse in Contemporary Nature Preservation in Flanders Usually the preservation of rare and fragile species is seen as being a delicate affair, best not left in the hands of the amateur. Especially in the circles of environmentalists, sound science and technology are seen to be better equipped to ensure the presence of certain selected species. The result is that most preservation schemes, at least in Flanders, seem to be governed by a purely scientific–technological paradigm. Nature preservation is thereby often reduced to a technological practice aimed at maximising biodiversity. Although there surely is nothing wrong with letting one’s preservation efforts be scientifically and technologically sanctioned, I believe, however, that a purely scientific–technological approach to nature preservation cannot explain all our 

 The idea that nature restoration should be interpreted as ‘re-storying’ is taken from a remark made by Eric Higgs in his Nature by Design (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2003), 285.   To the north American reader, my usage of the phrases ‘nature preservation’ and ‘nature restoration’ might be confusing. This has to do in part with problems of translation and in part with differences regarding the kind of nature present in western Europe and north America. Whereas in north America there are still places of real wilderness, or at least tracts of nature which have developed without the interference of humans for a considerable time, virtually all nature in western Europe is ‘agricultural nature’ – a nature which has been in agricultural use for centuries. In our western European context, nature conservation is mainly directed at conserving these ‘old agricultural landscapes’. But, in order to conserve these landscapes and their biodiversity, old agricultural practices such as mowing, grazing, burning and harvesting must be continued. So, within the western European context, ‘nature conservation’ is always a form of what the north American might call ‘nature restoration’. Whereas for the North American nature conservation and nature protection represent a ‘hands-off’ approach to nature and ‘nature restoration’ entails actively changing landscapes, in the western European context ‘nature conservation’ and ‘nature restoration’ can be used interchangeably.    When one browses for instance through the volumes of Natuur.Focus, the only major Flemish journal concerning itself with conservation questions, one finds that all talk seems to be about guaranteeing the presence of certain selected ‘target species’ through scientific and technological means.

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intuitions about this phenomenon. Indeed, nature preservation should also be seen as a practice that answers our quest for meaning. According to Arnold Burms and Herman De Dijn, all conscious motivations which drive human conduct can be divided into three large categories: humans seek knowledge, as is exemplified by science; they seek to manipulate their surroundings to make them more useful, as is exemplified by technology; and finally humans seek meaning: they want to know themselves as part of some overarching framework of ideas, people, situations and things which can orient, direct and give coherence to one’s chosen path in life – as is exemplified by religion, art and ethics. Due to the one-sided stress on the techno-scientific paradigm, the quest for meaning is often seen as peripheral to nature preservation; yet I believe it is central to it. Indeed the techno-scientific discourse cannot account for one crucial aspect of our drive to preserve natural areas: the symbolic significance of particular ones. It is this symbolic significance which certain natural areas can have that makes them into unique, irreproducible places, worthy of our respect and admiration, while the one-sided stress on the techno-scientific discourse can only lead to the technological reproduction of nature, reducing particular natural areas to reproducible and disposable containers for biodiversity. Every meaningful theory of nature preservation should therefore try to account for the place of this phenomenon within the wider scope of the quest for meaning. 2. The Techno-Scientific Framework and the Reproducibility of Nature In recent years, our knowledge of ecological dynamics has improved greatly, and it has reached a point where we seem to be able more or less to ‘re-create’ an ecosystem, putting it into a desired state with reasonable accuracy and certainty. Where once preservationists could only content themselves with preserving a nature which was already present but in danger of disappearing, now they can undo the damage done to natural areas, or even start dreaming of re-creating new nature in places where there was no nature to speak of in the first place. On the surface, these new possibilities do seem to be purely beneficial. Through eco-engineering we are not only enabled to correct past wrongdoing to nature, we can now also start to create win–win situations for age-old conflicts between nature preservation and economic development. From now on it seems possible to develop areas for industry where they are needed, without having to take any



  I follow Herman De Dijn and Arnold Burms in their intuitions about the three main conscious motivations of the human being: see Arnold Burms and Herman De Dijn, De rationaliteit en haar grenzen (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven 2005), p. 1. Subsequent quotations are in my own translation.

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cumbersome nature into account. We can develop the natural areas we destroy somewhere else, where the land is much less needed for other purposes. In ‘Faking Nature’, Robert Elliot was, however, very lucid about the negative consequences of such reasoning. Our technical ability for re-creating nature can be used as the perfect excuse for silencing protests against habitat destruction. If we can fully restore all the damage done to particular natural areas, even re-create them where they have disappeared altogether, then what reason do we have to protest against the destruction of natural areas in the first place? It is not, however, solely the fact that we have the capacity to re-create or restore nature to a reasonable degree that makes nature vulnerable to technological reproduction. Indeed, the way we conceive of the value of nature also opens up the possibility of a technologically reproduced nature. Nature must be conceived of as having a kind of value that can be (technologically) reproduced. The problem is that the preservationist movement itself seems all too eager to provide such a conception of the value of nature, and thus it seems to play directly into the hands of those who argue in favour of a technologically reproduced nature. In preservationist circles, the value of nature is often seen in terms of the rarity or abundance of the species present in a particular place, or of the importance which that area has for the preservation of overall levels of biodiversity. Nature preservation efforts are seen therefore to be aimed at safeguarding and maximizing biodiversity in a certain natural area and to do this through the most technologically efficient means. But it is precisely by defining the value of nature in terms of the presence 

 That this is no mere academic matter can be demonstrated by the European Birds and Habitats –Directives. These legally binding directives are aimed at the preservation of vulnerable species and their habitats; they force the EU member-states to designate a network of special preservation areas called the ‘Natura 2000 network’. In these areas nature preservation should be given absolute priority. Under strict conditions it is, however, possible to alter, damage or destroy certain natural areas protected under the Birds and Habitats Directives. One of these conditions is that the lost natural area should be compensated for by developing new nature somewhere else, and of the same size, type and quality. In Flanders, for instance, the destruction of valuable polders and mudflats protected under the Birds and Habitats Directives for the expansion of the port of Antwerp was eventually condoned by the European Union on the basis of a nature mitigation scheme for the lost natural areas. See European Council, ‘Council Directive 79/409/EEC on the Conservation of Wild Birds’ (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/legislation/birdsdirective/index_en.htm) and ‘Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora’ (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/legislation/habitatsdirective/index_en.htm).   Robert Elliot, ‘Faking Nature’, Inquiry 25.1 (1982), p. 81.    It would take too long to try and fully establish the case that at least most European nature-preservation-organisations would indeed see biodiversity as the prime value of natural areas. I will therefore give just one example, taken up in the Flemish natuurdecreet, the most important legislative text on preservation-matters in Flanders. The text is fully supported by preservationist organisations. The decree stipulates that the value of a natural area is dependant on its ‘‘nature-quality’’ [natuurkwaliteit]. That nature quality is further

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of biodiversity that the possibility of a technological reproduction of nature opens up. As Elliot correctly noted: ‘It may be that an area supports a diversity of plant and animal life’, but we cannot guard nature against technological reproduction on those grounds, because ‘presumably there are steps that could be taken to ensure the continuance of species diversity and the continued existence of endangered species’. Indeed, making a habitat fit for particular species to live in does not at all seem to be beyond the reach of our present scientific and technological capacities. Furthermore, if we only value nature because of the presence of certain species and we can do so by technological means, then we cannot meaningfully distinguish between the value of a technologically reproduced natural area and that of an ‘original’ natural area as long as the same species are present in both. Now, again, one might ask what the problem would be with such a line of thought. Could one not simply rejoice in the fact that we can now reproduce nature? Is that not the perfect solution for our environmental problems? The purely techno-scientific approach to nature preservation should nevertheless be rejected, as it quickly leads to very counter-intuitive results. What would be the problem, for instance, with re-creating a salt-marsh 300 kilometres inland of Belgium, where there is no salt-water to be found, by means of an ingenious system of pumps which allowed us to develop an area of highly endangered salt-marsh into a holiday resort near the sea? Even in the case of those preservationists who subscribe to the idea that it is mainly the presence of species that counts, such practices would not strike them as meaningful nature preservation practices. Most people would probably feel there is something decidedly fake about such a recreated salt-marsh, not unlike the result of someone proposing to break down the Tower Bridge brick by brick in order to rebuild it across the Mississippi. It just would not feel right, but rather fake and tacky. What the techno-scientific framework does, in short, is to reduce any particular natural area to a disposable and reproducible container for biodiversity. Ultimately this entails that there is little sense in attaching special significance to any particular natural area, as they can all be reproduced at will. The possibility of technological reproduction subsequently diminishes the ‘weight’ or the value attached to any particular natural area. This does not seem to be consistent with the reasons why we designate certain areas as nature reserves or natural areas. Indeed, it is precisely their particularity, the fact that they are remarkable, unique, individual, irreproducible that makes certain areas stand out and ‘beg’ for our attention and care. If an object is easily replaceable, like a mass producible good, it is also dispensable: it ‘sinks’ into the mass of its identical copies.

defined as ‘[t]he contribution that an area or one or more separated natural elements, either separately or in unison, can have on biological diversity’: Decreet betreffende het behoud van de natuur en het natuurlijk milieu. It is clear how such a definition makes the value of particular natural areas instrumental to the preservation of species.    Ibid., pp. 83–4.

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The principal uniqueness, individuality and irreproducibility of those areas at which our preservation efforts are directed is something which cannot be recuperated in the techno-scientific framework. It is, however, this uniqueness and individuality that grant value to a particular natural area– not, as René Munnik correctly notes, strictly an ethical value, but ontological value. As a unique individual object, a particular natural area has a certain ‘ontological weight’ which lifts it up out of the mass of the disposable and replaceable goods, installing in us an ontological duty to heed that weight. But how is it possible to conceive of that ‘weight’? In order to give a sufficient answer, it will be necessary to look at the work of Leuven philosophers Arnold Burms and Herman De Dijn on the quest for meaning. 3. The Quest for Meaning and Radical Transcendence According to Burms and De Dijn, the quest for meaning is essentially connected to the idea of radical transcendence.10 Meaning arises when we have a successful contact with a concrete reality, whether a person or a thing, which is, and this is crucial, ultimately recalcitrant to our attempts at full mental or physical appropriation. A example which is central to understanding the structure of the quest for meaning in the work of Burms and De Dijn is that of getting recognition.11 If I would physically or mentally force someone to give me recognition, it is clear that the resulting recognition would have little meaning. In the same way, if I were to hear a person only gives me recognition for who I am because she does not want to hurt my feelings, I would not be satisfied with that recognition at all, although it might have had the desired effect on me before I knew about the real motivation behind that person’s actions. These examples show that a recognition must be given ‘freely’ in order to count as a genuine one: a forced recognition is no recognition at all. When we are interested in being recognized by someone, we have to put up with the fact that that someone is ultimately beyond our control. If we really wish to be recognized, we must also allow for the independence and possible recalcitrance of the one who is to recognize us. This insight into the structure of recognition can be generalized for the whole quest for meaning according to Burms and De Dijn. All those things in which we find meaning, be they religious rituals, specific artworks or moral frameworks, can only arise within a contingent cultural context, which entails the possibility that at a certain point in time they will lose their special significance for us, without us 

 René Munnik, ‘Natuur en weerstand’, in Maarten Coolen and Koo van der Wal (eds), Het eigen gewicht van de dingen (Budel: Damon 2002), pp. 43–74. 10   Burms and De Dijn, De rationaliteit en haar grenzen (above, n. 5) pp. 28–9. 11  Recognition here is of course to be taken in the sense of being acknowledged for some achievement.

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having any control or insight into this process. The radical transcendence of those things in which we find meaning is thus essentially connected with a contingency which ultimately escapes our control. In the words of Burms and De Dijn: That everything which has ever seemed meaningful to us can lose its attraction, is not simply a sad fact, but belongs to the essence of our ability to perceive meaning in general; or, differently put: there is no meaning without the possibility of loss of meaning, which makes the idea of an all-compassing meaningfulness illusionary.12

From this general insight into the structure of the quest for meaning, Burms and De Dijn launch a critique on the Enlightenment project. They hold that the Enlightenment discourse, which is pervasive in contemporary culture, systematically negates radical transcendence. Indeed, the Enlightenment project aims to emancipate us from the confines of our particular cultural traditions, so that we can start to ‘dare to think for ourselves’. This can only be achieved if we trade our contingent cultural traditions for the abstract, scientific rationality, which aspires to transparency and universality. The enlightened individual should only accept something as true and valuable when transparent reasons are given why that something is true and valuable and when she can accept those reasons. But, for Burms and De Dijn, the problem is that meaning can only arise in contact with concrete realities, which can both get and lose their significance through processes over which we have no ultimate control, or into which we have no ultimate insight. It is this recalcitrance, this resistance to full mental or physical appropriation, that must be conquered according to the Enlightenment discourse: from the perspective of the enlightened rationality, affirming the importance of something which resists rational appropriation and justification can only be seen as irrational and unfounded. Yet, according to Burms and De Dijn, it is precisely this recalcitrance against full appropriation that is also constitutive of the quest for meaning. Consequently, Burms and De Dijn hold that the Enlightenment project systematically denies the importance of radical transcendence to the quest for meaning. Instead it reduces this quest to the fulfilment of well-defined needs – such as happiness, which can be maximized through a rational system.13 Connecting these ideas back to nature preservation, it becomes possible to see how the dominance of the techno-scientific framework clearly fits into the whole Enlightenment project. Attaching special significance to a natural area can only be justified if we give clear reasons as to why this area should be especially worthy of our consideration. If we fail to give such reasons, it looks as though our attachment to the area in question is nothing more than a mere subjective taste. A clear, quantifiable reason might be the number and the rarity of the species which   Burms and De Dijn, Rationaliteit en haar grenzen (above, n. 5), p. 28.  A good example here is of course utilitarianism.

12 13

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a natural habitat contains. But, precisely by giving such a reason, the area becomes vulnerable to technological reproduction and its particularity evaporates. 4. Ontological Weight and Durability Nature preservation should thus not only be a practice which aims at maximizing biological diversity through the application of science and technology. It should also be a practice which heeds and to the ontological weight a particular natural area has. It is in its particularity that a natural area ‘stands out’, ‘is weighty’, and thus merits our care. But how can a particular area ‘get’ its weight? We cannot actively produce its weight, because that weight seems to be radically transcendent: it is beyond our grasp and conscious control. In that sense, the ‘weight of things’ can only be ‘found’ as being already present in the lifeworld of someone who is open to notice it. And, once it is noticed, it can only carefully be heeded. The ‘ontological value’, or ‘weight’, of things should not be seen as emergent upon certain (ontologically) substantive properties the thing in question might have. Such properties can never explain why it is that particular object that seems to be so valuable for us. Indeed, whatever property we might select, there will always be objects which have similar or even identical properties, but which we might value less or not at all, despite the same properties being present. The presence or absence of such properties cannot thus explain why we attach special significance to this or that particular object. Furthermore, defining the value of an object on the basis of such properties always runs the risk of opening the door for technological reproduction, as we have seen to be the case when one tries to define the value of a particular natural area on the basis of the presence of certain species. According to René Munnik, the ontological value, the ‘weight’ which certain objects can have comes about through what he calls ‘the logic of binding’.14 He gives the example of two clocks in his possession: one he bought in a superstore, the other he inherited from his grandmother through his dad. He describes seeing the superstore clock as something: ‘purely disposable; I look right through it only to know the time’.15 The inherited clock, on the other hand, ‘demands attention’.16 Of course, Munnik considers the superstore clock to be replaceable, while he sees the inherited one as irreplaceable. But in his view this is not so because the inherited clock is in any sense more beautiful, more efficient or more valuable in monetary terms. Indeed, by all standards, it is a very simple clock, something someone else would just throw away as old junk. However, Munnik claims that the inherited clock, as opposed to the superstore one, has a certain weight and therefore becomes worthy of preservation. This weight comes about through its durability – by which Munnik does not mean in the first place the fact that it 14

 Munnik, ‘Natuur en weerstand’ (above, n. 10).   Ibid., p. 64. 16   Ibid. 15

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has been made in a decent manner, so that it did not fall apart over time, but that its value and significance has slowly accumulated through the contingent fact of its duration: the fact that his grandmother happened to stumble upon it in a shop one day, decided to buy it and to give it to his grandfather, who placed it in the room were it was present when Munnik’s father was born, and still when Munnik’s father drew his last breath. The clock was ‘present’ at all those events, and through the accumulation of unrelated contingencies it ‘witnessed’ the clock slowly ‘gathered’ value and significance for Munnik. An object thus receives ‘ontological weight’ through its durability, which makes it ‘witness’ a whole set of disparate and contingent events. Its durability in this sense, its continued material presence to a whole series of such events, enables it to unify them, it ‘sucks them up’ in its materiality, making it into a symbol which can evoke them. The ‘weight’ of the clock is thus its symbolic meaning in presenting to Munnik a whole set of disparate and contingent events which led up to him being the person he is and possessing the clock he possesses. Now, of course, Munnik agrees that the value he attaches to the inherited clock is indeed a highly subjective form of value: it is his attachment to his clock. But according to him this does not entail that he merely projects value onto the clock, or that his attachment to that clock is merely arbitrary. Indeed his attachment to the clock depends upon certain objective facts: it is the very same clock which was bought by his grandmother and which he found already present in his world. The value of the clock is not in any way produced by Munnik: it is ‘found’. Its significance is tied up with true stories which are all in some way connected to him. As a symbol, the clock thus represents, evokes and unifies all these stories, enabling Munnik to place his own life in the bigger context of the lives of his ancestors. Without the clock being tied up to such true stories, stories of which Munnik cannot be the author but in which he is nevertheless in some way implicated, the clock could never have the same significance and meaning. 5. Restorying Nature Munnik’s ‘logic of binding’ regarding the ontological weight of certain objects gives us some clues on how we should go about respecting the symbolic value of natural areas. People should be enabled to restory the land, reconnect it with true stories which in some way relate to their own lives. As we have seen, however, restorying natural areas is a delicate affair. As Munnik notes, the stories should in the first place be true, and they should be stories in which we are in some way implicated. It does not suffice, as Munnik correctly notes, just to come up with fantastic fairytales. Such stories might give a place more mystique, but they do not give it more ‘weight’; such stories need to be constantly backed up with dodgy evidence – for instance vague photos of Nessie – in order to keep capturing the imagination. That kind of ‘weight’ has to prove itself constantly, while the weight of the natural area should in a way be self-evident, without mystique, just as the

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weight of Munnik’s clock is self-evident and without mystery to Munnik. The clock need not justify its weight to Munnik; it just has it. Such stories are of course ever harder to tell. This has at least two distinct reasons. The first is that our lives become ever more urbanized. We live and work more and more in urban settings, and most of our stories are thus automatically connected to urban places. If we venture out into the country, it is often purely for leisure: a bike ride, a hiking trip, wild-water rafting, and so forth. Such consumerist activities seldom engage us in the country in any deep sense, if only because we have a tendency constantly to change the locations where we perform such activities. A second problem is the stress on the technological and scientific side of nature preservation itself. Through the dominance of the technological and scientific discourse, nature preservation is increasingly becoming a matter for specialists and professionals. The general public is often only tolerated into natural areas, and, if at all, through guided excursions or on neatly laid out footpaths, with information signs explaining to the hiker precisely what she has to see and how she should interpret it. Again, this leaves little room for any real engagement with natural areas, and little room for stories to be told other than those pre-packaged by the professional managers of an area. Now, I believe that at least part of the solution to these problems is to establish a more local, volunteer-based form of nature preservation. If members of the general public, and especially those who live close to a particular natural area, are invited to join in the maintenance of ‘their’ natural area, gradually something like the ‘weight’ of Munnik’s clock could start to emerge. Consider for instance a local who might be supportive towards a nature reserve, but only goes there for a stroll with his dog on Sundays on the carefully laid out path. This is of course better than nothing, but chances are that there is nothing to bind this man to that particular green patch through which he is accustomed to walk: that particular patch of nature is to him nothing more than a green décor; there are no essential ties that bind him with it. The result is that he might accept that his favoured nature reserve should be developed for commerce, if the company which wants to develop it promises to make a new pleasantly green décor a bit further down the road. Suppose, however, that this same person not only walked there with his dog on Sundays, but also found out that some volunteers from his community gathered every February to harvest some of the pollard willows that can be found in the area. At a certain point in time he starts to help them, and through doing this he learns about long traditions and about the need to top the willows in order to ensure their presence and value both for the landscape and for the ecosystem. Topping the willows in the cold February weather, he can start imaging how it must have been for the farmers a few decades ago. He might even start to feel connected to them in a way: through the continued presence of those pollard willows, his own life story of caring for them blends into the life stories of the generations who went before him.

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The individual of our example will thus learn the stories told of older generations who preserved the land, making it into what it is now, and will add his own story to that land.17 In this way, what was formerly a mere space filled with nature becomes a meaningful place, and a place from which one can get meaning and direction for life too. The area changes from a green décor to a very particular spot with a very particular meaning for the person in our example; it enables him to place his own life in the bigger perspective of the lives which went on in and around that natural area. Such an area is not something which he will not be likely to sacrifice for a technologically construed nature reserve, newly developed down the road. 6. Conclusion In the words of Eckhardt Kuijken, the recently retired head of the Flemish Instituut voor Natuur en Bosonderzoek, nature preservation should primarily play a historical role: ‘It wants to ensure continuity between the past and the future of our lifeworld.’18 Such a continuity can, however, only be established if nature preservationists are sensitive to the symbolic role which natural areas and features play in connecting and unifying disparate and contingent events, which happened in their presence. Moreover, it should be possible for natural areas to continue to perform these symbolic roles, through a careful ‘heeding’ of their weight; and this can hardly be achieved if nature preservation becomes a practice which aims solely at preserving species through technological operations executed by professionals. Such a practice can only yield, in the terminology of Marc Augé, non-places: ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’19 A natural area which is only managed for maximum biodiversity seems nothing more than a spatial vacuum in which we collect species, a container without any value, to be disposed of and thrown away at any point in time, as long as an other suitable container can be found. Such a nature commands little respect, reverence, or care. On the other hand, richly ‘storied landscapes’ have a self-evident weight and value for those who are implicated in their stories. Such landscapes do command respect and care – a care we can take upon ourselves by upholding their traditions, by adding our stories, by avoiding that their ‘weight’ disappears in the indifferent mass of replaceable and manipulable objects.

17  For an extensive and well-written defence of the need for ecological restoration to take the ‘re-storying’ route, see Eric Higgs, Nature by Design (above, n. 1). 18  Eckhardt Kuijken, ‘Natuurbehoud: van emotioneel verleden naar duurzame toekomst?’, in Martin Hermy and Geert de Blust (eds) Natuurbeheer (Leuven: Davidsfonds 2004), p. 56 (quoted here in my translation). 19  Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, translated by John Howe (London and New York: Verso 1995), pp. 77–8.

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Bibliography Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Non-Places, translated by John Howe (London and New York: Verso1995). Burms, A. and H. De Dijn, De rationaliteit en haar grenzen (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven 2005). European Council, ‘Council Directive 79/409/EEC of 2 April 1979 on the Conservation of Wild Birds’, available at: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ nature/legislation/birdsdirective/index_en.htm (last accessed on 4 June_ 2009). European Council, ‘Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on the Conservation of Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora’, available at: http:// ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/legislation/habitatsdirective/index_ en.htm (last accessed on 4 June 2009). Elliot, Robert ‘Faking Nature’, Inquiry 25.1 (1982), 81–93. European Council, ‘Council Directive 79/409/EEC of 2 April 1979 on the Conservation of Wild Birds’, available at: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ nature/legislation/birdsdirective/index_en.htm (last accessed on 4 June_ 2009). Higgs, Eric, Nature by Design: People, Natural Process and Ecological Restoration (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2003). Kuijken, Eckhardt, ‘Natuurbehoud: van emotioneel verleden naar duurzame toekomst?’, in Martin Hermy and Geert de Blust (eds), Natuurbeheer (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven 2004), pp. 19–56. Munnik, René, ‘Natuur en weerstand’, in Maarten Coolen en Ko van der Wal (eds), Het eigen gewicht van de dingen (Budel: Damon, 2002), pp. 43–74. Vlaams Parlement ‘Decreet betreffende het behoud van de natuur en het natuurlijk milieu’, available at: http://vlex.be/vid/natuurbehoud-natuurlijkonbepaalde-dvr-29941079 (last accessed on 4 June 2009).

PART D SACRED GEOGRAPHIES

Chapter 16

Indigenous Embodied Knowing: A Study in Crow/Apsaalooke Space, Nature, and the Sacred John A. Grim

The Crow/Apsaalooke People of the Northern Missouri River Plains and Wolf Mountain Highlands This discussion of knowing in relation to nature, space and the sacred focuses on a particular ceremonial, the Ashkisshe or ‘Sundance’, of the Crow/Apsaalooke. The Crow are an American Indian people who hold a reservation in the United States, north of the Big Horn Mountains and south of the Missouri River, in the state of Montana. Named by the early French explorers from a sign language gesture of a bird flying, the Crow call themselves Apsaalooke or Absaroke, after a mythical ‘large-beaked’ bird. An ancient clan system has endured among the Crow and is considered a major factor in explaining their resurgence as a people. Though allies of the advancing United States, after the Indian wars of the mid-nineteenth century the Crow population diminished through disease and despair to less than 2,000 individuals in the early twentieth century. Their current population is now well over 9,000. Through these challenging transitional years of the twentieth century, the Crow people continued to transmit their traditional ways of embodied knowing even as their ritual life changed. One ceremonial that provides insight into Crow religious views of space, nature, and the sacred is the Crow-Shoshone Sundance.    See John Grim and Magdalene Medicine Horse-Moccasin Top, ‘The Crow/ Apsaalooke in Montana’, Endangered Peoples of North America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2001).    In his From the Heart of Crow Country (New York: Orion Books 1992), p. 5, Joe Medicine Crow writes: ‘The family was the primary unit of social organization, and what may be regarded as the secondary unit was the clan. A clan is composed of distantly related families, with membership determined through the mother. A person belongs to his or her mother’s clan. As the tribe increased in population, it divided into subtribes or bands for convenience and travel.’   Fred Hoxie, Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), 130–5.

Fig. 16.1 At Cloud’s Peak, where the Apsaalooka became a nation. Photo: R. CraigKochel.

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Ceremonial Space as Embodied Crow people name this ritual complex, Ashkisshelissua, in their own language, and the ‘Crow-Shoshone Sundance’ in English. This ceremony of Ashkisshelissua is a placement in the space of a specially constructed lodge. In this lodge the lissua, or dancing, undertaken by male and female dancers helps to activate a cosmo-center, a sacred cosmos, in which sun, moon, stars, buffaloes, animals, eagles, humans and spiritual beings dwell and are present to one another. Thus the Ashkisshe – ‘the Imitation Lodge’ or ‘Big Lodge’ – symbolically opens the dancers and the community to a larger vision of themselves. Ashkisshe as a form of embodied knowing occurs in a ritual space that establishes relationships between personal, social, ecological, and cosmological bodies. These relationships manifest the possibility of, and the responsibility to, the sacred in the spaces of the world rather than to a metaphysically determined force or transcendent being. The work of male and female dancers during this ritual manifests a particular way of knowing that results from dancing, fasting, and displaying a community virtue in the specially prepared lodge. In this setting, the dancers come to know themselves and their worlds in many more ways than any observer can express. One interpretive pattern that emerges in the ceremony focuses on the relationships established by the dancers with other domains imaged as bodies. Thus the fasting body of an individual dancer is empowered through spiritual relationships with herself, with her community, with the biodiversity of the land, and with the sun, moon, and stars. These relationships are not static accomplishments, trophies, or badges. Rather they emerge during the ritual as somatic, cognitive, and creative processes that interweave during the dance. More than simply individual religious experiences, the Crow Sundance manifests communal practices as well as the worldview values by which these people live out their relationships in the world as they have traditionally known it. Yet, it is also important to acknowledge that the Crow face continuing challenges to their survival as a people. They still endure as a coherent indigenous society on the Northern Plains of North America and struggle for their sovereignty, for their cultural integrity, and for the vitality of their homeland along the Big Horn Mountains. Knowing in ritual space is a crucial way in which this endurance and identity are transmitted. While many Crow people live at some time in urban settings, most of them live on a reservation located within a small remnant of their traditional homeland. A prominent nineteenth-century leader of the Crow, Arapoosh, imaged their homeland as four tipi poles extending south into central Wyoming, west into the    See also Kay Milton, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (London and New York: Routledge 2002), p. 47 where she writes that ‘embodied knowledge’ and ‘embodied process’ are not simply descriptive of embodiment in such things as personal bodies, societies, ecologies, and the cosmos, but as something perceived as emerging from out of relationships between those different bodies.

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Yellowstone region, north into the Judith mountain range of Montana, and east into the Wolf Mountains of Montana. This nineteenth-century image continues as a spatial symbol providing identity for the people in relation to their traditional homeland. These Native American peoples have transmitted to later generations, then, an emotionally charged awareness of Crow life lived in relation to nature, space, and the sacred. Personal Observations Regarding the Apsaalooke/Crow The Crow people have a rich cultural life, which the present writer has been privileged to study for over twenty-five years. During that time my wife and I have been adopted by a branch of the large Bird-in-Ground, Medicine Horse, and Moccasin families. Guided and assisted by these families, I have participated nine times in the Ashkisshe ceremony. This participation does not position me either as a Crow spokesperson or as someone learned like an elder in Crow religion. What I say here arises from my academic study as a historian of religion during these years of attention to Crow and other indigenous religions. I speak also from my personal experiences during the complex of ceremonies that are pathways to the Crow Sundance, or Ashkisshelissua, which have graciously been opened to me by Crow religious leaders, sponsors, and individuals. The images that accompany these remarks were taken with the knowledge of the sponsors and Sundance chiefs during the dances pictured. They were accepted as given to me for the sole purpose of teaching about the Crow Sundance as a religious way. Thus my intention in this essay is to draw on well-known ethnographic writings about the Crow as well as on conversations with elders and on my own experiences to present an example of what Tim Ingold calls a ‘lifeworld’ and what I term lifeway. In this way I position religious behavior in Crow ceremonial space   During a Crow Fair in 1994, Harry Mocassin commented to me on the symbolism of the tipi, saying that the four poles of the tipi were a spiritual home embracing the occupants ‘like a mother’. At a Crow Fair, over 1,500 tipis are set up along the Little Big Horn River grounds for this tribal gathering.    See also the DVD entitled Native Spirit and the Sun Dance Way as Told by Thomas Yellowtail to Michael Fitzgerald, World Wisdom, available at: www.nativespiritinfo.com (accessed on 28 April 2009).    See Tim Ingold, ‘Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism’, in his Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge 2000), 209–18. ‘What I hope to have established, at least in outline, is that the lifeworld, imaged from an experiential centre, is spherical in form, whereas a world divorced from life, then, is a matter not of sensory attunement but of cognitive reconstruction … In the global outlook … the world does not surround us, it lies beneath our feet … [The] world … becomes an object of human interest and concern. But it is not a world of which humans themselves are conceived to be a part …They [humans] may observe it, reconstruct it, protect it, tamper with it or destroy it, but they do not dwell in it.’

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as a way of knowing that has interpretive significance in thinking about nature, space, and the sacred. Drawing on multiple experiences of bodies, I describe this Crow sense of embodied knowing as the convergence of fourfold spaces in the world, namely those of personal, social, ecological, and cosmological bodies. In these spaces the complexity of both nature and the sacred become lived moral experiences shaping the bodies and behavior of the religious participants. In a lifeway, one is born into a fourfold embodiment by virtue of one’s individual birth into a culture that inhabits a local ecosystem and a cosmological landscape with religious attention. This empirical attention embraces, but should not be understood as reduced to, subsistence needs and quotidian demands. Thus the Crow lifeway, as is evident in the Ashkisshe, orients its practitioners towards a human quest that actualizes these religious relationships with community, land, biodiversity, and cosmos. The terms ‘sensing’, ‘minding’, and ‘creating’ are used here to suggest the activation and realization of these connections as a somatic process. The present study investigates ways in which this somatic process reaches towards, and through, the embodiments. Body is not simply a philosophical trope, then, for an embodied consciousness, but a move to articulate the experiences and creative engagements in the symbolic world of Ashkisshe, where the dancers and the dance become living patterns of meaning. The following section departs briefly from our focus on Crow ceremonial life to explore sensing, minding and creating. After this brief section, we return to a discussion of this somatic process in the fourfold space of the Crow Big Lodge during Ashkisshe. A Somatic Process: Sensing, Minding, and Creating The ethnography of many indigenous peoples describes narrative cosmologies and lifeways in which native peoples structure ritual experiences of creative forces. Through configurations of the sensorium, the full range of the sense faculties of the human, communities bring individuals into an embodied knowing of spiritual realities. We also know that much more complex forms of sense realization are transmitted in bodies formed by particular cultures. In effect, sense experiences   An inquiry using the fourfold embodiment posits an explicit and implicit character, in which the embodiments are embedded in one another. They intimately illuminate one another. That is, each embodiment may or may not find a distinct or explicit articulation in any religious expression, yet they are deeply implicated in one another. On this point see Edward Slingerland, ‘Embodying Culture: Grounding Cultural Variation in the Body’, in What Science Offers the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008: 151–218).    Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1990; original title Le Sens pratique, published in 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit).

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leading to embodied knowledge are structured in indigenous rituals as coherent approaches to obtain personal power and to engage life creatively, through the numinous forces in nature. The personal body, the somatic self, is the space in which our perception and sensing of the world come to our attention. Yet this is a mutual process. For the world itself demands our attention and stands as an imperative that calls forth our sensing, inexorably leading us beyond ourselves into the world. Moreover, this call of the external world stands in various relationships with the complex of interactions that we, are within our bodies. Thus, our sense of the outer world of nature joins with our limited awareness of the autonomic functioning of our own body. We now realize the incredible range of chemical, neuronal, and somatic activities that enable our perception. These complex bodily interactions, or sensing, connect us to the world prior to any self-reflexive awareness. From sensing, and in conjunction with the full range of our sense faculties, comes that mental attention we call conscious awareness, or minding. Awareness follows from sense perceptions leading to conceptual thought as a further stage of minding. The close and inseparable connections of sensing and minding provide an entry point for understanding our engagement with the world of nature. That is, cultures orient humans to the world as a coherent reality by means of the complex interactions of our embodied sensing and minding. Reaching beyond the limits of sensing by means of minding gives rise to creating. This aspect of the somatic process – creating – is integral to the emergence of minding from sensing. That is, just as our awareness springs forth, in a spontaneous emergent manner, from our sensual engagement with the world, so also creating arises within us as we engage with the world without. We sense creativity in the world as it changes, grows, waxes and wanes. We know creativity in ourselves as imagination attunes us to the freshness of becoming alive in the spaces of the world. We reflect on creating in that ineluctable moment of speech that appears to be utterly free of our conscious formulation, but rather flows forth creatively from our orientations via sensing and minding. We have known of the socially constructed character of knowledge, and now we become increasingly aware, from neurological studies, of the sensual and emotional character of our knowing.10 We realize as well the deeply embedded significance of nature and ecological diversity in the formation of human reflection. That is, the emergence of human awareness would appear to be related to the rich evolution of late Cenozoic life. Moreover, we are increasingly aware of the cosmological dynamics at the heart of embodied intelligence. Thus we acknowledge the foundational relationship of our 10  For the social construction of knowledge, see Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books 1966); for neurological studies of emotion and intelligence, see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness (Heinemann: London 1999).

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carbon-based flesh to the origin of carbon atoms from the cataclysmic explosions of supernova and in the intense heat of stars. This expansion of our awareness of intelligence into communal, ecological and cosmological realms is a call to creating. All cultures and civilizations have been motivated by mythical stories that called them to a social commitment that was their ‘great work’, as Thomas Berry says.11 Now we begin to be aware of how different lifeworlds connect us creatively to spaces in the world that call us beyond our embodied knowing of ourselves to this ‘great work’. These connections can be described as both socially constructed and formed by deeper somatic, communal, ecological, and cosmological domains that we name here as the embodied process. Crow Lifeway and the Embodied Process of Sensing, Minding, and Creating In the discussion of Crow religion in this section, it is evident that the somatic process of sensing, minding and creating has a central role in establishing and maintaining efficacious relations with the surrounding world experienced as sacred powers (called baaxpe by men and maaxpe by women). For the Crow, these powers are experienced in a range of spaces in the world. For example, baaxpe may manifest in a personal body, in the community, in the bioregion, or in the larger cosmos. The world is on the one hand a religious ecology, an interdependent web of life generating forces, and on the other hand a religious cosmology, a world connected by kinship in which individual actions have meaning and affect the totality. Intimate relation with power in Crow religious ecology does not mean that the Crow did not alter or dramatically affect the landscapes into which they migrated. As the Crow pushed the Shoshoni peoples from the Missouri River drift plains in the seventeenth century, they left clear archaeological evidence of buffalo hunting by driving herds over cliffs.12 Crow historians still know these ‘buffalojump’ songs and powers. What is also clear from their oral histories is that Crow religious practices sought a deeper resonance with their environment even during these acts of massive slaughter. Buffalo jumps are themselves highly ritualized implementations of the Crow sensing/minding/creating relationships with buffalo manifest through songs, dances, painted images, and dream interpretations. These sensory modalities obviously embodied rational, conceptual understandings of buffalo kills. In related myths, there are many Crow stories in which humans transform into buffalo. Buffalo brothers still appear to the Crow as the stars of the Big Dipper.13   See Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Bell Tower 1992).   Joseph Medicine Crow, From The Heart of Crow Country: The Crow Indians’ Own Stories (New York: Orion 1992), 86–91. 13  Timothy Cleary, Stars We Know: Crow Indian Astronomy and Lifeways (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press 1997). 11

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In one story, humans transformed into buffalo in order to compete in races with the buffalo themselves to win the privilege of hunting. Moreover, there are stories of the willing sacrifice of buffalo for human relatives who married into the buffalo nation. For the Crow, these are heroic stories of human participation in buffalo life and of the buffalo empathy for humans in need of food, shelter, and visionary power. These are stories, then, of the shared need of animals and humans for each other.14 Thus, while the spaces in the world occupied by buffalo and humans can be distinguished, they are not separated. Rather there is a mutual responsibility that the stories describe by using the metaphor of bodies as more than a figure of speech. Human and buffalo bodies in these stories engage one another in the shared spaces we term nature through sacred relationships. These connections are what the Crow identify as baaxpe. This reciprocity between humans and buffaloes, described in Crow narratives, develops a mythical logic of giving. To reduce these myths to rationalizations, that simply describe subsistence practices, imposes an interpretive reading quite different than the somatic knowledge that creatively sustained those relationships. For traditional Crow, and even many Christianized Crow, the buffalo remains an archetypal symbol of the nourishing promise of sacred power in the land. The buffalo are, as the Crow say, powerful Ilapshe, or ‘Medicine Fathers’, who to this day continue to impart understanding and experience of giving that is at the heart of Crow religiosity. In the following quote Thomas Yellowtail, a Sundance chief and a healer (akbaalia) among the Crow, describes a heartfelt ethic of the Crow lifeworld. During the Ashkisshe these ways of embodying the sacred are evident in the giving of the fasting dancers, and in their humility of purpose and the force of their determination. Yellowtail underscores the embodied values of traditional Crow lifeway saying: The life of the traditional Indian was rooted in the sacred, he saw the natural world around him as a miracle created by Acbadadea [the Creator]. The traditional ways allowed the Indian to reflect on the mystery of life, and they were always aware of their place in creation … [The traditional Crow] knows the meaning of poverty and of gratitude. He also knows about religion; he knew long before the white man came … In the Indian way, whenever someone does something good, they have a giveaway … The Indians show humility by giving something away. When someone has a giveaway, they give because they are thankful for what they have … Praising songs are sung for people who are being honored. I have my personal praising

14  Howard Harrod, The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press 2000).

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songs that I sing for such people. I would gather them in front of me, if I were there, and sing my praise song, march around the floor, praising them up … When a traditional Indian possessed spiritual powers, he did not try to come out and make a show of what he had. Indians are always private in protecting holy things. It is very difficult to talk about some holy matters, and they are not advertised. Some spiritual matters that pertain to the tribe as a whole are of course public. But individual spiritual matters pertain only to that person, and no one should boast about the gifts he has been given. It is not just how you act, but how you are in your heart that is considered by the Medicine Fathers … But if you follow the sacred path, then you will probably be allowed to keep what you have been given.15

Central to the discussion here is the recognition of the limits of rational discourse for expressing engagement with the sacred. Rather than discursive inquiry into baaxpe, one had to experience the holy. Such an experience is a shaping of the personal body so that it aligns with nature and the sacred. Furthermore, a central cosmological value coursing through Crow embodied knowing was a sense of the giving universe, to which one responds by giving of oneself. Sensing, namely, that complex of perception and shaping of the body by means of emotions – is at the heart of Crow religious ecology. Giving generates further affective states, personal reflections, and potential social status. It is made manifest in such actions as public praising and personal religious humility. Crow religious ecology, then, does not relate simply to a transcendent spirituality, but engenders embodied life lived in the presence of pervasive power. Aligning the power of spaces in the world is a goal of Crow spiritual maturity – a goal which is accomplished through the embodied process of sensing, minding, and creating. While the term ‘visionary’ is used to indicate the practices associated with this intention, no separate emphasis on the visual over other senses is warranted. Similarly, the term ‘visionary’ places an emphasis on individual achievement; that, while very important in Crow lifeway, is more correctly understood as finding its fuller expression in the community. Crow ceremonial life is presented here as an ongoing, maturing field of inquiry into the fourfold embodied spaces. In this context the senses become both the site of disciplined intentionality and a potential conduit for the making of a visionary.16 Rituals and ceremonies are certainly not the only pathways. Language, childrearing practices, art, habitat, stories, education, subsistence practices, and all the   Yellowtail: Crow Medicine Man and Sundance Chief, as Told to Michael O. Fitzgerald (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1991), pp. 7–10. 16  For the Crow as a people, there is no one perspective on their lifeway. Moreover, the presentation here by a non-Crow is obviously an outsider’s view, based on that person’s experiences, readings, and thoughts over some twenty-five years of interactions. 15

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ordinary acts of life can embody the giving cosmos in a person. All activities of the lifeway, then, present themselves as capable of extraordinary manifestations of sacred relationships, baaxpe. As pathways of Crow embodied knowing the affective experiences generated in these daily tasks also foster self-knowledge, traditional learning and traditional environmental knowledge of the surrounding world. For the Crow, rituals are fundamental ways of engaging in and of learning about the world. Just as the Crow do not intellectually separate senses from one another; so also sense activity is not separated from cognitive activity. Indeed, sensory experiences for the Crow constitute ways of pre-reflexive knowing, that lead to embodied knowing and to the possibility of visionary creating. A Crow visionary engages the world through the senses so as to come to a knowing that is a mutual act, in which the embodied world also senses and knows humans. To come to this experiential understanding is to be on a creative pathway. For the Crow, this traditional creative pathway leads through major experiential rituals directly related to the Ashkisshe ceremonial. Key aspects of the whole complex ceremonial include: bundle openings, outside dances, sweat lodges, and, finally, the actual Sundance. As the Crow display bundles and pray while smoking tobacco, they activate particular modes of the fourfold embodied spaces in the world. Four outside dances prepare the ground in relation to stars, regarded as relatives and to the full moon, regarded as an ancestor. Moreover, during the sweat lodge participants feel the heat and steam from rocks as purification and prayer. Finally, dancers undertake bodily deprivations in the Ashkisshe to advance individually on the path of spiritual maturity, to achieve blessings for the community, and to renew the surrounding world. The Crow/Apsaalooke Ashkisshe or Sundance Initially, the Crow ceremonial of Ashkisshelissua came to this northern Plains as the Shoshone-Crow Sundance.17 An older, exclusively Crow Sundance featuring body piercing and buffalo hunt symbolism was lost in 1875, as the buffalo diminished and tribal warfare on the Northern Plains ended. That older ceremonial, directly linked to the warrior ethos of intertribal raiding, was undertaken to gain a vision that would assist in exacting revenge for a clan death. The current ShoshoneCrow Sundance, transferred to the Crow in 1941 by the Crow-Shoshone medicine man John Truhujo (Rainbow), recapitulated older shamanic practices of healing and baaxpe demonstrations, and introduced new religious ideas. The traditional Crow complex of shamanic healing, warrior ethos, and the sacrificial giving of the buffalo was grafted onto more contemporary community needs. 17

 The term ‘Sundance’ is widely used on the Northern Plains to describe different ceremonies, among which there may be some historical connections. But their differences are often collapsed, and thus misunderstood, as a result of using the one term ‘Sundance’.

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Prior to the transfer of the ceremonial, in 1940, a Crow named William Big Day initiated a request for the transfer of the Ashkisshe on the basis of drumming and singing heard in a dream that he identified with the music at the Shoshone Sundance.18 Big Day also sought a healing for an adopted son, who was ill.19 As the four-day ceremonial was integrated into the Crow lifeway, parents pledged to dance in the Sundance to assist their sons fighting in the United States army during the Second World War. Thus the track for the acceptance of this ceremonial accommodated older visionary, therapeutic, and warrior ideals of Crow lifeway into a changed religious landscape. Older rituals among the Crow – such as the sweat lodge, the vision quest, the sacred bundles, and the tobacco pipe prayer, helped to integrate the new ritual into the traditional Crow spaces in the world, where baaxpe appeared. These became accompanying rituals in preparation for and follow-up to the Ashkisshe. Thus an embodied process, well known in these traditional Crow rituals, served to validate the fourfold embodiment in the Sundance. Multiple Sundances pledged by different sponsors may be held in the spring and early summer on the Crow Reservation, at which 20 to 150 dancers may participate in any dance. Inside the Sundance At twilight on the first day of Ashkisshe, dancers who have pledged to dance in the Sundance line up outside the western side of the circular lodge. Many of them recognize this area behind the lodge as the setting of the four abbreviated ‘outside dances’ which established the Sundance ground over the four full moons prior to the actual dance. The open-air lodge may be built on traditional Sundance grounds, where older centering trees stand with their bare weathered wood. The dancers are barefoot, to feel the Earth as a source of power and as a potential ‘Medicine Father’ who could bless them. The women are dressed in bright calico dresses, and the bare-chested men wear fringed dance skirts. Each day they will change their dress, comb their hair and appear to be fresh and untroubled. At a call from the sponsor and Sundance chief, the dancers begin blowing on their eagle-bone whistles and they circle the lodge four times before entering. These whistles, made from the wing bones of an eagle by a skilled craftsperson, are often tipped at the end with the downy feather of an eagle. The cosmological symbolism here is multiple, as the eagle is closely associated with the sun. Moreover, the whistle extends the creative breath of the dancers and carries their prayers outward. In Crow thought, breath is a fundamental cosmological force   See Fred W. Voget, The Shoshoni-Crow Sundance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1984). 19   Heywood Big Dy, the boy who was sick in 1941, led the fiftieth Sundance in Pryor; see Michael Crummit, Sundance: The 50th Anniversary Crow Indian Sundance (Helena, MT: Falcon Press 1993). 18

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Fig. 16.2 Preparing the ‘Ashkisshe’ tree with buffalo head at the centre of the Sundance lodge. Photo: R. Craig Kochel. giving words and speech larger meaning. As the dancers circle the lodge, their whistling may call actual eagles from the mountains to draw that baaxpe to their intentional acts. A cottonwood tree approximately fifty feet tall, with a diameter of two feet, stands in the middle of the lodge. Only the two topmost branches remain untrimmed and are crowned with shimmering leaves. Two flags flutter from the branches: a blue pendant on the south branch and a white one on the north. Two bags of tobacco are tied high up in the tree. Surrounding the central tree and set into the ground in a circle, at a distance of about fourteen to sixteen paces from the tree, there are twelve forked poles about twelve feet tall. Pine rafters extend from each forked pole to the notch of the central tree. A stuffed eagle is tied among these rafters at their ‘V’-shaped gathering point and a handful of willow branches is placed further below, so that bunches of green leaves jut out from both sides of the central tree. Below the notch and just above eye level, a buffalo head is tied onto the tree facing the western rear of the lodge. This is the charged ritual space where the sponsor and chief reside during the dance. Male dancers fill out the curvature of the lodge on both sides of these two leaders, and women dancers fill the lodge up to the door that always opens to the east. At the door and slightly to the north, there is some space left inside the lodge for the drummers and singers. In this setting, the Sundancers abstain from food and water during the several days and nights of the ceremonial. Ritual ‘announcers’ call out to them, to awaken them before sunrise and to have them ready for the ceremonial singing which is to be performed at the central tree: they have to greet the morning sun and to receive

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the baaxpe in its first rays. After a rest, the drummers and singers begin to sing Sundance and personal vision songs as the dancers charge towards the center tree. The Sundance songs emphasize the dancing, and the singers’ high falsetto modes announce to the dancers the ecstatic phase of the song. This is the moment when they dance to the tree. Throughout the day the dancers continue this repetitive dancing in a straight line out to the tree and back. Their dancing tamps down the timothy and buffalo-grasses on the earthen floor of the lodge and gradually the dancers’ distinct paths emerge. These beaten paths signal the dancers’ diakaashe, their determination to touch the sacred power at the center and to draw it back for the community of life. As the dancers ‘dry up’, the leaders and the singers watch for those ‘stalked by the buffalo’. This is the experience, Sundance leaders say, that occurs when a dancer begins to intensify his or her dance and shows signs of collapsing from what outsiders might name as exhaustion and fatigue. For traditional Crow, this is a state of potential communication with baaxpe and the singers may aim special visionary songs at the exhausted dancer. Sundance healers may go to the central tree, draw power into their medicine fans, which are made out of wings of raptor birds, and throw that power at the dancer stalked by the buffalo. To knock a dancer down in this way is recognized both as a demonstration of shamanic ability on the healer’s part and as a way of assisting the dancer to receive the revelation awaiting her. The sincere determination of the dancers becomes dramatically present to the people on the ‘public day’. This second or third day of dancing and fasting precedes the final day when the dancers come out of the lodge. This public day begins with a sunrise ceremony; after this the face of the dancers and the upper torso of the men are painted by an elder, often a clan aunt or uncle, who has that privilege. Dancers and their families reciprocate with gifts of blankets, cloth material and cigarettes for the blessing of vision markings painted on them. These external markings attune with the internal orientations of the embodied process that shapes the dancer, namely the feel and sense of the paints and the gifts activates a fuller awareness among the dancers of their actions for the community. The colored clays and wet paint on dry skin remind the dancer of streambeds around the reservation where these special clays are found. These are natural spaces where the sacred has revealed itself to individuals. Blessings are narrated by a clan relative as she burns sweet grass and “smudges” the dancers, that is, moves the smoldering twist of sweet grass around the dancer. Both face the rising sun as the clan aunt reminds the dancer of clan and kinship connections to the land. The smell of the sweetgrass smudges and the sound of the prayers revive and embolden them. Seeing the other painted dancers, some completely covered in color over their whole body, galvanizes them. This whole morning instills a deeply memorable complex of experiences of a tactile, aural, olfactory and visual nature. Relatives dress their dancers in the finest beaded belts, medicine necklaces, hair-ties, pipes, bags and other family heirlooms. Remembering the traditional medicines and visions of the past in this performative atmosphere almost makes everyone forget the ordeal ahead. The complex of energies we call here sensing/

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minding/creating is about to be danced into reality in the lodge, which itself is constructed as a cosmic body. The families’ care and concern for the dancers is intense because they know that this is a day of demanding effort. As the temperature rises above 100 degrees, the dancers already weak from fasting, will repeatedly charge the central tree, being urged on by ‘announcers’, elders, and family. This is the open display of diakaashe that means so much to the people. Many of the dancers will be completely reduced to their last bodily energies and seem to move as if entranced and oblivious of the crowds standing just beyond the drummers and singers, at the eastern door of the lodge. Here a dancer falls, rises and continues her step. There a dancer goes to the centre tree with a cigarette as a prayer smoke, weeping and leaning on the tree for support. All this day, the sacrifice of the dancers is a public disclosure of their determination to act on behalf of the community. The sensory impact of the beauty of the dancers’ regalia and the steady singing and drumming build a palpable pressure in the lodge. Everyone is fully aware of the dancers’ ritual humiliation that draws down the renewing power of the sun and of those spiritual beings the Crow call ‘Without Fires’ – that is, the attending baaxpe beings of the surrounding natural world. No doubt the Crow understanding of these practices manifests a shifting sensorium of spiritual meaning as families have taken up various Christian, peyoteway, and other religious practices on the reservation. The capacity of religious experiences to convey the embodied knowledge of the traditional Crow world has changed. Yet the Sundance valuation of sincere intention, or diakaashe, still pervades the Crow lifeway. The embodied logic manifest in the Sundance ceremonial complex does not activate a set of strict, exact, bounded meanings. Rather, the Crow have established a pre-reflexive and interpretive dynamic based on their communal experiences with the surrounding world. This embodied process, which is embedded in Crow ceremonial spaces in the world, provides ongoing orientation in a changing world. A Study in Religion and Ecology One seminal aspect of the power of ritual performances is their penetrating presentation – of mythical gaps or of the distance between humanity, nature and the divine on the one hand, and of problems and flaws in the human and natural condition on the other. These religious acts, whether they are communal rituals or individual prayers, can become transformative moments, in which humans and the natural world overcome gaps and flaws and are restored to a mutual wholeness. Yet, this restoration is not typically accomplished by means of a rational act, a narration, or a simple act alone. The restoration to wholeness is completed in somatic practices that activate experiences placing the human in larger, meaningful spaces. In religions, relations established between the microcosm of the individual

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person and the macrocosm of the larger bioregion and of the heavens appear both as a given reality and as a cultivated achievement. Religions place believers’ bodies in a mythical space, with all of the gaps and flaws of the human and natural conditions. Religions draw attention to the limits of the human body and of the community of life. Drawing attention to those limits, religions may paradoxically enable the crossing of a distance, the bridging across a separation. Thus in many religions sacrificial death redeems, and suffering transforms. Space, nature, and the sacred often triangulate in religions and surround the existential confrontations occasioned by limits in human nature such as aging and transience. Even the Enlightenment, western sciences seem fascinated by change, as it investigates the selection processes of physical reality in evolution. Religion, however, tends to reflect upon change not as an end in itself, but as embedded in a larger salvation history, or as a moment in a recurring cycle of creation. In religion the ephemeral often reveals an underlying creative dynamics, or a numinous presence, or it stands as anticipatory of an eternal unchanging transcendence. The religious turn renders change, especially in embodiment, simultaneously evanescent and an opening to divine mediation. Thus religions, in their attention to embodiment, respond to the unexplicated gaps, spaces, and paradoxical tensions of existence. Moreover, in mythical space the interactions of cosmological and ecological realities are largely undifferentiated. That is, the natural world stands as the most immediate experience of the powers that pervade the cosmos, or, as in some traditions, the Earth manifests or reveals the original, primordial power of the Creator. In many lifeways, religious identity orients bodily perception even before the formation of conscious religious awareness. Bodily perception initiates a gaze that is cast upon the world, shaping the religious body as a way both of experiencing and of interpreting the world. This sets in motion the possibility of seeing correspondences and relationalities between humanity and nature, between the body and the spaces that inform it. For the religious person, these relations are not just metaphorical substitutes or abstract symbols. Nor can they be reduced to manipulative expressions of local, hegemonic political control. Rather, microcosm–macrocosm correspondences reveal the spaces in the world where physical matter and the divine become mutually present in that distinct sensing/minding/creating process activated in ceremonial lifeways. The philosopher Mark Johnson has described such a knowing, that extends out into the horizon of embodied being in the world as a complex that enables understanding. He writes: Understanding, of course, is here regarded as populated with just those kinds of imaginative structures that emerge from our experience as bodily organisms functioning in interaction with an environment. Our understanding, I shall argue, involves many preconceptual and nonpropositional structures of experience (such as image schemata) that can be metaphorically projected and propositionally elaborated to constitute our network of meanings

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Image schemata and metaphorical projections are experiential structures of meaning that are essential to most of our abstract understanding and reasoning. The metaphorical projections are not arbitrary but rather are highly constrained by other aspects of our bodily functioning and experience. ‘Experience’, then, is to be understood in a very rich, broad sense, as including basic perceptual, motor-program, emotional, historical, social, and linguistic dimensions. I am rejecting the classical empiricist notion of experience as reducible to passively received sense impressions which are combined to form atomic experiences. By contrast, experience involves everything that makes us human – our bodily, social, linguistic, and intellectual being combined in complex interactions that make up our understanding of our world.’20

Regional environments such as holy lands and cosmic centers, for example, have been understood as connected to a larger reality. Ecological life has long been understood as integrally related to cosmic powers. Human individuals and societies, through subsistence practices, arts, and habitat, have been symbolically associated with the forces that move the heavenly bodies. The astronomical orientations of such ritual places as the Ashkisshe illustrate the monumental character of some cosmic centers. In these connections, differently established within religious traditions, cosmology and ecology are typically understood as inherently related to the personal and the communal, in a fourfold embodiment of the sacred. That is, the teleology (or purposiveness) attributed in various systems of philosophy to nature and to the larger cosmos is linked in religious thought and practice to physical spaces in the world such as personal bodies, social communities, landscapes, and heavenly bodies. The fields of religion and ecology necessarily bring a student to broader questions about the connections made in their traditions between physical bodies, human societies, biological communities, and the larger cosmos. The study of religion and ecology stands at the convergence of cosmology and ecology, as an interpretive perspective of existential moment and of phenomenological insight into the mutual interdependence of embodied spaces. Across the cultural and doctrinal differences between religions, the human body remains a constant source of metaphorical experience in its mode of perceptual engagement and symbolic articulation of the world. An embodiment approach provides the study of religion and ecology with a set of questions about bodily experience in religion and about the ways in which this experience leads to ‘metaphorical thought’ on the emerging social order, the immediate environment, and the larger cosmos. Just as in the past peoples have felt drawn to a great work, it may be that the allure of our time is to acknowledge the creative understanding of our cosmological and ecological origins (as well as to go beyond postmodern doubt  Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1987) xv–xvi (my emphasis). 20

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and anxiety). We acknowledge that these critiques have recognized the mythic visions, for example of Earth from space, that can be manipulated for political control or an intolerance subversive of interdependence. Malleable human desires can be seduced by insidious uses of imagery for shaping an ethic that is wholly counterproductive to the somatic process of sensing-minding-creating. Questions arise in the religions regarding historical changes in what I call somatic processes. A contemporary consumer ethos for example, reorients human

Fig. 16.3

In camp after the Sundance with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Magdalene Medicine Horse-Mocassin, and John Grim. Photo: R. Craig Kochel.

desire for ultimate reality into the aimless acquisition of things. Computerized cultures increasingly multi-task with virtual imagery so as to present screen time as a natural experience. Perception itself can become a malleable, plastic reality, losing its possibilities for freshness. What embodied images of health will emerge as we intensify our body’s toxicity and as endocrine disruptors disturb our body’s genetic transmission? Can our diminution of the rich diversity of flora and fauna dim down our own imaginative, symbol-making capacity? Will the somatic process that emerged in the Cenozoic period of the Earth’s history, in relation to a florescent life –community, be able to flourish in the present period? Will the ramifications of our contemporary shutting down of a geological era break forth into an intergenerational transformation of consciousness? Although we have the scientific and analytical knowledge to make the needed societal changes, we seem unable, as communities, to come to a political, ethical, or religious consensus about the way forward. No doubt the challenges we face

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call for a broad range of investigations and interpretations. Thus the study of religion and ecology affirms the significance of the fourfold embodiments as religious meditations on spaces in the world. The somatic, social, ecological and cosmological embodiments – meditative spaces as such – arise from the preoccupation of humans with the world in itself. The study of religion and ecology benefits from this magnificent obsession of the human to shape the body into sacred, meaningful relationships with the space of nature. Hence religion and ecology, rather than beginning with religious metaphysics, rituals, or revealed scriptures, begin with this entangled world of bodies.

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Bibliography Battiste, Marie (ed.), Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press 2000). Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books 1966). Bernardis, Timothy, Baleeisbaalishiwee: Crow Social Studies Teacher’s Guide (Crow Agency, MT: Bilingual Materials Development Center 1986). Berry, Thomas, The Great Work (New York: Bell Tower 1992). Bird-David, Nurit, ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology’, in Current Anthropology 40 (Supplement, February 1999), 67–91. Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1990). Castellano, Marlene Brant, ‘Updating Aboriginal Traditions of Knowledge’, in G. Dei, B. Hall and D. Rosenberg (eds), Indigenous Knowledge in Global Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000), 21–36. Cleary, Timothy, Stars We Know: Crow Indian Astronomy and Lifeways (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press 1997). Crummit, Michael, Sundance: The 50th Anniversary Crow Indian Sundance (Helena, MT: Falcon Press 1993). Curtis, Edward, The North American Indian: The Apsoroke, or Crow (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp. 1970; reprint of 1909), Vol. 4, pp. 3–126. Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness (London: Heinemann 1999). Denig, Edwin T., ‘Of the Crow Nation’, in John C. Ewers (ed.), Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 151 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution 1953), 3–74. Ellen, Roy, Peter Parkes and Alan Bicker, Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Its Transformations: Critical Anthropological Perspectives. (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers 2000). Frey, Rodney, The World of the Crow Indians: As Driftwood Lodges (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press 1987). Grim, John (ed.), Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions 2001). — and Magdalene Medicine Horse-Moccasin Top, ‘The Crow/Apsaalooke in Montana’, in Tom Greaves (ed.), Endangered Peoples of North America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2002) 21–40. — ‘Traditional Ways and Contemporary Vitality: Absaroke/Crow’, in Lawrence Sullivan (ed.), Native Religions and Cultures of North America (New York: Continuum 2000), 53–84.

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— ‘Cultural Identity, Authenticity, and Community Survival: The Politics of Recognition in the Study of Native American Religions’, in The American Indian Quarterly 20.3/4 (Summer and Fall 1996), 353–76. Harrod, Howard, The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press 2000). Hoxie, Fred, Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995). Ingold, Tim, ‘Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism’, in The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge 2000), 209–18.. Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1987). LaDuke, W.inona, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (Cambridge, MA: South End Press 2005). Linderman, Frank, Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1962). — Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows (Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1974). Lowie, Robert, The Crow Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1983 (reprint)). Medicine Crow, Joseph. From The Heart of Crow Country (New York: Orion Books 1992). Milton, Kay, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (London and New York: Routledge 2002). Nabokov, Peter, Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell 1967). — ‘Cultivating Themselves: The Inter-Play of Crow Indian Religion and History’, (Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1988). Nelson, Richard, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forests. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983). Peet, Richard, and Michael Watts, Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (London and New York: Routledge 1996). Smith, Linda Tuhiai, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed Books 1999). Yellowtail, Thomas, Yellowtail: Crow Medicine Man and Sundance Chief as told to Michael O. Fitzgerald (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1991), — DVD Native Spirit and the Sun Dance Way As Told by Thomas Yellowtail to Michael Fitzgerald, World Wisdom at www.nativespiritinfo.com Voget, Fred W. , The Shoshoni-Crow Sundance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1984)

Chapter 17

Natural Sacred Places in Landscape: An Estonian Model Marju Kõivupuu

Only later, years after researching local heritage, I started to comprehend beliefs of the local people about the esoteric power of the trees. Often people thought that cutting a cross in a tree gives a sanctuary for the soul of the deceased. The soul will stay in the tree and will be not come home to disturb the living […] And such belief in nature tribes has always intrigued me. People who have grown amidst trees and forests tend to associate human lives with the magical life of trees. Just the way trees live in the forests; humans live in a world they perceive. Trees memorize things from the surrounding, the growth rings tell about the history, the direction of growth about the climate; the crosses carved in the bark show the unity of humans and forests.

Introduction David Lowenthal has said that, to be sure of the existence of the past, you must see its tracks. Those tracks may be different natural or man-made objects which fixed history as witnesses of a past event. Through language and other forms of culture, the common experience of history will shape identity. The development of the environment into meaningful places will be expressing itself not just in stories and names, but also through certain marked objects. This means that the landscape which expresses common history plays an important role in the development of identity. Objects, names and stories about occasions create a web of marks and interpretations allowing us to interpret the landscape for different meanings and purposes. To do this, we must know the logic of the web – in other words we must know how the marks and ideas correlate to each other. The importance of holy places is not only that they unite the supernatural and the natural world, but also (and above all) that they connect both of these with the world of the past, of the ancestors and their lives, and they allow us to look at a collective history. Holy   South Estonian author Indrek Hargla, writing in 1999, Uskmatuse hind. Jutt. Available at: http://www.obs.ee/cgi-bin/w3-msql/algernon/jutt.html?id=217, 1–39. (accessed on 25 August 2004).   David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press 1990), p. 243. 

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places are not just to be honoured; they are sometimes to be actively used. The natural and the supernatural meet there. Natural holy places – holy groves, holy trees, springs and sacrificial stones – form a major part of the cultural heritage and of folklore and unite historical, archaeological, folkloristic and ecological values. This is why it is no miracle that holy places and their reconstruction are important for the survival of small nations. Although Estonia became famous in Europe during 2007 because of the ‘bronze soldier’, there are landscapes in it where the cutting of a tree can produce more public indignation than the demolishing of a building. The number of different natural sacred places, or the amount of folklore related to mythological–poetical natural objects, is fairly high in Estonia. Historically, the natural sacred places are groves, single trees, water-bodies, stones and other natural objects used for sacrifices, worshipping, healing and other religious activities. The Estonian sacred groves are unique in Europe because their use and the traditions connected with them have survived up to the present day. Most of these traditions reflect the passive memory of Estonian history and culture, but there are plenty of natural cult objects which are continuously and actively used in group practices and folklore (for example Maausk). Since the nineteenth century, when the collecting of folklore began, more than 2,500 natural holy places have been registered in Estonian museums and archives. Today, 447 sites have been declared official heritage protection objects, and 50 have been declared nature conservation objects. So there are in Estonia about 500 ancient holy places altogether. Nowadays we may recognize two different kinds of natural holy places: holy springs, trees, stones and forests, which reflect the passive, past-directed cultural memory of Estonians and are not related to the behaviour and active folklore (that is, folk-belief, traditions, customs and so on) of any group; and cult objects, which are related to a group’s social heritage or behaviour and with which people actively communicate. In modern Estonian society the preservation of cultural heritage is subordinated to the relationship between lore culture and the preservation of antiquities. Generally speaking, while objects under the protection of national heritage are also objects of cultural heritage, most objects of cultural heritage are not – and very likely will not be – under the protection of national heritage, which comprises only the most valuable part of the cultural heritage. Cultural heritage, no doubt, is a political survival from the past: it is the result of an evaluative selection, whereas the age of an object or phenomenon is not always relevant in determining if it really belongs to the core of a    Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1977); Anna-Leena Siikala, ‘Spatial Memory and Narration: Oral History and Traces of the Past in a Polynesian Landscape’, Suomen Antropologi 23.2 (1998), 4–19.    Maarahvas – self-designation of Estonians predominant till the mid-nineteenth century; literally people of Earth, people of the Land. Maausk means ‘native religion’. Its adherents think that every people must follow their own historical, pre-Christian religion.

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cultural heritage. Of course, this division into more valuable and less valuable objects is of a dubious nature – should existing values be abandoned or destroyed in the pursuit of other values? Next to the relics associated with the formation of a cultural landscape in present-day Estonia, the objects under the protection of cultural heritage theoretically include buildings and constructions; economic monuments, military monuments, natural and semi-natural monuments, and monuments associated with oral history (eight subcategories, including a separate division for grove sites, grove trees, sacred trees, cross-hills and cross-trees). Sacred Groves In pre-Christian Europe, sacred groves were places of seasonal rituals. They were natural temples of the sort described by the Elder Pliny. Such places are at the same time visible and hidden; they represent national values which local people have loyally kept but which remained hidden to foreigners for centuries. The forgotten groves grew wild and changed into places where people believe ghosts and supernatural beings to live. In spite of this, the groves express national memory by representing a history and traditions which other ethnicities may not necessarily recognize; also the appreciation may vary within the dominating culture. Estonians consider themselves to be one of the most enduring European ethnic groups to have lived on the shores of the Baltic Sea. This premise is still of the utmost importance for national identity and explains the continued survival of the nation, in spite of foreign conquests going on since the thirteenth century. Even though national identity regards the current frontiers of Estonia as an inviolable unit, the development of the nation has not been smooth. Hidden power struggles have played a major role in its history, turning into marginalized countryside localities which had formerly been central to its economic activity – and this even before the foreign conquests. Patterns of power are the means by which abstract ideology is conveyed: land ownership, symbolic demarcation of property, how far influence extends, who makes the decisions, who has to carry them out. These structures of power involve strategies such as taxation and administrative units, as well as views over property which determine social behaviour – for example which villages get along well with each other. It also seems that these patterns of power are path-dependent: they are always shaped by the former configuration. Social ties established long ago can survive new territorial patterns of power: tradition prevails over ideology in the ways landscapes are understood – for example in deternining where sites for settlement are situated. During the thirteenth century, big changes related to Christianization occurred in Estonians’ social life and manner of thought. Churches and chapels were built on 

 Hannes Palang, Anu Printsmann, Marge Konsa and Valter Lang, ‘Ideology and Tradition in Landscape Change: A Case of the Helme Parish, Estonia’, in Tiina Peil and Michael Jones (eds), Landscape, Law and Justice (Oslo: Novus Forlag 2005), pp. 288–97.

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Kassinurme grove hill in Jõgevamaa county, July 2005.

sites which were important to people at that time – whether groves or graveyards. Even the Kuremäe nunnery, constructed in the nineteenth century, was built on the site of an ancient holy place. Similar kinds of example, where a church, a monastery or a chapel is built on the site of a holy place, can be found all over Estonia. During Soviet occupation, a lot of natural holy places were destroyed by intensive industry, and with them a part of the nation’s collective memory was destroyed too. In today’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious Estonia, according to this manner of thought, ancient natural places are our national shrines. Sacred groves are places where you can be undisturbed and in union with nature, yourself and the souls of ancestors. According to the Estonians, you cannot build on a sacred place and you should not operate economically near one. You must keep the place clean and in good order. Once a holy tree has been cut, the trees which grow in that place are held in honour, as holy trees. Untouched sacred groves are the oldest protected areas and unite the values of nature, which are thousands of years old, with the values of culture. Sacred groves hold the memory of a particular place and are sanctuaries for natives. The spoiling of any holy places will have an effect on all those who care about them; it is comparable with an attack against a people, its national culture and its land. In Estonian law and politics, national holy places must be equalled with the holy places of other, foreign religions – or at least that’s what the neo-pagans say. Because there are 500 holy groves in Estonia, it is hard to have a full overview and to protect them from different developers. Until now, mostly local people and free organizations have

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fought for protection. For example, a protest in the late autumn of 2004 called to a halt the operation of building on the Paluküla holy grove. The building of a wind-park on Kunda holy grove has been stopped through a court ruling. Cross-Trees Cross-trees are an inseparable part of south Estonian (south–east Estonian, to be more specific) funeral tradition. They have been the present author’s subject of research for the past fifteen years, and have been discussed by her in short papers and popular–scientific articles. A ‘cross-tree’ (also called a ‘cross-pine’ or a ‘cross-fir’ – in Estonian ristimänd or ristikuusk and in the south–sstonian dialect ristikuus´, ristipettäij or ristikõiv, depending on the species of the tree) is a tree by the road (or crossroads), usually bigger than others, into which the close male relatives of a deceased cut a cross on the way to the cemetery (and, rarely, on the way back from the cemetery). The ritual shows a conscious or unconscious line which the deceased has passed for being count out of the living. The earliest reports of cross-trees in Estonia (or their analogues) date back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century (Brand, Olearius). Olearius, one of the sources, also refers to a tradition of branched cross-trees which are known in Finland as karsikko; this custom has been described as early as in the thirteenth century. Kristfrid Ganander’s Mythologica Fennica contains a note ‘Risti Kannot ja Petäjät’ (stumps and pines with cut in crosses) and a reference to a letter sent in the year 1228, from Bishop Gregorius IX to Bishop Tuoma in Turu. The letter is about destroying the cross-pines and cross-stumps, which were considered important by the local people. In Finland, the tradition of cutting crosses vanished at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Systematic descriptions of the cross-tree tradition in Estonia are relatively late: they begin to   Marju Kõivupuu, ‘The Transformation of the Death Cult Over Time: The Example of the Burial Customs in Historic Võrumaa County’, Folklore, 22 (2004): 62–91, available at: http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol22/burial.pdf (accessed on 31 March 2009); Marju TorpKõivupuu, The Changing of Death Cult in Time: On the Example of the Historical Võrumaa Burial Customs (Tallinn: Tallinna Pedagoogikaülikool 2003); Marju Torp-Kõivupuu, ‘Ristipuud maastikul ja usundilises jutupärimuses’, Mäetagused 27 (2004), 105–25, available at: http://www.haldjas.folklore.ee/tagused/nr27/torp.pdf (accessed on 31 March 2009).    Johann Arnold von Brand, Reysen durch die Marck Brandenburg, Preussen, Churland, Liefland, Plescovien, Gross-Naugardien, Tweerien und Moscovien (Wesel: Poth 1702); Adam Olearius, Offt begehrte Beschreibung der Neuen Orientalischen Reisen so durch Gelegenheit einer Holsteinischen Legation an den König in Preisen geschelen Schleswig, and afterwards in several enlarged editions 1647).    Janne Vilkuna, Suomalaiset vainajien karsikot ja ristipuut: Kansatieteellinen tapatutkimus. (Kansatieteellinen arkisto 39. Helsinki: Suomen Muinasmuistoyhdistys. 1992), p. 165.

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Fig. 17.2 The oldest known cross-tree in Estonia. Cross-pine of Laatre, Valgamaa county, August 2004. appear from the second half of the nineteenth century. Other researchers in this field – Oskar Loorits, Ants Viires and Finn Janne Vilkuna among them – have

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based their work on the collections of Mattias Johann Eisen and Jakob Hurt, which are kept in the Estonian Archive of Folklore. The tradition of cutting crosses into trees as a way of stopping the souls from coming back home is also known in Latvia, where people used to cut a cross and to sacrifice alcohol, strips of clothing and colourful yarns (the last one mainly when a woman died) – but only on coming back from the cemetery. In north Latvia (and Latvia overall) this tradition faded during the Soviet era, when its practitioners were fined for intentionally damaging the property of the forest enterprise. Apart from south Estonia, the tradition thrived up until the 1940s in the western Saaremaa Island; analogous phenomena are found in the funeral customs of the Russian Orthodox Setus.10 The phenomenon of the cross-tree has preserved a concept of the tree as residence of the soul which is unique in the whole of Europe today – if not in the whole world. The choice of a cross-tree’s location depends on the particular landscape, but generally it marks, consciously or not, the point where relatives bid their last farewell to the deceased because he or she is no longer part of the world of the living. Cross-forests (coniferous or mixed) are situated either in the immediate vicinity of the graveyard or along the church-roads. The road creates the link between the village and the graveyard. The Soviet period was conducive to the preservation of the tradition of crosscutting, because social changes in society had disrupted the former way of life in the village community. If possible, the cross was cut at the border of some farm expropriated by the Soviet authorities. In this way ancient traditions were honoured, and protest was expressed against the violent and alien social order. The practice of cross-cutting was not limited to Lutherans living in rural areas. Whether a person was baptized and a member of a congregation was insignificant in the given context, because during the Soviet period people’s normal relations with the church had been severed. Cutting the cross was even regarded as a compensation for the absence of the clerical ceremony – and all the more so as atheist schoolteachers, party secretaries, and other functionaries who had moved in from elsewhere showed a negative attitude to it. Older local pastors generally had a neutral attitude to cross-cutting and participated in the ceremony themselves,

 Torp-Kõivupuu, The Changing of Death Cult (above, n. 6), pp. 97–100.   In the far south–east corner of Estonia there lies an original ethnic region: Setomaa. Setomaa borders with Lake Pskov to the north–east, Russia to the east and south–east, Latvia to the south and Võru County to the west. At present, Setomaa is divided into three administrative parts: one part is situated in Võru County; the second part in Põlva County; and the third part in the Pechory District, part of the territory of Russia. During the census of 2000, carried out in the Republic of Estonia, the Setos were not considered separately. The estimated total population of Setos in Estonia is 10,000–13,000, of which c.3,000–4,000 live in their indigenous area. According to the census of 2003, carried out on the territory of the Russian Federation, approximately 100 people identified themselves as Setos. 

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being motivated in their behaviour by local customs and by respect for the wishes of the deceased. The fate of cross-tree groves in areas of commercial activity prompted media attention to this tradition and activated the narrative lore about cross-trees among the local transmitters of folklore. Narratives from the earlier decades on this topic can be categorized into three major groups: •

memorates describing supernatural experiences in the proximity of crosstrees; narratives about folk healing or the curing of ailments caused by ancestral spirits or by the evil eye; and narratives connected with religious and ritual behaviour – for instance the cause and explanation of cutting a cross in the tree; the presentation of cross-trees as ‘simply’ sacred trees, and so on.

• •

Earlier warnings were now re-activated and new ones emerged. for instance, Whoever fells a sacred cross—tree, they claimed, would be punished by dying in a random accident in the forest, or his/her hands will dry out his/her family members will fall ill, and the like. To strengthen the impression of truth of these conditionals, the stories were presented as memorabilia. They included an element of the supernatural and were said to have happened to a relative or close acquaintance of the narrator.11 During the 1990s there was a view that, even if Estonia were free, the practice of cutting crosses into trees would become extinct in its economically underdeveloped south-eastern part.12 It had to be admitted that, even if the way of life, the law and the state had changed, the question of who owned the holy trees in forests remained especially relevant. The cross-cutting tradition showed that the creation of folklore was directed by factors independent from the upholders of traditions. – In this case, the relevant factor was the ‘land and forest ownership law’ and its legal aftermath. In 2003–4, when the felling of fully grown forests was said to be at its peak, a lot of holy forests in Võrumaa were destroyed, partly through not knowing and partly through not caring, although some of them were actively used until they were cut down. That was a destruction of a part of our culture which has been saved only in photos and videos. Most of these holy trees and forests were cut down illegally (a common place practice in 1990s when felling of logs was done without the knowledge of the forest owner, that is, by stealing timber). The owners of the restituted property may not live on their plot of land and thus do not possess the knowledge of its cultural values. Even nowadays holy forests and trees are unprotected in Estonia against developers who do not care for cultural heritage. For example in Rosma, Põlva an actively used holy forest of great relevance was 11

  Kõivupuu, ‘Transformation of the Death Cult’ (above, n. 6).   Vilkuna, Suomalaiset vainajien (above, n. 8), p. 10.

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cut down in the spring of 2005 to straighten up a road. The lack of communication between the local governor and the population led to a scandal which affected the whole country, and in the end it was decided to minimize the felling of trees. But the emotional and cultural–historical damage due to such governors’ thoughtless behaviour cannot be compensated for. At the turn of 2003–4, we faced the fact that many south Estonian cross-tree groves – a unique part of the local cultural heritage – were destroyed in the course of felling the forests, partly from negligence, partly from ignorance. In the recent past some cross-tree groves and some cross-trees have suffered heavily from illegal logging, as the owners of reprivatized forests, often of advanced age, are in many cases unaware of the whereabouts of their forest, of the biological species growing there, or of the culturally significant monuments located in their forests. The topic of cross-trees and of the events related to them is a telling example of a folklorization process quite unanticipated by either local or western folklorists. This example points precisely to what has been said above: that the factors driving the folklorization process – for example the ownership of land or forest – may often function independently from the active bearers of lore traditions. We may all agree that these objects of cultural heritage, to which we relate in a passive way and which reflect the values of the past, should be better protected. But the fate of such ritual objects like the sacred trees in the landscape, objects with which the tradition bearers have retained an active ritual relationship, often depends on the latter’s ability and wish to establish such objects in modern legal space. Conclusion Sacred groves and trees belong in the rich cultural heritage of Estonia. The possibility of the continuation of customs and rituals is related to religious convictions in a modern natural environment; or, to put it differently, to those whom the sacred trees in groves and the sacred stones on fields belong (or have belonged) de iure and to those whom they belong (or have belonged) de facto.13 Is there a different attitude towards ritual objects of natural origin in modern times? These objects may tentatively be divided into two groups. On the one hand there are ritual objects (including sacred springs, stones and trees, which fall under nature protection or under the protection of national heritage); these whih reflect the passive and retrospective collective cultural memory and are no longer associated with the active lore and ritual behaviour of any social group. On the other hand, there are ritual objects which continue to be associated with the lore and ritual behaviour of a social group (this active connection may have been revived in the course of the folklorization process) and which have a continuous and active meaning for and relationship with the transmitters of folklore. 13  Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2003).

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Fig. 17.3 Cross-pine in Hargla parish in Võrumaa county, October 2004. Nowadays in Estonia the defending of sacral objects and holy places is very difficult. A part of heritage protection belongs to folklore, but a large proportion of important folkloristic objects is not being protected and in some cases probably never can be. The context created by ancient traditions and by local people honouring them – in other words, by the citizens’ initiation – is very important. According to international conventions, Estonia has a duty to protect its natural and cultural heritage. Yet the procedure is rather painful there: local governments tend to fear or reject constraints on economic activity. A particular problem, especially from the viewpoint of tradition holders, is the meaning of a holy place: we could take a stone or a tree, protect it and erect a sign saying that it has a value; but if there isn’t any possibility to visit the place, to follow the tradition or to perform rituals there, then protecting the stone or the tree will not have great meaning. Not

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even our children will be be taught in school how one should behave when visiting nature, a holy place or a cemetery. So it may seem that the signs are there only for the sake oftourism, an industry which does not understand local traditions and culture. Systematic protection is also being set back by an imperfect database: it is not known, unfortunately, how many holy places or natural objects in Estonia need to be urgently protected and how the laws should be made to carry this out. Acknowledgement This research was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence CECT) and by the Estonian Science Foundation and target-financed project of Estonian Ministry of Education (SF 130033s07).

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Bibliography Boecler, Johann W. and F. R. Kreutzwald, Der Ehsten abergläubische Gebräuche, Weisen und Gewohnheiten (St Petersburg: Buchdruckerei der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1854). von Brand, Johann Arnold, Reysen durch die Marck Brandenburg, Preussen, Churland, Liefland, Plescovien, Gross-Naugardien, Tweerien und Moscovien (Wesel:Posth 1702). Brown, Michael F., Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2003). Eisen, Mattias Johann, Esivanemate ohverdamised. Eesti mütoloogia, Vol. 3 (Tartu: Eesti Kirjanduse Selts 1920). Kõivupuu, Marju, ‘The Transformation of the Death Cult Over Time: The Example of the Burial Customs in Historic Võrumaa County’, Folklore, 22 (2004), 62– 91, available at: http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol22/burial.pdf (accessed on 31 February 2009). Loorits, Oskar, Grundzüge des Estnischen Volksglaubens, Vol. 1 (Lund:Carl Bloms Boktryckeri A.-B. 1949). Lowenthal, David, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press 1990). Olearius, Adam, Offt begehrte Beschreibung der Neuen Orientalischen Reisen so durch Gelegenheit einer Holsteinischen Legation an den König in Preisen geschelen (Schleswig 1647, and afterwards in several enlarged editions) Palang, Hannes, Anu Printsmann, Marge Konsa and Valter Lang, ‘Ideology and Tradition in Landscape Change: A Case of the Helme Parish, Estonia’, in Tiina Peil and M. Jones (eds), Landscape, Law and Justice (Oslo: Novus Forlag 2005), pp. 288–97. Pentikäinen, Juha (ed.), Kristfrid (Christfried) Ganander. Mythologia Fennica (Klaukkala: Recallmed, 1995). Siikala, Anna-Leena, ‘Spatial Memory and Narration: Oral History and Traces of the Past in a Polynesian Landscape’, Suomen Antropologi 23.2 (1998), 4–19. Torp-Kõivupuu, Marju, The Changing of Death Cult in Time: On the Example of the Historical Võrumaa Burial Customs (Tallinn:Tallinna Pedagoogikaülikool 2003). — ‘Ristipuud maastikul ja usundilises jutupärimuses’ Mäetagused 27 (2004), 105–25, available at: http://www.haldjas.folklore.ee/tagused/nr27/torp.pdf (accessed on 31 March 2009). Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1977). Vilkuna, Janne, ‘Matka menneisyyteen’, Konneveden Joulu (1991), 8–10. — Suomalaiset vainajien karsikot ja ristipuut Kansatieteellinen tapatutkimus. Kansatieteellinen arkisto 39. Helsinki: Suomen Muinasmuistoyhdistys. (1992).

Chapter 18

The Domestic Order and its Feral Threat: The Intellectual Heritage of the Neolithic Landscape Tihamer R. Kover

The satisfactory resolution to our current environmental crisis, many scholars have suggested, might not simply involve a strictly pragmatic and technical solution but rather a more intensive scrutiny and questioning of our basic assumptions concerning the value of the non-human wild world. For, they suggest, the roots of the current environmental crisis lie within our contemporary conceptual milieu, which lauds and lionizes the human capacity to transform physical reality technologically in order to make it more conducive to human desires and ends, and sees non-human nature as having no other value beside its instrumental usefulness for humans. Consequently, it is argued, it is little wonder that we find ourselves presently confronted with an environmental crisis of such enormity and magnitude, as this formulation of the value of non-human nature gives incredible latitude to humans to utilize and exploit the non-human natural world in the service of their desires and projects, no matter how trivial or superficial these desires may be and regardless of their environmental impact and costs – the only restraint imposed on such exploitation being the limitations of our technical means and the ethical demand that the exploitation in question should not directly hinder human welfare. Yet, while this moral interdiction may be vigorous enough to prevent a wholesale global environmental catastrophe, it certainly does not appear to be robust enough to ground the continued existence of the wild non-human natural environment, as it is by no means certain that the disappearance of the wild world and of wild species would necessarily have a detrimental impact on human welfare. Thus modern environmentalism, in its efforts to argue for the preservation of the wild non-human natural world, has sought a ground for its evaluation besides its instrumentality for humans; and it is this endeavour that constitutes one of, if not the, central issues of environmental thought. To this end, many environmental thinkers have argued that the current devaluation of nature is a culturally and historically contingent moment and suggested that its roots lie with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, whose articulation of a fundamental ontological dualism between mind and matter sought to divorce our evaluative perceptions of nature from our intellectual understanding of it, thereby rendering the rest of nature

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essentially meaningless and valueless except for our subjective appraisal and technological appropriation of it. Others have argued that the historical roots of this devaluation of nature lie even deeper still; for even prior to the scientific revolution, they argue, there was a deeply embedded historical trend within western thought which had framed the relationship between humanity and the natural world as a hierarchical oppositional dichotomy in which human dignity and worth was articulated in terms of our separation from and opposition to the rest of nature, and this was seen as grounding and justifying our exploitation and domination of the natural world. The question thus becomes: when did this dichotomy between humanity and nature first became instantiated? Did this happen with the logocentric turn of post-Socratic thought; with the Judaeo-Christian divorce of the sacred from all matter; or, as some ecofeminists have suggested, the emergence of patriarchy? The environmental thinker and historian Paul Shepard posits that this decisive break occurred with the genesis of agriculture. For, according to Shepard, with the advent of agriculture during the Neolithic human beings began to occupy a world which for the first time had been altered to suit their needs and ultimately asserted their domination and suzerainty. The anthropologist Brian Morris concurs with this, writing: ’It has to be recognized that the advent of farming has had a profound effect on the way that humans relate to the natural world, and specifically nonhuman life.’ Similarly, James Serpell argues that the introduction of agriculture ushered in a completely new attitude towards nature and the wild, in that the entire system of agriculture ‘depends on the subjugation of nature and the domination and manipulation of living creatures’. This recognition of the agricultural lifestyle as constant war against the natural world is also noted by Boyce Rensberger when he writes” ‘the fact is that a farmer’s success depends on his winning battles against pest and predators and even against nature’s efforts to recolonize his fields with weeds’. This marked, Shepard argues, a shift in the hunter–gatherer attitude towards wildlife, essentially from one of equality, humility and respect to an agrarian one of hostility and antagonism. Consequently, for Shepard and others, the arrival of domestication marks the introduction of our current destructive attitude towards nature, in that it introduces an ethics of hostile opposition and domination towards non-human life. For agriculture, unlike the hunting and gathering lifestyle it replaced, depends on a decisive separation between the natural and the human world, a state in which the former is seen as completely compliant with human ends and needs and the latter is seen as defiant and antagonistic to the natural world. In  Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (Athens: University of Georgia 1982); see also Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene (Washington, DC: Island Press 1998).    Brian Morris, ‘Woodland and Village: Reflections on the “Animal” Estate in Rural Malawi’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1 (1996): 301–15, p. 304.    James Serpell, In the Company of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell 1986), p. 218.    Boyce Rensberger The Cult of the Wild (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/ Doubleday 1977), pp.17–8. 

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order to understand the decisive nature of this break, it is perhaps necessary first of all to reflect upon the hunting and gathering foraging societies which agriculture replaced and on their relationship to wild nature. With nomadic foragers, only the faintest line separates human living space from the rest of the natural world. Whatever camps and shelters they construct tend to be impermanent and temporary, with little evidence of human occupation a few weeks after their inhabitants have moved away. Moreover, much of the daily life of foragers is spent in a wild non-human environment, which bears little witness to human control or importance. Indeed their very method of subsistence attunes hunter–gatherers to an order not given by humanity but by nature itself. As Tim Ingold notes, ‘the hunter must acquiesce in a design beyond his grasp, which is put into effect by the herds themselves: “men only catch what is given to them”’. The outcome of the hunt, for instance, lies essentially outside the hunter’s control. For, though the hunter’s extensive knowledge of animal behaviour may allow him to forecast the prey’s potential move and adjust his behaviour accordingly, there are still a hundred and one different factors, such as an unexpected veer or charge, which can disturb the successful completion of the hunt. The conditions of the hunt, therefore, constantly attune the hunter’s attention not only to the nuances of wild animal behaviour but also to the acknowledgement that the hunter is essentially not in control, as even the most skilful hunter can come back empty handed. As a result, the ritual preparations of the hunt among many hunter–gatherers emphasize not only the importance of conveying the appropriate attitude of respect to the prey, but also the prevalent belief that the prey itself decides to give itself to the hunter who demonstrates appropriate skill and respect. The anthropologist Henry S. Sharp notes that the Chipewyan of Northern Canada believe that an animal ‘cannot be killed without its consent’ and that animals choose to die for hunters whom they ‘like’ or feel ‘pity’ for. Moreover, should the hunter fail to demonstrate proper respect or humility to the dead prey, or even boast about the kill, the Chipewyan believe that, in future, animals will refuse to give their life to humans. As Sharp writes: Animal abuse, as regards the matter of killing, treatment of the carcass, wastage of the prey animal, and (in the past) allowing dogs to feed improperly upon an animal’s parts can result in an entire species taking offence, all animals refusing to die for a particular hunter and even being so outraged as to abandon whole areas for a time, perhaps longer than a generation   Tim Ingold, Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers: Reindeer Economies and their Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), p. 284.   Henry Sharp, ‘Dry Meat and Gender: The Absence of Chipewyan Ritual for the Regulation of Hunting and Animal Numbers’, in Tim Ingold, David Riches and James Woodburn (eds), Hunter–Gatherers: Property, Power and Ideology ( New York: St Martin’s Press 1988), 183–91, at p. 186.    Ibid.

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The killing of the prey, therefore, is not conceived as an act of dominance or conquest, but as a gift or act of reciprocity, which must be acknowledged with appropriate respect and gratitude. Thus in gatherer–hunter or foraging societies animals and non-human nature are seen as the source of the gift of life, and this acknowledgement of life as a ‘gift’ brings with it, as Anne Primavesi observes in her contribution to this volume, the fundamental recognition that the gift is underserved and that we are indebted to, and dependent on, the sources of this gift. Hence the understanding of life as a gift from the non-human world underscores a fundamental sense of humility and gratitude towards the latter. Indeed this fundamentally egalitarian conception of the relationship between humans and animals, many anthropologists have suggested, appears fundamental to the symbolic thought and cosmological understandings of many foraging peoples. Central to the mythological thought of many foraging populations is the notion that initially, in primordial mythological time, humans and other animals shared a common therianthropic ancestor who, combining both human and animal traits, could easily take on either a human or an animal shape. Gradually, through various mythical events and interludes, creatures began to differentiate and acquired their present form; but it is because of this original mythic ancestral heritage that hunter– gatherers speak of wild species as kin and, like kin, engaged in ties of reciprocity and sharing. For, while foragers are aware that, as humans, they are different from other animal species in that we, humans, possess certain traits which are distinct and unique to our species, they are also aware that this difference was not absolute and that they share, as Ingold writes, ‘a common existential status, namely as

  Likewise, Mathias Gunter records a similar ‘conception of the hunt among the !Kung of Botswana’ in his paper ‘Animals in Bushman Thought, Myth and Art’, in Tim Ingold, David Riches and James Woodburn (eds), Hunter–Gatherers: Property, Power and Ideology (New York: St Martin’s Press 1988), 192–202; so does Bernard Saladin D’ Anglure for the Inuit in ‘Nanook, Super-Male: The Polar Bear in the Imaginary Space and Social Time of the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic’, in Roy Willis (ed), Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World (2nd edn, London: Unwin Hyman 1994), 178–95, at p. 187; and so does Signe Howell for the Chewong of Malaysia in ‘Nature in Culture or Culture in Nature? Chewong Ideas of Humans and Other Species’, in Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson (eds), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge 1996), 127–44. Nor is this view restricted to these three scholars, but appears to be almost universal among hunting and gathering peoples. See Tim Ingold, ‘Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment’, in Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui (eds), Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication (Oxford and Washington: Berg 1996), 117–55; Joseph Campbell, The Way of Animal Powers (London: Times Books 1984); James Serpell, In the Company of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell 1986), pp. 142–9.   Anne Primavesi, ‘Transforming the Theological Climate in Response to Climate Change: Jesus and the Mystery of Giving’, in eadem, Nature, Space and the Sacred (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008).

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living beings’.10 Thus gatherer–hunters, according to Ingold, see wild species as ‘partners with humans in an encompassing economy of sharing’. 11 Unlike foraging, however, agriculture is implicitly based on a deliberate and purposeful spatial separation between a human and a wild, non-human, natural domain and on bringing this domestic area under human control. For the practice of agriculture implicitly requires that the wild diversity of natural ecosystems be removed and replaced by a human imposed order of domesticated crops and fields, which must be kept apart and protected from wild competitors. Moreover, this pragmatic need to keep cultivated space separate from the rest of wild nature frequently results in a landscape where one is confronted by the tangible and visual juxtaposition between the well ordered and well managed plots and fields upon which human communities rely for their very existence and the (apparently) disorderly and chaotic profusion of wild nature, which threatens to overwhelm and undermine this order. Indeed the degree to which the wild represents a very tangible threat to the domestic enterprise is often lost on modern urban audiences, unacquainted as these are with just how precarious a subsistence agrarian life is yet, as Brian Morris reminds us historically, ‘not only is such agriculture highly dependent on rain, but the depredations of wild animals were a constant source of concern and anxiety as they still are’.12 Little wonder, then, that the practice and the landscape of subsistence agriculture tend to instantiate the notion of a dichotomous cosmos, ruled by the conflict between two antagonistic principles – that of a benevolent, domesticated order and that of a malevolent, wild chaos. This oppositional dichotomy between a domestic and a wild realm is one which, as many anthropologists have noted, is present in the cosmological frameworks of many simple horticultural and agrarian peoples. Current anthropological studies of the Aouan, for instance, attest to a widespread presence of a symbolic opposition between the world of the village and that of the bush in their cosmological thought.13 Similarly, Jean Comaroff notes in his ethnographic survey of the Tswana that the opposition between the village and the bush is one of the most central oppositions that exist in the symbolic thought of the Tswana.14 Likewise, in her anthropological monograph of the Lele, Mary Douglas observes that the symbolic distinction between forest and village is fundamental to the Lele cosmos.15 While the particular categories and logic of classification may differ from culture to culture, many 10

 Tim Ingold ‘Hunting and Gathering’ (above, n. 7), p. 133.   Ibid., p. 131. 12  Morris, ‘Woodland and Village’ (above, n. 2), pp. 310–11. 13   Jan P. M. Van der Breemer, ‘Ideas and Usage: Environment in Aouan Society, Ivory Coast’, in Ezibeth Croll and David Parkin (eds), Bushbase, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development (London: Routledge 1992), 97–109, p. 99. 14   Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985), p. 54. 15  May Douglas, ‘The Lele of Kasai’, in Daryll Forde (ed.), African Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1952), 1–26. 11

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ethnologists have suggested that the symbolic opposition between domesticated and wild remains central to most horticultural and agrarian societies. This marks a considerable transformation of foraging cosmology, as the nonhuman world is no longer understood as the complementary context for human culture and subjectivity but rather as its diametrical opposite: with the arrival of agriculture, the relationship between humanity and wild species becomes one not of reciprocity, but of hostile antagonism. The very pragmatic demands of agriculture, by their very nature, necessitate this oppositional. Indeed, as Shepard writes, ‘[i]n many ways, the sensory impact of the village fostered the impression of opposition or duality: things were either of the village or community or they were not, they either favoured the crops or hindered them, were wild or tame, weeds or crops, useful or worthless’.16 For what purpose does the existence of weeds or of other types of wild incursion serve for the farmer? In fact, not only does the wild serve no discernible advantage for the farmer and for agrarian societies in general, but it seems actively to hinder and undermine their aims. Wild flora or weeds usurp the fecundity of the soil, and wild fauna preys on domestic crops solely reserved for humans. While for modern urbanites, far removed as they are from the practical necessities of agricultural food production, the magnitude of such feral threat may seem overblown, as Morris reminds us, for simple agriculturalists the depredations of wild flora and fauna are a ‘constant source of concern and anxiety’, and failure to protect against these depredations can spell the difference between success or outright disaster. Thus, with agriculture, the wild becomes the enemy of the tame as its purposes seem to be constantly working to undermine the domestic human order. In his book The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur observes that order is often unequivocally identified with the good and chaos and lack of order with evil.17 While the cultural universality of Ricoeur’s claim may be debated, the claim itself certainly appears to hold true for many agrarian societies. For, as we have seen, the entire agrarian enterprise is dependent and prefaced on the implementation and maintenance of a spatial order, the absence or failure of which could spell disaster. Little wonder, therefore, that the principle of order itself is understood as synonymous with the good and disorder or chaos is identified with evil. Moreover, in this light, it is hardly surprisingly that wild or untamed nature is frequently seen in agrarian cosmologies as a source of disorder, malevolence and evil, and is often personified by demons, ghosts and monsters. Colin Turnbull, for instance, notes that, while Mbuti foragers understand the forest as a provider and a source of vitality, their horticultural Bantu neighbours fear and loathe it. Constantly struggling to maintain their hard-won clearing against the encroachments of the forests, Bantu farmers see the ordered life of the village as surrounded and threatened by the chaotic and malevolent forces of the forest and believe the wilderness to   Shepard, Nature and Madness (above, n. 1), p. 20.  Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper and Row 1967). 16 17

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be inhabited by demons and monsters.18 A similar, central, opposition between the homestead and the wild is noted for instance among the agrarian Lugbara of Uganda. The homestead is identified with order and authority, while the wild is seen as existing in a state of chaos which threatens to overwhelm the established order of the homestead.19 Again, Morris observes the existence of a comparable cosmological dichotomy among rural Malawians, where the agricultural community is seen as embodying order and ‘wildlife from the woodlands is seen as fundamentally hostile and antagonistic to human endeavours’. Indeed, wild mammals are frequently referred to by rural Malawians as chirombo – that is, useless and harmful.20 This evaluative identification of order as good and of chaos and disorder with what is malevolent and evil is similarly evident in the narrative theme of the creation myths of many agrarian peoples. For, just as agriculture demands (quite literally) the conquest of the feral wilderness and its transformation into an ordered, useful, and domesticated landscape, this act of human conquest is, as the historian of religion Mircea Eliade notes, a fundamental trope in agrarian mythology. In contrast to the cosmogonic myths of foragers which see the creation of the world as being the result of the cooperative enterprise of many different species, a narrative element common to the chthonic mythologies of many agrarian cultures is to see the creation of the world as having resulted from the act of a cultural hero or anthropomorphized god who vanquished the forces of primeval wild chaos – usually personified as a great monster – then used its carcass to form the fundamental features of the world. In the Babylonian myth of creation narrated in Enuma Elish, for instance, the monster Tiamat is killed by the chief god Marduk, who then uses her carcass to fashion the earth and the heavens.21 A similar cosmogonic theme of primordial chaos and conquering divinities who bring and establish order can be found in the Aztec myth of the creation of the fifth sun, where the gods Tezcaatilipoca and Quetzacoatl, after defeating the great earth monster, split her in half, in order to form the earth and sky.22 This marks a significant change from the cosmology of foragers and farmers also in that the gift of life is no longer seen as a gift from the non-human nature, but rather as one coming from the supernatural anthropomorphic divinities themselves. In her paper ‘The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer–Hunters’, the anthropologist Nurit Bird-David 18  Colin Turnbull, The Mbuti Pygmies: Change and Adaptation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1983), pp. 30–1. 19   John Middleton, The Lugbara (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1965), p. 23. 20  Morris, ‘Woodland and Village’ (above, n. 2), p. 311. 21  Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed (New York: World Publishing 1958), p. 401. 22   Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), p. 173.

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notes that, whereas foragers regard the wild environment and wild species as the source of the gift of life, farmers regard the human ancestors of the community as the source of this gift.23 Moreover, Shepard notes that the introduction and development of domesticated society seems to have been accompanied by the progressive anthropomorphization of the sacred, the therianthropic cultural heroes of foraging societies being replaced by the more distinctly humanized gods and divinities, who gradually usurped responsibility for the natural world and its phenomena.24 This, as Shepard argues, reflects the fact that the domestic environment in which humans dwell is itself a product of human manipulation. For example, the domestic crops and chattel upon which the agrarian relies have been altered over generations, through selective breeding, to suit human requirements and needs, and the immediate landscape has been transformed so as to be more directly and exclusively conducive to the fulfilment of human aims. Thus the progressive anthropomorphization of the sacred, Shepard suggests, is reflective of the fact that the world in which humans find themselves is increasingly their own creation and that human concerns and needs are dominant. This touches upon – and challenges – the position of a certain school of ecofeminist thought perhaps most closely identified with the work of Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler, which argues that the earliest agrarian Neolithic communities were in fact distinguished from our own in that they understood humanity as being embedded in the natural world and they saw humans’ relationship with the latter in terms of an ethos of concern, respect and reverence for it.25 In marshalling evidence for their case, these theorists point to the widespread prevalence of the identification of the earth as female in agrarian cosmologies and of the pervasive figure of a mother earth goddess in most agrarian pantheons. This identification of the earth as female, they suggest, is indicative of a system of values which was prefaced upon the more feminine qualities of nurturance, empathy and care. In these early Neolithic communities, they argue, nature and the earth were not conceived of as something separate and apart from the human world, something we must control and dominate, but rather as the maternal, nurturing source of all life – which human beings (in line with this more feminine ethos) sought to participate in, tend to, foster and develop. Such theorists contend, therefore, that the notion of a separation from, and domination over, the natural world did not occur with the introduction of agriculture per se, but rather with the emergence of patriarchy or of male-dominated societies, which lionized the masculine virtues of autonomy and control over the feminine qualities of nurturance and care. Thus this identification between women and nature would mean that the same symbolic 23

  Nurit Bird-David, ‘The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer–Hunters’, Current Anthropology 31 (1990), 189–96 at pp. 190–1. 24  Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (above, n. 1), p. 26. 25  Raine Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future ( San Francisco: Harper and Row 1987). See also Marija Gumbutas, The Goddess and Gods of old Europe, 7000–35000 bc (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1982).

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logic used to justify male domination over women was used to validate human or masculine domination over nature. Consequently, many ecofeminists argue that the devaluation of nature was concurrent with and dependent upon the devaluation of women, and that, if we wish to address the fundamental roots of our current environmental crisis, we must first address the primary causes of patriarchy. However, leaving aside the question of how patriarchy occurred in the first place (a subject of considerable debate even within ecofeminist circles: some, such as Eisler and Gimbutas, argue that it arose with the Indo-European invasions of Europe circa 3000bce, while others argue that the introduction of plow agriculture or civilization was the instigating factor ), this perspective not only rests on certain essentializing assumptions concerning gender (women are essentially nurturing and caring, while men are inherently violent and domineering), but it also seems to take as given certain popular preconceptions of agriculture as essentially a bucolic and placid pursuit. For it is assumed that a life centered around the tending of plants and animals imbues a peaceful and nurturing disposition, often identified with the feminine sex. Yet this fails to take into account the considerable archaeological and anthropological evidence26 to the effect that the adoption of agriculture is generally linked to an exponential rise and increase in the level of inter-communal hostility and warfare.27 Moreover, it overlooks the fact that the very practice of agriculture is itself inherently prefaced upon, and instantiates, the notion of domination and control over the natural world, as it requires the violent imposition of the domestic order upon the non-human natural world and the aggressive defense of it. Indeed, the very conception and trope of nature as the great divine earth mother is symptomatic of this agrarian logic of domination over and devaluation of wild non-human nature, as it reflects the progressive anthropomorphization of the sacred inaugurated by the onset of agriculture, whereby the sources of life and 26  For a good overview of the evidence for this, see Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (2nd edn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2000), pp. 136–40; Patrick D. Nolan, ‘Toward an Ecological–Evolutionary Theory of the Incident of Warfare in Pre-Industrial Societies’, Sociological Theory 21.1 (March 2003), 18–30; Melvin Ember, ‘Statistic Evidence for an Ecological Explanation of Warfare’, American Anthropologist 84.3 (Sept. 1982), 645–9; Bruce M. Knauft ‘Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution’, Current Anthropology 32.4 (August–October 1991), 391–423. 27  Though it may seem, intuitively, that the obverse would be the case, as agriculture is often perceived to be a benign, gentle and nurturing pursuit, this view overlooks the obvious fact that implicit in the commitment to the agrarian and horticultural way of life is a commitment to defending the land one farms. For, unlike hunter–gatherers, who can easily move to another area in the face of environmental stress or external invaders (the most they stand to lose being a few days’ hunting), agriculturalists can not so easily pick up and leave, as this would mean not only the loss of up to a year’s worth of labor but also the distinct possibility of hunger and starvation. Moreover, the growth in population density which accompanies the emergence of agriculture tends to lead to conflict between communities and competition for increasingly scarce resources.

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of the sacred were increasingly couched in human terms and placed under human control.28 Furthermore, this position ignores the considerable anthropological evidence of sexual inequality and male domination29 within most horticultural and simple agrarian societies which most closely approximate the cultural conditions of the early Neolithic, as well as the argument put forth by the anthropologist Marvin Harris that the introduction of agriculture itself was responsible for the genesis of patriarchy. In his essay The Origins of Male Supremacy and the Oedipus Complex, Harris links the origins of patriarchy to the considerable intensification and exponential increase in inter-communal hostility and warfare which generally occurs with the adoption of agriculture. He argues that, because men are for the most part reproductively superfluous and on average faster and physically stronger than women, the role of the warrior is almost universally reserved for men, and the cult of male dominance and the devaluation of women occurred out of the need to persuade men to make the ultimate sacrifice and give their lives in defense of the community. Thus prowess in battle and the willingness to quarrel or fight in order to protect one’s reputation or virility become the ultimate and supreme test and measures of a man’s worth and value. Consequently, men who are tough and pugnacious reap the praise of their community, and those who fail to live up to this manly ideal or to display the requisite masculine virtues risk public disapproval and scorn for being weak, cowardly and ‘womanly’; for accompanying this high cultural regard for masculinity there is also a corresponding devaluation of women and of the feminine, as a means to dissuade men from avoiding the rather traumatic prospect of a violent death through warfare. This possibly explains therefore the widespread existence, among many simple horticultural and agrarian communities, of a number of practices which are indicative of the subordinate status of women – such as polygamy, patrilocality, patrilineal bias in property and descent, the ritual uncleanliness of women, the training of men for combat and bravery, the prevalence and legitimacy of wife-beating, and the predominant 28   While it has been suggested by Peter Scott that Primavesi, in her work From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity, sees agriculture as the predominant source of this oppositional dichotomy between humanity and nature, it seems that, throughout this text and others (such as Sacred Gaia), she relies on, and lauds, the agrarian religious conception of the Earth as a female and suggests that the root of the devaluation of nature lay in the domination of women. This would appear to overlook the fact that the image of the Earth as a female is already symptomatic of the devaluation of nature and human dominance over it, just as it is indicative of a progressive anthropomorphization of the sacred whereby humans come to see themselves or some human-like gods as the source of creation and of the gift of life. 29   See Thomas Gregor and Donald Tuzin, ‘Comparing Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia’, in Thomas Gregor and Donald Tuzin (eds), Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia (Berkley: University of California Press 2001), 1–17; Beth Conklin, ‘Women’s Blood, Warrior’s Blood, and the Conquest of Vitality’, Gregor and Tuzin (eds) Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia (above), 141–74.

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identification of women with wild, untamed nature.30 Moreover, while it is true that with the introduction of agriculture women became identified with the fertility of the land, this identification, as Shepard notes, has probably ‘gone against women ever since’,31 for just as the farmer sought to secure access to and control of the earth’s fecundity so too he sought to control women’s fertility. Thus it would appear that, contrary to the claims of some ecofeminists that the rise of patriarchy lies at the historical roots of the devaluation of nature, it appears that the adoption of agriculture was not only responsible for introducing the notion of human suzerainty and domination over nature, but possibly patriarchy as well. Consequently, we have seen how the ecology and subsistence practices of agriculture, with its need to impose and maintain an artificial order upon the natural world, initiated the symbolic conception of the oppositional cosmological dichotomy, in which the domestic order became synonymous with the good and the wild became a symbol of chaotic malevolent evil. This fundamental oppositional dichotomy would underscore human claims to control and dominion over the natural world and would suggest that whatever lay outside this order or was opposed to it was at best useless and at worst malevolent. Though it is outside the limited scope of this paper to trace the various historical permeations of this view leading up to our present age, Shepard argues that the influence of the oppositional dichotomy between the human and the wild world inaugurated in the Neolithic is still very much with us and lies behind much of our current environmental crisis. For, perhaps, part of the solution to this present crisis would be for us to begin again to re-examine how the natural world came to be seen as essentially useless and empty, except in relation to our own needs and ends. Maybe then it will be possible to recapture some of the sense of humility and respect displayed by foragers towards wild species ­– attitudes which are perhaps necessary in order to prevent their loss.

30  Conklin ‘Women’s Blood’ (above, n. 28); Johnson and Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies (above, n. 25), p. 130; Marvin Harris, ‘The Origins of Male Supremacy and the Oedipus Complex’, in Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York: Vintage Books 1974), 81–97, at p. 86. 31  Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene (Washington, DC: Island Press 1998), p. 96.

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Bibliography Bird-David, Nurit, ‘The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer–Hunters’, Current Anthropology 31 (1990), 189–96. Campbell, Joseph, The Way of Animal Powers (London: Times Books 1984). Clendinnen, Inga, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991). Comaroff, Jean, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985). Conklin, Beth, ‘Women’s Blood, Warrior’s Blood, and the Conquest of Vitality’, in Thomas Gregor and Donald Tuzin (eds), Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia (Berkley: University of California Press 2001), 141–74. Douglas, Mary, ‘The Lele of Kasai’, in Daryll Forde (ed), African Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1952), 1–26. Eliade, Mircea, Patterns of Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed (New York: World Publishing 1958). Eisler, Raine, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future ( San Francisco: Harper and Row 1987) . Ember, Marvin, ‘Statistic Evidence for an Ecological Explanation of Warfare’, American Anthropologist 84.3 (Sept. 1982), 645–9. Gregor, Thomas and Donald Tuzin, ‘Comparing Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia’, in Thomas Gregor and Donald Tuzin (eds), Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia (Berkley: University of California Press 2001): 1–17 Guenther, Mathias, ‘Animals in Bushman Thought, Myth and Art’, in Tim Ingold, David Riches and James Woodburn (eds), Hunter–Gatherers: Property, Power and Ideology (New York : St Martin’s Press 1988), 192–202. Gumbutas, Marija, The Goddess and Gods of old Europe, 7000–35000 bc (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1982). Harris, Marvin, ‘The Origins of Male Supremacy and the Oedipus Complex’, in idem, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York: Vintage Books 1974), 81–97. Howell, Signe, ‘Nature in Culture or Culture in Nature? Chewong Ideas of Humans and Other Species’, in Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson (eds), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge 1996), 127–44. Ingold, Tim, Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers: Reindeer Economies and their Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988). — ‘Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment’, in Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui (eds), Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication (Oxford and Washington: Berg 1996): 117–55. Johnson, Allen W. and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (2nd edn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2000).

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Knauft, Bruce M. ‘Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution’, Current Anthropology 32.4 (August-October 1991), 391–28. Middleton, John, The Lugbara (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1965). Morris, Brian, ‘Woodland and Village: Reflections on the “Animal” Estate in Rural Malawi’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1 (1996), 301–15. Nolan, Patrick D., ‘Toward an Ecological–Evolutionary Theory of the Incident of Warfare in Pre-Industrial Societies’, Sociological Theory 21.1 (March 2003), 18–30. Primavesi, Anne, From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1991). — Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth Systems Science (London and New York: Routledge 2000). — ‘Transforming the Theological Climate in Response to Climate Change: Jesus and the Mystery of Giving’, in eadem, Nature, Space and the Sacred (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), 1–10. Ricoeur, Paul, Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper and Row 1967). Rensberger, Boyce, The Cult of the Wild (Garden City, New York : Anchor Press/ Doubleday 1977). Saladin D’Andlure, Bernard, ‘Nanook, Super-Male: The Polar Bear in the Imaginary Space and Social Time of the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic’, in Roy Willis (ed.), Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World (2nd edn , London: Unwin Hyman 1994): 178–95. Serpell, James, In the Company of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell 1986). Sharp, Henry S., ‘Dry Meat and Gender: The Absence of Chipewyan Ritual for the Regulation of Hunting and Animal Numbers’, in Tim Ingold, David Riches and James Woodburn (eds), Hunter–Gatherers: Property, Power and Ideology ( New York: St Martin’s Press 1988), 183–91. Shepard, Paul, Man in the Landscape: A History of Esthetics of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press 1969). — Nature and Madness (Athens: University of Georgia 1982). — Coming Home to the Pleistocene (Washington, DC: Island Press 1998). Turnbull, Colin M., The Mbuti Pygmies: Change and Adaptation (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston 1983). Van der Breemer, Jan P. M., ‘Ideas and Usage: Environment in Aouan Society, Ivory Coast’, in Ezibeth Croll and David Parkin (eds), Bushbase, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development (London: Routledge 1992), 97–109.

Chapter 19

Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan: Spiritual Mission, Health and Pilgrimage Gulnara Aitpaeva

In Kyrgyzstan and some other central Asian countries, a sacred site is traditionally called mazar. The term mazar originates from Arabic, where initially it designated a mausoleum or a tomb. The word has evolved in people’s consciousness to acquire the sense of a place which is sacred on account of the presence of spirits or of a supernatural power. From records of Kyrgyz culture as well as from traditions and rituals, it is known that the cult of Mazars was very widespread before the 1917 Revolution. On the one hand, it was connected with the cult of ancestors and of the lands where they had lived. On the other hand, worshipping at sacred natural sites was related to the cult of nature. In Kyrgyz traditional thinking, the idea of the sacred is intimately connected with nature and natural sites. Kyrgyzstan was a part of the Soviet Union until 1991, and Soviet policies and ideologies limited its freedom of religious and spiritual practice. After the collapse of the Soviet system and in the resulting conditions of the limited power of the new Kyrgyzstan state, traditional practices, including religious ones, have begun to re-emerge or are being revived. These phenomena have taken a variety of forms. In Kyrgyzstan, the revival of religious consciousness – through erecting and discovering mazars and worshipping at them, and through the shift from an officially atheist state to independence and religious freedom – has brought a return to the widespread custom of pilgrimage to the sacred sites. At present there are two types of sacred sites in the country: natural sites, which include springs, mountains, forests, stones, trees, lakes, caves, and the like; and then mazars created by humans, which include mausoleums of famous people, ancient buildings and graves of martyrs (such as victims of political repression).

  Islam: Encyclopedichskiii Slovar (Moscow: Nauka, S.Prozorov 1991), p. 15.   Samuil Abramzon, Kyrgyzy i ix etno-geneticheckie, istoricheskie i kulturnyie sviazi (Frunze: Kyrgyzstan 1990), pp. 307–322; 334–353.    Kinds of mazars are described by Talas practitioners in Mucaram Toktogulova, ‘Syncretism of Beliefs (Kyrgyzchylyk and Musulmanchylyk)’, in Gulnara Aitpaeva, Mucaram Toktogulova and Aida Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007), p. 515.  

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Fig. 19.1

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Built site: Mausoleum Zulpukor.

The concomitant antiquity and modernity of the pilgrimage to sacred sites shows that this is a phenomenon of unusual stability and universality throughout Kyrgyzstan. In all probability, mazars have unique characteristics and functions, and these are meaningful for different epochs and societies. But when the Aigine Research Center began in 2004 to research into the phenomenon of mazars, it was virtually impossible to find published materials about their number throughout    The historian Saul Abramson was the first scholar to describe Kyrgyz mazars in his book 1990 Kyrgyzy i ih ethno-geneticheskie I istoriko-kulturnye svyazi [The Kyrgyz and their Ethnogenetical and Historical–Cultural Connections] (above, n. 2). On the basis of fieldwork material collected in the mid-1950s, Abramson fixed the presence of mazars in a variety of places around the country and described some of them. Three definitions of mazar are presented in a new encyclopaedia, Kyrgyz Taryhy, A. Asankanov (ed) (Bishkek: Kyrgyzpoligraphkombinat 2003), p. 276: 1: ‘Cemeteries, graves’; 2: ‘Sacred sites related to Islamic practice (mosques, madrasas, religious schools, houses of religious leaders)’; 3: ‘Sacred trees (lone poplars, rowan–trees, etc.)’. All three definitions are genealogically connected with the meaning of mazars as shrines of the saints or places of the shahid’s death, but they emphasize different aspects. A special publication dedicated to the sacred sites in the Issuk-Kul province is the book Call of Our Ancestors: Natural Sacred Sites in the Issyk-Kol Biosphere Territory (Bishkek, 2004), published by Estelik Public Foundation (Kyrgyzstan) together with People and Nature, a German non-governmental organization. It contains descriptions of fifty-four sacred sites in the Issuk-Kul province. See also Cholpon Dyikanova (ed.), The Sacred Sites of Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek: FOP 2004). This publication does not describe any sacred sites in particular detail, but it includes important linguistic and

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the country, when and how they were erected or discovered, who visits them and why, how they operate, and what the public policy is in regard to mazar worship. The fact that the custom of visiting mazars has been preserved until the present is as obvious as the existence of Lake Issyk-Kul or Ala Too Mountains, but the social, cultural and religious phenomena related to mazars have not been studied. Reasons for Pilgrimage and Types of Pilgrims In order to find responses to the aforementioned and other questions related to sacred sites, the Aigine Research Centre (ARC) started extensive field work in 2005 in the province of Talas in Kyrgyzstan, with financial support from the Christensen Fund (USA). In 2007, ARC published the findings of two years of research in the collective volume Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas – an in-depth study of the pilgrimage, worship, and healing practices involving mazars. The book is divided into two sections, which present the world of mazars from two points of view: the insider perspective of pilgrims and the outsider perspective of researchers and cultural specialists. Because of widespread Soviet restrictions, gathering information on, and describing, sacred sites was impossible until ten years ago. Up until then, stories about most mazars survived only in the oral tradition. We collected information about 157 sacred sites in Talas, then described and mapped them. However, taking into consideration the practitioners’ concerns about making the map available to a wide audience, this map has not been published yet. The wish to ‘keep the sacred secret’ is typical of some practitioners. In Talas, the ARC has worked with about 400 participants. The only criterion for being chosen as an informant was that the candidate should already be making more or less regular pilgrimages to sacred sites. During a six-month period, the Aigine team visited the sites mostly on Thursdays and Fridays and asked simple questions, for instance when and why people started visiting mazars, where and how they usually went to worship, or what outcomes they expected from a pilgrimage. On the sacred sites my colleagues and I met people of different ages, sexes and social status. As for ethnicity, about 99 per cent of the informants were

ethnographical information and articles of scientists and informants giving their personal perspective on various aspects of the subject.   Talas is one of the seven provinces of the country. It is the smallest one of Kyrgyzstan, and it is divided into four rayons: ‘the territory of the oblast is 11,400 sq. km. It is situated in the north–west of the country and includes 98 villages and Talas City.’ See Aman Karypkulov (ed.), Regions of Kyrgyzstan. Talas oblast (Bishkek: Kyrgyz Encyclopaedia Press 2001), p. 10.    Zemfira Inogamova, ‘Keeping the Sacred a Secret’, (in the present volume).

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Fig. 19.2

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Kyrgyzchylyk Followers on the Sacred Site, 1.

Kyrgyz. The main reasons driving Kyrgyz people to go on a pilgrimage are health, fertility, well-being, and spiritual needs. Our field research also revealed that there is a strong popular belief that certain people are chosen for life missions such as healing, reciting the epics, guarding sacred sites, or mediating in different ways between this and the other world, and that their health and well-being are directly affected by their acceptance or rejection of this spiritual mission. In other words, the health of those selected for spiritual service depends on whether they accept or reject their ‘calling’. Only people who accept their spiritual mission can live a happy and healthy life, in the social approval of others. The ones who reject it are likely to suffer long-term illnesses and to die early. The concept of a divine call and of the obligation to meet it is well-known in shamanistic studies. In Talas, this concept works on a very diverse spectrum of spiritual practices, which are unified by a general term kyrgyzchylyk (‘Kyrgyzness’) – sometimes also called aktyk (‘whiteness’) and aruuluk (‘purity’). Later on, when ARC started working in the province of Ysyk-Kul in 2006–2008, we found similar terms and concepts.    See the details in Gulnara Aitpaeva, ‘The Main Regulations on Visiting a Mazar and Why People Go’, in Aitpaeva, Toktogulova and Egemberdieva (eds) Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan (above, n. 3), 124–35.   Roger Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism (Moscow: Institution of Transpersonal Psychology Press 1996), p. 46; Mircha Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Kiev: Sophia 1998), pp. 23–29.

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The Concept of Kyrgyzchylyk Kyrgyzchylyk is the key word (and concept) we regularly encounter in researching the sacred sites in Talas and in Issuk–Kul. There is no easy translation of this term, either into Russian or into English; not even generally accepted definitions of it are available in the Kyrgyz language, where it has many different meanings. The term does not occur in classic works on Kyrgyz ethnography, And not all Kyrgyz speakers use it in their everyday life. The word kyrgyzchylk consists of two parts: Kyrgyz and chylyk. Kyrgyz is the name of an ethnic group. Chylyk10 is a collective suffix which designates a totality of definite characteristics and qualities. For example, musulmanchylyk is translated as ‘muslimness’; tengirchilik as ‘Tengrian beliefs’ (that is, beliefs related to Tengir, the sky god); tuuganchylyk – as ‘kinship’. There is no single positive or negative connotation assigned to this suffix: koshomatchylyk means ‘groveling’, and mei’manchylyk means ‘hospitality’. Kyrgyzchylyk can be translated as ‘Kyrgyzness’ and defined as the totality of definite characteristics and qualities inherent to Kyrgyz ethnicity. In the widest sense, kyrgyzchylyk is everything which is in any way connected with the traditional identification of the Kyrgyz people. The meanings and uses of a word with such polysemic potential will depend on historical period and context. During the period of Russian and Soviet rule, the term took on a negative meaning: the Russians assumed that the Kyrgyz were a backward people with a lower place on the scale of social evolution, and therefore kyrgyzchylyk connoted this assumed backwardness and state of ignorance. At present, many Russians and Kyrgyz continue to use kyrgyzchylyk to refer to negative aspects of Kyrgyz life. For instance, when they wish to criticize the system of promoting relatives in the sphere of public administration or of making presents to people at the top, Kyrgyz speakers may characterize it as kyrgyzchylyk. Also, they sometimes use the related word kyrgyzbai to stress negative aspects of male behaviour. But the overall place of the term on semantic maps has changed radically nowadays. Kyrgyzchylyk is more closely associated with the philosophy of

 Abramzon, Kyrgyzy i ix ethno–geneticheskie i istoriko–kulturnyie svyazi’ (above, n. 2); B. Amanaliev, Iz istorii philosophskoi mysli kyrgyzskogo naroda (Ilim: Frunze 1963); B. Amanaliev, ‘Razmyshlenie o Religioznoy Ideologii i Svobodomyslii v Istoricheskom Opyte Kyrgyzsckogo Naroda’, in Obshestvennaia Psixologia I Religioznyie Predrassudki (Ilim: Frunze 1970), 25–64; T. Bayalieva, Religioznyie Perejitki Kyrgyzskogo Naroda i Ix Preodolenie (Ilim: Frunze 1981); Oljobai’ Karataev and Salai’din Eraliev, Kyrgyz Etnografiasy boiuncha Sozduk (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2005). 10   -chilik, -chuluk, -chülük, perhaps –chi- and -lik. 

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tengirchilik11 and with such concepts as ‘a specific system of world perception’, ‘a particular way’, ‘a system of ideas and values inherent in Kyrgyz people only’.12 Kyrgyzchylyk as Spiritual Mission As was mentioned above, kyrgyzchylyk is more actively used today to define a people ‘chosen’ to carry a particular spiritual mission. The spiritual spectrum of kyrgyzchylyk includes folk medicine in its most varies forms – for instance tabypchylyk (herb and breath healing), kuuchuluk (conjuring), bubu (healing performed by women), bakshylyk (healing and acting with shamanistic techniques)13 – as well as activities such as ai’tymchylyk (soothsaying), manaschylyk (the narration of the Manas epic14), dubanachylyk (the dervish phenomenon), jai’chylyk (the human influence on weather), tüsh jooru (the interpretation of dreams), tölgöchülük (divination), shai’yktyk (caring for mazars), and others. Kyrgyzchylygy bar – a person carrying kyrgyzchylyk – is someone with an extraordinary gift for curing, reciting the epic, and other traditional practices, although without any special education and training. The idea of a supernatural gift being received by a person speaks of an interconnection between different worlds and times. Kyrgyzchylygy barlar (kyrgyzchylyk bearers) of any type and quality are united through a capacity to mediate. Visible and invisible worlds, the world of people and the world of spirits, the world of the owners of gifts and of their ‘masters’ or patrons, the world of thinking and feeling creatures besides the human – all these are implied in kyrgyzchylyk. For kyrgyzchylyk bearers, the past, the present and the future are inseparably linked. On this understanding, people with kyrgyzchylyk ( kurgyzchylygy barlar) are endowed with an ability to transcend any boundaries: body, brain, time, space. There are two main indicators which help to identify kyrgyzchylyk and to differentiate it from a psychic disorder: a. inheritance – when one/several of a subject’s forefathers or relatives

 C. Ömüraliev, Tengirchilik (Kant: Kron 1994).   K. Koshaliev, Kyrgyzchylyk (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2007);. Ibragim Kyzy Zulfia and Mamyrasul Tajiev, Tenir Ata (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2006); J. K. Abdymambet Sariev, Kyrgyzdar Duino Elin Jakshylykka Alyp Barat (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2004); E. Ajibaev, Ruxtar Menen Syrdashuu (Bishkek: DEMI 2008). 13  Duishen Adylov, ‘Healing at Mazars: Sources of Healing, Methods of Curative Impact of Healers and Criteria of their Professional Qualifications’, in Aitpaeva, Toktogulova and Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan (above, n. 3), 377–95. 14  The great Kyrgyz epic Manas has roughly 500,000 lines. Manas telling and tellers played a special role in traditional Kyrgyz society, and the epic held a special place among Kyrgyz folk works. 11

12

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possessed out of the ordinary abilities and practised them b. the presence of a prolonged disease the cause of which cannot be determined by medical experts. These indicators of kyrgyzchylyk seem to confirm the conclusions drawn by Mircea Eliade in the 1950s in the course of his research on Shamanism in other cultures.15 There is a certain pattern of behaviour which is typical of all the representatives of traditional Kyrgyz culture. Everything starts with a prolonged disease without detectable causes. As a rule, treatment in institutions of formal medicine does not yield positive results and people have to search for alternative cures. According to Burul Kojobekova, a healer from Talas, ‘[p]eople having kyrgyzchylyk will never recover with the help of medicine’.16 This is a belief of all the spiritual practitioners in Talas and Issyk-Kul with whom the AiRC has worked. Such diseases can be revealed at any age; they often coincide with twelve-year cycles in a person’s life.17 Holders of kyrgyzchylyk frequently begin by falling sick during childhood, but acute diseases can develop at any age. Diseases are accompanied by strange and terrible dreams or visions on one hand and by a series of accidents around the ‘chosen person’ on the other hand. In most cases, that is when a person is diagnosed as kyrgyzchylyk karmady (or as ‘being caught by kyrgyzchylyk’). The literal meaning of this expression testifies to the fact that, initially, kyrgyzchylyk was conceived of as an animated power appearing from beyond the person’s senses. Diseases, failures and visions force the subjects to start searching for ways in which they may carry out their mission. Denial and misunderstanding of one’s mission have serious consequences and might lead to death. Searching for a way to carry out one’s mission includes looking for a mentor who can explain what is happening, and communicating with supernatural forces in order for the subjects to realize that by themselves. Like gifted people in other cultures,18 an overwhelming majority of those ‘chosen’ by kyrgyzchylyk have a mentor. Sometimes a pair ‘mentor–follower’ may do not work properly (as in the case of Sonunbubu S.); then the needy follower has to start another round of searching. Some practitioners say that they do not have a mentor – or rather that their mentors are not people but supernatural forces. Thus neither the healer Burul Kojobekova from Talas nor the  Eliade, Shamanism (above, n. 8), p. 27.   Kojobekova, Burul, ‘Scientific Medicine Never Helps People who Posesss Kyrgyzchylyk’, in Aitpaeva, Toktogulova and Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan (above, n. 3), p. 242. 17  On the concept of the life cycle (muchol), see Asya Mukambetova, ‘Tengrianskyi kalendar kak osnova nomadicheskoi tzivilizatzii’ [‘Tengrian Calendar as a Basis of Nomadic Civilization’] [on Kazax material], in Serik Ajigali (ed.), Istoria i Kultura Aralo-Kaspia [Aral-Caspian History and Culture] (Almaty: Academy of Science Press 2001). 18  Eliade, Shamanism (above, n. 8), pp. 93–112; Walsh, Spirit of Shamanism (above, n. 8), pp. 38, 39. 15

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Manas teller Ulan Ismailov from Kara-Kol had human mentors: they perceived the fundamentals of their gifts with the help of supernatural tutors and teachers. This method is also known in other cultures.19 A period of realization of one’s ‘specific’ way and of carrying out one’s obligations is accompanied by considerable improvement in health and by gain in stability and internal peace across one’s life. Generally, this way of accepting and carrying out various practices of spiritual kyrgyzchylyk might be considered to be one of the manifestations of a universal model, other manifestations of which have been described by M. Eliade, R. Walsh, P. Vitebsky, and Virlana Tkach.20 Usually, different rituals are practised at the sacred places, in the presence of a mentor and close relatives. They symbolize certain steps of the implementation of a spiritual mission. At many mazars of Kyrgyzstan, especially on Thursday nights, one can run into people who are undergoing a test.21 One of the Aigine respondents, the dubana (dervish) Atamkul, started his mission in 1985– one year before Gorbachev’s perstroika. According to the dervish, One of my ancestors was Baabedin.22 I did not know about it. I even did not know that I had dubana qualities and skills. Later I became suddenly sick and had mental problems. I could not understand why this was happening. I went to many doctors; none of them could help me. One day I met one famous dubana from Issyk-Kul region. He said that one of my ancestors was a great dubana and if I do not accept dubanachylyk I will not get healed. I wanted to live further and I accepted this. There are only two ways to get away from dubanachylyk: first is death and second is acceptance of it. I decided to continue my ancestor’s way.23

Numerous interviews with people selected for spiritual services demonstrate with a predictable consistency similar milestones across their stories. In this case, the

  Ibid.; Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman Voyages of the Soul, Trance, Ecstasy and Healing from Siberia to the Amazon (London Duncan Baird Publisher 2001), pp. 59–63. 20  Eliade, Shamanism (above, n. 8, pp. 39–119; Walsh, Spirit of Shamanism (above, n. 8), pp. 31–104; Vitebsky, Shaman Voyages (above, n. 19), pp. 52–94; Virlana Tkacz, Sayan Zhambalov and Wanda Phipps, Shanar Dedication Ritual of a Buryat Shaman in Siberia as Conducted by Bayir Richiniv (New York: Parabola Books 2002), pp. 12–14. 21  G. Aitpaeva, ‘The Phenomenon of Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan: Interweaving of Mythology and Reality’, in Thomas Schaaf and Cathy Lee (eds), Conserving Cultural and Biological Diversity: The Role of Sacred Natural Sites and Cultural Landscapes (Paris: UNESCO 2006), pp. 122–3. 22   Baabedin Bahhaudin is the name of the Buhara protector; usually the heroes of Central Asian epics call to his help. 23  Atamkul Dubana, ‘There Are only Two Ways to Get Away from Dubanachylyk’, translated by Kanybek Konokbaev, in Aitpaeva, Toktogulova and Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan (above, n. 3), pp. 258–9. 19

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freedom is concluded in choosing between a life with predestination and a death and suffering in the case of its denial. Ancient Values and Islamic Norms Islam is the main religion in Kyrgyzstan, and there is an academic tradition of considering Islam in Kyrgyzstan as a mixture of traditional and Islamic beliefs.24 However, as Nathan Light has pointed out, ‘[i]n the case of Kyrgyz religion, throughout the twentieth century both Soviet scholars and clerical officials have attempted to distinguish Islamic and native practices, while popular practitioners have generally been less concerned with these divisions’.25 The overwhelming majority of traditional practitioners or kyrgyzchylyk holders consider themselves to be Muslims and freely combine the ancient values with Islamic norms, which are as traditional to them as the pre-Islamic ones. The differentiation between ‘Islamic’ and ‘pre-Islamic’ was itself was erased for them. ARC research in 2004–2006 has shown that Muslims of this type are typical and widespread, yet they do not voice their position. One of the reasons why they are silent is that ‘many people perceive Islam as a shared, scripturally-based international religion, and they do not hear about the diversity of Islamic practices throughout the world, they often accept as authoritative pronouncements about what all Muslims should do’.26 Current Islamic authorities regard this type of Muslim as ‘impure’ and ‘incorrect’. It should be admitted that there is a problem of control and power to be shared between the followers of Kyrgyz, or popular Islam, and clerical Islam.27 But, beyond that, the potential conflict between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ Muslims has roots in the old opposition between polytheism and monotheism: those who are visibly monotheistic become ‘pure’ and ‘correct’, since the world has refused polytheism a long time ago. The ‘pure’ or ‘Mosque

24   Sergey Poliakov,’Tradisionalism v sovremennom sredneasiatskom obshestve’, in Yurii Arapov (ed.) , Musulmanskyia Srednyia Asia. Tradisionalism i XX vek (Moscow: Academy of Science Press 2004);Montgomery, David W., The Transmission of Religious and Cultural Knowledge and Potentiality in Practice: An Anthropology of Social Navigation in the Kyrgyz Republic (Boston: Religious Studies, Boston University 2007); Mucaram Toktogulova, ‘Syncretism of Beliefs (Kyrgyzchylyk and Musulmanchylyk)’, in Aitpaeva, Toktogulova and Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan (above, n. 3), pp. 507–18. 25   Nathan Light, ‘Participatiopn and Analysis in Styding Religion in Central Asia’, in Aitpaeva, Toktogulova and Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan (above, n. 3), p. 492. 26   Ibid. 27  Toktogulova (above, n.3), 511–17.

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Muslims’ consider kyrgyzchylyk to be a phenomenon of historical importance but not currently valuable. The ‘incorrect’ or popular Islam of the Kyrgyz practitioners does include an ‘extra’ focus on home nature and ancient spiritual practices. In this connection, kyrgyzchylyk28 might be compared with ‘[n]ew religiosities’, which, ‘as they emerge both inside and outside of traditional world religions, are characterized by a strong sense of a holistic emphasis on nature, and they experiment frankly with imaginations and traditions of sacred space’.29 The main reason why ‘Mosque Muslims’ have a negative attitude towards kyrgyzchylyk practices is related to their fear of equating things or human beings with Allah. On this point Kyrgyz practitioners acting within Islamic boundaries usually argue that the worship of Allah takes diverse forms, and these forms exist only by Allah’s will and creativity. If we look for scientific paradigms to explain this notion of the traditional mind, Niels Henrik Gregersen’s theology of nature would offer one such paradigm: ‘Gregersen’s theology of nature builds on the notion of God as “the Creator of creativity”’, and ‘we should see the natural self-enfolding of life forms as an expression of God’s creativity’.30 Today the visiting and worshipping of sacred sites is accompanied by a minimum of formalities: there are some basic and very simple rules which nobody tries to unify, adjust or complicate. Aigine considers such an approach to be optimal, and in all possible ways it tries to support the simplicity and flexibility of mazars worshipping in order to preserve the accessibility of this spiritual action to many people. However, it is necessary to emphasize that the ways and forms of mazar worship and their accompanying rituals are not simple or homogeneous. I will give one example: there is a mausoleum called Zulpukor, which is one of the biggest and most frequently visited human-made mazars in the province. Women suffering from infertility often go there and, as a rule, they bring a bübü (female healer), who decides what rituals should be accomplished on the mazar and supervises their performance. Two well known healers in the area, T. (74 years) and Ch. (63 years), practise treatment on this mazar. They do it in essentially different ways: by bringing a patient inside of the mausoleum and by touching the walls in one case (T.), and without entering and touching in the other (Ch.). So two bübüs from the neighbouring villages, of approximately of the same age and similar social experience, heal women with the same problem (infertility), on the same mazar, by using the same ritual of healing in two different ways or traditions. Both bübüs have been practising treatments at the mazar for many years, including during the Soviet period. Both are successful as traditional healers; both are in   Some communities and groups practise kyrgyzchylys, which act out of mainsteam religion (Islam.) However, there is too little room to consider this issue here. 29   Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Theology on its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God’, Religious Compass 1.3 (2007), p. 372. 30   See Anders Melin’s contribution to this volume. 28

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demand and have followers. The same ritual, executed in different ways, achieves its purpose and expands the spectrum of opportunities for people who require such treatment. Today bübüs are chosen by followers and patients. It is important that there is a choice. Choice mobilizes an individual and promotes mechanisms of analytical and independent thinking. Sacred Sites as the Domain of Faith, Wonder and Hope There is a circle: in order to be healthy and socialized, certain people should take a spiritual mission – kyrgyzchylyk – which includes pilgrimage and different practices on sacred sites. There is a very old but constantly reinforcing idea behind these connections: according to the Kyrgyz traditional mind, sacred sites are special energetic zones, where human beings are able to connect directly with higher powers in order to attain vitally necessary conditions and achieve vitally important life goals. Such zones have a special spirit and give birth to extraordinary phenomena. In particular, traditional practices like folk healing or epic recitals are being revived at sacred places. They awaken the sacred feelings and help to develop the hidden abilities of humanity. Sacred sites are places where the mental health and spiritual balance of people are rehabilitated and supported. Exactly this fact could explain a high attendance at mazars during periods of social cataclysms and crises. Mazars help to relieve

Fig. 19.3

Kyrgyzchylyk Muslims on the Sacred Site, 2.

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individual and social tension, to bring balance during periods of crisis, and therefore they fill an important social need. Natural mazars, as phenomena of nature, do not have such limiting characteristics as nationality, race, or religious orientation. They are terrapolitan by origin. And this obviously affects the character of sacred sites worship. Our research shows that there is a complicated but non-adversarial combination of very diverse cultures and religions in sacred sites worship. This simultaneously ancient and modern system of worship reflects a flexible mechanism of synthesis between diverse cultures and religions. With such a mechanism, the worship of mazars can exist for centuries. Enduring for centuries, mazars become depositories of natural and cultural diversity and heritage, accumulators of knowledge. Mazar pilgrimage is a form of sacral behaviour, and therefore the spiritual component here is very strong. A lot of what people bring to and take away from mazars is in the domain of faith, wonder and hope in an interaction with the domain of the desired and imagined. Perhaps another important function of mazars is to support the spiritual component of the human soul. This, in turn, ensures the integrity of humanity, its mental health and peace of mind.

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Bibliography Abdymambet Sariev, K. J., Jashyl Kitep, Kyrgyzdar Duino Elin Jakshylykka Alyp Barat (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2004). Abramzon, Samuil, Kyrgyzy i ix etno-geneticheckie, istoricheskie i kulturnyie sviazi (Frunze: Kyrgyzstan, 1990), pp. 307–322; 334–353. Adylov, Duishen, ‘Healing at Mazars: Sources of Healing, Methods of Curative Impact of Healers and Criteria of their Professional Qualifications’, in Gulnara Aitpaeva, Mucaram Toktogulova and Aida Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007), 377–95. Aitpaeva, Gulnara, ‘The Main Regulations on Visiting a Mazar and Why People Go’, in Gulnara Aitpaeva, Mucaram Toktogulova and Aida Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007), 124–35. — ‘The Phenomenon of Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan: Interweaving of Mythology and Reality’, in Thomas Schaaf and Cathy Lee (eds), Conserving Cultural and Biological Diversity: The Role of Sacred Natural Sites and Cultural Landscapes (Paris: UNESCO 2006), 118–23. Aitpaeva, Gulnara, Mucaram Toktogulova and Aida Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas, translated by AdiletSultan Meimanaliev, Alina Jangazieva, Damira Umetbaeva, Umut Asanova and Kanybek Konokbaev (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007). Ajibaev, Ergeshbay, Ruxtar Menen Syrdashuu (Bishkek: DEMI 2008). Amanaliev, Bakyt, Iz istorii philosophskoi mysli kyrgyzskogo naroda (Ilim: Frunze 1963). — ‘Razmyshlenie o Religioznoy Ideologii i Svobodomyslii v Istoricheskom Opyte Kyrgyzsckogo Naroda’, in idem, Obshestvennaia Psixologia I Religioznyie Predrassudki (Ilim: Frunze 1970), 25–64. Asankanov, Abylbek, Kyrgyz Taryxy: Encyclopedia (Bishkek: Kyrgyzpoligafkombinat 2003). Bayalieva, Toktobubu, Religioznyie Perejitki Kyrgyzskogo Naroda i Ix Preodolenie (Ilim: Frunze 1981). Begalieva, Ömürbübü, Aalamdan Kelgen Kattar (Bishkek: Silani 2004). Bergmann, Sigurd, ‘Theology on its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God’, Religious Compass 1.3 (2007), 353–79. Begalieva, Omurbubu, Osnovnyie Zakony Razvitia Chelovechectva (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2003). Dömpke, Stephan and Daria Musina (eds), The Call of Our Ancestors: Natural Sacred Sites in the Issyk–Kol Biosphere Territory (Bishkek: Estelik /People and Nature 2004). Dubana, Atamkul, ‘There Are only Two Ways to Get away from Dubanachylyk’, in Gulnara Aitpaeva, Mucaram Toktogulova and Aida Egemberdieva (eds),

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Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007), pp. 258–62. Dyikanova, Cholpon (ed.), The Sacred Sites of Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek: FOP 2004). Eliade, Mircha, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Kiev: Sophia 1998). Fry, Peter, ‘Spirits of Protest: Spirit-Mediums and Articulation of Consensus among the Zezuru of Southern Rhodesia’, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 14 (1976), 65–90. Groff, Stanislav, The Transpersonal Vision: The Healing Potential of Nonordinary States of Consciousness (Moscow: ACT Press 2004). — Beyond the Brain (Moscow: ACT press 2004). Jung, Karl Gustav, ‘Psychology and Poetical Works’, in Self–Consciousness of European Culture of the Twentieth Century (Moscow: Political Literature Press 1999), 103–25. Ibragim Kyzy Zulfia and Mamyrasul Tajiev, Tenir Ata (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2006). Islam: Encyclopedichskiii Slovar (Moscow: Nauka, S. Prozorov 1991). Light, Nathan, ‘Participatiopn and Analysis in Styding Religion in Central Asia’, in Gulnara Aitpaeva, Mucaram Toktogulova and Aida Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007), 476–97. Karataev, Oljobai’ and Salai’din Eraliev, Kyrgyz Etnografiasy boiuncha Sozduk (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2005). Karypkulov, Aman (ed.), Regions of Kyrgyzstan. Talas oblast (Bishkek: Kyrgyz Encyclopaedia Press 2001). Knouj, Abdullah, Islam: Its Meanings, Objectives and Legislative System, edited by A.Asankanov (Wasgington: Kyrgyz Taryhy/Bishkek: Kyrgyzpoligraphkombinat 2003). Kojobekova, Burul, ‘Scientific Medicine Never Helps People who Posesss Kyrgyzchylyk’, in Aitpaeva, Toktogulova and Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007), pp. 242–8. Koshaliev, Kadyr, Kyrgyzchylyk (Bishkek: Biyiktik 2007).Montgomery, David W., The Transmission of Religious and Cultural Knowledge and Potentiality in Practice: An Anthropology of Social Navigation in the Kyrgyz Republic (Boston: Religious Studies, Boston University 2007) Mukambetova, Asya, ‘Tengrianskyi kalendar kak osnova nomadicheskoi tzivilizatzii’, in Serik Ajigali (ed.), Istoria i Kultura Aralo-Kaspia (Almaty: Academy of Science Press 2001), 104–29. Ömüraliev, Chouyn, Tengirchilik (Kant: Kron 1994). Poliakov, Sergey, ‘Tradisionalism v sovremennom sredneasiatskom obshestve’, in Yurii Arapov (ed.) , Musulmanskyia Srednyia Asia. Tradisionalism i XX vek (Moscow: Academy of Science Press 2004). Tkacz, Virlana, Sayan Zhambalov and Wanda Phipps, Shanar Dedication Ritual of a Buryat Shaman in Siberia as Conducted by Bayir Richiniv (New York: Parabola Books 2002).

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Toktogulova Mucaram, ‘Syncretism of Beliefs (Kyrgyzchylyk and Musulmanchylyk)’, in Gulnara Aitpaeva, Mucaram Toktogulova and Aida Egemberdieva (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practitioners in Talas (Bishkek: Maxprint 2007), pp. 507–18. Vitebsky, Piers, The Shaman Voyages of the Soul, Trance, Ecstasy and Healing from Siberia to the Amazon (London: Duncan Baird Publisher 2001). Walsh, Roger, The Spirit of Shamanism (Moscow: Institution of Transpersonal Psychology Press 1996).

Chapter 20

Keeping the Sacred Secret: Pilgrims’ Voices at Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan Zemfira Inogamova

Sacred sites and the experiences, hopes and fears that practitioners have about them in relation to the changing economic and social organization will be the main focus of this article. I will raise, specifically, the question of power and control over knowledge of the sacred sites. The hypothesis of the present paper is that every community has its own local ethics and certain claims that arise in accordance with it. I will also dwell on issues of how people think about the sites, what kind of respect they show towards them, and how they maintain control over them. I will be discussing questions of cultural property rights – one of the main concerns of local practitioners, many of whom argue that sacred sites have to belong to all the people who live in Kyrgyzstan and not just to some private owners. This article will present the concerns of research respondents and will describe the uses of the sites in direct relation to the kinds of rights people feel they should have, along with any challenges or limits to the rights they have experienced. Local practitioners have extensive knowledge of the sites and were put at the centre of the mapping project conducted in one village in the northern part of Kyrgyzstan. The project was carried out by members of the Aigine Research Centre (AiRC) in Kyrgyzstan. In this case the mapping work was a way to find out how practitioners felt about the idea of mapping sacred sites and how they thought that their knowledge should be used. Hence my paper will focus on the experts first, then will talk about the mapping project as another tool used in my research. This tool helped to reveal the knowledge of cultural practitioners and to expand the conversation with the local cultural experts beyond the initial aims of my project. All the unsourced sentences cited in this paper are reproduced from transcriptions of interviews conducted by me. For reasons of research ethics I have not revealed the identity of my informants, but my sources will be available upon a request for transcriptions of field research interviews (April, May, 2006) made to [email protected].

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Place-Based Ethics This article hypothesizes that there is no general regulation or code of ethics that could anticipate all the research situations, places and cultural contexts. Conduct of ethical behaviour should be shaped in accordance with local content and context. Moreover, even in a local context ethics is emergent: it emerges on the basis of particular situations and instances. Codes of ethics such as the Code of Research Ethics, approved by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the Code of Ethics of World Archeological Congress, or the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Statement of Ethics and Professional Behaviours are not ironclad formulae to be followed, but guidelines for the researchers which help to a certain extent the conduct of ethically responsible research. The main goals of the present paper are to reveal the ethics of mapping the Nyldy Ata sacred site and its regulations concerning visits and displays of reverence at the sacred sites, and to investigate into the divergence between some of the aspects of AAA ethics and their local application in Kyrgyzstan, particularly in the Nyldy Ata sacred sites. Conducting the Research The purpose of my research project was to describe, put in perspective and analyze the ethics of mapping the Nyldy Ata complex of sacred sites. The focus of the study was the Nyldy Ata complex of sacred sites in the Özgörüsh village, which is located in the northern part of Kyrgyzstan, in the province of Talas. The central questions were: What is the ethics of revealing the sacred? What does ethics mean in the local situation? How can we localize the ethics of the fieldwork? What could be considered wrong or right in Kyrgyz traditional culture? What are the locally relevant principles and how do they function in the study of mapping? These questions were investigated through a qualitative research design which consisted mainly of in-depth interviews, participant observation, observations of sacred site guardians and pilgrims. Interviews would last between one and two hours. The definitions of local terms were decided on the basis of the research conducted in Talas on the sacred sites. A qualitative approach seemed to be the most appropriate method of dealing with these questions. I predominantly chose, as research participants, the guardians of the sacred sites and the pilgrims to Nyldy Ata, because these are aware about the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ – both about making a map of the sacred sites and about forms of behaviour at mazars – since they respect the regulations when they visit sacred sites over a period of many years. One site was sufficient for the study, since I would not have be able in practice to cover the number of sacred site complexes in Talas, and ultimately the results of the research project are not applicable to all the sacred sites in Talas but only to Nyldy Ata. The primary sample was seventeen pilgrims, who came to visit the sacred sites at Nyldy Ata together with a guardian of the site. This formed the

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nucleus of my study; and there was a second sample, of twelve additional sacred site guardians from the same province, who also visited Nyldy Ata and took part in a round table discussion. I have selected the participants to the study from a number of volunteers to be interviewed among the pilgrims at Nyldy Ata; these included male and female informants, guardians and residents of the Özgörüsh village. Each informant was interviewed once and, if a follow-up interview was necessary, I contacted them again. Most of the questions I asked from the guardians and pilgrims of Nyldy Ata were open-ended. My focus was on the pilgrims’ reflections, reactions, concerns and thoughts about the idea of making a map of the sacred sites at Nyldy Ata. I recorded my informants’ interviews on tape, and the records were transcribed and used along with my field notes and with the results of participant observation. Thus the results of the interview analysis will be more representative of the concerns and thoughts about the idea of making a map of the complex of sacred sites at Nyldy Ata.

Fig. 20.1 An Eye spring at the sacred site of Nyldy ata, March 2006. The Cultural Phenomenon of Mazar Reverence in Kyrgyzstan The visitation of sacred sites is a well-known form of cultural behaviour all over the world, and in Kyrgyzstan it constitutes a widespread phenomenon as well. In the Kyrgyz language, sacred sites are called mazars. Mazar is an Arabic word

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meaning ‘place which is visited’. There is usually an object of pilgrimage – often the grave of a Muslim saint. Over time, the word came to be used to designate any place with a sacred character. Further in the present article, sacred sites will be referred to as mazars. Shaykhs (guardians of mazars) and zyiaratchys (pilgrims) were predominantly chosen as key participants in my research project. Shaykh is an Arabic word meaning ‘elder person’, but also ‘guardian’. Shaykhs are thus guardians of Muslim mausoleums, mazars and other sacred sites. The term zyiaratchy comes from the Arabic ziyara, which means ‘pilgrimage’. Zyiarat, in the understanding of Kyrgyz Muslims at the Nyldy Ata mazar nowadays, means visiting local mazars, rocks and mountains which are connected to the names of the prophets, of the mashaykhs (saints or pious monks) and of the kojo shaykhs (master guardians) with a goal to make certain wishes, to ask for salvation from sins and to pray. Shaykhs and zyiaratchys were involved in my research project as cultural practitioners who had visited the mazars and possessed traditional knowledge of them. The concept of rights and responsibilities related to mazars is related to the ethical ideas of the local community members. Thus my article will present the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of making a map of the mazars at Nyldy Ata and of visiting and displaying certain forms of behaviour at mazars, since zyiaratchys are strongly recommended to fulfil certain social expectations while they visit mazars. Visitors of Mazars According to traditional understanding, the visitor should come to the mazar being physically and spiritually clean. (Spiritual cleanness denotes a positive inner intention and a sincere belief in the healing power of sacred sites; in this context it might be appropriate to say, not spiritually, but intentionally ‘clean’.) Those who go to mazars ‘clean’ will be blessed by the pirs (guardian spirits) of mazars. Specifically, a visitor should be respectful towards other visitors, realizing that they are at the mazar, and should behave in accordance with the situation. The 

 Gulnara A. Aitpaeva, ‘The Phenomenon of Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan: Interweaving of Mythology and Reality’, in Thomas Schaaf and Cathy Lee (eds), Conserving Cultural and Biological Diversity: The Role of Sacred Natural Sites and Cultural Landscapes (Paris: UNESCO, Susan Curran Publishing 2006), p. 118.   E. Geoffroy, ‘Shaykh’, in P. J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, G. Lecomte et al., The Encyclopædia of Islam, 2nd edn., 12 vols (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1960–2005) Vol. 9 (1997), 379–98.    Kojo in this phrase derives from the Persian khojo (‘master’).    Bruce G. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazah Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press 2001), pp. 1, 32.    Editors: Oljobai Karataev and Salaidin Eraliev, in [first edition] Kyrgyz Ethnographic Dictionary (Bishkek: Biiktik] 2005).

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majority of the experienced zyiaratchys whom I interviewed were concerned with people visiting Nyldy Ata and, specifically, with whether or not these people would fulfill the rules for visiting mazars; for, if they did not, that would ‘disappoint’ the spirits of the mazars. Here are the rules which every visitor to a mazar is expected to follow and fulfill. They do not have a juridical power, but most of the visitors submit to them, since the social pressure to do so is strong. One should: visit the mazar on the understanding and realization of the fact that one is visiting the place where traditional praying is performed; recognize the cultural importance of the mazar and respect the feelings of zyiaratchys; keep the mazar and its surroundings very clean and behave in proper ways, which prohibit smoking, consuming alcohol, shouting or using foul language; take ritual ablution before a visitation; visit the mazar with covered head and body (long sleeves, long skirt and scarf); follow the suggestions or regulations of the shaykh, if there is one; avoid things which could destroy or disturb the praying process (including loud music, alcoholic drinks, and guns for hunting); for women, avoid visits to the mazar during menstruation. Why Should One Map Mazars at Nyldy Ata? The shaykhs of Nyldy Ata receive and guide visitors to mazars who visit a sacred site due to social and health problems. Usually a shaykh leads visiting zyiaratchys to mazars at the complex and gives them certain directions, for example on how to take part in fixed rituals. He also heals the zyiaratchys who are ill, or addicted to alcohol or drugs, by using traditional ways of curing such as dem saluu. Dem saluu is a spiritual and physical empowerment and personal cure. Zyiaratchys believe that this guidance precipitates the process of getting fit and healthy. Usually, pilgrims to Nyldy Ata ask a guardian of the complex to accompany them to the mazars. However, when the guardian is out of the village, visitors have difficulty in finding the places and performing certain rituals. A number of informants claim that the maps would be useful for zyiaratchys who come from different parts of Kyrgyzstan, since they are not aware of all of the mazars located at Nyldy Ata. The strength of a map is that it can ease the process of visiting mazars for people who do not know the road; but at the same time a map can weaken the ‘social validity’ of a shaykh, who is a leader in this regard – since a shaykh’s knowledge of how to perform a certain ritual, which incantations to use while praying, and how to perform rituals in general is a type of social power. Thus making a map which describes the healing purposes or the special prescriptions of

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a mazar and its specific features will lead to a dissemination of information which is tantamount to making a guardian less powerful in society. If I am to pay heed to the responses and wishes expressed on all these aspects, I should say that the idea presented – namely of making a map of the mazars at Nyldy Ata – was not supported by all the zyiaratchys who contributed to the research. To my question concerning the advantage of a map, my informant stated the following: ‘If we come to pray at a mazar at a certain time with certain intentions and expectations, we have to realize our wishes on a planned day since our wishes are stronger and more sincere, because we were prepared for this trip.’ Zyiaratchys who visit mazars in Nyldy Ata have a strong belief that, if any one of them were to come to a mazar with bad intentions or with an ironic, skeptical approach (for instance with the intention of testing the powers of the mazars without having any sincere belief in the visit itself), the spirits of the sacred site would not help them to recover or might even harm them. Sincere belief in the powers and spirits of mazars is one of the strongest expectations placed in a zyiaratchy – the kind of person who visits mazars and believes them to aid towards recovery. Specifically, I think that this sincerity of a zyiaratchy promotes belief in the healing power of the mazar – which is equal to a belief in recovery. The idea expressed by my informants, that they were prepared for a trip to a mazar, underlines such pre-existing, positive beliefs. One reaction to the idea of making a map of mazars at Nyldy Ata was that mazars are very powerful and pure places which should be preserved for the present and future generations as a cultural practice. Knowledge about the location of mazars would ease the process of visiting them and receiving treatment from traditional healers at sacred sites. Local practitioners and pilgrims think that mazars have a positive influence on zyiaratchys; hence, sites which are useful for health should be preserved by creating a map. Legal validity could be acquired only by creating a map of mazars, which marks the borders of the territories of the private owners and of the mazars. Practitioners fear that some private owners might buy large territories which include mazars, to use them as pasture, as cultivated land, or for other means of exploiting the land. For instance, according to Anthony Stocks, maps are not just a graphic way to present what would then be taken to be the ordinary palpable realities of land use; maps can also be pure ideological products. According to the idea of local zyiaratchys, Nyldy Ata does not belong to any private owner or government, but to all the citizens of Kyrgyzstan. However, the government is privatizing most of the pasture lands and, without a legally powerful document such as a map, zyiaratchys will not be able to protect their rights from the private owners of pasture lands.

  Anthony Stocks, ‘Mapping Dreams in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve’, Human Organization 62.4 (Winter 2003), 344–54.

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Why Should One Not Map Sacred Sites? This section will focus on critical thoughts and responses expressed towards the proposal of making a map of the mazars at Nyldy Ata. The interviews revealed that some of the zyiaratchy prefer the map not to be made. They believe that, when the map is created, there will be a lot more people wanting to visit Nyldy Ata than heretofore. Eventually, an increase in the number of zyiaratchys would possibly lead to the construction of a road for transportation. For the visitors to mazars at the Nyldy Ata complex, bringing transportation implies moving a lot of stones and making changes. As one of my informants noted, ‘at this particular complex all material and natural things have their “own” locations and places and there is no need to remove or to add other things to here. This place should be as natural as it is now. Also, each stone has its own power that I cannot explain.’ Humanity fears the unknown and the uncertain, and starts to feel powerless if it cannot interpret them in a certain way. This is one of the cultural and social taboos about ‘leaving things as they are’, which my informant derived from her collective memory. Taboos are an integral part of holiness. By observing certain taboos, one accepts the ‘power’ or ‘sacredness’ of a place. Places might not be sacred, but knowledge conveys sacredness; and knowledge about certain taboos, and strong expectations in regard to a place, make visitors behave in a culturally and socially specific way. For instance, mazars and mosques are places where people perform the worshipping of spirits and of Allah in one case, and only that of Allah in the other. But at both places, irrespective of the belief in spirits or in Allah, people observe and follow certain rules of behaviour and conform to expectations. At mazars, most of the visitors perform a zikir chaluu ritual accompanied by praying, which is designed, according to them, to bring their wishes closer to God or to the ‘owner’ of the mazar; and there is a similar pattern to the zikir ceremony of the Sufis. At mosques, worshippers of Allah perform the namaz, which is also accompanied by certain prayers. But those who visit the mazars consider the mazar a sacred place, and, similarly, those who pray to Allah perceive the mosque as a sacred place. Thus the understanding and interpretation of the notion of ‘sacredness’ can only occur at an individual level. Moreover, my informants believe that constructing a road will provide easy access to all kinds of visitors, including tourists. According to the words of zyiaratchys, there is a certain number of visitors who come to the mazars in order to take tests for the consistency of the springs, to try to establish what makes them medically efficacious. Specifically, their goal was to analyse the spring waters in order to discover why they are useful against certain diseases and not others. ‘If the purpose of the tourists’ visits will be research that might be useful for us, then   Zikir chaluu (‘ritual of chanting’) derives from the Arabic dhikr (‘remembrance’).   Namaz (‘ritual worship in Islam religion’) derives from the Arabic as-sala (one of the five pillars of Islamic religion).   Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan (above, n. 4), pp. 32, 82.  

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I do not mind them coming here and testing our water, since some of the non-local visitors of Nyldy ata would take water with them for testing, I guess’, said one of my respondents. Some of the zyiaratchys were concerned that the more people from other places of Kyrgyzstan gain access to a map of the Nyldy Ata complex of mazars, the more such maps could be used by individuals for a range of purposes. One of my informants claimed: ‘You never know how many buzuk oiluu (evil minded) people with suspicious intentions can visit mazars if they have a map in their hands.’ Another respondent, adding to the same idea, stated the following: ‘some of the visitors come with their beliefs in Kudai,10 and others come here with negative moods and try to test the real power of the mazar. Such kinds of negative intentions might scare the powerful pirs [spirits] of mazars and [the spirits] might leave the mazars for good.’ In other words, my informants believe that the spirits of the mazars respond to any negative approach or intentions and they might desert such places if people do not believe in them. According to Anthony Stocks, ‘land is often the home of spirits, it is not just spirit owners of the various “natural” elements that enter into production, but also human-like societies of spirits that interact with the living and, of course, the spirits of the dead, especially ancestors’. The main consequence of the spirits leaving the mazars would be deprivation of an opportunity to receive cheap treatment for those zyiaratchys who cannot afford to see a doctor and to stay in hospital. My respondents believe that spirits make mazars powerful, since they possess special healing abilities when visitors ask them for help. In other words, without these spirits, the mazars will resemble other ordinary places. In this regard, one of my informants stated the following: ‘one of the exceptional powers of the pirs of the mazars is that through their prayers to them, traditional healers can cure the pilgrim who is experiencing the process of kyrgyzchylyk. Because the doctors cannot heal such a patient who is diagnosed with kyrgyzchylyk.’ According to the definition of a clairvoyant informant in Talas, Kyrgyzchylyk is an inherited strong capacity which is not visible. Such a strong capacity could be inherited only by a spiritually clean person who has a ‘clean’ mind and soul too. All kinds of strong capacities, such as an extrasensory perception, the abilities of clairvoyants, traditional healers, forecasters and manaschy11 are considered as the main types of kyrgyzchylyk.

According to Gulnara Aitpaeva, in a broad sense, kyrgyzchylyk means the totality of traditions and customs inherent in the Kyrgyz people since early times. In relation to mazars, kyrgyzchylyk is usually understood as a diverse spectrum of extrasensory 10   Kudai (‘God’) comes from the Persian Khoda: Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan (above, n. 4), p. 77. 11  A manaschy is someone who has the ability to recite the Kyrgyz epic Manas.

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abilities, which a person receives congenitally and which help him or her to heal and help people.’12

On the basis of my research results, it can be concluded that an illness related to kyrgyzchylyk is a pre-initiation process, a stage before accepting the duties of a certain type of kyrgyzchylyk (which were mentioned above). People who inherit kyrgyzchylyk go through a period of ‘illness’ (consisting of physiological and emotional experiences), and this illness can be healed only by another clairvoyant or traditional healer. Medical doctors cannot help at all in such cases. As for the traditional healers, they cure these people, usually at mazars, and they have a strong belief that the spirits of the sacred sites will help to heal a person who is being initiated into kyrgyzchylyk. One of the advantages of mazars is that they are pure places where pirs inhabit and help to cure the zyiaratchy who has the ‘diagnosis’ of kyrgyzchylyk. This is important for the zyiaratchy, because doctors cannot treat such a patient by using modern methods. In the words of my respondent, even if a zyiaratchy goes to see doctors, usually they are not able to diagnose the illness and therefore they are not able to treat him or her; on the contrary, their meddling with various medications might make a situation even worse. As for the traditional healers, they can recognize ‘symptoms’ of kyrgyzchylyk and they also know how to treat them, since these were part of their own initiation experience. To Construct or Not to Construct a Road to the Nyldy Ata Complex One result of my interviews is the conclusion that people perceive the road construction in a negative way. In the Kyrgyz language, the practice of mazars visitation is called mazar basuu. This literally means ‘walking to the mazar’. It is not called mazarga baruu, ‘going to the mazar’. Thus a pilgrim is expected to walk to a mazar and not to drive by some kind of transportation. It is important to take into consideration that the cultural practice of mazar visitation has survived from ancient times, when there was no transportation. However, Kyrgyz people have used horses as one type of transportation for ages, especially when they had a nomadic mode of life. In other words, going to a mazar by horse would be also mazarga at menen baruu; one cannot say, mazarga at menen basuu (‘walking to a mazar by horse’), which logically, contextually and grammatically would be inaccurate in Kyrgyz language. In this case respondents mean walking a distance from the main road to the mazar itself, since it would be physically impossible to walk to a mazar from distant places in Kyrgyzstan. Moreover, zyiaratchys strongly believe that, if one walks to a mazar by foot, one will receive more blessings from the spirits of the mazars. 12

 Aitpaeva, ‘The Phenomenon of Sacred Sites’ (above, n. 1), p. 121.

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As for my question, ‘What would be the consequences of building a road?’, I have received the following answer from several respondents. ‘Building a road would basically mean that a very holy place as the Nyldy Ata complex will be spoiled in the same way as the Manas Ordo [one of the biggest complexes of sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan] was “spiritually spoiled”. It was spoiled by drunken and unclean visitors who were not in the mood for visiting the mazars but who were taking part in wedding parties.’

Fig. 20.2 Path into the sacred site at Nyldy Ata, March 2006. In most parts of Kyrgyzstan, the wedding ceremony is accompanied by the ritual of visiting a mazar. For instance, in Talas young couples visit the Manas Ordo, in Karakol, which is in the northern part of Kyrgyzstan. In Bishkek some of the couples visit the mausoleum of Baitik Baatyr (hero). The guardians of mazars and the zyiaratchys of sacred sites were not only upset but even disgusted by some wedding guests. Since most of the drunk people behave in a way that does not comply with the expected behaviour on visiting mazars, guardians and zyiaratchys feel insulted. One of my respondents said, ‘the more “dirty” [bulganych] and prayerless people visit mazars, the higher our fear that spirits who inhabit these places will leave them’. By saying ‘dirty’, respondents mean a person who is drunk, without ritual ablution and not fulfilling expectations that a visit to a mazar requires. Socially, the guardians of mazars have a right to suggest to a drunken person, or to anyone whose behaviour does not comply with the social

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expectations, to visit the mazar at another time, when they will be ready. They might be asked to do so as courtesy to other pilgrims, since they might disturb their prayers. But, legally, any person who can afford to buy a ticket may enter the territory of a mazar. During the interviews, a mazar guardian mentioned that he had seen an ayan concerning the initiative to construct a road to the mazars in Nyldy Ata,. An ayan13 is a sign which gives knowledge of future events.14 Ayan is a dream which serves as a sign to undertake a specific action on the basis of a vision that a person sees in their dream. According to the ayan which the guardian had, it was not good to construct a road to Nyldy ata. In his view, it was a sign that spirits of the Nyldy Ata complex do not allow him to build a road. A guardian had the idea of building a house in Nyldy Ata and of healing people there. However, he had seen the ayan again concerning such intentions. According to the ayan, it was not allowed to build anything at the Nyldy Ata complex of mazars. Research in Nyldy Ata shows that some of the pilgrims spend a night at one of the mazars. Sometimes they stay for one, two or more days. Usually guardians of Nyldy Ata recommend that pilgrims pray to Allah, make wishes during the night and spend a night at the mazar. Asceticism – such as spending the night in a draughty place with basic rather than more sophisticated home conditions – increases the pilgrims’ belief in recovery, since, according to their explanations, Allah will bless them for their sacrifices of all kinds. Thus, on the basis of the interviews, I noticed that there is a fear among zyiaratchys that, if a road is constructed, there would be access for large numbers of people to visit Nyldy Ata. The fear is that Nyldy Ata would become similar to Manas Ordo, where people come for weddings, consume alcohol, swear, vomit and smoke. Zyiaratchys prefer the strict observation of strong rules and social expectations when visiting the mazars at Nyldy Ata. Should Tourists Visit Mazars? The distribution of a map might attract not only zyiaratchys but also tourists who are interested in culture and would like to gain more knowledge about the mazars in Kyrgyzstan. In the interviews, respondents expressed their preference for tourists (non-local visitors) who come with good intentions and with at least modest beliefs in the special qualities of mazars, or with certain positive wishes. However, zyiaratchys were concerned about tourists who do not believe in the spirits or the power of mazars and still visit one, as if it were a place of entertainment. As one of my informants maintains, the visitors who do not have a sincere belief in the power of spirits and of  This term derives from the Arabic ayn, ayan is in plural (‘eye’).   S.v., Kyrgyz Explanatory Dictionary, [2 vols, E. Abduldaev and D. Isaev (eds), Vol. 1 Frunze: Mektep] 1984), p. 107. 13 14

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mazars are considered unbelievers; such visitors are not wanted at the sacred sites. In short, most of the visitors to the Nyldy Ata complex feel very comfortable with the idea of tourists coming the mazars as long as they follow and fulfil the rules governing the conduct of visitors. But some of the zyiaratchys were against the idea of tourists visiting the sacred sites, specifically Nyldy Ata, since tourists do not have adequate knowledge of the rules of behaviour to sacred sites, and the violation of these rules could be perceived by the spirits of the mazars as disrespect. According to my informants, mazars should not be privatized by the government or by private land owners in Kyrgyzstan. However, there is no legal basis for that view. Aigine conducted a seminar with administrators of the provincial government in Talas and presented them a draft of a project on the ‘Preservation and Protection of Mazars in Talas Province and Rules Required for a Visit to mazars’, which was elaborated jointly between the guardians of the mazars and government workers in the town of Talas, who were involved as stakeholders connecting the shaykhs with government officials. The Ethics of Revealing the Sacred For the zyiaratchys, keeping sacred knowledge secret is very important. According to the conversations I had with my informants, keeping the sacred a secret will help to preserve the character of the mazars. According to my research results, the zyiaratchys think that each mazar has its own spirit, which can have different visions. However, the zyiaratchys who are capable of seeing the ‘owners’ or ‘spirits’ do not reveal these visions to visitors who are not capable of seeing them. They are bound by a taboo against revealing the vision of the ‘owners’ of the mazars, and they are expected to keep secret the sacred phenomena they witness. ‘Abbot called for caution and exposed the risks inherent in visualizing place specific local knowledge and making it available for public consumption, without ensuring sufficient control of the process and outputs by legitimate custodians of such knowledge.’15 Most of the zyiaratchys claim that people cannot, and do not have to, visit the mazars for the purpose of entertainment. That would harm not only the environment of the mazars, but also them personally as well. The pirs of the mazars could get angry with them, or abandon the mazars and leave for other places. According to Adylov Düishönkul, the method of treatment that traditional healers use during consultation with their patients perfectly combines the elements of rationality and mystery. By using the element of mystery during the healing process, a healer has the opportunity to create a sacred image of a mazar spirit

15

 Giacomo Rambaldi, Robert Chambers, Mike McCall and Jefferson Fox, ‘Practical Ethics for PGIS Practitioners, Facilitators, Technology Intermediaries and “Researchers’, Journal of Participatory Learning and Action 54 (2006), 106–13.

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who possesses special capacities.16 Belief in this sacred image leads to belief in the power and special capacities of a spirit. Accordingly, the spirit which possesses special capacities is able to treat a zyiaratchy by using them. As Clingerman suggests, ‘if nature is found always already in place, then our understanding of nature arises in the act of interpretation that sets apart a place (in time, space, use, and communal membership, among other things) from other places’.17 There are several reasons for keeping sacred knowledge secret – such as keeping a monopoly over knowledge which equals social power. Dissemination of the knowledge that some zyiaratchys or shaykhs possess might lead to a loss of power. As Trevor W. Purcell states, ‘A spiritual healer may explain a persistent headache not as resulting from physiological phenomena, but from a reluctance to accept the power of an ancestor and believe in them. The plausibility of this explanation rests on an intuitive understanding within the symbolic structure of the healer’s culture.’ Purcell also claims that, by making a conceptual separation of knowledge from culture and by problematizing knowledge and its application, scholars are inserting culture/knowledge into the contemporary discourse as a component of power relations, beyond the notion of a cultural division of labour, beyond race and beyond ethnicity.18 Most zyiaratchys experienced the social and political system of the Soviet era. During this period the practice of sacred sites visitation was prohibited, but this does not mean that people did not practise mazar visitation. Attempts to keep the sacred a secret are a relic of the Soviet period, since during that time people would withhold any information regarding their beliefs for the sake of securing their safety. Most of my informants believe that the pirs of Manas Ordo in Talas left that place and moved to clean and pure locations such as the Nyldy Ata complex of mazars. To my question, ‘Why are you visiting such far-away mazars when you have another big one in Manas Ordo?’, one of the zyiaratchy from Talas answered that, because of the many weddings celebrated at Manas Ordo, many people consume vodka, smoke cigarettes and have fun there, which makes the mazar less powerful. The pirs of mazars can leave certain places and move to other ‘more pure’ places. As I have mentioned before, most of my informants claimed that the powerful spiritual hosts of Manas Ordo left that place and moved to Nyldy Ata in their search for pure and clean places. Specifically, places are ‘clean’ in the sense of not being spoiled not only by vodka and smoking, but also by bad thoughts and ironic attitudes towards the mazar and its visitors. For example, as one guardian mentioned, ‘the visit to a mazar might be harmful if the visitor does not acquire 16  Düishönkul Adylov, ‘Healing at Mazars: Origins of Healings, Types of Healers and Criteria for Estimation of their Professional Qualifications, Methods of Medical Effect’, in G. Aitpaeva, A. Egemberdieva and M. Toktogulova (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practicioners in Talas ( Bishkek: Max Print 2007; Kyrgyz version), p. 352. 17  Clingerman, Forrest, ‘Interpreting Heaven and Earth’, this volume, p.46. 18  Trevor W. Purcell, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Applied Anthropology: Questions of Definition and Direction’, Human Organization 57.3 (Fall 1998), p. 20.

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the knowledge that one is not allowed to urinate near sacred places, because one might be paralysed forever or one’s mouth might be physically curved’. Guardians assume that the spirits of the mazars become angry through such actions on the part of visitors and might punish someone who urinates at the mazar. Such a cultural explanation as to why one cannot urinate at mazars can help to keep sites physically clean; it urges the visitors to follow this rule through fear of making the ancestors angry. A physically dirty place with a bad smell cannot be an appropriate environment for healings, since it creates negative perceptions of the place instead of instilling the belief in its healing powers. The Blessing Mazar: Concluding Remarks As a first result of the mapping project, we were able to hear the ‘voices’ of local practitioners such as the shaiykhs and the guardians about their hopes, fears and concerns. There are strong beliefs on the part of Kyrgyz people in the power of mazars and of their ancestors, as well as in the phenomenon of visiting sacred sites. These practices are in general conducive to the preservation of the ecological and cultural environment, which is essential for local survival. Thus I support the opinion expressed by Stephan Dömpke in his article ‘YssykKöl – A Sacred Land in Central Asia’ to the effect that ‘traditional populations historically have had at their disposal comprehensive and time tested knowledge about sustainable forms of the use of natural resources and the protection of biological diversity. This knowledge has been connected to cultural systems, worldviews and practices that render meaning and values to it, and because of this, ensure their tradition from one generation to the next.’19 During my research and interviews I heard the word ‘blessing’ many times. It could be a blessing of the spirits, a blessing of Allah or a blessing of the ‘owner’ of the mazar. Blessing, in Kyrgyz, is bata, which could be a sign of acceptance. People take part in rituals in order to define their roles in society and to feel as a part of this society. The practice of mazar visitation is not only a cultural practice of people who inhabit central Asia, but one of the ways of learning the law and moral teachings of the Kyrgyz people. Emil Shükürov claimed in his article that it is important to emphasize that holy places satisfy the spiritual needs of human beings, which are sometimes more important than the material ones. On the basis of this research, I would like to conclude that the zyiaratchys in Talas have their locally relevant and locally ‘sound’ ethics. In other words, ethics must be conceived in accordance with particular situation. Ethics has a strongly situational character.

19

 Edited by: Stephan Dömpke and Daria S. Musina, Issyk-Köl – A Sacred Land in Central Asia’, in S. Dömpke and D. S. Musina (eds), The Call of Our Ancestors (Bishkek: Estelik Foundation/People and Nature 2004), p. 15.

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Bibliography Abduldaev, E. and D. Isaev (eds), Kyrgyz Explanatory Dictionary, 2 vols (Frunze: Mektep 1984). Adylov, Düishönkul, ‘Healing at Mazars: Origins of Healings, Types of Healers and Criteria for Estimation of their Professional Qualifications, Methods of Medical Effect’, in G. Aitpaeva, A. Egemberdieva and M. Toktogulova (eds), Mazar Worship in Kyrgyzstan: Rituals and Practicioners in Talas (Bishkek: Max Print 2007; Kyrgyz version), 352–66. Aitpaeva, Gulnara A., ‘The Phenomenon of Sacred Sites in Kyrgyzstan: Interweaving of Mythology and Reality’, in Thomas Schaaf and Cathy Lee (eds), Conserving Cultural and Biological Diversity: The Role of Sacred Natural Sites and Cultural Landscapes (Paris: UNESCO, Susan Curran Publishing 2006), 118–23. Bergh, S. van den, ‘Ayn’, in P. J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, G. Lecomte et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, 12 vols (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–2005), Vol. 1 B (1979), pp. 784–5.Bogolubov, A. S., ‘Shaid’, in L. V. Negria (ed.), Islam Encyclopaedic Dictionary (Moscow: Nauka 1991), Vol. 1, p. 296. Dömpke, Stephan, ‘Issyk-Köl – A Sacred Land in Central Asia’, in Stephan Dömpke and Daria S. Musina (eds), The Call of Our Ancestors (Bishkek: Estelik Foundation/People and Nature 2004). Geoffroy, E., ‘Shaykh’, in P. J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, G. Lecomte et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, 12 vols (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1960–2005) Vol. 9 (1997), 379–98. Karataev, Oljobai, and Salaidin Eraliev (eds), Kyrgyz Ethnographic Dictionary (Bishkek: Biiktik] 2005). Privratsky, Bruce G., Muslim Turkistan: Kazah Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press 2001). Purcell, Trevor W., ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Applied Anthropology: Questions of Definition and Direction’, Human Organization 57.3 (1998), 258–72. Rambaldi, Giacomo, Robert Chambers, Mike McCall and Jefferson Fox, ‘Practical Ethics for PGIS Practitioners, Facilitators, Technology Intermediaries and Researchers’, Journal of Participatory Learning and Action 54 (2006), 106–13. Stocks, Anthony, ‘Mapping Dreams in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve’, Human Organization 62.4 (Winter 2003), 344–54.

PART E TURNING TO THE EAST

Chapter 21

Touching the Depths of Things: Cultivating Nature in the Thought of Wang Yangming 

Mary Evelyn Tucker

Introduction The immense and interconnected dimensions of our global environmental crisis are calling us to reconsider the potential contributions of Confucianism to new forms of modernity. Our current environmental crisis is born out of the irony of unintended consequences of rapid modernization and unlimited industrialization. It invites us to new kinds of cultural correctives which embrace a broader environmental ethics. With our rapid growth in the twentieth century from two billion to over six billion people, we have become a planetary presence. With our collective efforts to spread modern industrialization into east and south Asia, we have become a planetary force which is now affecting all the life forms on Earth. Modernity, no doubt, has brought great benefits, including improved health and rapid communication among cultures and individuals. Yet, as Tu Weiming has noted for several decades now, the unforeseen consequences of the promise of progress and of the allure of modernization are coming to haunt us. He has called for rethinking, with greater attention to fraternity and community, the Enlightenment’s promise of liberty and equality. He observes that, in our blind race to build a prosperous world, we have inadvertently undermined both the human and the natural community and thus put at risk the very conditions for a sustainable future. Natural and social scientists have been documenting this process of undermining with extensive research and publications over many decades. Authors of the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report observe that, through the destruction of the ecosystems on which all life depends, the foundations of civilization are being threatened. Clearly, those of us, students of Asian humanities and philosophy, who are concerned with the investigation of culture and civilization cannot ignore this challenge of sustainability. For the problem of creating a sustainable future calls us to examine the very nature of our identity as humans and of our role in relation to the natural world. Are  An earlier version of this essay appeared in Nature and the Environment: Perspectives from the Humanities, edited by Donald Swearer and published by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School in 2008. 

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we a life-threatening species or a life-supporting species? Are we emerging as a species which is losing its claim to the name Homo sapiens? Can ‘wise humans’ be the ones who are threatening the survival of other life forms, changing the nature of the climate, drying up rivers and aquifers, destroying top soil and forests at a rapid rate? As Tu Weiming asks, is it the humans themselves who are an endangered species? If we do not ignore these questions, those of us who are involved in the study of Asian humanities and philosophy need to join in the conversations of the natural and social scientists regarding the environmental crisis in its global and local manifestations. We surely have something significant to contribute. Philosophers and theologians, historians and artists have reflected for centuries on this question of our nature as humans in a sustained, if contested, manner. Human interdependence with other humans and with nature has been an important focus of these discussions. Moreover, the way civilizations are shaped and flourish is a key concern of many scholars in the humanities. Indeed these explorations have been at the heart of humanistic studies since the rise of the universities of the West – Paris, Oxford, Cambridge – and also in the centers of learning of the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Jewish, Islamic, and other indigenous worlds. We need to draw on these reflections from the humanistic traditions of the world’s cultures and civilizations. In doing so we are creating new grounds for a dialogue between civilizations around the issue of a sustainable future not only for humans, but for the broader Earth community as well. In this context a sustainable future will depend on the emergence of a pluralistic, multiform planetary civilization concerned with identifying the shape of mutually enhancing humanity–Earth relations. Tu Weiming has been at the forefront of such discussions, and his contributions to rethinking Confucianism in this context have been especially notable. Science and Politics are Necessary but not Sufficient Conditions for a Sustainable Future In analysing the current planetary situation, leaders from the fields of science and policy are reflecting on the reasons why we have not made greater progress in solving environmental issues. On the one hand, the enormous contributions of science, over the last fifty years, to our understanding of many aspects of environmental problems, both global and local, need to be fully recognized. Without the careful and collaborative research of thousands of scientists around the planet we would be virtually blind to the state of the environment and to our effects on it. We would be unaware of such macrophase issues as global warming or species extinction, not to mention a whole range of other issues such as pollution and its effects on health. However, while countless scientific studies have been published and then translated into policy reports, many experts feel we have not made progress in implementing effective solutions. We are stymied by a range of obstacles, from lack of political will to ignorance, denial, and inertia. Scientists are noting that the

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dire facts about environmental problems, alarming as they may be, have not altered those kinds of human behavior that are rapaciously exploiting nature. Nor have such facts affected the human habits of addictive consumption, especially in the richer and in the now developing nations. Moreover, policy experts are realizing that legislative or managerial regulations of nature prove to be insufficient for the complex environmental challenges at hand. Environmentalists are observing that, while science and policy-making approaches are clearly necessary, they are not sufficient in helping to transform human consciousness and behavior to the advantage of a sustainable future. These specialists suggest instead that values and ethics, religion and philosophy may be important factors in this transformation. This view is being articulated in conferences, in publications, and in policymaking institutes. Prominent scientists and policy-makers are calling for a broad and new manner of thinking to make possible the transition to a sustainable future. They acknowledge that arguments from ‘sound science’ and computer models which draw on reams of data and statistics do not necessarily move people to action. In this vein, James Gustave Speth, the Dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in his book Red Sky at Morning (2004), acknowledges that religion, ethics and values need to play a larger role in environmental discussions. Similarly, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, in his book On the Future of Life (2003), notes the potential power of religious beliefs and institutions to mobilize large numbers of people for ecological concerns. Think tanks such as the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC are also realizing that statistics and alarming reports are not enough to help in initiating the changes for an ecologically sustainable world. Denial and paralysis can set in when the future is presented in endless bleak scenarios. In the final chapter of the Worldwatch 2003 report State of the World, senior researcher Gary Gardner wrote about the growing role of religions in shaping attitudes and action towards a broader commitment to environmental protection and restoration. His essay received significant attention, and an enlarged version of the chapter is published in a separate Worldwatch Paper (#164, December 2002) entitled ‘Invoking the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in the Quest for a Sustainable World’. In the 30-year anniversary edition of Limits to Growth published in 2004, Dennis Meadows and his colleagues observe that we need new ‘Tools for the Transition to Sustainability’. The authors admit that In our search for ways to encourage the peaceful restructuring of a system that naturally resists its own transformation we have tried many tools. The obvious ones are – rational analysis, data systems thinking, computer modeling, and the clearest words we can find. Those are tools that anyone trained in science and economics would automatically grasp. Like recycling, they are useful, necessary, and they are not enough’ (269).

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Instead, they suggest the need for values and ethics beyond the usual frame of environmental science and policy. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich voiced similar concerns in an address to the Ecological Society of America in August 2004. He observed that, ‘[f]or the first time in human history, global civilization is threatened with collapse … The world therefore needs an ongoing discussion of key ethical issues related to the human predicament in order to help generate the urgently required response.’ He acknowledges that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has undertaken an important evaluation of the conditions of the world’s ecosystems. He notes, however, that ‘[t]here is no parallel effort to examine and air what is known about how human cultures, and especially ethics, change, and what kinds of changes might be instigated to lessen the chances of a catastrophic global collapse’. He calls for the establishment of a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) to address these problems. The Emerging Field of Religion and Ecology Historians and theologians of the world’s religions are beginning to make significant contributions to these discussions as a common field of religion and ecology is emerging. It is a field still in its infancy, which remains to be shaped in a variety of ways and by plural perspectives. The Harvard Conference Series on World Religions and Ecology held betwen 1996 and 1998 at the Center for the Study of World Religions might be seen as the foundation of this field as far as embracing all the world’s religions is concerned, although some studies preceded it in Christianity and in several other religions. This international conference series was inspired by Thomas Berry’s vision of a flourishing Earth community and by Tu Weiming’s call to draw on the wisdom of the world’s religions in rethinking the Enlightenment’s mentality. The series involved over 800 participants and resulted in ten groundbreaking volumes, which demonstrate how perspectives and values regarding nature are shaped, in frequently contested ways, by various religions, cultures, and geographies (see Part A of the Bibliography at the end of this chapter). Many of the participants hoped that this broadened perspective would contribute a more comprehensive and culturally diverse basis for environmental ethics, as it is conceived both inside the academy and beyond. This is indeed occurring. With the growing interest in comparative environmental ethics and in global ethics, these Harvard volumes are becoming useful resources for ethicists, philosophers, and theologians as well as for policy-makers. Consequently, several of the Harvard books are being translated into other languages, for instance into Arabic, Farsi, Urdhu, Indonesian, and Turkish in the Islamic world. In addition, the volumes on Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism are being translated into    See Paul Ehrlich and Donald Kennedy, ‘Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior’, Science 309 (22 July 2005).

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Chinese, and the volume on Christianity into Spanish. These books thus have the potential of addressing those interested in environmental policy-making in particular countries and regions around the world. For example, the government of Iran and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) held two conferences on religion and ecology in Teheran in 2001 and 2005. The volume on Islam was signaled for attention by the Minister of the Environment, who is encouraging its translation into Farsi. Similarly, two years ago the Chinese Deputy Minister for the Environment Pan Yue made a lengthy speech calling for the development of an environmental ethics in China on the basis of the traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. In addition, the Hinduism and Ecology volume has been published in India, where numerous projects based on Hindu and Jain values are already underway – for example tree-planting and river restoration. There is still much to be done within the academy, for the newly emerging field of world religions and ecology has yet to be more robustly shaped and defined. As the field unfolds, the role of scholars will also be developing – in documenting this newly emerging alliance, in identifying the resources for its further emergence, and in providing critical analysis. Throughout this process scholars in the field will be striving to raise thoughtful questions and to pioneer self-reflexive methodologies. There are varied roles here for engaged intellectuals, constructive theologians, and historically and textually based scholars. In addition, the challenge is to create bridges with, and between, other scholars interested in the environment from the perspective of the humanities and from that of social, natural, and even applied sciences such as medicine and public health. This is why we organized major interdisciplinary conferences in October 1998 in New York City, at the United Nations and at the American Museum of Natural History – conferences attended by over 1,000 people. In addition, with Tu Weiming’s encouragement, support, and active participation, we held interdisciplinary conferences on world religions and animals, on nature writers and the ecological imagination, on religion and climate change, and seminars on cosmology and religion. In this context, religions and scholars of religions can be seen as necessary, although not sufficient, partners; for they need to be in dialogue with scientists, economists, and policy-makers. In creating the website www.yale.edu/ religionandecology, we highlighted these dialogue partners. We also included, beyond institutional religions, broad movements such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental justice, which are helping to shape the discussion of values for a viable future. The key is to create a tent large enough for all of these to co-exist and contribute under it. The Harvard Conference Series on World Religions and Ecology was based on an acknowledgement of the dark side of religions as well as on a recognition of the disjunction between religious traditions and modern environmental problems. The participants underscored the historical and cultural separation between texts written in earlier periods for different purposes. They worked within a process of retrieval of texts and traditions, of critical re-evaluation, and of reconstruction for the present circumstances. They highlighted the gap between theory and practice,

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noting that textual passages which celebrate nature do not automatically lead to the protection of nature. There is thus an important dialogue which should occur between environmental historians and historians of religions, a dialogue designed to explore the interaction between intellectual ideas and practices in relation to actual environmental conditions. Despite these caveats, there is growing recognition that religious and cultural traditions have helped to shape worldviews and systems of ethics regarding nature and our place in it. These traditions, moreover, are far from static entities, but are rather dynamic, contested processes, adapting to different times and circumstances. Indeed, our studies in the humanities are dedicated to exploring how religious and cultural traditions are constantly negotiating the boundaries between change and continuity and between ideas and action. As a historian of religion, especially east Asian religions, I am interested in understanding what these traditions have said in their own cultural and historical contexts, as well as in what they say to us in our times. In pursuing this interest, I am following the leadership of Tu Weiming and W. Theodore deBary, who have brought Confucianism into discussions regarding human rights and environmental ethics. I acknowledge the concerns of those who argue for the incommensurable nature of the cultural differences involved in studying other religions. This is why we rely on the rigorous scholarly work of historians of religions, philosophers, and theologians as well as on that of historians of literature, art, and history. At the same time, I observe, along with Tu Weiming, deBary, and others, that these traditions have significant ideas regarding who we are as humans and in our relationship to nature, ideas which transcend the particularity of cultural or historical contexts. Confucianism: Resources for Ecological Perspectives and Ethics It is in this spirit, of acknowledging differences of time and circumstances and yet of valuing the efficacy of ideas which transcend such particularisms – that I turn to explore a leading scholar, statesman, and soldier in the Neo-Confucian tradition of China: Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529). In a book titled Fifty Key Environmental Thinkers, only six of the figures included are not western thinkers: Buddha, Gandhi, and Vandana Shiva from India; Chuang Tzu and Wang Yang-ming from China; and Basho from Japan. I cannot help wondering what this book will look like fifty years from now, as we begin to discover individuals beyond the West who will expand our environmental thinking through the humanistic legacy of world cultures – which we are inheriting in all their rich diversity. Wang Yang-ming is one of these individuals. Along with Chu Hsi (1130–1200), Wang was the most influential thinker in the Chinese Neo-Confucian tradition. His ideas spread across east Asia and endured in both Korea and Japan for some    Joy Palmer and Peter Blaze Corcoran (eds), Fifty Key Environmental Thinkers (London: Routledge 2001).

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five hundred years. In Japan, Confucians interested in implementing a humane government relied on his teachings, as did the reformers in the Meiji Restoration of the nineteenth century. Tu Weiming’s influential book on Wang Yang-ming, along with Wing-tsit Chan’s translation of the Instructions for Practical Learning, helped to make Wang’s ideas more widely known in the West. Seen as controversial by the more orthodox Confucians, he has none the less made important contributions to humanistic thought and praxis which warrant our consideration today for environmental ethics – both for east Asia and for the planet as a whole. The three pillars of his thought on epistemology, ethics, and cosmology are an emphasis on empathetic knowing, embodied acting, and compassionate living in the world. Empathetic knowing affirms human subjectivity as a primary way of apprehending the nature of things. Embodied acting unifies knowledge and action. Compassionate living embraces a common kinship with the larger community of life. These ideas of Wang include both humanistic and ecological values and can be more fully appreciated within the broader context of Confucian and NeoConfucian thought itself. The Confucian tradition is remarkably rich and diverse – from its early classical articulation by Confucius (551–479 bce) and Mencius (372–289 bce), through its theories of cosmological and correlative correspondences in the Han period (206 bce–220 ce), to its more metaphysical expressions in the Neo-Confucian synthesis of the Sung, Yuan, and Ming dynasties (tenth century to the seventeenth). Its humanistic values had a strong and lasting appeal, spreading across east Asia to Korea and Japan, and into south-east Asia to Vietnam and Singapore. Its influence continues in the present with the new Confucian philosophers working out of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, along with Tu Weiming, at Harvard. Although this tradition is still not well known in the West, the humanistic and ecological perspectives of Confucian and Neo-Confucian thinkers merit our attention. For these are individuals who have dealt for 2,500 years with pressing questions about how to create sustainable societies supported by a politics which promotes the common good. Within this ancient Confucian ideal of establishing humane government, they encouraged the equitable distribution of goods and provided conditions for agriculture and commerce to flourish. Against formidable odds and despite frequent failures, they struggled to sustain effective political and social institutions. To staff these institutions, they created the oldest meritocracy in the world, in which government appointments were based on civil service examinations that drew on the values of the Confucian classics. All leaders, even the emperor himself, were called to an ongoing task of moral cultivation. In this spirit, Confucian education was a means of encouraging the selfcultivation of literati, so that they could contribute to the wellbeing of the larger society and body politic. Thus Confucians promoted education, fostered printing, 

 For a broad survey of some of the key thinkers in the Confucian and Neo-Confucian tradition, see Tu Wei-ming and Mary Evelyn Tucker (eds), Confucian Spirituality, 2 vols (New York: Crossroad 2003, 2004).

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created immense libraries, established academies, and built universities. They also encouraged the arts, celebrated nature in painting and poetry, kept detailed historical records, and wrote lasting interpretive histories. While Confucianism, like all religious and philosophical traditions, at times became distant from its ideals and was used for autocratic ends, it none the less was a dynamic and unifying force for one of the world’s oldest continuing civilizations. Its promotion of broad humanistic education in the family and in schools is one of the reasons for its continuity into the present. The aim of such education and self-cultivation was to realize one’s innate good nature and ultimately to achieve sagehood. This is what Wang Yangming prized above all – beyond fame, position, or power. Such cultivation of the person was based on a firm belief in the goodness of human nature as well as on an understanding of the inherent unity of thinking and feeling. The character which designates ‘mind’ in Chinese implies both functions and is often translated as ‘heart–mind’ or ‘mind and heart’. In a Confucian context, the human elementis considered to be the heart and mind of the universe (which in turn is described as Heaven and Earth). Another distinguishing feature of Confucianism is its recognition that the basis of a sustainable society and civilization is a healthy agricultural system. Thus Confucian governments built complex irrigation works as well as regional granaries for the storage of rice. Moreover, in the capital city, the emperor supported the development of farmers’ almanacs, and also performed rituals at the altar of Earth for the planting and harvesting of rice. All of this was done with detailed attention paid to seasonal changes and to the appropriate cultivation of nature. In east Asia, then, cultivating nature was a primary concern of the Confucians. This cultivation embraced both the natural and the human world: it was, namely, agricultural cultivation of the land for producing food and moral cultivation of the human being for creating virtue. In essence, these were seen as mutually related activities, for the human was not viewed as an isolated entity but as part of the larger community of life – social, natural, cosmological. Tu Weiming has described this worldview as anthropocosmic, in contrast to the more anthropocentric emphasis of the western religious and philosophical traditions. This anthropocosmic worldview is characterized by a naturalistic cosmology and a transformative ethics. Naturalistic Cosmology The naturalistic cosmology of Neo-Confucianism is characterized by Tu Weiming as an organic holism and a dynamic vitalism. The organic holism of NeoConfucianism relates to the fact that the universe is viewed as a vast integrated 

 This section, on naturalistic cosmology, and the following one, on transformative ethics, are adapted from my introduction to the volume Confucianism and Ecology, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions, 1998), pp. xxxvi–xxxviii.

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unit, not as discrete mechanistic parts. Nature is seen as unified, interconnected, and interpenetrating, constantly relating microcosm and macrocosm. This interconnectedness is already present in the early Confucian tradition, through the Book of Changes (I Ching), and in the Han period, through cosmological correspondences of the elements with seasons, directions, colors, and even virtues. Cheng Chung-ying has described the organic naturalism of Confucian cosmology as being characterized by ‘natural naturalization’ and ‘human immanentization’, in contrast to the emphasis on rationality and transcendence in western thought. This naturalistic cosmology based on organic holism is distinguished by the view that there is no Creator God; rather, the universe is considered to be a selfgenerating, organismic process. Neo-Confucians are traditionally less concerned with theories of origin or concepts of a personal God than with what they perceive to be the ongoing reality of this generative, interrelated universe. This interconnected quality has been described by Tu Weiming as a ‘continuity of being’. It implies a great chain of being linking inorganic, organic, and human life forms. For the NeoConfucians, this linking is based on the understanding that all life is constituted of ch’i (in Japanese ki) – the material force or psychophysical dimension of the universe. This is seen as the unifying element of the cosmos and creates the basis for a profound reciprocity between humans and the natural world. The second important characteristic of Neo-Confucian cosmology is the quality of dynamic vitalism inherent in ch’i. It is material force as the substance of life that is the basis for the continuing process of flux and fecundity in the universe. The phrase sheng sheng (in Japanese sei sei), ‘production and reproduction’, is used in Neo-Confucian texts to illustrate the ongoing creativity and renewal of nature. Furthermore, it reflects a kind of ecological awareness that change is the basis for the interaction of life systems – mineral, vegetable, animal, and human. And, finally, it celebrates transformation as the clearest expression of the dynamic processes of life with which humans should harmonize their own actions. In essence, humans are urged to ‘model themselves on the ceaseless vitality of the cosmic processes.’ This approach to self-cultivation is an important key to Neo-Confucian thought, for a cosmology of holism and vitalism provides a metaphysical basis on which

 Cheng Chung-ying, New Dimension of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York 1991), p. 4.   Frederick F. Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1971), pp. 17–18.    See Ch 2 (‘The Continuity of Being: Chinese Visions of Nature’) in Tu Wei-ming’s Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany, NY: State University of New York 1985).    Ibid., p. 39. Tu Wei-ming notes: ‘For this reference in the Chou I, see A Concordance to Yi-Ching, Harvard Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series Supplement no. 10 (reprint; Taipei: Chinese Materials and Research Aids Service Center, Inc., 1966), 1/1.’ 

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an integral morality of accommodating change and being in harmony with it is developed.10 The extended discussions of the relationship of li (‘principle’; in Japanese ri) to ch’i in Neo-Confucianism can be seen as part of the effort to articulate continuity and order in the midst of change.11 ‘Principle’ is the pattern which provides a means of establishing harmony amidst flux. This contrasts with the Buddhist understanding of attachment to change as a source of suffering. The Transformative Ethics of Self-Cultivation For the Neo-Confucians, the idea of self-cultivation implies, then, a ‘creative transformation’12 such that humanity forms a triad with Heaven and Earth. This triad underlies the assumption of our interconnectedness to all reality and acts as an overriding goal of self-cultivation. Interrelatedness is thus both a given and an achievement for humans. Through the deepening of this sense of basic identity humans may participate fully in the transformative and fecund powers of the universe.13 In doing so they are able to touch the depths of things. In cultivating their moral nature within this triad, then, humans are entering into the cosmological processes of change. Numerous images from nature are used to describe self-cultivation: planting and nourishing seeds, pulling up weeds, not overgrazing land, not cutting down trees wantonly. Human beings nurture the seeds of virtue within themselves and participate both in the natural and in the human order.14 This is elaborated upon by the Neo-Confucians through a specific understanding of the correspondence between the virtues practiced by humans and the cosmic processes, which are seen as their natural counterpart. In his Treatise on Humaneness, Chu Hsi speaks of the moral qualities of the heart–mind of Heaven and Earth as a fourfould entity, namely origination, flourish, advantage, and firmness. Similarly, in the heart–mind of humans there are four moral qualities: humaneness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. Cosmological powers and human virtues are seen as two aspects of one dynamic process of transformation in the universe.

10   See how this developed in Japan in Mary Evelyn Tucker, Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism (Albany, NY: State University of New York 1989). 11  For a discussion of debates on li and ch’i in China and Japan, see Mary Evelyn Tucker, The Philosophy of Qi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 12   See Tu Wei-ming’s essays in Confucian Thought (above, n. 8). 13  This term is used by Tu Wei-ming in Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung Yung (Albany, NY: State University of New York 1989). 14   See Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 1997).

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This anthropocosmic worldview, then, is a view of the human heart–mind as forming a triad with Heaven and Earth. Through self-cultivation humans affect the growth and transformation of things and create the possibility for a flourishing, sustainable society. This metaphor, of the humans completing the triad, originates in classical Confucianism and finds one of its richest expressions in the Western Inscription of Chang Tsai (1020–77). The interrelationship between Heaven, Earth, and humanity is seen as a parental one. Central to the metaphor is the notion of humans as children of the universe, who thus have a filial responsibility for its care and continuation: Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I find an intimate place in their midst. Therefore, that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.15

Grounds for an Ecological Philosophy and Ethics Wang Yang-ming, an outlstanding Ming Neo-Confucian scholar, statesman, and military leader, was born in a period of enormous upheaval.16 Wang struggled to overcome great personal difficulties in order to formulate a system of thought and action which challenged the orthodox Neo-Confucianism of his day. Against formidable odds of political corruption, social decay, and educational mediocrity, he offered fresh and invigorating insights into perennial Confucian problems. While these insights were born out of the intense political and social challenges of Ming China, his hard-won reflections on epistemology, ethics, and cosmology transcended the particular historical context in which they arose. Indeed they have been a source of inspiration across east Asia for some five hundred years. As a comprehensive vision of the nature of humans and of our capacity for reciprocity with nature, his philosophy bears re-examination in our own times. Wang’s active life, with numerous challenges to overcome, clearly shaped his philosophical ideas and ethical perspectives. He embodies many of the ideals of the Confucian scholar–official, who practiced self-cultivation so as to serve the wider society better and to bring order to the state. Yet, as Tu Weiming observes, 15   Wing-tsit Chan, translated by [plse ADD name], Source Book of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1963), p. 497. 16  For biographies of Wang Yang-ming, see Tu Wei-ming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472–1509) (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976) and Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming (New York: Columbia University Press 1976).

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he transcended this model of conventional Confucian literati, for his philosophy was born out of immense personal suffering. He described this struggle, often in isolated or difficult circumstances, as ‘a hundred deaths and a thousand sufferings’.17 Despite these difficulties and in the face of severe criticism, he was able to breathe new life into Neo-Confucianism and to inspire active debates on the nature of learning, cultivation, and action. His reflections on epistemology, ethics, and cosmology have significant implications in our current search for formulating sustainable relations between humanity and the Earth. The three key aspects of Wang’s thought are his ideas on innate good knowing (liang chih in Chinese, Ryochi in Japanese); on the unity between knowledge and action (chih-hsing ho-i in Chinese, chian goi in Japanese); and on forming one body with all things (wan wu i-t’i in Chinese, banbutsu ittai in Japanese). The first idea outlines an epistemology of empathetic knowing; the second articulates an ethics of embodied action; and the third embraces a cosmology of kinship of being. Through these ideas, Wang articulates a profound sense of reciprocity among all forms of of life, a phenomenon touching the depths of things. Moreover, he understands the human being as having a heart–mind which embraces the interconnected circles of society, nature, and cosmos. These ideas lend themselves to treatment in an ecological philosophy and ethics; for they underscore the importance of subjectivity, embodiment, and reciprocity. In this regard, it might be noted that, although the causes of the current global crisis are manifold – economic, political, social, and technological – a major contributing factor is the imbalance of human relations with the natural world. Because these relations are out of balance, we have created societal norms which threaten the variety and complexity of life forms on the planet. Our attitudes and our actions regarding nature reflect a dominance model rather than a reciprocity model. Because we have lost or obfuscated the deep identity between humans and the natural world, we have forgotten the appropriate boundaries for creating the conditions for societies to flourish in. What is needed is the recovery of modes of reciprocal relationship with nature and the cosmos. It is here that Wang Yangming’s Neo-Confucian thought may be instructive. By examining some of his key ideas we can re-imagine what recovering the depth of things would look like – not only in the Chinese context, but in our own western milieu as well. Innate Knowledge of the Good: An Empathetic Mode of of Knowing Wang’s emphasis on innate knowledge of the good was a central focus of his thought. In highlighting an empathetic mode of knowing, Wang was attempting to overcome the fragmentation of learning and the objectification of things which characterized the degenerate forms of Confucianism in his own time. Instead, he wished to affirm the deep wellsprings of human subjectivity as a source of authentic  Tu Wei-ming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action (above, n. 16), pp. 4–5.

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understanding. In so doing, he sought to express his own personal experience of realizing an integrated heart–mind. 18 He celebrated the primordial numinous quality of the heart–mind by saying: ‘It is my nature endowed by Heaven, the original substance of my mind, naturally intelligent, shining, clear, and understanding’ (278). For Wang, the heavenly nature of the heart–mind was identical with the Principle of Nature and with the Tao. It was self-sufficient yet pervasive. He says: ‘Innate knowledge is man’s root which is intelligent and is grown by nature. It naturally grows and grows without cease’ (210). It is like the ‘spirit of Creation’ (216). This pure and potential responsiveness of the heart–mind was what continually preoccupied Wang. He observes: ‘The mind of the sage is like a clear mirror. Since it is all clarity, it responds to all stimuli as they come and reflects everything’ (27). Key to Wang’s ideas is the intuitive capacity of the heart–mind for a sympathetic resonance with all things. He notes that the heart–mind’s original substance is sincerity and commiseration (176). In its primal form, before the feelings are aroused, the heart–mind is in a state of equilibrium and thus is impartial. Wang Yang-ming felt that this broad, empathetic basis of apprehension should be recovered before things could be properly investigated. For him, the basic orientation of learning was to cultivate this innate knowledge so as to make us sense the inner depths of things and thus investigate things more clearly. He did not deny the importance of objective knowledge, but felt that the relationship between person and things should not be lost in abstract or disembodied knowledge. For Wang, this intuitive awareness was grounded in personal experience. His life-long struggle to discover and to nurture this empathetic knowing is exemplified in his search for the principle, both in things of the world and in texts. A breakthrough moment occurred for him when, after exhausting meditative efforts to penetrate the principle of the bamboo as an external object, he finally had an experience of seeing into the true nature of the bamboo. He recognized that seeking the principle externally was inadequate; for the principle lay within the heart–mind itself. This intuitive knowing is described by Tu Weiming as a ‘primordial awareness’ or a ‘feeling knowledge’. Indeed, for Wang the cognitive, affective, and ethical intelligence of the heart–mind was one. The key to uncovering this innate knowledge of the good was making the will sincere. One’s intentions, attitudes, and motivations are essential for activating this depth of one’s feeling awareness. Wang writes: ‘If the will is sincere, then, to a large extent, the mind is naturally rectified, and the personal life is also naturally cultivated’ (55). In reference to the Great Learning, he notes: ‘The task of the Great Learning consists in manifesting the clear character. To manifest the clear character is none other than to make the will sincere, and the task of making the

 All quotations are taken from Wang Yang-ming, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, translated by Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press 1963). Page numbers are given after the quotations. 18

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will sincere is none other than the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge’ (86). Disagreement with Chu Hsi It was precisely over the priority of sincerity of the will versus emphasis on investigating things that Wang disagreed with Chu Hsi. This was evident in their different interpretations of the Great Learning, as Wang felt that Chu had rearranged the order of the sentences. Although he hesitated to challenge Chu Hsi, he nonetheless thought it was essential to emphasize learning as something based on a sincere attitude. Chu was interested in the investigation of things (ko-wu), while Wang insisted that this should be understood as the rectification of things. For Chu, this involved objective study, whereas for Wang it involved a search for the truth within. Their differences were a matter of emphasis. For Wang, genuine learning was not simply an investigation of facts but an understanding of the deeply interconnected nature of reality – a way of touching the depths of things. While Wang stressed the unity of innate knowledge, Chu felt that it was important to make distinctions. Chu said that one developed moral awareness on the basis of the study and investigation of principles outside the mind. Wang had a different concern, which was about stressing the primacy of the heart–mind in containing all principles. Chu Hsi felt that learning should proceed empirically and deductively; one should search for the principle inexhaustibly, in texts and (externally) in things. Wang felt this procedure lacked probity and could become forced or strained. Rather, one needed to recognize that principles reside within. Thus a prior existential determination was essential to illuminate the heart–mind and establish the will. This could not be done simply empirically, but intuitively and inductively. Sincerity of the will was essential to this task. The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Encouraging Spontaneity of Action For Wang this cultivation of an empathetic knowing grounded in sincerity led to an ethics which emphasized the unity of knowledge and action. When innate knowledge arises into consciousness, then spontaneous action is possible. Throughout his life of intense commitments as scholar, statesman, and military leader, Wang demonstrated this fundamental unity of knowing and doing. For him, these two were part of one spontaneous movement, where the mind and body could act in perfect harmony for a larger moral good. He writes: ‘Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action is its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge. At bottom the task of knowledge and action cannot be separated’ (93). A plausible objection to this profound subjectivity of knowledge is that it could slip into subjectivism. Evil arises on account of personal limitations, inertia,

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and self-deception. Thus there is a need for the continual cultivation of sincerity, transparency, and authenticity. Checks are also required in order to avoid solipsistic subjectivity. This was the danger which faced many of Wang’s followers in the later T’ai chou school. To avoid such narcissistic subjectivity, Wang aimed at nourishing innate knowledge not in isolation, but by relating to other Confucian scholars, to the broader Confucian tradition, to the larger social community, and to the heavenly principle. He hoped to foster a gradual process of transformation which was effortless (tzu jan). Wang thus aimed to promote a kind of action in the world that followed naturally from, and embodied, one’s deep inner springs of innate wisdom. The goal was to encourage a spontaneity which brought one into a vibrant relationship with other humans and with all forms of life. From such a balanced inner unity, harmonious action would result. This meant that humans would be reciprocal among themselves and would resonate with the natural world at large. This spontaneity is expressed in Wang’s poem ‘Sitting at Night at Pi-Hsia Pond’, written in 1524, when he had retired to his native place: An autumn rain brings in the newness of a cool night: Sitting on the pond’s edge I find my spirit brightened by the solitary moon. Swimming in the depths, the fish are passing on words of power;Perched on the branches, birds are uttering the true Tao. Do not say that instinctive desires are not mysteries of Heaven: I know that my body is one with the ten thousand things. People talk endlessly about rites and music; But who will sweep away the heaps of dust from the blue sky?19

Forming One Body With All Things: The Kinship of Being Thus from innate knowing and from the unity between knowledge and action comes Wang’s rich cosmological understanding of forming one body with all things. This microcosmic–macrocosmic identity characterizes Wang’s thought and draws on many strands of earlier Confucian ideas. From classical notions of forming one body with the myriad things in the Book of History and in the Doctrine of the Mean to Chang Tsai’s filial relationship with Heaven and Earth in the Western Inscription, Wang’s organismic identity broadens and deepens the Confucian vision. His resonant language for expressing this identity embraces not only the human order but the natural order as well. What distinguishes his thought is the extension of sympathy and concern from humans to animals, birds, plants and living things, and finally even to inanimate objects. The ecological implications are manifold; here are illustrative selections from his writings:   Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom (above, n. 16), p. 237.

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Nature, Space and the Sacred The mind of a sage regards Heaven, Earth, and all things as one body. He looks upon all people of the world, whether inside or outside his family, or whether far or near, but all with blood and breath, as his brothers and children. He wants to secure, preserve, educate, and nourish all of them, so as to fulfill his desire of forming one body with all things. (118) That the great man can regard Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things as one body is not because he deliberately wants to do so, but because it is natural to the humane nature of his mind that he do so ... Therefore when he sees a child about to fall into a well, he cannot help a feeling of alarm and commiseration. This shows that his humanity forms one body with the child. It may be objected that the child belongs to the same species. Again, when he observes the pitiful cries and frightened appearance of birds and animals about to be slaughtered he cannot help feeling an ‘inability to bear’ their suffering. This shows that his humanity forms one body with birds and animals. It may be objected that birds and animals are sentient beings as he is. But when he sees plants broken and destroyed, he cannot help a feeling of pity. This shows that his humanity forms one body with plants. It may be said that plants are living things as he is. Yet, even when he sees tiles and stones shattered and crushed, he cannot help a feeling of regret. This shows that his humanity forms one body with tiles and stones ... Such a mind is rooted in his Heaven-endowed nature, and is naturally intelligent, clear, and not beclouded. For this reason it is called the ‘clear character’. (272–3)

This anthropocosmic cosmology highlights the identity of the microcosm of the human with the macrocosm of the Earth and of the universe. The interconnected concentric circles that move outward, from humans to the larger community of life, are evident. That these circles extend even to inanimate things indicates the depths of our relationality. The Ecological Implications of Wang’s Thought It is evident, then, that Wang Yang-ming encouraged a profound affective identification of human beings with the natural world. He recognized the heart– mind as a nature which had the capacity for sympathetic resonance with all things. The heart–mind was like a mirror in being responsive to the life forces around one. Wang provided an interrelated means of self-cultivation, beginning with an epistemology that nourished empathetic knowing, moving into an ethics encompassing the unity of knowledge and action, and ultimately entering into the cosmological interpenetration of self, society, nature and cosmos. For Wang, the principles embedded in the heart–mind are the means of understanding the larger world. In order to examine principles within, one has to make the will sincere. Then the extension of knowledge is possible. Ultimately, through sincerity one is able to maintain the mirror-like quality of the heart–mind.

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One can thus reflect the principles of nature, extend one’s affective knowing, and link to the sincerity of the larger universe, as was suggested in the Doctrine of the Mean. Wang’s teachings on innate knowledge are important as a means of reawakening the capacity of humans to apprehend nature and to embrace its vast complexity and magnificent particularity. To appreciate anew the principles and patterns of nature’s diversity is indispensable for the task of overcoming the present tendencies to objectify nature as something external to humans and thus to use it mindlessly. This deepening knowledge of nature encourages reciprocity rather than dominion, communion rather than exploitation. Wang’s life-long aspiration to touch the depths of things echoes the our present yearning for humans to embrace their larger self: Everything from ruler, minister, husband, wife, and friends to mountains, rivers, spiritual beings, birds, animals, and plants should be truly loved in order to realize my humanity that forms one body with them and then my clear character will be completely manifested, and I will really form one body with Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things’. (273)

Our challenge is how to realize our humanity within the larger Earth community in this new millennium.

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Bibliography A. The Harvard Series on World Religions and Ecology Chapple, Christopher Key (ed.), Jainism and Ecology: Nonviolence in the Web of Life (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2002). Chapple, Christopher Key and Mary Evelyn Tucker (eds), Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2000). Foltz, Richard C., Frederick M. Denny and Azizan Baharuddin (eds), Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2003). Girardot, Norman J., James Miller and Xiaogan Liu (eds), Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2001). Grim, John A. (ed.), Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2001). Hessel, Dieter T. and Rosemary Radford Ruether (eds), Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2001). Samuleson, Hava Tirosh (ed.), Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2003). Tucker, Mary Evelyn and John Berthrong (eds), Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 1998). Tucker, Mary Evelyn and Duncan Ryuken Williams (eds), Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 1998). [The tenth volume, Shinto and Ecology, was published in Japanese, in Japan] B. Works used in this paper Allan, Sarah, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 1997). Chan, Wing-tsit, Source Book of Chinese Philosophy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1963). Ching, Julia, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming (New York: Columbia University Press 1976). Chung-ying, Cheng, New Dimension of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York 1991).

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Ehrlich, Paul and Donald Kennedy, ‘Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior’, Science 309 (22 July 2005). Mote, Frederick F., Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1971). Palmer, Joy and Peter Blaze Corcoran (eds), Fifty Key Environmental Thinkers (London: Routledge 2001). Tucker, Mary Evelyn, Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese NeoConfucianism (Albany, NY: State University of New York 1989). — The Philosophy of Qi (New York: Columbia University Press 2007). Weiming, Tu, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472– 1509) (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976). — Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany, NY: State University of New York 1985). — Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung Yung (Albany, NY: State University of New York 1989). Weiming, Tu and Mary Evelyn Tucker (eds), Confucian Spirituality, 2 vols (New York: Crossroad 2003, 2004). Yang-ming, Wang, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, translated by Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press 1963).

Chapter 22

Stone and Sacred Space in China and Japan: Implications for our Treatment of the Earth Graham Parkes

One of the most fascinating features that distinguish Chinese culture from the world’s other great traditions is its enduring passion for stone. Indeed the English language lacks names for such a passion: neither ‘lithophilia’ nor ‘petromania’ is to be found in the dictionary. As in many other places, there is prehistoric evidence in China of religious practices in which stone plays a key role; but the Chinese veneration for stone in its natural, unworked state is unparalleled in its intensity and range. Mountains, as manifestations of the vast telluric forces that thrust the earth thousands of metres into the heavens have always been regarded in the Chinese tradition as sacred. Microcosms of those majestic peaks in the form of rocks were considered to manifest the same energies at a similar intensity, especially when arranged in the context of ponds and vegetation in imperial gardens. On an even smaller scale, there was the practice of collecting and displaying stones of more modest size to be placed in trays or on the desks of scholars. At each level of magnitude, the stone is understood to generate a kind of sacred space around it, and human beings who inhabit such a space will, moreover, find their physical and mental wellbeing to be greatly enhanced. A historical text from around the third century bce mentions ‘weird rocks’ or ‘strange stones’ being sent as tribute to the mythical Emperor Yu; and records of rocks being arranged in emperors’ parks go back some two thousand years. At first a prerogative of the imperial families, enthusiasm for stone spread subsequently to the literati, and it remains vital in the culture to this day. In the art of gardenmaking, rocks constitute not only the framework of the classical garden but also its major focal points. But the primary feature of the role of stone in the Chinese tradition is that stone is understood not as some kind of matter or substance, but 

 For a more detailed treatment, see my essay ‘Thinking Rocks, Living Stones: Reflections on Chinese Lithophilia’, Diogenes 52.4 (2005), 75–87. (French version: ‘La Pensée des rochers, la vie des pierres: Réflexions sur une passion chinoise’, Diogène 207 [Paris: Unesco, 2004], 95–111.)    See Loraine Kuck, The World of the Japanese Garden: From Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art (New York: Weatherhill 1968), p. 39. Also John Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China Institute in America 1985), p. 18.

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rather as a certain configuration of ‘earth’s essential energies.’ Indeed, a dichotomy that has profound consequences for our relation to the natural world in ‘the West’ is conspicuously absent from Chinese cosmology: that between the animate and the inanimate. Of course, the Chinese distinguish flora from fauna and the mineral realm from the vegetal, but the underlying idea is that phenomena in all realms dissolve into and condense out of an all-pervading medium of cosmic energies known as qi. These energies flow, like magnetic forces, between two poles: one positive and active, known as yang, the other negative and passive, known as yin. Qi energy also works along a spectrum from fast-moving and rarefied (as in the breath, which is invisible) to slow-moving and condensed (as in rock, which is both visible and tangible). In fact we find something similar to qi at the beginning of the western tradition too, in the thought of the Presocratic philosopher Anaximenes, for whom aêr is ‘the underlying nature, one and infinite’. The hard thing to grasp at first about the Chinese qi cosmology (unless you are a Presocratic philosopher or a particle physicist) is its lack of substance. There is no solid stuff, no matter – just forces or energies. For several centuries, however, it seemed to western observers otherwise after the discovery that the Chinese had a doctrine of the ‘five elements’ which dated back to the fourth century bce and appeared to be a counterpart to the idea of the four elements (earth, water, fire, air) discussed by the ancient Greeks. But the analogy turns out to be misleading, since the Chinese name wuxing is properly translated ‘five goings’, ‘transitions’, or ‘doings’. On the Daoist worldview, the primal emptiness is constantly differentiating itself into the polarities of yang and yin energies, whose interplay gives rise to what we had better call the ‘five phases’. In a world of unceasing change, far from being static elements forming the building-blocks of the cosmos, wuxing refers to the five phases of transformation through which the energies associated with the earth pass – namely wood, fire, soil, metal, water. Further differences between Chinese and western thought are exemplified by the very different images of the human body in the two traditions. Vesalius represents the human body as an essentially muscled structure belonging to a man of substance – which no doubt reflects the European emphasis on the human being   See Hay, Kernels of Energy (above, n. 2), p. 52.   See the section ‘Naturalistic Cosmology’ in Mary Evelyn Tucker’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 21).   Like the Chinese qi, this one underlying nature, which is ‘always in motion’, is subject to the two basic transformations of condensation (puknotês) and rarefaction (manotês): ‘Being made finer,’ Anaximenes writes, ‘it becomes fire, being made thicker it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when thickened still more) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest come into being from these’ (J. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven. The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963), pp. 144–5).    Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1956), 232–61.  

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as an agent capable of producing things from raw material. Vesalius’s Chinese counterpart, Hua Shou, represents the body more as a configuration of forces, a site through which qi-energies flow along specific courses and thereby exemplifies an understanding of the human being as a participant in the interactions among the forces of heaven and earth. The body so conceived is a microcosm of the larger world, a patterning of energies corresponding to the larger patterning that is the physical environment, in which that body’s activities take place. As such, the body of the earth is animated by flows of energy that course along invisible channels corresponding to the ‘meridians’ envisaged in the body by Chinese acupuncture. These channels within the earth are called its ‘veins’ or ‘lifelines’. There is also a temporal dimension to our relations with the places we inhabit. As the seasons proceed, the cosmic qi alternates between yang and yin: yang qi is in the ascendant from the beginning of spring and reaches its highest point in midsummer; it then diminishes as the yin qi begins to increase, which peaks at the winter solstice. It will obviously make sense to try to harmonize the currents of qi in one’s body with the larger ebbs and flows beyond, and the oldest surviving Chinese medical text (dating from the third century bce) recommends precisely this. A contemporary scholar of Chinese philosophy sums it up as follows: The measures good for one’s health … are the measures one is moved to take when one understands how the seasons act on the body. … Man is in spontaneous interaction with things, but responds differently according to the degree of his understanding of their similarities and contrasts, connexion or isolation. … To know how things compare and connect, in particular whether in connecting they support or conflict with each other, … is to know their patterns [li] and the Way which unites them all.

It is on such grounds that a fuller awareness of the relations between our own energies and those of our physical environment will be conducive to our flourishing. For an individual to flourish, on this worldview, it is necessary to harmonize the energy flows that constitute the human body with the larger patterns of energy which make up the physical environment. Certain places and kinds of terrain, owing to the nature of the energies coursing through them, will not be conducive to the flourishing of certain bodies, while other places with different energies will enhance wellness and vitalize one’s activities. But in cases where the particular individual is likely to flourish in a particular environment, this will happen only   See the discussion and images in Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books 1999).    The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine [Huangdi neijing], Translated by Ilza Veith (Berkeley and London: University of California Press 2002).   A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (LaSalle, IL: Open Court 1989), pp. 355–6. 

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when the flows of energy between the body and its surroundings, as well as those within the body, are open and not blocked. (It is a major task of Chinese medicine to free up such blocks in order to restore balance to the internal flows of qi and harmonize them with the environing patterns of energy.) In other words, it’s not enough simply to be in a place: one has to be awake, open to it and aware of its propensities, in order to thrive. And the practical environmental science that instructs us on how best to achieve optimal functioning goes by the name of fengshui, which means literally ‘winds–waters’.10 For over two thousand years, the Chinese have expressed their admiration of landscape (the Chinese word for it, shanshui, means ‘mountains–waters’) by creating landscape gardens designed to provide all the benefits of the greater ‘mountains and waters’ within a smaller space – at first in gardens adjacent to the imperial palace, then typically in the garden adjoining the house of a literatus, a Confucian scholar–official. But wherever it was, the garden was a place of social and cultural interaction within a natural setting. The aim of the landscape garden was twofold: to create a microcosm of a natural landscape in the city; and to furnish it with places for social interaction, where the human constructions would be integrated into the landscape in a simple and harmonious manner. A basic premise of fengshui thinking underlies the development of the Chinese garden: since the human body is a configuration of the same kinds of energies that course through the natural environment, one’s activities will be enhanced to the extent that one harmonizes the patterns of qi flowing through the body with the energetic configurations of the places in which one lives, works, eats, sleeps, and so forth. Thus, when the Chinese build a landscape garden, the idea is not simply to create a place in which to relax, converse and enjoy the aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena such as rocks and vegetation. The point is to construct an environment where the flows and patterns of qi will have a restorative and invigorating effect on the wellbeing of its inhabitants. And, since in the Chinese tradition rocks have always been revered as being especially powerful configurations of qi, it is natural for them to form the framework and focal points of the garden, such that their presence will vitalize one’s system and enhance one’s experience. The more impressively shaped the rock, the more powerful the energies it embodies, and the more beneficial the effect it generates on its surroundings. *** When the Chinese art of garden-making spread to Japan, it found fertile ground in the indigenous religion, Shinto, and a similar reverence for rock and stone. According to Shinto, the whole world is pervaded by awe-inspiring forces known as kami. Large and powerfully shaped rocks, as conduits of high intensities of kami, 10

 For a more comprehensive discussion, see my essay ‘Winds, Waters, and EarthEnergies: Fengshui and Sense of Place’, in Helaine Selin (ed.), Non-Western Views of Nature and the Environment (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer 2003), 185–209.

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were experienced as generating a kind of sacred space around them – an effect that could be enhanced by grouping them together in appropriate ways.11 Influences from Daoist mythology, Confucian philosophy, and Buddhist philosophy contributed to the development of a unique style of rock garden known as karesansui (‘dry landscape’), in which the components of the garden are kept to the ‘bare bones’ of rocks, pebbles, and gravel (with only the occasional plant or patch of moss).12 The premise of this style is that unworked stone, when appropriately contemplated, is not only a deep source of wisdom but also an aid to contemplation and thus a companion on the way to enlightenment. Unfortunately none of the dry landscape gardens from the mediaeval period in Japan has survived the ravages of time and war, though one thing that did survive lays claim to being the oldest manual for garden-making in the world. This is the Sakuteiki (Notes on Garden-Making), attributed to the eleventh-century nobleman Tachibana no Toshitsuna. Even though the text deals with the pleasure gardens of the nobility in the Heian period, with their ponds and streams, a section near the beginning contains the first mention of karesansui in the literature: ‘There is also a way to place rocks [create gardens] without ponds or streams. This is called the dry landscape style.’13 The earliest surviving example of this style is the ‘dry cascade’ in the garden at Saihōji, designed by the famous Zen priest Musō Soseki, which is often seen as the ultimate example of karesansui as described in the Sakuteiki. This garden initiates a break with the tradition, insofar as it inaugurates dry landscape as an independent style. A look at the Sakuteiki, a quarter of which is devoted to the topic of rocks, will help us better understand their role in the Japanese art of garden-making, and in the dry landscape style in particular. The text opens on a note of stone: ‘When arranging rocks, first be aware of the overall sense of the place.’ These opening words, Ishi wo taten koto, literally mean ‘the act of setting rocks upright’; but this locution eventually acquired the broader sense of ‘when making a garden’ – which demonstrates the centrality of rock-arranging to the development of the garden arts in Japan. The primary principle to be observed is exemplified in the frequent occurrences of the locution kowan ni shitagau, which means ‘following the request [of the rock]’. For example, the text at one point recommends: ‘Choose a particularly splendid rock and set it as the Master Rock. Then, following the request of this first rock, set the others accordingly.’ What is needed is a responsiveness on the part of the garden-maker to what we might call the ‘soul’ of the stone: one translator refers in this context to the

11  For a more comprehensive treatment of Shinto, see Daniel Shaw’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 23). 12  For a concise history of this style, see François Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden, translated by Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000). 13   Jirō Takei and Marc P. Keane, Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden (Boston: Tuttle 2001), p. 161.

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Japanese term ishigokoro, meaning the ‘heart’, or the ‘mind’, of the rock.14 Rather than imposing a preconceived design onto the site and the elements to be arranged there, the accomplished garden-maker will be sensitive to what the particular rocks ‘want’. If he listens carefully, they will tell him where they best belong. The most famous dry landscape garden is at Ryōanji in Kyoto, a Zen garden that adopts and adapts a motif from Shinto: the practice of using white gravel to denote a sacred space. The more one contemplates the interrelations among the fifteen rocks and the five groups in this garden, the more they seem to be ‘saying something’ and the stronger the sense becomes that the arrangement of rocks somehow ‘speaks to us’. I would like to conclude by outlining an important theme in Japanese Buddhism which I think helps us to understand this phenomenon with reference to the two most profound and sophisticated thinkers in the Japanese philosophical tradition: Kūkai and Dōgen. According to Kūkai (who flourished around the turn of the eighth to the ninth century), the entire physical universe is the body of the cosmic Buddha Dainichi Nyorai, who constantly expounds the true teachings of Buddhism ‘for his own enjoyment’. Even though this preaching of the Dharma doesn’t take place in any human language, if we practice we can come to hear and understand it. Dōgen (a Zen master from the thirteenth century) similarly regards the natural world as the body of the Buddha and believes that, with practice and effort, we can hear its preaching through, for instance, the ‘voices of the river valley’ and the ‘sounds of the mountain’. Furthermore, both thinkers claim that, as well as hearing the cosmos as a sermon, one can see the natural world as scripture. Kūkai writes in one of his poems: Being painted by brushes of mountains, by ink of oceans, Heaven and earth are the bindings of a sutra revealing the truth.

Again, it takes practice to be able to read this natural writing, since one must first open ‘the Buddha Eye’. Similarly for Dōgen, sutras are not restricted to writings contained on scrolls, since the natural world too can be read as sacred scripture. This is the burden of the chapter in the Shōbōgenzō entitled ‘Sansuigyō,’ or ‘Mountains and Waters as Sūtras’.15 In another chapter Dōgen writes: ‘The meaning of “the

14   Sakuteiki, translated by Shigemaru Shimoyama (Tokyo: Town and City Planners, 1976), p. ix. Yuriko Saito places appropriate emphasis on the importance of ‘following the request’ of the rocks in her essay ‘Japanese Gardens: The Art of Improving Nature’, Chanoyu Quarterly 83 (1996), 41–61. 15  A translation of this text, with my philosophical introduction, is available in William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield (eds), Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2009), pp. 83–92.

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sutras” is the whole Universe in ten directions, mountains, rivers, and the Earth, grass and trees, self and others.’16 We have seen how the Chinese tradition reveres rocks for their age and beauty, and for their being vitally expressive of the fundamental energies of the earth on and from which we live. Japanese Buddhism adds paedagogic and soteriologic dimensions by inviting us to regard rocks and other natural phenomena as sources of wisdom and companions on the path to deeper understanding. But nowadays the earth itself is as much in need of saving as its human inhabitants are – and especially of being saved from its human inhabitants. To this extent there are practical and not just aesthetic lessons to be learned from our relations with rocks, and good grounds for attending to the voices of nature both inside and beyond the confines of the Chinese or Japanese landscape garden. The east Asian experience of, and reverence for, rock is accessible to anyone who has the patience to look with an open mind and understanding. And a worldview that understands stone as sacred will obviously discourage any kind of abuse of the earth. Unfortunately most people in China and Japan nowadays have bought into the western attitude of condescending superiority to the natural world, regarding it as a mere resource for human beings to exploit as they will. And, since both countries are going to have to play a major role in dealing with the environmental crisis that the world now faces, one can only hope that they will have an interest in tapping into their roots and drawing from the salutary resources in their own traditions – where they will find a worldview for which the whole earth, and especially those parts of it that are stone, is experienced as sacred.

  Dōgen, ‘Jishō zammai’ [‘Samādhi as Experience of the Self’]: Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, trans. Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross (London: Windbell Publications 1999), p. 32. 16

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Bibliography Berthier, François, Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden, translated by Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000). Graham, A. C., Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (LaSalle, IL: Open Court 1989). Hay, John, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China Institute in America 1985). Kirk, J. S. and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963). Kuck, Loraine, The World of the Japanese Garden: From Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art (New York: Weatherhill 1968). Kuriyama, Shigehisa, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books 1999). Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, translated by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross (London: Windbell Publications 1999). Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1956), Parkes, Graham, ‘Thinking Rocks, Living Stones: Reflections on Chinese Lithophilia’, Diogenes 52.4 (2005), 75–87. (French version: ‘La Pensée des rochers, la vie des pierres: Réflexions sur une passion chinoise’, Diogène 207 [Paris: Unesco, 2004], 95–111.) — ‘Winds, Waters, and Earth-Energies: Fengshui and Sense of Place’, in Helaine Selin (ed.), Non-Western Views of Nature and the Environment (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer 2003), 185–209. — ‘Dōgen’s ‘Mountains and Waters as Sūtras’, in William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield (eds), Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2009), pp. 83–92. Saito, Yuriko, ‘Japanese Gardens: The Art of Improving Nature’, Chanoyu Quarterly 83 (1996), 41–61. Sakuteiki, translated by Shigemaru Shimoyama (Tokyo: Town and City Planners 1976). Takei, Jirō and Marc P. Keane, Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden (Boston: Tuttle 2001). Veith, Ilza (trans.), The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine (Berkeley and London: University of California Press 2002).

Chapter 23

The Way Forward? Shinto and a Twenty-First Century Japanese Ecological Attitude Daniel M. P. Shaw

I. Explanations and Clarifications The thematic trinity of this publication – nature, space and the sacred – can be seen truly to converge in Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan. In this chapter I hope to convince the reader that the beliefs and values exhibited in Shinto spirituality can play a fundamental role in developing a post-modern Japanese ecological attitude fit for the needs of twenty-first-century Japan. Given the constraints of space available to each author in this publication, it will be necessary to make certain assumptions. I will not be able to debate whether Shinto can be sufficiently separated from other Japanese faiths in order to be considered independently, nor whether, despite its multiple denominations, it can be considered as one faith. Similarly, I will not venture too far here in proposing ways in which the ecological attitude could be translated into everyday ecological practices. Shinto Spirituality: Kami It would not be possible to discuss Shinto without mentioning the kami (very loosely translatable as ‘spirits’). The world as viewed through Shinto eyes is often described as ‘teeming with kami’, ‘permeated by kami’ or ‘kami-filled’. Kami is experienced spiritually as a presence in the encountered world which inspires wonder or awe. It is particularly evident at times when one senses the vital energy    J. Baird Callicott, Earth’s Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (California: University of California Press 1994), p. 96.    Ian Reader, Religion in Contemporary Japan (Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd 1991), p. 25.    Thomas Kasulis, Shinto: The Way Home (Hawai’i: University Press of Hawai’i 2004), p. 17.    Ibid., p. 11.

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in natural entities or phenomena. Such feelings are sometimes comparable to the western aesthetic idea of the sublime. Certainly, under the towering Fuji, at the foot of a thundering waterfall, in the midst of a summer storm or struck by a plummeting gorge, one feels the presence of kami. However, kami are also there when one is marvelling upon the intricate minutiae of a beautiful flower, or in the caress of a gentle breeze, in the magic of birdsong and in the brief midnight encounter with a darting fox caught in the headlights. Sensing kami can be uncomfortable, too – when one is hearing the wind moaning through trees, for example. The vital energies or powers sensed in each of these awing presences are not the kami per se. Mono, mi or tama are the Japanese terms used to describe the vital energy or power perceived in experiencing the kami. The very presence of this power is the kami. It should be noted that the kami do not discern strictly between the ‘natural’ world and the ‘man-made’ world. For Shinto, humans are very much a part of nature, and therefore so, too, are all human creations. Thus the presence of kami can also be sensed in buildings, cars, music and other products of human labour. The world as seen with a Shinto mindset can be thought of as an interconnecting, overlapping whole of internal relations. Therefore, through any one experience where the presence of the kami is felt, one has access to experiencing the power of nature as a whole. Such awe-inspiring moments are not ever-present, of course. A Shinto practitioner is almost as likely as any other human being – if not just as much – to get as caught up in the worries and trivialities of her daily life. Nevertheless, experiencing the kami can shake a person out of those myopic tendencies and reawaken him to the greater wonder of the world, as if stopped in one’s tracks by the life-power of a giant ancient tree. In fact, in their first form, the shrines were no more than spaces with specially designated trees called shinboku (‘sacred tree’), and probably marked off by a shimenawa straw rope – a sight still very common in contemporary Japan. In this manner a noteworthy tree is marked off as sacred, as being the residing place of a particular kami. How it is exactly that a kami comes to reside in a tree (or in a waterfall, rock or any other natural phenomenon) is not easily explained. A shinboku sacred tree, for example, is thought of as both the manifestation and the abode of the kami it enshrines. Kami thus ‘permeate’, ‘riddle’ or ‘fill’ the natural world. The expression ‘the natural world’ is meant in its widest sense here, and not as just a collection of material objects and beings. Kami can be present in seasons, or in particular times of the seasons, or in Time itself, just as they are present in meteorological



  Ibid., p. 11.   John Nelson, A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (Washington: Washington University Press 1996), p. 45.    Ian Reader, Simple Guide to Shinto: The Religion of Japan (Kent, UK: Global Books 1998), p. 72.    For an idea of the variation in kami types, see Vol. I of the Kojiki, translated by Basil Hall Chamberlain, 3 vols, downloaded from: http://www2.plala.or.jp/wani-san/kojiki.html. 

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Fig. 23.1 Large Shimenawa straw rope adorning the Grand Shrine of Izumo phenomena and in concepts. Even people, dead or living, can become kami or manifestations thereof. In Shinto mythology we learn that the entire Japanese people are descended from kami, with each tribe or family being the progeny of a different kami. The sun kami, Amaterasu, whose illumination of the day is so crucial, heads the flat kami hierarchy, which makes her a predictable ancestor for an emperor of divine blood. The ancestral relationship with the kami is an important reason for the closeness the Shinto practitioner feels to the kami. Moreover, the natural world, teeming with kami, is alleged to have been created by those first ancestral kami. The kami world and the human world are not separate, distinct realms, but over time one has evolved into the other. Furthermore, all the elements of the world they created are akin to humans. From a spiritual point of view, then, there is a sense of continuity with and relatedness to the natural world. Holographic Entry Points Exploring the multifaceted natural and ancestral presences of the kami adds further intricacy to the interconnecting, overlapping view of the world as seen through Shinto eyes. As mentioned before, this holographic character of the Shinto 

  Ibid.

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world results in the entire power of nature being accessible through a single, aweinspiring encounter with the presence of kami. Kasulis aptly dubs these doorways to the spiritual realm ‘holographic entry points’. Although one can discover a holographic entry point from anywhere and at any time in one’s daily environment, the communal dimension of spirituality typically leads to certain places or objects being ‘labelled’. In Shinto, some examples of communal pointers to these entry points are the red torii – gates marking the sacred grounds of shrines; the shimenawa – ropes adorning the impressive bodies of prominent natural objects, of sumo wrestlers and of sacred buildings and places; and the norita – prayers designating moments to revere the spirits. Values of Shinto Spirituality What do these entry points reveal to us about the Shinto spiritual realm when we step into the bubble of awe provided access to by the holographic entry points? At least six common themes can be identified which reveal Shinto values: naturalness simplicity taboo purity/purification separateness and community intoxication.10 Spiritual Characteristics of Shinto Other characteristics can be found as typical of Shinto spirituality as a whole.11 Firstly, nothing and nobody can be complete without being conceived of as connected through internal relations to the environing world. Secondly, the importance of the awe-inspiring power of the world is evident in its being both the key to and the result of experiencing the presence of kami. A third characteristic of Shinto – and of the ‘Japanese-ness’ of the (once foreign) religions it has influenced ­– is the significance of ritual practice. We notice this in the unconscious nature of Shinto spiritual identity, which is exemplified in the rejection of an essentialist Shinto identity by most Japanese people, while they simultaneously demonstrate frequent existential Shinto spirituality in their daily life. Not to be forgotten is the comfort of ritual, especially as the divisions between religion and daily life become blurred. One only needs to look at people’s faces at a matsuri (Japanese festival) to witness this. Finally, there can be a kind of latent nostalgia for a mythical past in the actions and traditions of Shinto. This can be misplaced and abused, as in the case of the militarist state, Shinto, claiming superiority and authority over the   As expounded by Kasulis, Shinto (above, n. 3), pp. 38–70.   As highlighted ibid., pp. 165–70.

10 11

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A famous ‘floating’ torii at Itsukushima Shrine, signifying that the entire island constitutes a sacred space. Photo: Dan Smith

rest of the world on the basis of ancient cosmological ethnologies. However, the yearning for the past might also encourage promising thoughts for the future when old solutions to present problems are rediscovered. Sacred Time and Sacred Place There are two further Shinto concepts I would like to note: those of sacred space and sacred time. The tranquil bubbles of the sacred spaces – designated by torii, shimenawa and other markers – act as holographic entry points to the true power and sacred nature of the world as a whole. This power, revealed through the presence of the kami, manifests itself in every being, place, nook and cranny of the world. Therefore these sacred spaces, specially designated, should not be the only locations considered worthy of spiritual attention. The physical world as a whole can be conceived of as a sacred space by extrapolating this idea from basic Shinto beliefs. The sacred space of the shrine grounds can be thought of as being there to help us remember this; but the sanctity of nature is not limited to that space.12 Sacred time is the temporal dimension of the sacred bubble surrounding moments of experiencing the kami. At such times one is more thoughtful, more caring and ‘purer’ in one’s thinking: time slows down. Once out of the sacred 12

  Cf. Graham Parkes’ contribution to this volume (Chapter 22), p. 303.

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time zone, however, the focusing of attention on daily issues and worries resumes. Sacred time is also the time calendristically designated for the public worship of kami: matsuri and holidays. At such moments, one remembers one’s social interdependence with the others by participating in public celebrations. Hierarchies and distancing formalities are, however, resumed on the next day. Just as we can speculate upon the potential extension of sacred space to the entire world it spiritually represents, we might wonder whether the extra care and communal solidarity exhibited during sacred periods could spread further, to encompass more of daily life. An Ecological Attitude My aim here is demonstrate that the beliefs and values exhibited in Shinto spirituality could play a fundamental role in developing a post-modern Japanese ecological attitude. Before continuing, let us consider these two terms, ‘ecological’ and ‘attitude’, and why I choose to use them rather than, for example, the more commonly used ‘environmental ethic’. ‘Ecological’ The term ‘ecology’ has its etymological roots in two Greek words: oikos, meaning ‘house’, and logos, meaning ‘discourse’. Taken literally, then, ‘ecology’ speaks about one’s dwelling – about how one lives at home. The Chambers Dictionary defines ‘ecology’ as ‘the scientific study of plants, animals or peoples and institutions, in relation to their environment’.13 The modern definition retains some of the connotations of ‘home’ in using the words ‘in relation to’ here. The term ‘environment’, on the other hand, refers to that which is in our environs, around us. Despite encouragement from writers such as Cooper to consider a richer sense of ‘environment’,14 I chose the qualifier ‘ecological’ over ‘environmental’, firstly due to the connotations of detachment which the latter radiates. ‘Environmental’ is more suggestive of anthropocentrism, by placing the observer (usually a human observer) – in the centre. It is the slightly more decentralized slant of ‘ecological’ that appeals to me, with its idea of the observer being embedded in the world rather than surrounded by it. Moreover, this term suggests that other, non-human, members of the world are similarly embedded and ‘at home’. ‘Ecological’ retains the flavour of internally related constituents rather than extricably distinct wholes. Finally and more subjectively, the etymological derivation of ‘ecological’ implies that, ideally, one should be at ease with the world within which one is embedded, and not forcing oneself into relations with a separate and foreign body. Admittedly, choosing ‘ecological’ over ‘environmental’ may betray certain assumptions   Catherine Schwarz (ed.), The Chambers Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). 14   David Cooper, ‘The Idea of Environment’, in D. E. Cooper and J. A. Palmer (eds), The Environment in Question (London and New York: Routledge 1992), 165–80. 13

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regarding the nature of the human relationship with the environment. Furthermore, the former is clearly the more appropriate term to use in discussing Shinto, whose values of interconnectedness and views of the humans as part of nature clearly suit this term better. ‘Attitude’ As to why I have chosen to pursue the topic of the basis for an ecological attitude rather than for an ecological ethics, I’d like to respond by making three points: Firstly, my aim is not to suggest a strict code of conduct, or even to lay out a definitive list of values from which to draw a Japanese ethics. I hope merely to suggest a basis for a way of relating to, thinking about and behaving towards the natural world, a basis from which a stricter ethics might eventually – but not necessarily – crystallize. Secondly, I wish to discover a way of relating to the world, particularly in order to address the environmental problems apparent in the twenty-first century, rather than to attempt to justify why that particular way is ‘right’ (aside from attending to the recognized problems.) Thirdly, the term ‘attitude’ is particularly appropriate to a Shinto-based, or even Japanese-based, approach, which has a fundamental attitude of its own in makoto no kokoro. This missing element of the Shinto account given above is most appropriately introduced here. Makoto no kokoro We have mentioned already the importance of a clear, pure mind when passing through and beyond the torii (gates to the grounds of a shrine). Encountering the presence of the kami is only possible if one’s heart and mind are open to experiencing the awsome power of the natural world. This pureness of heart and mind is called makoto no kokoro, or simply magokoro.15 Kokoro is somewhat difficult to translate, as it designates both ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ – a kind of mindful life-force of the individual, or a ‘mindful heart’.16 ‘Makoto no’ translates as ‘of truth’ or ‘of sincerity’. Kokoro alone is yet another example of the difference between the ‘western’ and the Japanese mindset. The Cartesian worldview typically divides body from mind, whereas its Japanese counterpoint considers the two as one. Kokoro can be thought of as a kind of ‘resonant responsiveness within the overlap between the world and the person’.17 Therefore, to be makoto no kokoro is to respond truthfully or sincerely to the world in a given situation. A person who responds to the world sincerely, with a mindful heart, is receptive to the holographic entry point and breaks down the boundaries between self and the world in order to experience the full power of the latter. Walking thus through the   Kasulis, Shinto (above, n. 3), p. 24.   Ibid., p. 25 17  Following Kasulis: ibid. 15 16

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torii, a person will feel to be a nestled part of an interconnected whole, embedded in the world: at home. Makoto no kokoro is perhaps the most fundamental virtue of Shinto18 and, similarly, of other religions in Japan. Rather than being understood as a code of conduct, its existence as a sincere and accurate responsiveness to the world is better described as an attitude. This underlies my reasoning behind choosing to pursue an ‘ecological attitude’ over an ‘environmental ethics’. The Lack of and Need for an Ecological Attitude in Japan There are environmental movements, organizations and individuals in contemporary Japan which serve as examples of people and institutions beginning to be part of a shift in approach to the natural environment. However, there is no broad, sweeping collective attitude which is capable of addressing the ecological issues of twenty-first-century Japan. A national attitude is necessary, due to the pervasive degradation of the natural environment throughout the country and to the fact that other parts of the world are suffering ecologically as a result of Japanese ecopolitics (or lack thereof). There is no space here for specific examples; suffice it to say that Japan is rife with ecological problems, many of them worsening, and this constitutes proof that an appropriate attitude does not exist. The detail and scale of such problems will be outlined below. From an eco-centric point of view, these problems also create the need for such an attitude. For weightier, anthropocentric reasons for this need, we can look in the first place at the lives, and quality of lives, lost in the Minamata and Ashio disasters. The irresponsible use of, and damage to, the natural resources and the lives affected, coupled with such problems as the aging population, threaten the economy and the political power of Japan. Plundering other countries will inevitably result in further political problems and will contribute significantly to the global ecological crisis. The great lack of and need for a better Japanese ecological ethics, while not comprehensively deduced here, is undeniable.19 II. Nature, the Japanese and Identifying with the World Through centuries of kami worship, the Japanese have developed what they feel to be a close relationship with nature.20 This closeness often extends to a sense of being ‘at one’ with nature and with the natural phenomena21. Certainly, as   Brian Bocking, A Popular Dictionary of Shinto (Surrey: Curzon Press 1995), p. 115. 19   Cf. Graham Parkes’ contribution to this volume (Chapter 22), p. 303. 20   Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland (eds), Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives (London: RoutledgeCurzon 1997), pp. 2–3. 21   Ibid.; see e.g. pp. 54–67. 18

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a people, the Japanese have unrelentingly exhibited an intimacy with nature,22 not only through their religions – and in particular Shinto – but also through the plethora of artistic traditions endemic to Japan. Gardens The meticulously groomed traditional gardens in Japan are a typical example of Japanese natural aesthetics. Whereas the miniature and decorative character of garden arrangements can be seen as ruthless subjugation and controlling of nature, the careful modifications can also be seen as ‘drawing out’ selected aesthetic qualities already visible in the plant to the attentive eye.23 Music Nature also plays an important part in the philosophy behind the playing of traditional music. For the duration of my stay in Japan I studied the shakuhachi (the Japanese bamboo flute). My teacher demonstrated to me the surprising variation in sound attainable from a perforated wooden tube. Such capacity for timbre alteration could produce, in even the shortest of phrases, a progression from ‘whispering, reedy piano to a ringing metallic forte only to sink back into a cotton-wrapped softness, ending with an almost inaudible grace note, seemingly an afterthought’.24 My teacher explained that the different sounds of the shakuhachi were the sounds of different natural phenomena. One of these was, unsurprisingly, the sound of the wind. In playing the instrument by using the ‘wind’ from her own lungs and trying to make a sound from it that most accurately mimicked the wind itself, the shakuhachi player displays a musical equivalence between her aesthetic intentions and those of the Japanese gardener. She is drawing out from the wind a sound which makes it even more evocative of itself to the human mind than when it was just ‘raw’ wind. Her breath becomes a more wind-like wind. Poetry Basho and mirroring the world At the pinnacle of the Japanese literary tradition there are few towering figures placed as highly as Basho, when he is at his haiku-writing best. We can take for example a haiku (Japanese poetry form, most commonly seventeen syllables long) which is probably his most famous:

22

  Ibid.   Cf. Graham Parkes’ contribution to this volume (Chapter 22), p. 303. 24   William Malm, Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (New York, NY: Kodansha International Ltd 2000), p. 173. 23

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Breaking the silence Of an ancient pond, A frog jumped into water – A deep resonance.25

Even to the more experienced haiku student, this is at first sight a simplistic, objective study of natural cause and effect: a frog jumping into a pond. The greatness of the poem, however, resides in its symbolism, achieved while in no way presenting itself as symbolic. Upon further consideration, we come to realize that the still pond is at the same time the meditative mind of the poet, and both are disrupted by the same external disturbance. It is a perfect metaphor of the subject mirroring the world. Its power is further enhanced by the act of unifying the meditative reader with the mind of the poet and with the pond the latter describes. Basho’s own explanation and advice to his disciples regarding this poem follow on from these realizations: Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one – when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural – if the object and yourself are separate – then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.26

From Makoto no kokoro to Koto no kokoro Basho reminds us here of makoto no kokoro – the Shinto virtue of truthful, resonant responsiveness to the world. With makoto no kokoro, a person reflects ‘the whole in themselves and thereby [reflects] themselves into the whole’.27 Can the same be said of a poem which responds truthfully to the world? Indeed, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), an important Shinto philosopher, spoke of koto no kokoro: the kokoro of words. Koto no kokoro is the spirituality of words as expressed in their written form and sound. What made it possible for Norinaga to reason that words and poetry could have kokoro was their overlap, their internal relation with humans, whose kokoro I have already outlined. Thus all overlapping entities have their own

  Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches [Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto], translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1966), p. 9. 26   Ibid., p. 33. 27   Kasulis, Shinto (above, n. 3), p. 27. 25

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kokoro – not just living beings and plants, but also non-living things, including language.28 The world can respond to itself and to us just as we can respond to it. When read with an appropriate responsiveness, then, the combined kokoro of poet, poet’s world and listener is able to create true poetry in a sincere, wholehearted, mutually responsive triangular internal relationship. In makoto no kokoro, the world shines through and reveals its power. This cannot happen if, as Basho stresses, ‘your feeling is not natural – if the object and yourself are separate’. Likewise, the shakuhachi player must be inseparable from the wind when she seeks that specific timbre; the gardener must not feel separate from his garden. In Japanese art there should be no sense of division: everything is part of the same interconnecting whole and the subject/object dichotomy dissolves. Unconscious Identification with Nature The Japanese identification with nature – which undoubtedly goes hand in hand with the age-old beliefs and internal relations with the kami29 – is so ingrained that it is largely unquestioned and inexplicable upon further analysis. Close observation of seasonal changes plays a large role in the contemplation of nature in Japan – which is evident in many second-nature activities such as the quasireligious celebration of the cherry blossom, or in the fact that no letter or poem is complete without an opening reference to the present season. On a personal note, a question I was often asked in polite conversation in rural Japan was whether Britain or Switzerland has four seasons. Despite my responding in the affirmative, I was usually subjected to a brief explanation of the four seasons in Japan. Upon reflection, this could demonstrate several things. Firstly, it confirms that Japanese self-awareness is achieved in terms of the importance of the seasons (and, by extension, of nature) to Japanese identity, while at the same time it betrays an unwillingness to ‘share’ this identity with another culture. Secondly, it underlines the subconscious idea that Japan is unique in its relationship to the seasons and nature. This would seem to imply that, among the Japanese people, the notion of their identification with nature is so entrenched that it has become fundamental to their self-identity. Subsequent generations of foreign scholars of Japan have been particularly receptive to the Japanese advocacy of this identity, even to the point of convincing the Japanese of its veracity still further. As a consequence, these ‘beliefs concerning the general sensitivity of the Japanese people to nature kill off the incentive for the Japanese themselves to ask any further specific questions’.30 28

  Ibid., p. 26   See Asquith and Kalland (eds), Japanese Images of Nature (above, n. 20), pp. 2–3; Kasulis, Shinto (above, n. 3), p. 43; Nelson, Life of a Shinto Shrine (above, n. 6), pp. 188–9; Sonoda Minoru, ‘Shinto and the Natural Environment’, in John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (Surrey: Curzon Press 2000). 30   Peter Ackermann, ‘The Four Seasons: One of Japanese Culture’s Most Central Concepts’, in Asquith and Kalland (eds), Japanese Images of Nature (above, n. 20), p. 43. 29

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This is certainly not to say that a relationship, perhaps even a unique relationship, does not exist; but it signals the possibility of a situation where a gulf might arise between actual beliefs and beliefs of what those beliefs are – or, more succinctly, a gulf between behaviour and belief. We can draw an interesting parallel between the unthinking assumptions of Japanese ‘at one-ness with the world’ and examples of daily interaction with the kami. Kasulis relates a brief encounter with a Tokyo businessman, who stopped to offer a hurried prayer at a shrine on his way to work. ‘Why did you stop at the shrine?’ ‘I almost always stop on the way to work.’ ‘Yes, but why? Was it to give thanks, to ask a favour, to repent, to pay homage, to avoid something bad from happening? What was your purpose?’ ‘I don’t really know. It was nothing in particular.’ ‘Well, then, when you stood in front of the shrine with your palms together, what did you say, either aloud or silently to yourself?’ ‘I didn’t say anything.’ ‘Did you call on the name of the kami to whom the shrine is dedicated?’ ‘I’m not really sure which kami it is.’31

Such empty responses could lead to accusations of merely going through the motions, which defeats an attitude of makoto no kokoro. Indeed, another meaning of the word matsuri, used primarily for the boisterous communal celebration of the kami passing amongst the people, is ‘meaningless ritual’ or ‘ostentations display’.32 But I think it would be presumptuous to jump to such conclusions, as if, ‘if one cannot explain exactly what something is, then perhaps it does not exist’.33 The businessman, after all, did something as he stopped to pray. The ritual is part of existential Shinto spirituality and does not become worthless just because the person performing it cannot explain it. On the other hand, I would be equally cautious of an attitude of ‘what we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence’.34 There is plenty to learn from – and much to be wary of – in those things which lie between the stages of thought and action (or between Shinto values and Japanese environmental behaviour).

  Kasulis, Shinto (above, n. 3), pp. 27–8.   H. Byron Earhart, ‘The Ideal of Nature in Japanese Religion and its Possible Significance for Environmental Concerns, Contemporary Religions in Japan 11 (March– June 1970), p. 13. 33   See also Kasulis, Shinto (above, n. 3), p. 28. 34   Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London and New York: Routledge Classics 2001), point 7. 31 32

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III. A Holistic Attitude of Respect for Nature From kami to Biocentrism… The Shintoist belief that natural elements are manifestations of worldly spirits, along with the resultant interconnected human identification with nature, lead smoothly to a form of biocentric egalitarianism resembling the one advocated by Paul Taylor. Taylor, following Schweitzer, goes beyond sentience-based environmental ethics. He argues that each living thing is of equal inherent worth – and therefore to be accorded intrinsic value – by reason of its possessing a ‘teleological centre of life’, pursuing its own good in its own distinct manner. His ‘biocentric outlook’ has four main parts which are very reminiscent of a Shinto outlook: 1. Humans are members of the community of life on the same terms which apply to non-humans. 2. The earth’s natural ecosystems are a complex web of interconnecting elements, each part beinginterdependent upon the others. 3. Each individual centre of life, in its own way, pursues its own good. 4. It is incorrect and prejudiced to claim human superiority by reason of inherent worth. If we assume the biocentric outlook, concludes Taylor, then we are already acting as moral agents and are thus ‘adopting a certain ultimate environmental moral attitude toward the natural world’. He calls this attitude ‘respect for nature’.35 In adopting an attitude of respect for nature, one is morally bound to promote and protect the good of all living things as individuals. Obligations to groups, species and ecosystems derive from the interests of the individual constituents.36 From a Shintoist perspective, the kami which permeate the living world are spirits with very human traits – spirits who can be angry, happy and even die. They therefore need to be treated delicately, often placated – and looked after too. In abstract form, to compare this Shinto worldview with the biocentric outlook might appear to be missing the point: a tree doesn’t need street parties – it needs nutrients, water, space and sunlight. However, this is to oversimplify the characteristics of the kami, which manifest themselves simultaneously in natural objects, thereby requiring the attention specific to each object as presented to us. Certainly, a shinboku (sacred tree) will be made sure to receive all its practical, natural needs as well as its spiritual ones, and doubtless it will live a long and healthy life. 35   Paul Taylor, Respect For Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1989), p. 101. 36   Eventually, says Taylor, applying the commitment undertaken by the attitude of respect for nature requires the development of rules and regulations in order to deal with inevitable practical difficulties such as accommodating conflicting interests. Discussing such implementation in our case here, however, goes well beyond the scope of the present essay.

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Taylor would remind us that his biocentrism is egalitarian and not selective: it does not accord special treatment only to some impressive natural beings, as does in practice Shinto – a rather Orwellian form of biocentric egalitarianism. The misunderstanding here is about the spiritual role of the venerated natural objects, acting as holographic entry points to the kami-filled natural whole. However, in practice this does not have to lead inevitably to a spiritual hierarchy. These selected objects can act merely as representatives of the larger biotic whole and of the way it should be treated. Any eventual Shinto attitude of respect for nature must recognize this representative role. …and beyond However, if we take Shinto as the leader here, stopping at biocentric egalitarianism would be premature. Shinto, of course, believes in kami permeating all the parts of the natural world, not just those which are alive. It goes beyond the life-centred, to include non-living things – such as water, rocks, cherry blossom and celestial bodies – and natural phenomena: from rivers, mountains and the land itself, to lightning, seasons and the wind. Leopold and Ecocentrism Aldo Leopold also went beyond biocentrism in his own search for a ‘Land Ethic’. Leopold urged his readers to realize their symbiotic relationship with the earth37 and to push back the ethical ‘frontier’ in order to value the biotic community, ‘the land’, in itself. Of this community, which includes the living and the non-living elements of nature, we are equal members. It is not, I think, an unrealistic stretch of the imagination to conclude that a similarly all-encompassing respect for nature could be derived from Shintoist beliefs. However, Leopold valued the community, the ecosystem, first: individuals are of value only insofar as they are parts of the community. In contrast, the kind of ecological values drawn from kami beliefs would, like Taylor, consider the individual as being of primary value and the communities, the species, as being of value only on account of the individuals who make them up. I believe that the Shinto-influenced attitude of respect for nature might ultimately be able to accommodate both the top-down and the bottom-up valuations of ‘the land’. Religiously, the belief in spirits of nature is a form of animism, and advocating a rejuvenation of such beliefs would not be consistent with the aims of this paper. It is the implicit values which accompany these beliefs that are of principal interest. Most of these values are visible in Japanese daily life, but they also reveal themselves in more promising, structured forms. One particularly tantalizing

37  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1949), p. 117.

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example of this can be found in the work and thought of Japanese biologist Kenji Imanishi. Kenji Imanishi Imanishi’s short book The World of Living Things, a translation of Seibutsu no sekai, had a massive impact in Japan at all levels of society upon its publication in 1941.38 His distinctive view of nature and how it should be studied challenged the western-dominated international views and, in laying the groundwork for much of the subsequent scientific, ecological and philosophical scholarship in Japan, was also prescient of modern ecological studies. His refreshing alternative to modern neo-Darwinism is ‘essentially … an ethic of how to relate to and understand nature’.39 His fundamental starting point was his perspective that everything developed through the internal differentiation of one thing,40 and therefore all things are related ‘in terms of blood, soil or living space’.41 As a biologist, Imanishi felt strongly that natural objects could not be studied satisfactorily without examining them living in their natural environment. This was because he considered the subject and its environment to be part of each other, ‘flowing into each other’. Another object of Imanishi’s criticism, which often accompanied the decontextualized study of natural things, was the habit of studying the bodies of dead animals and plants as representatives of the former live versions. As a result, he felt that biology was often the study of dead things, with ‘life’ tacked on afterwards. Rather than study the world as full of mechanically moving objects propelled by ‘instinct’, in his own biological explorations he wanted to start with the ‘living’ of things, with their own intentionality, as something central to the organisms. One of the characteristics of living things as opposed to dead ones is that they move and/or grow. However, their nature is not to move or grow in a lab, but ‘out in the world’, and so understanding those living things requires seeing them in their environment. Thus environment is an extension, or a part, of the living self, of life.42 Imanishi also disagreed with the Darwinist interpretation of evolution as motivated primarily by ‘survival of the fittest’. He saw rather much more cooperation between individuals, groups and species than conflict. Originating from one whole, it made sense to him that, rather than fighting for space, living things existed as part of an ever-harmonizing whole.43 38

  Despite this impact, the English translation was only published in 2002.   Kenji Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things, edited and translated by Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi and Hiroyuki Takasaki(London: RoutledgeCurzon 2002), p. xxxviii and back cover. 40   Ibid., p. xxxv. 41   Ibid., p. xxxix. 42   Ibid., p. 41. 43   Ibid., p. xxxvii. fn. 39

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Of further interest to our purpose here is Imanishi’s reasoning that both socalled living and non-living things can be described as having a ‘life’ and a ‘mind’ of their own, regardless of whether they are ‘alive’. He concludes this partly as following from his first principle that all things came from one origin and that therefore ‘living things’ and ‘non-living things’ have a common origin – they are related. Non-living things, like living things, can still be encountered and have their own environment, without which their story is incomplete. Close to the Surface Imanishi’s concepts of the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of the world; his biocentric perspective; his idea of ‘mind’ in non-living things; and his rejection of an intrinsic competitiveness to life – all sit comfortably alongside the elements of Shinto we have covered. Modern mainstream examples like Imanishi and the enduring Shinto traditions show that the idea of the intrinsic value of natural beings resides at least semi-consciously in the minds of the Japanese. I contend that, while the degraded state of the Japanese environment is not to be coveted by the conservationists of other countries and cultures, the potential in Japan for the adoption of an attitude of respect for nature should be the envy of non-Japanese environmental ethicists. The multitude of environmental problems faced and caused by Japan are sufficient proof of the need for a fundamental change in Japan’s environmental outlook. I believe that a new outlook could, at least in part, be informed by looking at some of the values present in the Shinto tradition; that it could take the form of a holistic ecological attitude of respect for nature; and that it would need to be assumed at the individual, communal and national level in order to be truly effective for the nation. Such a proposal may seem far-fetched and unrealistic, particularly in choosing Shinto values to form part of its basis. However, these values can already be found under the surface of society and, if they could be harnessed as a unity and driven forwards together, the result would be one of the easier ways of establishing a quick and acceptable change. Leopold regarded ethics as arising out of environmental limitations upon freedom.44 If a proto-ethical ecological attitude is to be adopted by Japanese people, then it would make much more sense that it arose from their own socio-cultural milieu than from a foreign source. IV. First Steps of a Way Forward With this very brief overview, I hope that I have begun to convince you that a holistic ecological attitude of respect for nature in Japan could be built at least partly upon the values revealed in Shinto spirituality. Shinto values are already close to the surface of society and, if identified and mobilized as a unit, a swift   Leopold, Sand Country Almanach (above, n. 37), pp. 201–204.

44

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alteration of attitude towards the natural world might be possible. To be truly effective, a change would need to be assumed at the individual, communal and national levels simultaneously – true to the Shinto ideal of the part being indivisible from the whole. Furthermore, the Shinto establishment must take a lead in redressing the gender balance and undoing the subjugation of the feminine and of the natural. Traditionally allotted bubbles of sacred space and time should be properly understood as providing examples of how the whole world should be treated at all times. Maintaining such heightened awareness should be associated with the pursuit of upholding a constantly makoto no kokoro. Only in this way will a damagingly narrow conception of nature be avoided. If one extends the world of the kami to a global level, other nations need not be seen as competitors or resources, but as equal parts of an ever-harmonizing whole. Finally, Shinto has a head start as a tradition of worshipping this world. However, in its celebration of life, it must be able to look death in the face, so as not to be blind to human and environmental devastation. As I stated at the beginning of this presentation, space does not allow me to go into any depth concerning how the values found within Shinto might concretely be applied to everyday life as parts of an ecological attitude. I have – nevertheless – begun to explore this elsewhere. Furthermore, I would welcome the reader’s thoughts and suggestions on ways in which a Japanese ecological attitude drawing – not necessarily exclusively – upon Shinto values and concepts might practically manifest itself, whether in the day-to-day life of the individual, in communal activities or in higher-level policy. We can appreciate Shinto as a unique convergence of the abstract concepts of nature, space and the sacred, but also as an inspiration for concrete action within those spheres.

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Bibliography Ackermann, Peter, ‘The Four Seasons: One of Japanese Culture’s Most Central Concepts’, in Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland, (eds), Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives (London: RoutledgeCurzon 1997), pp. 36­–53. Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland (eds), Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives (London: RoutledgeCurzon 1997). Barret, Tim, ‘Shinto and Taoism in Early Japan’, in John Breen, and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (Surrey: Curzon Press 2000),, pp.13–31. Basho, Matsuo, The Narrow Road To The Deep North and Other Travel Sketches [Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto], translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1966). Blackburn, Simon, Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996). Bocking, Brian, A Popular Dictionary of Shinto (Surrey: Curzon Press 1995). Breen, John and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (Surrey: Curzon Press,2000). Callicott, J. Baird, Earth’s Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (California: University of California Press 1994). Confucius, The Analects, translated by D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979). Cooper, David E., ‘The Idea of Environment’, in D. E. Cooper and J. A. Palmer (eds), The Environment in Question (London and New York: Routledge 1992, pp.165-180). ‘Cumulative Listing of Essays and Book Reviews’, in The Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (2005), found at: http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/ publications/jjrs/jjrs_cumulative_list.hrm (accessed on 1 September 2005). Dauvergne, Peter, Shadows in the Forest: Japan and the Politics of Timber in Southeast Asia (Massachusetts: The MIT Press 1997). Earhart, H. Byron, ‘The Ideal of Nature in Japanese Religion and its Possible Significance for Environmental Concerns, Contemporary Religions in Japan 11 (March–June 1970), pp. 1–26. Excerpts from Nihongi, translated by Aston, downloaded from: http://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/nihon0.htm (accessed on 1 September 2005). Grapard, Allan, ‘The Economics of Ritual Power’, in John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (Surrey: Curzon Press 2000), pp. 68–94.. Heidegger, Martin, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books 2000). Imanishi, Kenji, A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things, translated and edited by Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi and Hiroyuki Takasaki (London: RoutledgeCurzon 2002).

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Karan, Pradyumna P., Japan in the Twenty-First Century: Environment, Economy, and Society (Kentucky: Kentucky University Press 2005]). Kasulis, Thomas P., Shinto: The Way Home (Hawai’i: Hawai’i University Press, 2004). Kojiki, translated by Basil Hall Chamberlain, 3 vols, downloaded from: http:// www2.plala.or.jp/wani-san/kojiki.html (accessed on 1 September 2005). Krautbauer, Erik, ‘About Shugendo’ from Shugendo – ‘The Way of the Yamabushi’, found at: http://arvigarus.Bravehost.com/history_001.htm (accessed 1 September 2005). Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1949). Littleton, C. Scott, Understanding Shinto: Origins, Beliefs, Practices, Festivals, Spirits, Sacred Places (London: Duncan Baird Publishers 2002). Malm, William P., Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (New York, NY: Kodansha International Ltd 2000). Mason, J. W. T., The Meaning of Shinto (Canada: Trafford 2002). ‘Minamata Disaster’, in TED Case Studies (Case Number 246), found at: http:// american.edu/TED/MINAMATA.HTM (accessed on 1 September 2005). Nelson, John K., A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (Washington: Washington University Press 1996). Omura, H., ‘Trees Forests and Religion in Japan’, Mountain Research and Development 24.2 (Berkley, CA: University of California Press 2004), 179–82. Ono, Sokyo, Shinto: The Kami Way (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing 1962). Picken, Stuart D. B., Shinto Meditations For Revering The Earth (Berkely, CA: Stone Bridge Press 2002). Pojman, Louis P., Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company 1998). Reader, Ian, Religion In Contemporary Japan (Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd 1991). — Simple Guide to Shinto: The Religion of Japan (Kent, UK: Global Books 1998). Schreurs, Miranda A., Environmental Politics in Japan, Germany and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002). Schwarz, Catherine (ed.), The Chambers Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). ‘Shinto – Religion in Japan’, in Asian Mall Art, found at: http://www.asianmallart. com/shintoarticle.htm (accessed on 1 September 2005). Sonoda Minoru, ‘Shinto and the Natural Environment’, in John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (Surrey: Curzon Press 2000), pp. 32–46. Stone, Christopher D., Should Trees Have Standing? And Other Essays on Law, Morals and the Environment (USA: Oceana Publications Inc., 1996).

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Index (References to illustrations are in bold) action, and knowledge 296 agriculture and attitude to nature 236, 239 and creation myths 241 development, and Confucianism 290 and inter-communal conflict 243 and spatial order 240 Aitpaeva, Gulnara 6 Åkesson, Lynn 135 altar of the dead, Malmö 131, 137–40 blackboard wall 140 design 137–8 gift leaving 139–40 as liminoid phenomenon 139–40 location 138, 139 popularity 139 praesentia notion 141 American Anthropological Association 266 American Atheists 136 animal lore, Chipewyan people 237–8 anthropocentrism, ecocentrism as alternative 89 Aouan people 239 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae 68 Arcadia, dualism of 118 architecture 101 and energy flows 102 narratives of 103 and otherness 118 as thaumata 106 art, psychosomatic concept of 97–100 artist as healer 103 user as 103–4 Ashkisshe, Crow people 205, 207, 210, 212 attitude, ecological, Japan 316–18 Augé, Marc 198 Bailing, Robert C. 59

Baker, Susan 87 Barcelona ‘Fossar de la Pedrera’ 116 No man’s land 110 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics 65 Bartholomew, Patriarch 62 Basho, haikus 319–20 beauty meaning 111, 114, 119, 123 and the natural 123 see also landscape, ideal Beck, Ulrich 72 Benedict of Nursia, St 62–3 Benedict XVI, Pope, on desertification 62 Bergmann, Sigurd 1, 52 Bergson, Henri 4 Creative Evolution 147–8 on the nervous system 149 Berry, Thomas 286 Beuys, Joseph 3, 118, 119 installations 101 as shaman 103 theory of sculpture 102 work, role of symbolic in 98 works Das Ende des 20 Jahrhunderts 97 Infiltration - Homogen für Cello 99 Tallow 102 Billgren, Ernst 126 biocentrism Imanishi 326 and Shinto 323–4, 326 Taylor on 323, 324 biodiversity Christian response 81–2, 83 preservation 75, 82, 91 biosphere 35–6, 37 Bird-David, Nurit 241–2 Bloch, Ernst 40

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body mind, separation 317 representations 304–5 Borås Project see under road landscapes Brown, Peter 141 Brown, Tom 158 Burke, Edmund 118 Burms, Arnold 190, 193, 194 Callicott, Baird J. 78 Caputo, John 26 carbon dioxide emissions 64, 179 China 66 developed vs developing countries 66–7 North America 66 sustainable level 67 UK 66 Carleton School of Architecture (Ottawa), design studio 3, 100, 104, 106 Castells, Manuel 114, 117 Chang Tsai, Western Inscription 293, 297 Cheng Chung-Ying 291 ch’i 291, 292, 304 in stones 306 and yin/yang 305 see also kami China carbon dioxide emissions 66 garden culture 306 Chipewyan people, animal lore 237–8 chora 3 Chowdry, Kamla, Earth Charter in Action 184 Chu Hsi 288 Treatise on Humaneness 292 Wang Yang-ming, disagreement 296 Clark, Jennifer 134 climate change 3, 20–21, 22 consciousness raising about 179 cost-benefit assessments 59 costs 58 and globalization 72 and greenhouse gas emissions 65 and hope 69–70 individual action 69 Intergovernmental Panel 65 ‘Live Earth’ campaign 179, 181

models 71 Potsdam Institute 71 present danger 58 prevention 72 and sin 61–2, 64 as spatial danger 57 UN Framework Convention 59, 64 see also Kyoto Protocol climate stability, and human development 59, 71 Clingerman, Forrest 2, 277 Cloud’s Peak 204 Club of Rome, Limits to Growth 85, 285 Code of Research Ethics 266 Comaroff, Jean 239 communion of saints and greenhouse gas emissions 70 and hope 70 and memory 70 Confucianism 287 and agricultural development 290 and ecology 288–90 moral cultivation 289–90 The Great Learning 295, 296 tradition 289 see also neo-Confucianism Conradie, Ernst 2 constructivism 166 definition 164 vs realism 163–5 consumerism 5 and ‘Live Earth’ campaign 181 cosmology anthropocosmic 290, 293, 297–8 naturalistic 290–92 creating, and minding 208 creation ethics of 3 Holy Spirit’s indwelling 38–40 creation myths, and agriculture 241 creativity, God as creator of 79–81 Cronon, William 164, 166 cross-trees definition 227 destruction 230–31 Estonia 227–31, 228, 232 Finland 227 Latvia 229

Index narrative traditions 230 as residence of soul 229 Crow people 203 Ashkisshe 205, 207, 210, 212 baaxpe powers 209, 210, 211, 213 buffalo hunting 209 symbolism 210 transformation into 210 cultural life 206 embodied knowledge 207–8, 211 homeland 205–6 lifeway 206, 210–11, 212 religious ecology 211 rituals 211–12 sacred, engagement with 210–11 see also Sundance cultural heritage, Estonia 224–5, 231–2 Darwin, Charles on nature 148 The Origin of Species 4, 148 de Certeau, Michel 122, 123, 137 De Dijn, Herman 190, 193, 194 death, personalization 133fn11 deBary, W. Theodore 288 deep ecology definition 165 and epistemological realism 169–71 movement, Naess 91–2, 93, 163 and scientific realism 167–9 Deleuze, Gilles 150 Deliège, Glenn 5, 47 Demarco, Richard 99, 100, 105 Derrida, Jacques 24, 25, 27 desertification, Benedict XVI on 62 DesJardins, Joseph R. 93 Dewey, John 65 divine love, Jesus on 27 Dobzhansky, Theodosius 150 Dôgen, philosophy 308–9 Dömpke, Stephan 278 Douglas, Mary 239 Duhon, Anna 4 Dunn, Kevin 133, 134 Earth damage to, by coal-mining 71

333

as empowering agent 36 as female 242 Heidegger on 155–6, 158 human relation to 63 as machine 71 sky, interface 152–3 Earth Charter 14 and decentralization 183 as ecospirituality 182–3 as ‘living document’ 184 movement 178 Eckhart, Meister 26 ecocentrism 89–92, 93, 324 as alternative to anthropocentrism 89 holism of 89 ecoengineering 190, 192 ecofeminism, and nature 242–3 Ecological Society of America 286 ecology and Confucianism 288–90 definition 316–17 and ethics 91 as life of lines 141 and religion 90, 216–20, 286–8 religious, Crow people 211 see also deep ecology economic development, nature preservation, conflict 190–91 economy, divine 90, 91 ecospirituality 5, 177–8 definition 178 Earth Charter as 182–3 and environmentalism 177–8 Gore’s 178–80 nature, link 185 ecotheology 76–7, 177 anthropocentrism 78 Sideris’s critique 77–9, 82 ecumenical discourse, and household of God metaphor 31–5 ego, transcendental 169 Ehrlich, Paul 286 Einstein, Albert 181 Eisler, Riane 242, 243 Eliade, Mircea 241, 255 Elliot, Robert 191, 192 emplacement 2 and building Heaven 50

334

Nature, Space and the Sacred

definition 47 and meaning of nature 47, 48 emplotment 47 ends, means, unity 184–6 energy flows, and architecture 102 Enlightenment, critique 194 Enuma Elish 241 environment built/natural, distinction 47–8 ‘furniture’ 153–4 human need to manipulate 190 as zone of entanglement 151 environmentalism 10 and ecospirituality 177–8 Estonia Archive of Folklore 229 cross-trees 227–31 cultural heritage 224–5, 231–2 Kassinurme grove hill 226 sacred groves 225–7 sacred sites 5, 224 churches in 225–6 protection 232–3 Estonians, identity 225 ethics of care 77 of creation and ecology 91 environmental 78, 93–4, 178–9, 287 land 78 of mapping Nyldy Ata complex 266–7 of research 266 fengshui 306 and stones 7 Filter Project see under road landscapes Finland, cross-trees 227 fossil fuel, use 58 Foucault, Michel 138–9 Fox, Warwick 91, 92, 93 Franzmann, Majella 134 Gaia theory 90 Lovelock on 71–2 Gali, Beth, ‘Fossar de la Pedrera’ 116, 117 Galison, Peter 94 Ganander, Kristfrid, Mythologica Fennica 227

Gandhi, Mahatma 176, 181, 185 garden in Chinese culture 306 in Japanese culture 319 see also rock garden Gardner, Gary 285 genius loci of place(s) 52, 126 and road landscapes 119, 127 Gibson, James 152, 153, 154, 155, 156–7, 159 Gimbutas, Marija 242, 243 giving, mystery of 23–4, 28–9 and Jesus 24–6 Global Commons Institute 68 globalization, and climate change 72 God as creator of creativity 79–81 omnipresence 51–2 and space, Tillich on 51–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, on selfknowledge 9, 13 Goodall, Jane 151 Goodwin, Kingsley 4, 46 Gore, Al 67 An Inconvenient Truth 179, 182 Earth in the Balance 178, 179 ecospirituality 178–80 Nobel Peace Prize 178 ‘Save Our Selves’ campaign 179, 180 greenhouse gas emissions as act of war 68–9 borderless nature of 72 and climate change 65 and communion of saints 70 growth 58 and human evolution 59 Gregersen, Niels Henrik 3 theology of nature 79–81, 82–3 Grim, Joseph A. 5 Grotius, Hugo 68 Guattari, Félix 150 Gustafson, James 78 habitat, house, distinction 36–8 Haeckel, Ernst 90 haikus, Basho 319–20

Index Harris, Marvin, The Origins of Male Supremacy 244 Hartig, Kate 133, 134 Hayles, N. Katherine 165 healer, artist as 103 healing, and landscape 127 Heaven building 45, 52 as child’s play 53 and emplacement 50 problems 48–9 as spiritual practice 52 and theology 50 definition 48 as reinterpretation of place 50 as undelineated place 48–9, 52 Heidegger, Martin 148, 149, 159 on the Earth 155–6, 158 on place 50 on the sky 156 on understanding 105 history, nature, dualism 75 Holy Roman Empire 72 Homann, Annette 3, 118–19 home anthropomorphic notion 36 connotations 33fn13 house, tension 41 Moltmann on 40 hope and climate change 69–70 and the communion of saints 70 house habitat, distinction 36–8 home, tension 41 household of God metaphor 2 adequacy 40–41 built/non-built environment 35–8 and ecumenical discourse 31–5 integrative function 31, 32–3, 35 limitations 35 Moltmann on 38–40 Hua Shou 305 human development, and climate stability 59, 71 Hunt, John Dixon 117, 121, 122, 124 hunting animals, humans, relationship 237–8

uncertainties 237 hunting-gathering, and nature 236–7 Husserl, Edmund, phenomenology 167 identity Estonians 225 and landscape 223 Imanishi, Kenji anti-Darwinism 325 biocentrism 326 The World of Living Things 325 Indian Ocean, temperature rise 57 Inge, John 48, 50 on place 51 Ingold, Tim 4, 14, 206, 237, 238 Inogamova, Zemfira 6 Islam Kyrgysztan 257–8 and kyrgyzchylyk 258 Japanese people ecological attitude 316–18 garden aesthetics 319 nature, relationship 318–19, 321–2 traditional music 319 Jeremiah 71 on land/sea relationship 60–61 Jesus on divine love 27 and the mystery of giving 24–6 John Paul II, Pope 64 Johnson, Ellen 136 Johnson, Mark 217–18 Jokivirta, Lisa 4 Jones, Lindsay 101 kami(s) 7, 321 experience of 311–12 holographic entry points 314 Japanese descent from 313 and Shinto 306, 311–13, 323–4 in trees 312 see also ch’i Kant, Immanuel, on the world 152 Keller, Catherine 22 Kennelly, Brendan 23 kingdom of God 26–9 Kirkman, Robert 91, 92

335

336

Nature, Space and the Sacred

knowledge and action 296 embodied, Crow people 207–8, 211 human search for 190 Kõivupuu, Marju Torp 5 koto no kokoro, and Makoto no kokoro 320–21 Kover, T.R. 5, 6 Koyukon people 157 Kuijken, Eckhardt 198 Kűkai, philosophy 308 Kyoto Protocol 65, 67, 71 Kyrgysztan Islam 257–8 Manas Ordo 274, 275, 277 Nyldy Ata 266, 267, 274 road map, pros and cons 273–5 tourism 275–6 sacred sites 5, 6, 259–60, 266 see also mazars kyrgyzchylyk indicators 254–5 and Islam 258 and life cycle 255 meaning 253–4, 272–3 as spiritual mission 254–7, 259 kyrgyzchylyk bar 254 land as medium and substance 157–8 and sea, relationship 60–61 and weather 158 landscape(s) artificial 124 with baled silage 113, 114 design issues 114 Lassus 114–15 and healing 127 ideal 109, 111, 124 Borås Project 123 and identity 223 of loss 110 non-places 109 scenery 112 see also road landscapes Lassus, Bernard 126 landscape design 114–15

Latvia, cross-trees 229 Le Corbusier 52 Lease, Gary 163 Lefèbvre, Henri 12, 139 Lele people 239 Leopold, Aldo 78, 324, 326 Lévinas, Emmanuel 141 life spatiality of 10, 11 unity of 151–2 life cycle, and kyrgyzchylyk 255 life forms, human responsibility for 76 lifeway, Crow people 206, 210–11, 212 Light, Nathan 257 Linné, Carl von 90, 91 ‘Live Earth’ campaign climate change 179 and consumerism 181 limitations 180–81 logic of inversion 147, 148 Logos, the 39 Lovelock, James 90 on the Gaia theory 71–2 Lowenthal, David 223 Lugbara people 241 McDaniel, Jay 177 McFague, Sallie 3, 75 Super, Natural Christians 76 Madison, Gary Brent 171 Makoto no kokoro 317–18, 327 and koto no kokoro 320–21 Malmö altar of the dead see altar of the dead road landscape 123–4 Malpas, Jeff 49 Manas Ordo see under Kyrgysztan Marcuse, Herbert 9 Margulis, Lynn 22, 90 Marion, Jean-Luc 25 Matsumoto, Oyuki 137, 139 mazars 249–51, 256 cleanliness 277–8 definitions 250fn4 function 259–60 illustrations 250, 252 mapping, pros and cons 269–73 pilgrimages 251–2, 267–8

Index rituals 258–9 secrecy 277 spirit of 276–7 visitors attitude 270 etiquette 268–9 on foot 273 unsuitable 274–5, 277–8 wedding parties 274 Mbuti people 240 meaning and beauty 111, 114, 119, 123 and the Borås Project 121 and memory 109 and radical transcendence 193–4 and road landscapes 125 and roadside memorials 131 search for 190, 193, 194 see also recognition means, ends, unity 184–6 meat eating, abstention from 63 Melin, Anders 3 memorials domestic 134 personalized 133–6 spontaneous conflicts 136–7 examples 132–3 see also roadside memorials memory and the communion of saints 70 and meaning 109 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Phenomenology of Perception 170 The Visible and the Invisible 170 Meyer, Aubrey 68 Michaels, Pat 59 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report 283, 286 minding, and creating 208 modeling, theological 46fn2 Moltmann, Jürgen 2 God in Creation 38 on home 40 on household of God metaphor 38–40 Moreau, Robert 121, 122 Morris, Brian 236, 240, 241 Muir, John 90

337

Munnik, René 193, 195–6, 196–7 music, traditional, in Japanese culture 319 mycelium metaphor 150 triumph of 159 Myrtell, Miriam 137 Naess, Arne 4, 172 deep ecology movement 91–2, 93, 163 on realism 166, 171 on science 167–9 ‘Natura 2000 network’ 191fn5 nature and agricultural lifestyle 236, 239 Darwin on 148 devaluation of 5, 235–6 domestication 242 and ecofeminism 242–3 ecospirituality, link 185 history, dualism 75 and hunting-gathering 236–7 interdependence 76 Japanese people, relationship 318–19, 321–2 meaning, and emplacement 47, 48 perceived value 191 and place, examples 46 reproducing 192 restorying 196–8 as scripture 308–9 and the Self 9–10 spatialization 1 theology of, Gregersen’s 79–81, 82–3 Thoreau on 90 nature preservation economic development, conflict 190–91 historical role 198 meaning 189fn2 ontological weight 195 Nelson, Richard 157 Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack 22 neo-Confucianism 7, 176, 288 organic holism 290–91 self-cultivation 291–2 see also Confucianism nervous system, Bergson on 149 Newton, Isaac 71

338

Nature, Space and the Sacred

Noah saga 59–60 non-places 109, 110 Norberg–Schulz, Christian 52 Norinaga, Motoori 320 North America, carbon dioxide emissions 66 Northcott, Michael 3 Nyldy Ata see under Kyrgyzstan oikonomia 31 oikos 2, 31 Olsen, Bjørnar 156 ontological weight example 195–6 nature preservation 195 organisms alternative view 150–51 conventional view 150 in meshworks 149 re-creation 148 tissues of 149 otherness, and architecture 118 Parkes, Graham 7 patriarchy, origins 243, 244, 245 Pecqueur, Charles 126 perception body interactions 208 phenomenology of 170–71 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 105 Petersson, Anna 4, 126 phenomenology Husserl 167 of perception 170–71 of place 172 physis 10 Pizarro, Alejandra 137, 139 place(s) acquiring sense of 45–6 genius loci 52, 119, 125 Heidegger on 50 Inge on 51 of loss 110 and nature, examples 46–7 phenomenology of 172 and play 45–6 undelineated, Heaven as 48–9, 52 see also non-places; sacred sites

play, and place 45–6 post-colonialism 21 Potsdam Institute for Climate Change 71 praesentia notion 141 Primavesi, Anne 2, 14, 176, 238 Gaia’s Gift 23, 185 Sacred Gaia 23, 185 PRUDENCE project 20 Purcell, Trevor W. 277 qi see ch’i radical transcendence, and meaning 193–4 Raiser, Konrad 37 Rárika association 137 realism epistemological, and deep ecology 169–71 Naess on 166, 171 scientific, and deep ecology 167–9 vs constructivism 163–5 realities, diabolic/symbolic 135 recognition, obtaining 193 see also meaning religion and ecology 90, 216–20, 286–8 and space 1, 11, 132 Rensberger, Boyce 236 Richardson, Dick 86 Ricoeur, Paul 47, 53 The Symbolism of Evil 240 Rio Conference (1992) 14, 75 rituals Crow people 211–12 role 98 road landscapes Borås Project architectural illustration 120 artistic input 119–20 artist’s illustration 121 colour use 120–21 message boards 121–2 Filter Project aim 119 concept 115–16 design issues 117 inspiration for 116–18 photo collage 115

Index and the sublime 118 and genius loci 119, 127 as ideal landscape 123 Malmö 123–4 and meaning 121, 125 of passage 110 planning & design 111, 119 projects 112 as transition landscapes 128 roadside memorials 125–6 and meaning 131 Newcastle (Australia) 133–4 Oregon, removal 136–7 problems 136–7 reasons for 134 rock garden examples 307, 308 in Japanese culture 306–7 manual 307–8 Rolston, Holmes 36, 78 Rothenberg, David 170 roundabout dogs 125, 126 Rudofsky, Bernhard 103 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 3 Gaia and God 75 social Darwinism, critique 76 Sabbath, celebration 38 sacred groves, Estonia 225–7 sacred sites Estonia 5, 224 ‘Fossar de la Pedrera’, Barcelona 116 Kyrgysztan see under Kyrgysztan marked by straw rope 312, 313 natural 224 and the past 223–4 see also mazars ‘Save Our Selves’ campaign 179, 180, 182 Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory 118 science, Naess on 167–9 sea and land, relationship 60–61 law of 68 Self, and nature 9–10 self-cultivation neo-Confucianism 291–2 transformative ethics of 292–3 self-knowledge, Goethe on 9, 13

339

Serpell, James 236 Sessions, George 164, 166, 167 shaman, Beuys as 103 Sharp, Henry S. 237 Shaw, Daniel M.P. 7 Shepard, Paul 6, 236, 240, 242, 245 Shinto 7 and biocentrism 323–4, 326 and kami(s) 306, 311–13, 323–4 Makoto no kokoro 317–18 spiritual characteristics 314–15, 326–7 values 314 Shoshoni people 209 Shue, Henry 65, 67 Shükürov, Emil 278 Sideris, Lisa 3, 75 critique of ecotheology 77–9, 82 Environmental Ethics 77 Sielma, Heinz 104 sin and climate change 61–2, 64 structures 64–5, 69 sky Earth, interface 152–3 Heidegger on 156 social Darwinism, Ruether’s critique 76 Södergran, Edith 122 Soja, Edward 12, 13 Soulé, Michael E. 163 space creation 122 dichotomies 138–9 and God, Tillich on 51 limitedness of 14 place, relationship 1 politics of 103 reinterpretation 47–8 and religion 1, 11, 132 sacred and stones 303 and torii 315, 315 to pass through 110, 111 spatiality of life 10, 11 trialectics of 12 Speth, James G., Red Sky at Morning 285 Spirn, Ann Whiston 126 Stãniloae, Dumitru 28

340

Nature, Space and the Sacred

Steiner, Rudolf 98 Stern, Howard 58 stones ch’i in 306 in Chinese culture 303–4 and fengshui 7 and sacred space 303 subject-object model 76 subject-subject model 76–7 Sundance, Crow people 5, 203, 205, 206, 207, 210, 212–16 ‘Ashkisshe’ tree 214 dancers’ clothes 213 history 212–13 performance 213–16 sustainable development 3, 93, 283–4 assumptions 85–6 critique of 87–8 strong version 87, 88 tools for 285–6 weak version 87, 88 Taylor, Paul, on biocentrism 323, 324 theology and construction of Heaven 50 of nature, Gregersen’s 79–81, 82–3 Thomson, J. Arthur 149 Thoreau, Henry, on nature 90 Tillich, Paul 2 on God and space 51 Systematic Theology 51 time, sacred 315–16 Tinker, George 22 Toadvine, T. 169 transformations 19–20 trees kami in 312 power of 223 see also cross-trees Trinity, economic 31 Trotzig, Birgitta 117, 118 Tswana people 239 Tu Weiming 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293–4, 295 Tuan, Yi-Fu 135 Tucker, Mary Evelyn 6, 175–6 Turnbull, Colin 240 Turner, Victor 138

UK, carbon dioxide emissions 66 UN, Framework Convention on Climate Change 59, 64, 66 UN Environment Programme (UNEP) 287 understanding, Heidegger on 105 universe, as self-generating process 291 Vesalius 304–5 Vikström, Björn 3 von Humboldt, Alexander 10 Wang Yang-ming 288–9 on action and knowledge 296–7 Chu Hsi, disagreement 296 compassionate living 289 embodied acting 289, 294 empathetic knowing 289, 294, 295 on heart-mind responsiveness 295, 298–9 Instructions for Practical Learning 289 philosophy 293–9 ‘Sitting at Night at Pi-Hsia Pond’, poem 297 weather absence in philosophy 156 and land 158 as medium 156–7 Weber, Klaus 159 Welker, Michael 36 Wilson, E. O., On the Future of Life 285 Wingren, Carola 3, 105 women, subordinate status 244–5 the world Kant on 152 without objects 154–5 World Council of Churches 64 World Religions and Ecology, Harvard Conference Series 286, 287 world trade, uncontrollability 72 World Trade Organization 72 worldview, Cartesian 317 Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 285 Yangming, Wang 7, 176 Yeats, W.B., ‘Easter 1916’ 19–20 yin and yang 304 and ch’i 305