The following post elaborates on some comments I made this week at the Ritual Creativity conference at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Deep thanks to conference organizers Katri Ratia and François Gauthier for inviting me to what turned out to be an immensely rewarding event, and to my co-panelists Graham Harvey, Sarah Pike, and Susannah Crockford for providing the occasion for these comments. Since this particular line of thinking was resonant among conference participants, I’m sharing it here in an extended form.
Imaginative formations
My approach to understanding the power and impact of ritual — whether religious, political, or other kinds — is shaped by my longstanding interests in the relationship between imagination, place-making, and identity-shaping. This relationship features as central to my work over many years, from ethnographic work in Arizona, southwest England, and Ukraine and Eastern Europe (where image, discourse, and embodied practice combined to shape contestations over place and identity) to my analyses of moving images, digital media, and the imagination writ large (as in this article or Part Three of Shadowing the Anthropocene).
As I argued in my recent piece on the religious imagination, “religion” may be too restrictive a category for the kind of thing that historian of religions Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed to call “imaginative formations” — that is, the worlds humans create through our imaginative practices. To understand what’s meant by “imaginative practices,” we need a clear definition of imagination. For that I turn to Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei’s recent The Life of Imagination, which defines imagination succinctly, yet coherently, as “the presentational and transformational activity of human consciousness.” As presentational, imagination presents the world to us by configuring perceptual data into the recognizable patterns by which we inhabit it. As transformational, it enables us to reconfigure, play with, respond to, and alter that world.
That selective “taking up” of the world (to use a set of terms introduced by anthropologist Tim Ingold) in turn leads to the “bringing forth” of the world to others — a “consumption” and “production” that occurs on a macro level, as in Ingold’s cultural analyses, as much as it constitutes the micro level activity that A. N. Whitehead termed “prehension.” As readers of this blog will likely know, the concept of prehension was at the center of Whitehead’s process-relational ontology: it is what it means to live, to act, to exist, to be — which always means: to become.
To act is to respond to things as given to perception (and imagination; Whitehead’s theory of perception is a nuanced one). The things “as given” are the “objective” to which our response adds its “subjective,” which becomes objective for the next arising subjectivity, with subjectivity and objectivity leading one another like two companion horses taking turns in a DNA strand-like spiraling dance. In events of relational engagement, each of us makes ourselves via our relations with those to which we respond. In that way the world is made, moment to moment.
Enter creativity
Between the perception and the response there is a gap, in which we find the creativity at the heart of every action: the gap between what is and what could be, a gap that is traversed in every prehension, every “actual occasion” adding to the “creatively advancing” universe. This gap indicates the subjunctive mode, which Katri Ratia references in her framing document for this conference. Ratia quotes Jordan Miller (2019:6), for whom the subjunctive
describes the world, not as it is, but as it might be. This ‘might be’ is the root of both movements of political resistance which seek to model life differently than the status quo and of religious world-construction through theology, myth and ritual.
This “might be” informs every act of imagination by which we change the world.
In a conference on “ritual creativity,” it’s worth noting (and notable that no one has noted it yet!) that it was Whitehead who in fact coined the term “creativity” in his 1926 book Religion in the Making, and then developed it as the heart of his metaphysics in Process and Reality, published three years later.
For Whitehead, creativity is a metaphysical ultimate, the core of his conception of the universe. As André Cloots puts it, creativity articulates the ways in which “becoming can be thought in all its possible directions [… :] the ongoingness as well as the novelty, the ‘that’ of becoming as well as its ‘what,’ its absoluteness as well as its relationality.”
If this processual, relational, and evental metaphysics sees every action as responding to relational prompts, then certain kinds of actions respond so as to actively maintain or vary relations in particular ways. “Ritual” and “play” make up two broad categories of such kinds of action. Where play loosens the relations of “the world as it is” in order to try them on in different guises, test them out and query their boundaries and paradoxes, and otherwise vary and have fun with them, ritual’s goals are more formalized and intentional with respect to that world. Ritual works to maintain, calibrate or recalibrate, reset or re-establish (following disruptions or disasters), and otherwise coordinate relations in time and in space in order to maintain a habitable world. Both, however, are inherently creative.
Ritual as inhabitory practice
With this in mind, I propose to redefine ritual by building on Hanegraaff’s notion of “imaginative formations.” Ritual, I suggest, is best thought of as an embodied relational practice of imaginative formations.
It is embodied in being intimately performed by and through material bodies, objects, and landscapes. It takes place in space and in place and it makes place and space, shaping the grooves and patterns of space for its performers and participants.
It is relational in that it both constitutes and is constituted by relations among different entities, perceived and imagined, human and nonhuman. In this it always involves some form of negotiation.
It is practice in that its performance takes place temporally with an eye toward the future. It takes place in time, but also shapes time, following and funneling it into grooves and patterns for its practitioners. Ritual bears repetition, unfolding within parameters set by relational negotiations, which have their regularities, their rhythms, their comings and goings, successes and failures.
And ritual contributes to the constitution of imaginative formations, that is, to the worlds we come to live in and by, worlds made up of relational webs incorporating us (those we recognize as co-subjects), others (who might be nonhuman, other-than-human, transhuman), and things in-between (whose subjectness and otherness may be negotiable).
Ritual is the embodied, performative practice of imagination by which worlds are created and maintained for their dwellers.
Ritual is in this sense an inhabitory practice. (It is sometimes inhibitory, even prohibitory, and often exhibitory, especially in its more ceremonial and festive forms. But that’s not what I mean here.) It is inhabitory because it enables its practitioners and participants to better inhabit the real and imagined worlds in which they (wish to) dwell. To inhabit (as I’ve noted before in relation to C. S. Peirce’s arguments in defense of habit) means both to make habitual and to shape into a habitus — a “co-(in)habited” environment that is comfortable and suitable to our continuance and flourishing.
Reinhabiting
If there’s a resonance here with the bioregional movement’s call to “reinhabit” our bioregions — to effectively learn to “reindigenize” our relationships with the land, waters, animal worlds, and ecologies around us — that resonance, for me, is quite intentional. With its impending climate crisis and related challenges, today’s world calls for reinhabitation on multiple levels — which should lead those of us who study ritual (or play, for that matter) to ask: what kinds of reinhabitory practices are appropriate for people and places today? How might we contribute to them?
These are normative questions, not the kinds of questions scholars are typically required to answer. (They’re also questions I’ve been asking since the heyday of the bioregional movement a few decades ago.) But that makes them no less important than empirical or “scholarly” questions.
In my teaching and writing on “environmental culture,” I consider the virtues, paradoxes, motivations, and impacts of a variety of reinhabitory practices, from conservation, restoration, and rewilding projects, local food and farm-to-table networks, and “creative placemaking,” to eco-spiritualities of one kind or another. Almost all of these fall somewhere in the muddled middle between the categories that shape the modern world’s understanding of itself (what Latour calls the “modern constitution“): Religion, Science, Art(s), Politics, Economy, and so on. That distribution of powers, or “distribution of the sensible,” tends to relegate “creativity” to the artists whose job it is to be creative but not political, or religious, or scientific, et al.
Whitehead’s argument dispels any such distribution, and I would suggest that the inhabitory practices we need today ought to draw from all of these categories at once. Reinhabiting means bringing together the work of the arts, of science, of politics and policy, and of religion and spirituality (among other things). It requires utilizing all the tools at our disposal including ritual, play, inventiveness, and protest alongside planning, media campaigns, and rational argument.
The eco-humanities have been moving toward this kind of perspective for years (see here for a recent rendition), but sometimes the movement has seemed all too haphazard. And to be fair, the structure of academe, with its publishing expectations, granting systems, review and compliance boards, and so on, hasn’t exactly supported that shift. So we keep tweaking and muddling our way forward.
So it goes.
