immanence

Here’s something I’ve written to accompany a reading and discussion of Arturo Escobar’s piece “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimensions of the Epistemologies of the South,” which I proposed as my suggested reading contribution for an intro graduate class in Environment and Society. I’m sharing it here as a brief think-piece. 

1. If we could somehow momentarily shed our western cultural lenses and see the world both trans-culturally and trans-historically, we would see that the relationship between people and land is perhaps the central issue for any study of either people or land.

A few clarifications should be made here.

a. I don’t mean shedding our human lenses. We can do that temporarily, with interesting and often useful results. Traditions of shamanism and other kinds of spiritual experience have arguably cultivated such a skill for a long time. But ultimately we must come back to being humans and living as humans, in human groups.

b. By “people” I mean the sociological sense of a people, a society, an internally differentiated and fractious collectivity that is always more than the sum of its parts. (It is in this sense that Margaret Thatcher was wrong: there is something called “society,” even if it’s an ideal that is never attained in practice.) And by “land” I mean the similarly fractious and even more radically pluralized “stuff” within and in relation to which that people finds its capacity to exist: the other beings, the patterned relations of lived time and of lived space, and so on. “People” and “land” are a little bit like “culture” and “nature,” but not exactly, since they are never fully separable, generalizable, or universalizable.

c. This claim about the centrality of the people-land relationship is (still) pretty revolutionary within a western context. There are multiple forms of people-to-people (or intra-human) relations that could be, and have been, studied by our sociologists and anthropologists, political scientists and philosophers, cultural and religious leaders, and so on. And there are multiple forms of intra-land relations (i.e., relations between organisms and biological networks in which humans are not very central) that could be and have been studied by scientists. Most of western science and scholarship has studied one or the other of these. The study of their interaction, however, has historically been marginal.

d. It’s not easy to shed our cultural lenses. It may seem easy because, in fact, science claims to do it already — it claims to study how the universe works, to do so dispassionately and objectively (“culture-free”), to measure its actual pieces and the relations between them, and so on. But the entire history of modern science has been shaped by presuppositions that presume certain dichotomies that comparatively few cultures have subscribed to: dichotomies that distinguish radically between mind (or idea) and matter, between subjectivity and objectivity, between perception and reality, and so on. Certain forms of human culture that have been most different from ours (i.e., indigenous cultures) typically don’t assume any of these things.

2. The relationship between people and land has taken many forms, from the more locally embedded to the more globally and complexly embedded, but all of them have been embedded in relations with land. In other words, whether you live in a complex, imperial civilization like ours today or those of ancient Rome, China, India, Egypt, and many others, or in a small-scale foraging, pastoral, or sedentarist community, you always ultimately depend on the land for sustenance and survival. The larger, more imperial sorts of societies have often been more dynamic and unstable than the others, but there have been no guarantees either way.

Over the long haul, both types (and all the others that fall on the spectrum of options) have been globally unstable with emergent local stabilities. We can learn a lot from those stabilities and their comings and goings, and especially from the difficulties social groups have had in maintaining them. This history of experimentation in people-land relations constitutes a kind of ‘seed bank’ that is inherently useful to think with. To a global civilization like ours that is heading into highly unstable and precarious times, it’s especially important to preserve, build on, and learn from the diversity of ways of living that have been developed in different places. I’m referring here not to biodiversity but to a kind of network diversity — a diversity of relational systems, each of which can be thought of as an experiment in the development of flourishing pluralities, multispecies collectivities or assemblages that allow a plurality of types of entity to survive and flourish.

The call to shed our western cultural lenses is part of what some have called the decolonial turn in social theory. And the call to see, appreciate, and give voice to the radical differences between such lenses and others — differences in perception, in valuation, and in practice — is part of the ontological turn. Both have been influencing the work of engaged anthropologists working around the world, among indigenous communities and in the global South, and both are now important to an increasing number of cultural and environmental theorists, among others.

3. In a talk last year at a conference on mountains and sacred landscapes, Karenna Gore (lawyer, founding director of the Center for Earth Ethics, and daughter of Al Gore) rather hopefully described the Trump administration’s Inquisition-like demolition of environmental governance as “no match for a metaphysics of humanity interconnected with its sacred landscapes.”

This is a good articulation of what we might think of as the optimistic underpinning of the ontological turn: the belief that when humanity is metaphysically — epistemologically, ontologically, morally, and emotionally — inseparable from the land in which it dwells, then it is stronger than anything a disconnected (and disconnecting) political or economic system can do to it. Such a morally and metaphysically embedded humanity gets its strength from the links of obligation and reciprocity that undergird its trans-generational continuities — continuities built on connections to the ancestors whose (dignified and honorable) descendants we must strive to be, to the descendants whose (dignified and honorable) ancestors we must strive to be, and to the land that is the matrix for both.

In these circumstances, the relationship between people and land is not random or happenstance; it is morally and ontologically loaded. When there are people who are obligated and responsible for the waters of south Dakota, the mountain hollers of Appalachia, the forests and waters of the Yurumangui of coastal Colombia, and all the other places and spaces of earth (with all the ancestors, descendants, and other spirit entities that make those relations meaningful), then the faith-based neoliberal capitalist economy premised on “infinite growth” is going to be “no match” for it.

Science, of the sort we are used to, does not recognize this moral loadedness of the world. So it needs supplementation (at the very least) through dialogue with the kinds of alternative, relational ontologies Escobar and others describe and defend.

4. These issues are relevant everywhere, because no matter where you are, global techno-economic visions are being enacted (and need to be judged from multiple perspectives; they are neither equally bad nor equally good); and no matter where you are, alternative, more diverse and divergent, relational or “cosmopolitical” visions have been cultivated and/or are being proposed.

Even here in Vermont, the land that many of you might be studying — turned into ‘nature’ and its ‘resources’ and ‘ecosystem services,’ or whatever categories you might use — even that land encompasses long histories of relationality that have been enacted over centuries. Abenakis today still tell stories about how this land was formed, how it was shaped by people over millennia, and what sorts of plants, animals, and other entities were reciprocally engaged with in what ways. It’s worth learning some of those stories, or at least finding out about the people who know them. (See, for instance, here.)

5. Finally, none of this is to suggest that science, technology, or any other forms of modern thought and practice are inherently bad, or that indigenous or other forms of knowledge or practice are inherently better. There are obvious gains made in the last few centuries — gains in individual and collective rights, medical and scientific achievements, and so on — that are clearly needed in a world of 7.5 billion humans and counting. But it’s important to see the limits of these projects, and the values and virtues of what has been marginalized.

There is no “rootedness in land” that we can go back to, especially with the ecological instabilities and precarities that are on the rise all around.  There are only better and worse ways of moving forward. The better ways acknowledge that the voices of those who are at the margins of the modern/colonial enterprise are more needed than ever today, and they engage with them respectfully.