Paper short abstract:

Mexican indigenous migrant youth's vulnerabilities have driven community efforts for re-appropriating animistic ecologies and learning to care for all life forms in order to regenerate health and create well-being after their transnational migratory experiences.

Paper long abstract:

Agrarian restructuring and transnational migration have reconfigured Mexican Indigenous youth and undermined cultural and environmental sustainability. Two decades after Nahua youth took the lead in transnational migration in search of work and life opportunities, adolescent suicide, chronic illness and disability have become families' primary concerns in new migrant-sending communities in the process of abandoning subsistence agriculture amid ever-increasing ecological devastation. The social relations of learning and care for kin and the other-than-human world have been reconfigured by the transnationalization of local livelihoods and educational reforms.

Mexican rural youth's recent efforts to re-appropriate their animistic ecologies after their migratory experience and to rebuild communion with other beings in nature brings to the fore the agency of the other-than-humans in regenerating health and sustainable ecosystems. First, I examine how the transnational/transcultural experiences of Nahua returned youth affected the re-appropriation of an Indigenous identity and the recreation of Indigenous agronomy and farmwork in rural Mexico after migration to the USA. Secondly, I focus on young Mexican migrants who after working with their parents as farm laborers in Oregon and struggling to get college education decided to rent plots to develop organic farming and to learn spiritual practices that sustain agriculture in their Indigenous communities in Mexico as well as from Native American traditions. By drawing on decolonial approaches and collaborative ethnography in Mexico and the USA, this paper analyzes how youth's vulnerabilities have driven local efforts for cultural revitalization and sustainability by centering on relatedness with and caring for all life forms.

Paper short abstract:

The global networks promoting the attribution of a legal personality to natural entities invent rituals to perform a communion with Earth beings. They draw inspiration from indigenous people and from the cultic milieu of alternative spiritualities.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of granting rights to natural entities and Mother Earth is increasing worldwide since the inclusion of such rights in the Ecuadorian constitution of 2008. Recently, new laws and legal decisions have provided rivers with rights in New Zealand, India and Columbia.

The ethnography of the global networks that promote these rights shows that the legal aspects are only one dimension of their commitment, which is directed by an alternative, ecocentric, being-in-the-world. Their conception of the world as a web of life, made of interdependent beings that all have intrinsic value also draw inspiration from indigenous cosmologies.

More specifically, invented ecorituals, that echo the practices of indigenous people and of the movement for their rights, are performed to enact interbeings relationships with the natural entities to be defended.

The visual presentation of several ceremonies will be analysed using the relational approach to ritual developed by Michael Houseman to address the issues of ritual innovation, performativity and legitimacy.

Paper short abstract:

The Interspecies Community is an art/activist collective established in 2019 in Poland in an attempt to invent an interspecies spirituality. The activities of the collective use art to forge new interspecies alliances and to articulate the relations with non-humans in spiritual experience.

Paper long abstract:

The Interspecies Community was established in March 2019 by a group of artists, academics and activists in Poland. The collective held its first public ritual in May 2019 during the Museum Night at the Botanical Garden in Warsaw. The ritual was named "Mszak" - a word game connoting (Holy) Mass and moss, and it celebrated radical recycling. Using recycled litanies and plastic foil, as well as a barrow of compost with a speaker reciting the list of Latin names of extinct species, it encouraged the participants to embrace the cycle of life, death and decay, and to see death as another form of life. At the same time it explored the ritual possibilities for expressing environmental grief and mourning.

The various ritual, artistic and activist interventions that followed, focused on reinventing human relations with non-humans and on exploring the collective experience of climate catastrophe. When the current environmental crisis becomes subject of artistic endevors it often becomes commoditized as an art object. The Interspecies Community is an attempt to both challenge the institutional conditions within the artworld itself and to let art out of its social bubble. While experimenting with new forms of ritual it also reinvents the social function of art and reveals its necessity in environmental struggles.

Paper short abstract:

In southwestern France, peasants involved in Biodynamic Agriculture are working on their relationship to "the Living". Practicing this agriculture of care, their work on the soil is at the heart of entangled relationships informing their agronomical, ecopolitical and spiritual commitments.

Paper long abstract:

This study takes place in the Comminges region in the South of France and focuses on a peasant network involved in Biodynamic Agriculture.

In 1924 Rudolf Steiner founded the Biodynamic Agriculture at the very beginning of the organic movement in Europe and inspired by his esoteric current called Anthroposophy. The Biodynamic Agriculture's spiritual origins have practical consequences for it is nether simply about improving the productivity of the farm but is rather an agriculture of care, aiming to reach a symbiotic welfare for the individual and his environment through a process of ritualization of practices. The biodynamic farming is related to an ideal: the agricultural organism. In hence, the farm is conceived as a "whole" with each element specifically considered. Biodynamists desire to understand the living forces of nature and connect or "reconnect" to them.

In this process, the soil is a major concern. Its ethnography enlightens the biodynamic holistic approach and its analogical way of thinking, as the interactions with the soil are intertwined with many other relationships (with animals, plants, Earth, Sky, etc…) and scales: from the most micro (microorganisms in the ground) to the most macro level (the cosmical influences).

In this fieldwork, practices are driven both by a peasant commitment (which is social and political) and by a spiritual commitment. Using a relational approach to ritual (Houseman, 2012), we will see how links are built and maintained between this diversity of actors engaged in the welfare of the agricultural organism's foundations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper gives an ethnographic account of the radical transformation of the meaning of landscape ritual and the authority of landscape in a rural community on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia in the face of the threats to livelihood and collective life posed by severe water pollution and climate change.

Paper long abstract:

Rural communities around Lake Titicaca, Bolivia are facing urgent environmental threat as livelihoods based on fishing and agriculture are undermined by the combined impact of water pollution and climate change. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a lakeside community of Aymara speaking heritage, this paper examines the way community members strive to navigate a world in radical disruption. Their livelihood strategies aim to materialise aspirations for a life that remains embedded in landscape and collective ritual, while making use of opportunities in the burgeoning urban economy of the nearby city of El Alto, seeking engagements with international tourism, or embarking on arduous voyages of migration to labour in the global metropolis. These strategies express the diversification and mobility key to rural life in the Andes and reflect an ongoing aspiration for community and place, even as the meaning of landscape ritual central to collective life and livelihood and the authority of landscape are undermined. This paper builds on ideas of the ontological priority of place in personhood and the constitution of collectivity (de la Cadena 2015) and Descola's analogism (2013) as vital to understanding relationships with the non-human in the Andean context. However, an emphasis on intentionality and the phenomenology of landscape allows it to foreground dynamics while still accounting for the weight and solidity of lived relations with the landscape and non-humans. It is thus able to give an account of the ways in which community members face both the possibilities and threats posed by attempts to manage epochal change.

Paper short abstract:

I study modern Western animism in the context of contemporary nature connection practices, specifically the constitution of non-human persons, drawing on classical phenomenological notions of the Other.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses nature connection practices, such as forest bathing and nature therapy, based on field research in the Baltic Sea region. At the heart of these practices are experiences and attitudes constituting what I have termed modern Western animism. I use the term in much the same way as Kocku von Stuckrad (2002) speaks of modern Western shamanism, a current in opposition specifically to Western modernity. Animism, as personification of non-humans has a long history in anthropology and has seen a renaissance in recent decades, now often understood as a relational epistemology (Bird-David 1999), i.e. and epistemology that prioritizes relations rather than things. This tendency to personify non-humans may be studied on a cultural, social, or personal (psychological) level. My own approach takes its starting point in classical phenomenology, where the notion of the Other has been given substantial theoretical attention. Husserl postulated that the Other is constituted through appresentation, i.e. through likeness in bodily form, leading us to derive an indirect recognition of another node of experience to which we do not have direct access. For Levinas, the Other is presented to us as a face, an existential horizon which overflows our conceptual grasp, lifting the Other from the sphere of ontology to the sphere of ethics. For those generations of phenomenologists, the Other was almost exclusively a human person. In my own study, I attempt to describe in detail how Earth Others are constituted on an experiential level, through emotions, attitudes, and social conduct.

Paper short abstract:

This participation draws on ethnographic observation of two contrasting events stressing on "creativity" as to constitute personal rituals and experiences in order to reconnect to "Nature" or "Earth". It will question how ritual creation allows the grounding of participant's ecological engagement.

Paper long abstract:

In Switzerland, contemporary spirituality references have been increasingly combined with ecological awareness (Grandjean & all., 2018; Becci & al., forthcoming). This is especially observed in the setting of public events and festivals, staging multiple performances in which spirituality, environmental and social activism easily entangle (Becci & al., forthcoming). This participation analyzes two events that took place in the Lake Geneva region; a two day workshop led by the famous spiritual activist Starhawk and a three day alternative art and electronic music festival. The first featured a practical workshop on permaculture and activism in a local farm. The second, set in a nightclub of Geneva's former industrial district, aimed at reuniting artists, spiritual practitioners and participants on the issue of "how to live on our planet". Comparing these two contrasting events is interesting as they both stress on "creativity" as to constitute personal rituals and experiences in order to reconnect to "Nature" or the "Earth". Interestingly, no precise definitions of the aforementioned notions were provided to participants as these would be tacitly understood or assumed to be personal.

I will raise the question of how these events, located in different contexts, similarly engage participants to actively participate in creativ rituals as a way to ground their ecological engagement. This contribution is based on ethnographic participant observations as well as recording and analysis of conferences. It highlights the central place given to the senses in artistic and activist milieu also expressing concerns over ecology.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we discuss how "Contemplative Theatre" is being introduced in educational and therapeutic contexts in Japan. We suggest that Contemplative Theatre is a liminal space of ritual innovation, and we tell the stories of the participants, incorporating autoethnographic approaches.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we discuss how "Contemplative Theatre" is being introduced in educational and therapeutic contexts in Japan. We suggest that Contemplative Theatre is a liminal space of ritual innovation, and tell the stories of the participants, incorporating autoethnographic approaches.

Since 2018, Imoto has been organizing Contemplative Theatre workshops within universities and beyond, in collaboration with a drama therapist and 'naikan (introspection)' therapist. Beaud joined as a participant in August 2018 and has been following the project since then. This paper aims for a collaborative autoethnographic approach based on the perspectives and experiences of Imoto and of Beaud.

We suggest that Contemplative Theatre is a liminal space of ritual innovation, that brings 'self-awareness', 'reconnection with self and other', and 'self-transformation', but that the meaning and experiences of this process is specific to the Japanese socio-cultural context and its artistic, spiritual, therapeutic traditions. We explore how the contemplative theatre workshop may be one ontological arena where the borders of the spiritual and the secular, the self and the other, body and mind, the 'real' and the 'imagined' disintegrate. We identify (re)connections with Japanese noh theatre, Noguchi taiso (movement practice), and kagura shamanic ritual, as well as with the facilitators' 'Westernized' influences including 'mindfulness' as a science-based approach, and drama therapy approaches developed in the UK.

Paper short abstract:

This paper on contemporary animistic practices in France explores how believers and spiritual seekers create affective entanglements with the community of spirits who are believed to inhabit trees and megaliths.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, the multicultural, multiracial and multireligious dimensions of contemporary France have been the background for the awakening of different spiritual practices, some of them notably related to the New Age wave originating in the United States in the 60s. Among these practices, the one related to the energy healings surrounding French megaliths has drawn our attention.

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork among the members of several groups who hold regular meetings in Carnac Archaeological Site in order to celebrate nature and communicate with the genius loci or 'spirits of the place' who are believed to inhabit every organic and inorganic elements located in this landscape: the Neolithic megaliths, the trees, the rivers, the wind and the ground, among others.

These individuals visit Carnac in order to develop their spiritual and physical welfare; executed rituals blend science, indigenous beliefs and local folklore. Brittany, the region where Carnac is settled, has a strong Celtic heritage and maintains a fierce local identity. For centuries, the population of this rural territory has reproduced oral traditions portraying the megaliths as healing stones capable of curing various diseases such as infertility, fever, meningitis and deafness. Through our research we have stated that these local beliefs have been entangled with James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and New Age philosophies, leading to the perception of Carnac as a 'power place' and a 'naturally sacred landscape'.