This post comprises reflections and learnings from a number of materials and topics explored through the Intercultural. The materials discussed here are the following:
1. A Chapter in the book by Ethan Miller (2019) on "Reimagining livelihoods: Life beyond economy, society, and environment".
2. The first chapter in "The spell of the sensuous" by David Abram (1996) called "The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction To The Inquiry in The Spell of the Sensuous Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World"
3. A Documentary by Marin Trejos (2009) about the Jipi Kogui community.
Key Points in Miller's article: Troubling Economy, Society and Environment in Maine.
Figure 1: Ethan Miller's book Source: https://www.bibliovault.org/BV.book.epl?ISBN=9781517904326
Some key points that emerge in Miller’s work start with the argument that the constructs of “economy”, “society” and “environment” into separate entities create problematic paradigms that isolate certain aspects being, experiencing and more specifically to Miller’s subject, working, that do not actually happen as isolated phenomena.
“In what sense are the economic and the social not always already “environmental”? In what sense can an “economy” be isolated— even for strategic or analytical purposes—from a domain of sociality? Don’t these distinctions—regardless of the precision of their definitions—in fact reproduce an ethico-political habitat in which capitalist economism, human exceptionalism, and multiple forms of colonial domination can continue to thrive?” (Miller, 2019, pg. 7)
An interesting point that Miller makes here is that the way we create knowledge and organise or read how the world works is a lot about creation rather than simply describing things, and a lot of the definitions actually go on to create the world we live in, reinforcing power relations that are involved in their making.
A lot of our classifications and ways of organising such as the separation of “environment”, “economy” and “society” are in fact born out of political, colonialist constructs that serve the capitalist powers that created them. Miller shows us how questioning the ethical and political power relations involved in how we decide to read the world is an important part of creating ethical knowledge and world constructs that are open and inclusive rather than exclusive and closed to other worldviews.
Miller investigates and questions how these separate concepts of “economy”, “society” and “environment” create conflicts in the development of communities in Maine, specifically, because people often end up favouring economic gains over safeguarding the environment, because aspects of the world we live in have been constructed in conflict to each other.
A final key point that stood out to me in Miller’s work is how the interviews with participants were conducted. Rather than trying to avoid ‘leading’ participants to say certain things, Miller actively looks for how specific and fixed understandings and perceptions that people hold can start shifting through thoughtful conversation that the researcher is deeply part of rather than trying to act as a bystander. While this is usually not the way interviews are led, as the aim is usually to avoid to role of the researcher affecting what is said, it points to two main things: First, the questioning of whether the role of the researcher can indeed not affect the outcome of a discussion. Secondly, it investigates how a change of assumptions and beliefs can change for the better through discussion, suggestions, prompts and further inquiry.
Reflecting on the article by Abram and the Jipi Koguis documentary – what do these two materials have in common?
Figure 2: David Abram's book. Source: https://zabriskie.de/product/the-spell-of-the-sensuous/
Some common elements that arise in the Jipi Kogui (2009) documentary and Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) are the following: First, is an identification of deep respect and understanding for the connection between humans and nature as part of a natural way of living harmoniously in the world. Non-human entities are here not really considered as a separate part of life, but an interconnected aspect of how we go on living in the world; a mutual relationship to be sustained “ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth.” (Abram, 1996, pg. 7). The relationship that pervades in the west between human beings and things around us often causes us to see nature as something outside of ourselves that needs to be controlled and conquered in order for humans to live comfortably. However, in many cultures, human life is not the only kind of life that is alive, sentient and in “possession” of an intelligent soul. In fact, the whole universe is seen as intelligent and participating in the constant creation.
Secondly, both the documentary and the book seek to understand cultural relationships of humans with the natural world from within the communities themselves through an experience of the peoples' subjective viewpoints rather than a purely ethnographic viewpoint that anthropologists, researchers and outsiders tend to have formed knowledge through in the past.
A third common element is how in both book and documentary, we can see an experience of people’s shift in understanding and experience from one worldview to the realisation of another that seems to be more harmoniously in touch with the natural world. In Jipi Kogui (2009) we can see a sort of adoption of people from the west into indigenous communities while in Abram’s work (1996) we can see the author’s internal shift as he learns how Shamans in Indonesia and their families live and the kind relationships they hold with the environment around them. Both of these resources show us how we can learn new ways of understanding our role and nature's role in the world.
What do you understand by embodied knowledge? Sensory perceptions? More than human cosmologies?
My personal view on our nature is that we are deeply connected to our environment. We are a product of our environment and are in constant relationship with it throughout our whole life. Due to us growing out of this world rather than being created into it, there are things that we understand that come to us not (only) from sensory perception but come to us as a certain deep knowing from our living with this world. Due to the way we live and the constructs we have created to organise the world, however, this embodied knowledge is often forgotten or disregarded and we become numb to it the more we disconnected ourselves from nature.
More-than-human cosmologies, to me, convey the alive-ness of the universe around us as a continuous, fluctuating, manifesting phenomenon. Everything around us is part of this continuous flux, movement, creation, destruction. We are part of all this and all this is part of us.
References:
David Abram, (1996), The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction To The Inquiry in The Spell of the Sensuous Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, New York, Pantheon Books
Marin Trejos, S. (2009). Jipi Kogui. Colombia: Universidad del Magdalena.
Miller, E. (2019). Introduction: Troubling Economy, Society and Environment in Maine. In Reimagining livelihoods: Life beyond economy, society, and environment. U of Minnesota Press.
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