Some interesting things are happening to the "Religion and the Anthropocene" syllabus as I start thinking about what I can and should include, how to sequence it, etc. Much must needs be different from last time in any case, since this time it's meeting once rather than twice a week - and of course it's meeting online. But since the first iteration we've also passed the tipping point predicted in one of our readings, and the endemic inequalities brought to new light by the pandemic demand a new framing of the question, too.
Here's the course description, as before and too late to change:
The dawning awareness that humanity is a planetary force, effecting
changes in earth systems disruptive to other life forms and even leaving
geological traces, has religious resonances. Are we now the “god
species,” or confronted with the non-metaphorical reality of karma, of
hubris, of original sin? This course explores emerging discussions of
religion amid the ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. Are the
insights of the world religions, fruits of the Holocene we’ve set on
terminal wobble, obsolete? Must new religious narratives and rituals be
crafted to articulate our new reality? We will also look at the way
ostensibly secular discussions of the Anthropocene (including the many
challenges to the term and its scope) engage in religion- and
mythmaking, from Gaia to Chthulu. Finally we’ll ask if discussion of the
“age of humans” takes us more deeply into pressing spiritual and
ecojustice challenges or distracts from them.
What's changing? Last time we spent rather more time on Anthropocene, and less on religion, than I had intended - not that students complained! This time I'm planning for each of the fifteen weekly sessions to include something explicitly religion-related. I'm trying to include materials from indigenous American traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and perhaps Daoism, and nods to some African and Indonesian traditions. We'll also consider Earthseed, the religion created in Octavia Butler's Parable books, and Szerszynsky's "Gods of the Anthropocene."
But how and why do we engage them? The question can't be the one posed by the "Anthropocenologists" critiqued by Bonneuil and Fressoz, those generalizations about the species as a geological agent which don't just occlude the vastly different ways different peoples affect and are affected by anthropogenic natural change but invite us to continue thinking in the very universalizing commodifying ways which have brought things to this head. With that, I need to find a way to shed the "we" of my course description, or complicate it. Some of us (like me) are just now confronting the world-destroying effects of certain western ways of thinking and acting, reeling with Roy Scranton's discovery that "this civilization is already dead!" But for many others, the destructiveness has never been a secret. And many other civilizations have had near-death experiences, thanks to us. The settler's fantasy, Kyle Whyte writes, was the native's apocalypse. "The white utopia," Kathryn Yusoff quotes Sylvia Wynter, "was a black inferno." They've been there as we've done that.
We read Whyte and Yusoff last time, and rehearsed ecojustice critiques of the too "easy story" the Anthropocene offers, as Françoise Vergès has put it, when she argues "racial capitalocene" is a more fitting name:
Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all.
But last time these critiques were not central, as the embarrassing placement of "ecojustice challenges" at the very end of my course description confirms. I accepted the anthropocenologist's giddy framing: something from the natural sciences seemed to offer a new dimension to humanistic reflection. Oh boy, it seems like we're leaving a trace in the geological record! What does that say about us as an apex species? What cosmic judgment or responsibility does it portend? It seems inescapably true that something about western (especially anglophone) modernity is leading to the sixth extinction, and understanding what that something is is crucial to the survival of not only other species. (This includes understanding Christianity's handmaiden role in the "racial capitalocene.") But the site of my question has to lie outside of this complex of dysfunction. I thought I was doing something like that gesturing toward "religious resonances" but I need to make sure these, too, aren't understood in the terms of this worlds-destroying culture.
I'm not there yet, but getting somewhere. The Anthropocene temptation, to which I defaulted, is to think this new "age of man" makes everything else obsolete - perhaps especially religion. Religions as I introduce students to them must be plural and localized, and I need to foreground their resonances with the interdependence of species, and the bonds of reciprocity of all life, which "Anthropos" denies, along with wisdom about the value of ritual, myth, and penance. In reality, as Frédérique Appfel-Marglin argues, most humans past and present live in potentially sustainable "inter-collectivity" with the other-than-human world, inhabiting spiritual worlds only more urgently relevant in this moment as we (sic) learn to see past falsely naturalized patterns of inter- and intraspecies violence. "Ecojustice challenges" remain but this is sounding like a religious studies class after all!
(Top image from the Afrofuturist film Pumzi)
