The following is a short essay I wrote for the Peder Sather/Reassembling Democracy workshop on “Environmental Change and Ritualized Relationships with the Other-than-Human World,” held at UC Berkeley this past December.
There are physical boundaries between humans and specific nonhumans—fences, walls, windows (of homes, gardens, kennels, zoos, abbatoirs, safari vehicles, camera lenses, guns); and there are metaphoric boundaries, about which much has been written by animaphilic critics of Descartes, Bacon, and other high priests of early modern science.
Many of these boundaries are so ritualized as to be hegemonic: the rituals are repeated, reinvoked, or transgressed and renegotiated every time we visit a zoo, a park or nature reserve, a wilderness area or urban greenspace, or for that matter our gardens, our grocery stores, and, for some, our bodies and our homes (or lack thereof).
The nonhuman is of course intimately entangled with the human. (I could say “other-than-human” or “more-than-human,” but these all take the human as the normative term and it’s not clear to me what advance either makes over the generic “nonhuman.” The point is that the human is only one among many, and that it itself is contested today.)
Every boundary is a crossing, a meeting place, a checkpoint, a negotiation; it is also a representation and a practice.
In my work with EcoCultureLab, a “collaboratory” of scholars, artists, and citizens that organizes events and initiatives in Burlington, Vermont, I have found that there are invisible boundaries both enabling and constraining the organization of relations between humans (individuals, communities, commercial establishments, the city and its institutions) and the many nonhumans—buildings, machines, streets, parks, trees, streams, a lake, domestic and wild animals, microbes, concepts—with which one might wish to renegotiate the future we hope to share. Which questions should be directed through the mayor’s office and which ones can we take up and answer ourselves? How might the currently voiceless be invoked into vocality in future city councils, say, 50 years from now? Action becomes a matter of trial and error, speculative projection and imaginative play. We model ourselves on initiatives like Mexico City’s Ministry of the Imagination and Bologna’s Civic Imagination Office.
Organizing the symposium Feverish World, 2018-2068: Arts and Sciences of Collective Survival, we set out to invoke the hopes, fears, and anxieties suffusing the background of people’s lives today, to pin a label onto them (“feverish world”), and to draw out an interest, a longing, that may no longer be drawable through conventional formulations (of “climate change,” “environment,” “social justice,” and so on), all of which come with cultural straitjackets pre-shaping their effectivity.
We consulted with farmers and designed a parade of dancers and musicians around evening calls to the cows and sheep that still dot the ex-urban countrysides of Vermont—”Come on,” with a tonal declension on the second syllable—and moved slowly across the pedestrianized city center beckoning restaurant sitters, tourists, and street people to join us, as church bells responded to each other in a composition arranged by composer and carilloneur David Neiweem, and as Abenaki dancers prepared to dance and drum for the sunset.
In other words, we tried to invent rituals. Some of the rituals of an ecologizing society have already been proposed, tried, and put into practice: “councils of all beings,” watershed recommitment ceremonies, green-up days, river and water defender actions, tree sits and mass tree hugs, blockades against fossil-fuel infrastructure, restoration flashmobs. Sometimes these are folded into existing rituals: Christian rites of confession and communion, Jewish Sabbath rites, “greenings” of pilgrimage routes and sites, and so on.
Rituals are active configurings of boundaries and bonds. They bound and re-bound (delimit, but also fasten and connect); they bind and re-bind (PIE “bhendh-“: to bind), as does religion, re-ligare (PIE “leig-”: to tie, to bind), for better or worse.
Here’s the rub.
In our lives and those of our children, the bindings will be coming apart as fast as anyone can fasten them: the boundaries separating land from sea, places-with from places-without, contaminated places from secured, gated, protected, and livable ones, spaces of precarity and “unfastenedness” (failed states, war zones, islands under water, et al.) from spaces of control, demarcation, and purification.
If ritual is the re-establishment of boundaries, of lines and crossings, and of relational assemblages, then all of the knife-point renegotiations of the climate-destabilized era to come will themselves be ritualized: in the annual flight from fires, hurricanes, and typhoons; in the building and strengthening of walls, gates, barriers, and borders; in the mantras of “thoughts and prayers,” invocations of ineffective compassion, in handwringing and justification; and in international meetings and action plans, plebiscites, and social media frenzies.
Feverish World was an attempt to raise the question of “Where are we bound?” at the same time as it left the “we” undefined and open to renegotiation. With whom, and to whom, are we bound?
These are the questions for the turbulent and precarious world ahead of us. Many answers will be offered (most of them are out there already). Navigating between them ethically and judiciously will be the tricky part.
This post is cross-posted to the EcoCultureLab blog.
