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God: A Human History of Religion

Reza Aslan

 

In relation to meaning of the word animism  author Aslan describes as a belief being apart of a whole. That the attribution of a spiritual essence , or “soul” is not so different in form or substance from the souls of those around them, the souls of those before them, the spirit of the trees and the mountains. It is the totality of all that coexists and its entanglement thats binds it together like a vessel that breathes as one.

 

It is this primal belief that is considered to be the hallmark of the human experience and humanity’s earliest expression of anything that could be termed religion. Archaeological evidence and studies finds that ancient forms of rituals and burials practiced by Adam and Eve as well as their forebears, the neanderthal and homo erectus suggests that they too may have conceived the soul as something separate from the body.

 

In ancient rock paintings found in Cueva de las Manos, Santa Cruz Argentina (15000-11000B.C) hidden deep in the cave the rock wall surfaces pulse with hundreds of animals superimposed one on top another: some that are recognisable and some that are mysterious and unidentifiable, others that blur the boundary between human and animal. It is not correct to call these paintings “images”. They are the dots the connect symbols that reflect our ancestors animistic belief that all living things are interconnected, that they all share the same universal spirit. 

 

“How can revisiting the notion of animism through a contemporary framework influence the ecological/enviropolitical issues in western industrialised and non western unindustrialised cultures?”

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Facing Gaia - Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime 

Bruno Latour 2017

 

In this book Latour examines the understanding of “natural religion”, a force that was at once mythical , scientific, political and probably religious, and describes the New Climate Regime and critical issues of natural environment as a “Cosmocolossus”.  Latour uses this term to summarize the present situation in which the physical framework that the Moderns (and notions on the Rational) has become unstable in order to further explore/revisit possible links between humans and nonhumans. 

 

Today we are living in an era of “ecological crisis! The awareness of ecological disasters has long been standing, active, supported by documentation and proof from the beginning of the machine age. 

 

Science studies today finds itself reinforced by the widely accepted understanding that the old constitution, the one that distributes powers between science and politics has become obsolete. 

 

This is now the time when the notion Gaia is presented as a return to earth that allows for a differentiated version of the respective qualities that can be required of sciences, politics, and religions, as these are reduced to more modest and earthbound definitions of their former vocations. The sciences from now on so intermingled with the entire culture that we need to turn to the humanities to understand how they really function. 

 

The definition ecological crisis as a “return to nature” may unleash a panic as if we were being asked to moved back to cave days.Even the   the expression “relation to the world” demonstrates the extent we are alienated from nature itself. It is therefore fundamental to examine  why “culture”, “society” and “civilisation” are distinguished as entities that are separate from nature. 

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 DONNA HARRAWAY - STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE

 

Harraway demonstrates a relationship of understanding between the Chthlucene (a kind of time place for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth), the chthonic (the beings of tentacles, spiiderlegs, cords etc that demonstrate and perform the meaningfulness of earth process and critters), the anthropocene and the capitalocene. She explores the kin (being a wild category that people try and domesticate) and kinship that connects all human and other than human beings to have a chance to unite. 

 

Harraway explores the notion of extinction in relation to profit and power and the unequal consequences for the poor and the rich as well as the vastly burdens imposed on earth by the rich compared to the poor and even worse consequences for non humans everywhere.

 

Harraway includes research from biologist Deborah Gordon’s theories about ant interactions and what we can learn in relation to ecological development and non-hierarchical systems. Harraway examines from the “otherness” of nonwestern communities and has learnt that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas”, what quality of thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions. 

 

The British anthropologist Marilyn Stathern wrote about the risk of relentless contingency; about anthropology as the knowledge practice that studies relations with relations, that puts relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other worlds.

Harraway uses the example of the drawing ‘ multispecies Cat’s cradle” by Nasser Mufti to describe the patterning and connections of ‘beauty’ , ‘harmony’ and order and “right relations with the world” including the right relations with human and non humans.

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Vibrant Matter - a Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennet 2010

 

Bennet in this book theorises the notion of vibrant matter as a philosophical project in relation to politics and the ecological crisis. Bennet believes that all matter is animate and vibrant rather than passive or dead.

 

The political intention of this notion is to encourage more sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things and questions how political responses to public problems would change were we to take seriously the vitality of non human bodies.

 

Bennet aspires to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans and explains how patterns of consumption would possibly change if we viewed litter/rubbish/trash not just as inanimate stuff but rather as an accumulating pile of lively breeding entities.

 

What issues would surround stem cell research in the absence of the assumption that the only source of vitality in matter is a soul or spirit?What difference would it make to the course of energy policy were electricity to be figured not only as a resource, commodity but also and more radically as a source of action that can be either human or non human. It is any entity that modifies another entity in a trial. 

 

The notion that matter as “dead” feeds human hubris and our earth destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption as it prevents us from detecting a fuller range of the non human powers circulating around and within human bodies. Where as the advocation of all matter being animate may assist the movement to more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production as consumption.

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Matters of Care Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

 

Bellacasa discusses a speculative exploration of the importance of care for thinking and living in more than human worlds. This includes the vital entanglement between things, objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical forces, spiritual entities and humans. 

What is included in our world? And why should relations in the ethics of entanglement be re-addressed? 

These questions bring emphasis on care as vital in interweaving a web of life, expressing a key theme in feminist ethics thats suggests interdependency as the ontological state in which humans and other beings live.

This invites us to become sustainably involved with care as a living terrain that delves not into how can we care more but rather how to care and how can it be instrumentalized on a global political/ global environmental level? Thus critically but speculatively the transformative potential of care, despite and because of hegemonic ethics, of its current commodification and because its importance makes it vulnerable to become a powerful vehicle of normative moralisation.

 

It requires engaging with situated recognitions of care’s importance that operate displacements in established hierarchies of value and understanding how divergent modes of valuing care coexist and co-make each other in non-innocent ways.

 

Can we think of care as an obligation that transverses the nature/culture bifurcation without reinstating the moralism of anthropocentric ethics? and how can engaging with care help us to think of ethical “obligations” in human-decentered cosmologies?

 

One method that is discussed is the potential of care’s generic significance to confront and disrupt the destructive dynamics of scientific knowledge that separates brain and hand, intellect and practice, from the “heart” and focuses on care as a politics of knowledge at the heart of techno scientific, nature cultural worlds.

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MARC DION -THE SCHILDBACH XYLOTHEQUE AT DOCUMENTA IN KASSEL. 

 

The tree books in Documenta are associated with the Enlightenment ideals but are also interested in the natural process and depict the trees lifecycle, however, they are not from a period of ecological thinking. The tree books in some sense represent the living tree and the death tree at the same time which has changed the perception of them from that of Enlightenment to the way they are seen today and in representations of nature.

 

The XYLOTHEQUE attempts to represent the tree in totality and acknowledges the tree as both a cultural and natural entity. 

What was interesting for participants in the workshop was the following of the material from organism to artwork and because of the division of labour in our society it is hard to experience the chain of raw materials to commodity and therefore it is easy to feel disconnected from the natural process at the front end of the chain.

 

The production of these books involved expedition and productions dealing with nature that are share some similarities with many colonial expeditions and the artist tries to tease apart the cords that bind colonial enterprise from investigative field science. 

As a foreigner to the places the artist visits he speaks of how the trees he researches speak of the space and its history and the input of the foreigner reminds us that all his not natural and that there are different ways of being, other priorities, and other stories- the idea of ‘the trouble shooter’ - which is a person from the outside that you bring into a situation to put fresh eyes on a problem. 

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Jacques Ranciere - The lost thread - The democracy of modern fiction.

 

In this book fiction is cast here not as a structure of rationality but instead as an imaginary realm somewhere between being and nothingness. Ranciere calls this a ‘creative destruction ‘ of the representational regime of fiction. 

 

Ranciere argues the issues of realist fiction as a random order of empirical facts that signal equality without rationality and attempts at reinventing representational effects by inundating the narrative structure with excessive description of a paradoxical usefulness. The paradoxical usefulness is precisely to signal the eternity of the new (bourgeois) reality and its historical permanence with the destructive dimension to demystify taboos, eradicate inherited psychic structures and so on.

 

If new fiction is ‘democracy in literature’ it is because of the effects of equality it is able to generate and which are hierarchical in essence- are shattered and new bodies and subjects able to emerge. 

 

The core of representational regime, and its hierarchy of life forms , which had defined the space of fiction and commanded its organic unity, had simultaneously given way to a space of sensible coexistence of all individuals, things and situations- what Ranciere calls an aesthetic democratism.

 

The random succession of empirical facts is no longer the basis of poetic rationality but becomes the time itself of a ‘democracy of sensible coexistences’, ‘a chain of sensible events that weaves thoughts and wills’. 

 

Ranciere argues it is not about the ontological status of the real - whether ‘the real is really real’ but instead is about the texture of this real. And the texture of this real is not about analysis but rather about the life lived by those who inhabit it. This texture undoes the hierarchies of old fiction and thereby operates in an effect of equality- a de-hierarchized one. 

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