In "Religion and the Anthropocene" today, I tried to get us to think about ritual, using the fascinating ideas of Frédérique Appfel-Marglin. Human beings are part of an "inter-collectivity" with "non-humans" (plants, animals) and "other-than-humans" (the dead, spirits, gods, etc.), and the way we communicate with them is through ritual. I proposed we start our discussion with this:What separates out ritual action from everyday action is that in the former, the patterning of actions is designed to focus awareness so as to synchronize the awareness of the different participants – humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans – enabling them to weave each other into a continuous world, a regenerated world. (164)
This comes near the end of her argument, gathering together reflections on how ritual sustains continuity of space and helps us maintain a livable experience of time, and I thought it would lead to an exciting discussion. It didn't. The issue turned out to be not only the difficulty of the idea that modern conceptions of uniform space and linear time are constructions, but the notion that there really are "non-humans" and "other-than-humans" out there for us to communicate with in the first place.
When the class drew blanks I asked them what they knew of shamanism, and learned about new age "shamans" who use various potent substances to "potentiate spiritual experiences," deal with trauma, help people connect with their "ancestry." "Experiences of what?" I asked; "ancestry or ancestors?" But the students didn't want to go there. Spiritual technologies might polish the mirror of the self's self-understanding, but not open the door to the more than human. Next week we encounter Robin Wall Kimmerer's sorrow at the "species loneliness" of western people, who think humans are the only people around. Will it fall on deaf ears, or receptive ones?
Synchronized awareness with non- and other-than-humans might be one of those topics which students are shy too talk about in class - reading responses sometimes tell of enthusiastic or deeply moved engagement with ideas which, in class, nobody would own up to even finding interesting. There was a glimmer of something as I read them an account Apffel-Marglin gives of an American student asked to participate in a ritual at the Sachamama Center for "biocultural regeneration" she started in Peru - it collects and cultivates a particularly rich form of rain forest soil, whose microbial superpower apparently traces back to precolumbian "biochar," but frames this work with rituals engaging the forest, and the soil itself.
We involve our interterm U. S. undergraduates in these rituals, asking them to speak from their hearts in their own words. Some find this impossible and decline, but many are able to speak. I recall one vivid case where the student told me she could not possibly speak to the soil. Then I saw her with a bowl of chichi at a distance speaking at great length to the earth. When she returned I commented that she seemed to have been able to overcome her reluctance. She answered that she had explained to the earth at length how and why she could not speak to her! (201)
The class laughed at that, and again when I asked what might happen the next time: "remember me, the one who couldn't talk to you?"
Funny how my relatively new courses in religion and ecology converge with the older religious ethics classes, with their attention to wider moral communities...!
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities:
How Rituals Enact the World (Oxford 2012)
