Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature

Negotiating the Environment

Angela Roothaan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138337770
• eBook ISBN: 9780429808227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature contributes to the young field of intercultural philosophy by introducing the perspective of critical and postcolonial thinkers who have focused on systematic racism, power relations and the intersection of cultural identity and political struggle.

Angela Roothaan discusses how initiatives to tackle environmental problems cross-nationally are often challenged by economic growth processes in postcolonial nations and further complicated by fights for land rights and self-determination of indigenous peoples. For these peoples, survival requires countering the scramble for resources and clashing with environmental organizations that aim to bring their lands under their own control. The author explores the epistemological and ontological clashes behind these problems. This volume brings more awareness of what structurally obstructs open exchange in philosophy world-wide, and shows that with respect to nature, we should first negotiate what the environment is to us humans, beyond cultural differences. It demonstrates how a globalizing philosophical discourse can fully include epistemological claims of spirit ontologies, while critically investigating the exclusive claim to knowledge of modern science and philosophy.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental philosophy, cultural anthropology, intercultural philosophy and postcolonial and critical theory.

Chapter 1

A world of motion and emergence

An outline of what’s at stake

Border crossings

Philosophy does not start with wonder. It starts with being touched. Of this I was reminded when I read, a few years ago, the first page of the first chapter of Where Spirits Ride the Wind (Goodman 1990). In this book, Felicitas Goodman, an out-of-the-box anthropologist, describes the shock she experienced upon finding out, at age 12, what becoming adult meant: ‘The magic time is over.’ I recognized what she described:

… all of a sudden and without the slightest warning, I realized that I could no longer effortlessly call up what in my terms was magic: that change in me that was so deliciously exciting and as if I were opening a door, imparting a special hue to whatever I chose.

(Goodman 1990: p. 4)

The experience of ‘magic,’ of a world shining and bristling with life, is – it must be clear – not just an aesthetic mode of being. It is not the ‘receiving,’ like in a revelation, of a spiritual reality – imperceptible for the uninitiated. It springs rather, as Goodman’s description makes clear, of her rediscovery of the ‘magic time,’ which means participating in a mutual, playful, dialogical relationship with beings around us – opposed to the ‘normal’ modern relationship to nature, which filters out conscious and intentional agency of any being but the rational ones, making the world around us, even though the beings in it move and interact, in a sense inert and alien. This filtering-out is characteristic for a secularized technological interference with nature. It presupposes (for example) that the tree I want to fell to build a shelter will not strike back at me. In the non-secularized, ‘magical’ experience, I will need to address the spirit of the tree, to conjure it or atone it to fence off retaliation. Such address can take varying forms, like making offerings (giving something back for what I take) to gods and deities, saying ritual prayers, or warding off adversities by placing a power object at a place where danger may most likely enter our world.¹

For Goodman the loss of the ability to enter a world ‘… where I could always feel the comfort of invisible presences around’ (1990: p. 5) came with a shock, and her return to that openness for the spiritual world was marked by unexpected events. After she had moved from Europe to the US, and was visiting a place in New Mexico, she felt invited by presences living there to buy the land and build a house on it. From that time on she increasingly became aware of how animals and spirits gave her messages to heed, which set her on a path of rediscovery of ways to learn about life and the world through shamanic trance states. With her students she investigated how body postures portrayed by ancient statuettes from horticultural and hunter-gatherer societies lead to varying types of trance, which offer insights and help with things like healing, knowledge, protection, attack, etc. Thus she rediscovered what we will call in this book a shamanic way to be in the world.

The results of Goodman’s uncommon empirical research were presented in the above-mentioned book, where she characterizes the world she came to live in as a world of motion and emergence, contrasting it with the passive, motionless world of being that had been sought after by philosophy and science ever since the ancient Greeks. Goodman’s observations do not stand alone – one can find a similar turn away from the reductive aspects in modernity in the posthumous book by Paul Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance (1999). About the ontology that has for the larger part characterized what we call modernity, he writes:

The search for reality that accompanied the growth of Western civilization played an important role in the process of simplifying the world … this search has also a strong negative component. It does not accept the phenomena as they are, it changes them, either in thought (abstraction) or by actively interfering with them (experiment).… In both cases, things are being taken away or ‘blocked off ‘ from the totality that surrounds us. Interestingly the remains are called ‘real,’ which means they are regarded as more important than the totality itself.

(Feyerabend 1999: p. 5)

In contrast with this way to understand and manipulate being, Feyerabend aims to get a wider reality into view, which includes ways of being in the world that have been cut off by modernist orthodoxy as primitive. In an attempt to evoke the experience of this reality, he sums up:

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies.… Only a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds.

(Feyerabend 1999: p. 3)

Feyerabend is very much aware, and I follow him in this, that opening up to the wider reality, which means opening up to shamanistic or spirit ontologies, presupposes bracketing the exclusionary principles that characterize modernism. This again means that we undefine the boundaries of modern culture, opening up the possibility that inside modern culture itself the phenomena in all their richness are still perceived, by some, at certain moments, and also expressed in texts and art forms which the orthodoxy classifies as ‘esoteric.’ In line with this an important point in this study will be that although modernity aimed to ban spirited beings from reality, it has never completely succeeded in doing so. Precisely this may provide a point of connection that will make the hoped-for dialogue, and the negotiations that have to precede dialogue, possible.

Another interesting recent attempt to describe and critique the limits of modernity is found in the works of Bruno Latour, especially in his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013). In this quasi-anthropological study, its author investigates the implicit presuppositions, the deep values of the tribe he calls ‘the moderns.’ I will make use of this name here, as it provides us with the ability to speak about a certain life world, with its ontologies, its ways of life, its beliefs and practices, without having to essentialize a worldview, the ‘modern’ worldview, in the same abstracted manner that modern abstraction seduces us to. Latour’s work is, like this book, equally motivated by a concern about the environment, and it also looks for a way to repair the ‘othering’ of indigenous ways of being in the world, as this seems to be a point at which mending is necessary. My approach differs in many respects from Latour’s as well, most importantly I challenge his contention that the moderns can/may enter, without a preceding analysis of the violent nature of their conquest of the world, into negotiations, and even without reparations. His contention follows from the fact that he remains on the ‘clean’ playing field of philosophical reflection. After his investigation into the deep values of the moderns, he claims that

… only then, might we turn back toward ‘the others’ – the former ‘others!’ – to begin negotiation about which values to institute, to maintain, perhaps to share … Together, we could perhaps better prepare ourselves to confront the emergence of the global, of the Globe, without denying any aspect of our history.

(Latour 2013: p. xxvii)

Latour is moving too fast here. As long as forests are being cut at a terrifying rate and the indigenous peoples who live in them still have to struggle to get legal recognition of their autonomy and ownership, the moderns offering them to negotiate common values is precocious. Indigenous activists for the environment are being killed for their work all over the world, which makes the situation between the parties involved to have more characteristics of a war than of a clash of values, and to end wars negotiations are in place before dialogue can be done.

To prepare for dialogue, it is therefore of utmost importance to include in our analysis the systems of power, the politics, the economic realities, the ideologies and instruments and people that have not yet ended this war. This is what the present postcolonial situation asks of us. With the word postcolonial I do not mean that colonialism is in the past and we can now make a fresh start among peoples. The eruption of violence, of domination of people and of nature by ‘the moderns’ that colonialism was, has not only left its marks on the actual lives and the minds of those who inherit its effects, but also has put in place so many legal structures, value systems, moralities, trading practices, migration patterns, etc., that are still effectively dominating our relations, even after institutional colonialism has been abolished. I will touch on such structures when I describe specific cases (trees, elephants) in which the environment is negotiated. I urge philosophy to move beyond an analysis of values or ideas only, and to also take the contexts into account which provide the conditions of success or failure of the negotiations that are to be held. Decolonization is still in process, and we should still heed, continuously, a warning like that of Fanon, that

In its narcissistic monologue the colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized that the essential values – meaning Western values – remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man.

(Fanon 2004 [1961]: p. 11)

We have to remain aware of the effects of colonial knowledge systems that, in a two-tier move (by means of modern epistemology and of ethnology), have denied spontaneity and conscious action to non-white² people, and to non-human nature – identifying spirited ontologies to be the primitive worldview of the natives. The consequences of this colonization of minds and bodies for the peoples that were caught in this conceptual trap, have been well-analyzed by authors such as Fanon, Saïd and others. The consequences for non-human nature have, up till now, been analyzed well enough, but are almost absent in academic philosophical literature. This book wants to change this by undoing the two-tier trick, showing not only that ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour 2013), but also that there is a chorus of natural spiritual voices to be heard around us – voices that are still heard by those who practice shamanic ways to be in the world. This is what is at stake, to seek to hear the voices of indigenous peoples, and consequently of the spirited beings that they hear or used to hear. To be able to do this, we have to be ready to bracket, and negotiate the reach and power of modernist approaches to nature and to humanity.

In order to take shamanistic ontologies and those who hold them seriously as negotiating partners, modernity should stop to describe them from the outside, as ‘other.’ This means trying to take their voices seriously. To prepare for such a step it may be helpful to understand what is at stake existentially, for actual human beings, if they cross over to the ‘indigenous’ side. There are many stories of this kind of border crossings, and I will highlight two of them here: the first one of a Dutch psychologist who came to work for developmental organizations and over time became increasingly involved with indigenous people and their ways to relate to the world. Robert Wolff, who died in 2015 at the age of 94, having lived the final stage of his life in Hawaii, feeding himself on what he could find in nature, wrote down his ‘conversion story’ to an indigenous way of life in a collection of stories titled Original Wisdom (2001). The second one is of a Burkina Faso (then Opper Volta) – born shamanistic coach and writer, who saw himself destined to go through the Western education system, to finally leave the life of an academic in the USA in an attempt to bridge the worlds of knowledge. Malidoma Patrice Somé’s autobiography Of Water and the Spirit (1994) became a classic among spiritual seekers. Nowadays, aged 61, he makes a living introducing Westerners to shamanic rituals. Presenting the self-narration of the crossover of these two men, and the healing knowledge they wanted to share with their audience, I will analyze the ways in which they crossed cultural, geographical and ontological boundaries, while they felt their destiny to lie in the rediscovery and/or active restoration of ‘ancient’ ways to be. What interests me here is how the powers of modern culture and those of the indigenous ones clash, and lead them into unidentified territories of knowing, to find another way to relate to nature, to all that is living and of which the individual human being is a part.

Tiger

Robert Wolff embarked on his journey to expand his knowledge of the predicament of today’s world with the critical approach of a scientifically trained researcher, an approach he never lost, even after his close encounters with the Sng’oi people of Malaysia who changed his life. In the foreword of the report of Wolff’s explorations of a wider reality, Thom Hartmann writes of those who treat spirituality as just another consumption article on the global market:

It’s even fashionable nowadays for First World eco-tourists to visit remote parts of the world, spend a week or two with an indigenous shaman, smoke a few plants, see a few hallucinations, then come back to declare themselves shamans and develop large followings. Shamanism for self-growth, shamanism for business, shamanism to build wealth and power – it’s popping up all over …

(Wolff 2001: p. ix)

Wolff understood his own journey to be different from such instant-shamanism. All the same, it also started in the trail of the Western-dominated political-economic expansion now named globalization. Wolff starts his story on the island of Sumatra, colonized by the Dutch, where his family lived as ‘colons.’ That he felt more warmth and belonging in the world of the local ‘servants’ than with his own kin is a story that doesn’t stand on its own. Present day norms about parenting in the West, which normatively prescribe sharing and guiding ones children on a close by, affectionate and day to day basis, are far from the Victorian style treatment of children in wealthy families up till World War II. While mothers and fathers were busy pursuing the bourgeois life, young children were left with house-maids and other personnel, in the ‘Old’ world as well as in the colonies. In little Robert the exposure to a different way of being and understanding meant the first initiation to his life long search for a non-Western mode of living.

… it was impressed upon me that humans always exist within a larger context. I knew that people, despite great differences, are related as humans, as we are related to the animals and plants around us.

(Wolff 2001: p. 1)

After working in several countries as a psychologist for several organizations, the great change in his life came when Wolff lived for several years in Malaysia. Driven by curiosity he made contact with the seminomadic Sng’oi people, who lived deep within the forest, hoping to be left alone by modern society. Being introduced by a town dweller who is related to them, the Sng’oi however receive Wolff friendly, and when they start to accept him as a regular visitor, he learns their language and commences to stay over for several days at a time whenever he is in their neighborhood. In his book he describes many aspects of Sng’oi knowledge and ways of life. Most interesting is his description of their collective sessions of dream interpretation in the morning, which tell them things that will happen or that are to be done. Wolff finds that they master ways of intuitive knowing that seem strange or unbelievable to modern peoples – like that day when all of them go on a long walk to see a giant forest flower that blooms only one day. Several of them had ‘seen’ the flower in their dream, so they knew the day it was blooming. Another story tells how always when Robert approaches the village on one of the jungle paths, someone is awaiting him before he reaches his aim. There are no ways to let them know beforehand that someone is coming, still they know when he does.

After some time Wolff is invited by Ahmeed, the shaman of one of the villages to be initiated in the shaman’s way of knowing. The instruction consists of nothing but long days of walking in the forest with Ahmeed, without much talk and without food or drink. It takes several visits with several walks on which Robert doesn’t notice any change, and even a period in which he distances himself from the process out of frustration. When he returns for a final try however, on the second day of walking suddenly a new way of experiencing opens up to him:

I stopped abruptly. The jungle was suddenly dense with sounds, smells, little puffs of air here and there. I became aware of things I had largely ignored before. It was as if all this time I had be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 A world of motion and emergence: an outline of what’s at stake
• 2 Ending the othering of indigenous knowledge in philosophy and the ontological turn in cultural anthropology
• 3 When the spirits were banned: Kant versus Swedenborg
• 4 The return of (animal) spirits in the modern Western world
• 5 Deconstructing or decolonizing the human–animal divide
• 6 Vital force: a Belgico-African missionary’s spirited philosophy
• 7 Decolonizing nature: the case of the mourning elephants
• 8 Spirited trees – negotiating secular, religious and traditionalist frameworks
• 9 Blurred, spirited and touched: from ‘the study of man’ to an anim(al)istic anthropology
• References
• Index