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Part I
Illuminating and problematizing ecocultural identity
Identity is an unavoidable, complex, varied, and contested concept at the center of today’s public, political, and academic vernaculars. Individuals and groups experience, enact, and negotiate multiple identities that intersect within contexts to form, at least momentarily, a perceivable and seemingly fixed representation of who or what an individual or group is. Although scholars from multiple disciplines have considered notions of identity through diverse theoretical, methodological, and ontological approaches, predominantly sociocultural categories – imagined as largely devoid of ecological or more-than-human considerations – have shaped identity conceptualizations. Authors in this section put an ecocultural lens on identity to expand the scope and revisit and redefine identity as always already sociocultural and ecological.
The opening chapter of Part I provides a nuanced and embodied more-than-human framework for considering identity as ecocultural from influential cultural ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram. In Chapter 1, ‘Interbreathing ecocultural identity in the Humilocene,’ Abram centers earthly existence as the focus point for moving through and past interrelated social and environmental problems. In conversation with the Handbook editors, he shares insights about acknowledging and embracing identity via the path of remembering humanity’s interdependence ‘with so many other shapes and styles of sensitivity and sentience’ (p. 6). He elaborates on the intimate relations between language and the more-than-human world (his broadly influential term) and how those who write have the obligation to keep human language alive, to transform and create new terms to evoke the world within which we are connected in an interbreathing vital flux of earthly organisms. In this vein, Abram introduces the term Humilocene to describe the current ‘epoch of humility’ as a regenerative, ethical, and empathetic framework within which multiple ecologies of sensory experience interlock to engender ancient and renewed ways of being human – as a species, as animals, as sensory bodies – and to break from the prevalent contemporary narcissistic human posture threatening existence on our planet. As a new concept developed in this chapter, the Humilocene provides fresh ecoculturally inclusive ways to understand contemporary interwoven environmental and cultural crises and to foster relational identifications that stimulate humble and holistic conversations and actions.
Scaling down to everyday ecocultural interactions, Tema Milstein traces the boundaries of normative human-centered identity in Chapter 2, ‘Ecocultural identity boundary patrol and transgression.’ This chapter illuminates the hegemonic character of interpersonal ecocultural interactions, which often function in Western/ized settings to restrict both individuals and societies to ecologically distanced positions and to mask biospheric care, connection, and immersion. Based on extensive ethnographic work, Milstein identifies ways individuals express connection with the more-than-human world, ranging from worms to whales, and ways these expressions are marked as aberrant by others, and constrained with ridicule or labeling. At the same time, she illuminates ways individuals self-patrol, mitigating their own expressions of forms of ecocentric identity via self-labeling, self-censoring, and marking their own boundary-crossings out of the anthropocentric realm. Milstein also identifies rare unmitigated displays of ecocentric identity, in which shared regenerative ways of being are co-constructed, validated, and strengthened. As a practical outcome of this research, she illuminates methods for transforming ecocultural identity in these times – specifically for undisciplining and rewilding our ecocultural selves, and renewing communication in Western/ized settings as a restorative resource.
Chapter 3, ‘Borderland ecocultural identities,’ by Carlos Tarin, Sarah Upton, and Stacey Sowards, presents the U.S.–Mexico border as a site of ecocultural liminality and contestation. The Río Grande, as a living international border, works as a metaphor and material riverway for articulating how identity may unfold across geographies and ways landscapes of the borderlands are an ecotestimonio of resistance, resilience, and diffusion. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, these authors theorize borderland ecocultural identities through what they term environmental nepantlisma, an ecocultural identity characterized in part by alluvial diffusions, ‘the physical and metaphorical flows of water and sediment that occur following floods and changing river patterns’ (p. 54). The authors theorize the complexities of identity in border landscapes fraught with numerous conflicting dualistic tensions – in this case, contested dualities including U.S./Mexico, English/Spanish, city/desert, culture/nature, human/more-than-human, straight/queer, and citizen/non-citizen. Whereas these identities’ boundaries are patrolled and policed (both literally and symbolically), the border also provides a unique lens for understanding how (seemingly) oppositional tensions can both conflict and converge in order to (re)create transformative perceptions and praxis. Indeed, this chapter animates environmental nepantlisma as a ‘geography of self’ that simultaneously constrains and enables possible modes of thought and practice, contributing to a broad understanding of ecocultural identity as transitory, in flux, bounded, resistant, and constantly negotiated.
In Chapter 4, ‘Ecocultural identities in intercultural encounters,’ José Castro-Sotomayor recasts the particularities of borderland ecocultural identities in his work with a transboundary Indigenous organization located at the border of Ecuador and Colombia. Castro-Sotomayor engages with dominant notions of culture and their limitations when it comes to illuminating ways human-centeredness, intrinsic to dominant understandings of intercultural relations, tends to undermine, or even completely forget, the ecological dimension of human selves and the environmental conditions in which identities arise. He theorizes ways ecocultural identity exists in dialectical relations between ecological subjectivity and environmental identity, a differentiation that attends to nuances of ways extrahuman actors function as constitutive elements of identity. His study demonstrates how an ecocultural perspective offers different ways to understand intercultural relations and ethnicity, race, and class-based approaches to these relations. In focusing on two kinds of site-specific ecocultural identities, restorative and unwholesome, he illustrates ways insider–outsider and respect–disrespect dialectics inherent in these dueling identities inform inter- and intra-ecocultural relations among Indigenous, Mestizo, and Afro populations. Castro-Sotomayor’s chapter illustrates ways that an ecocultural perspective can contribute to efforts to diversify and enhance transdisciplinary fields of inquiry that seek paths away from anthropocentric identity constraints and toward ecologically awakened peacebuilding processes.
In Chapter 5, ‘Western dominator ecocultural identity and the denial of animal autonomy,’ Laura Bridgeman takes us on a fascinating voyage into the ancient origins of Western mastery identity. Examining a frozen moment in time, she identifies the frieze of the Greek Parthenon as marking a likely starting point of dominator identity in the West. Bridgeman connects a close read of these beginnings to contemporary times – and the shifting dynamics of the dominator identity – in part illustrated in recent U.S.-based protest-driven removals of horse-man monuments that represent multiple interlocking oppressions. All the while, Bridgeman centers other animals’ sentience and autonomy, the loss (to most humans) of a universal language in which all animals communicate, and an illumination of the symbolic and material work required to assert and reproduce dominator ecocultural identities. The horse-man (not woman) journey serves both as metaphor and lived relationship, actively denying animal sentience and physical autonomy and playing a central role throughout Western civilization. The horse’s body serves as a site both of representation and acting-out of the domination of gendered selves and othered animals according to the chain-of-being hierarchy originating with Plato. In illustrating ways the horse-man relationship has remained core to dominator identity for thousands of years, including during waves of colonization, female disempowerment, and slavery and recent assertions of white racial supremacy, Bridgeman argues for an alternate Western loving ecocultural identity, which replaces domination with respectful interspecies relationality.
In the final chapter of this first section, Chapter 6, ‘Critical ecocultural intersectionality,’ Melissa Parks revisits the concept of intersectionality within an ecocultural identity framework. In this theory-building essay, Parks foregrounds anthropocentrism as a deeply rooted and foundational ideology in Western/ized cultures that perpetuates hierarchical human-centered structures and directly intersects with additional nodes of othering and oppression, including race and gender. Parks argues for adding an ecocultural lens to the transdisciplinary framework of critical intersectionality to challenge overlapping forms of both sociocultural and more-than-human othering. In the process, she reviews extant eco-oriented identity theories and their conceptualizations of ecological identity, environmental identity, and green identity, and posits ecocultural identity as an alternative non-normative lens that problematizes conceptions of identity as static and separate from sociocultural power structures. Parks argues an ecocultural approach to identity functions to intersectionally dismantle dualistic and anthropocentric orientations that permeate predominant constructions of identity and interlocking oppressions of both people and planet.
Identity is multidimensional and its mounting complexity signals a world that is becoming increasingly fragmented in terms of senses of self and the well-being of societies and vast and multiple ecologies. In illuminating and problematizing ecocultural identity, this first section of the Handbook centers an ecocultural perspective and offers key theoretical constructs of an ecocultural framework and approach. The chapters within seek to understand ways an ecocultural identity lens can help expand understanding of not only who we are and how we transform as individuals or groups, but also how who we are as a species engenders planetary environmental crises or earthly repair and renewal.
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1
Interbreathing ecocultural identity in the Humilocene
David Abram with Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor
David Abram is a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher whose work has helped catalyze the emergence of several fields of study, including the burgeoning fields of ecopsychology, eco-phenomenology, and ecolinguistics. He is author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1996) and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Vintage, 2011). The former book is considered a generative work and continues to inform and inspire scholars across disciplines, and the latter is reflected in the film Becoming Animal (2018) by Peter Mettler and Emma Davie. Abram also is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), a consortium that employs the arts and the natural sciences ‘to ease the spreading devastation of the animate earth through a rapid transformation of society,’ especially ‘through a rejuvenation of oral culture – the culture of face-to-face and face-to-place storytelling’ (http://wildethics.org/the-alliance/).
Abram’s work explores, first and foremost, the ecology of perception – the manifold ways that sensory experience binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. This exploration has led him to engage, ever more deeply, the ecological dimensions of language – the manner in which ways of speaking profoundly influence and constrain what we see, and hear, and even taste of the Earth around us. Abram works to alter our directly felt experience of the world by transforming the ways language today is dominantly used. Through the weaving of his own words, his writing brings the world alive in ways that can excite and nourish earthly spiritual and sensual engagements and identifications. For instance, while writing in the mid-1990s, he found himself frustrated by problematic terminology within environmentalist movements that reinforced the dominant Western culturally constructed divide between humankind and what commonly is referred to as ‘nature’ or ‘the environment.’ In response, in 1996, Abram coined the phrase ‘the more-than-human world’ to signify the broad commonwealth of earthly life, a realm that both contains humankind and yet also, necessarily, exceeds humankind and human culture. The term has been gradually adopted by many other scholars and theorists (you will see ‘more-than-human world’ informing the discussion of ecocultural identity throughout this Handbook) and has crossed into the practitioner realm to become a key term within the paradigm-shifting phrasing of activists and the broader ecological movement.
Abram’s work is deeply resonant with the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity’s intention of understanding and addressing contemporary ecocultures and ecocultural identities and of offering alternative ways of thinking and feeling at once ancient and strangely new. As a pivotal contemporary thinker who lectures and teaches around the world both within and outside academia, we asked Abram to join and help frame the ecocultural identity conversation. The following is a transcript of a conversation with the Handbook’s editors, Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor, in Abram’s home in the southern foothills of the United States Rocky Mountains.
Milstein: Identity is manifesting centrally in society and politics right now, driving activisms and organizing on the ground and informing major regime and policy changes. At the same time, a lot of activisms, politics, and much social science and humanities research around identity continue to focus exclusively on sociocultural aspects. The conversation in this Handbook, in part, responds to ways this tendency leaves out the more-than-human world and, in many cases, reproduces and leave unchallenged the dominant Western human/‘nature’ binary at the heart of today’s related ecological and social crises.
Abram: Yes indeed. Our identity as animals, for instance, or as citizens of this breathing biosphere, are completely left out of account.
Milstein: And since identity is transdisciplinary and also often non-academic, many people in different contexts around the world are part of this conversation. We felt now is a time to expand the scope of the conversation and ask: What does identity mean when we take into account humans always being ecological and, equally, society and culture always being ecological?
Abram: Wonderful. So often our internecine human conflicts – our readiness to take offense at perceived slights in relation to some identity or other – come in the way of and interrupt any felt discovery of our shared dependence upon the Earth, our shared interdependence with other creatures and plants and earthly elements. I often think that we use identity con...
