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- Convenors:
-
Federica Toldo
(University of Udine)
Verónica Calvo Valenzuela (Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (CNRSEPHE-PSL))
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/011
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on ritual as a modality of action through which transformation is produced, experienced, and negotiated within the climatic and ecological crisis. We search for contributions on ritual as a way to deal with reactive agents and menaced commons beyond the subject-object dichotomy.
Long Abstract:
Rituals take place on different occasions and are instigated by different goals. Despite any differences, a distinctive and universal feature of rituals is the transformative effect they aim to obtain. In Où aterrir?, Bruno Latour affirms that all rituals from those populations who ignore the idea of resource and production that are associated with the idea of a separated nature can themselves become a resource when confronting reactive, out of control agents (Latour, 2017 : 97). These experiences can be an inspiration when dealing with uncertainty within the context of the climatic and ecological crisis, and may in this way represent a source of hope in the Anthropocene. Therefore, this panel focuses on ritual as a modality of action through which transformation is produced, experienced, and negotiated.
Ritual – namely, a mode of interaction and engagement that favorizes reflexive arrangements – has been a main topic in “classic” anthropology. However, it rarely becomes a main theme in more recent works in the anthropology of nature and political anthropology of commons. This panel aims to combine these two approaches – respectively, the anthropology of ritual and environmental anthropology – under a broader theory of action. We welcome contributions, with no restrictions in geographic or cultural terms, regarding how ritual can produce, experience, and negotiate transformations with/around reactive agents and menaced commons beyond the subject-object dichotomy.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Rosalie Allain (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
I show how Gbaya ancestor rituals act as an ongoing interface between colonial French and Gbaya, where gold oscillates between its status as gift and commodity, resource and reactive agent and imbricate technical and exchange processes challenging existing anthropological categorisations of action
Paper long abstract:
In the East Region of Cameroon, Gbaya communities have practiced artisanal mining since it was introduced by French colonial mining companies in the 1930s. With their departure, local Gbaya communities appropriated and transformed these mining techniques, by transplanting ancestor rituals – originally specific to hunting - into the extraction of gold.
Ritual ancestor offerings are productive of luck (desonti), a Gbaya generative force that is central to socioeconomic forms of (re)production and success by rendering human action efficacious. In mining, luck is a transformative potential gifted from the ancestors which transforms food offerings into gold, conceived of as an animate, quasi-living entity.
This paper shows how these rituals are modalities of action enabling sociomaterial transformation at two interconnected scales, by 1) underlying the material and value transformations within mining, and 2) articulating the broader scale transformations of historical and technical change, by mediating the period of (post)colonial transition and the appropriation of French mining into a pre-existing Gbaya cosmotechnical repetoire.
I show how these rituals act as an ongoing sociotechnical interface between colonial French and Gbaya, where gold oscillates between its status as gift and commodity, resource and reactive agent. I argue that these rituals imbricate technical and exchange processes and show how the luck they generate follows a logic of obtainment instead of production, challenging existing anthropological categorisations of action.
Federica Toldo (University of Udine)
Paper short abstract:
The ethnography of an abrupt marine storm will allow to grasp the agencies involved in the ritual offerings to mermaids in contemporary Luanda (Angola). This will also allow to and to consider the ambiguous role of ritual to face reactive, out of control agents within the context of Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
A distinctive and universal feature of rituals is the transformative effect they aim to obtain. Within the context of ecological crisis and political conflicts, the aim may be object of negotiation between different human actors, and between humans and non-humans. This is precisely the case of contemporary offering for mermaids in Luanda, the capital of Angola. Formerly, among the kimbundu-speaking fishermen of Luanda known by the ethnonym of Axiluanda, the relationship with the agents of the sea was insured by periodic food offering that the sea rewarded through the availability of fish. The stigmatization of traditional practices by the Cristian churches and the interference of socialist post-colonial central state made these offering fall into disuse in the past decades. However, small groups continue to realize these offering. These are often commanded by private or public powers for their own aim (like business inauguration). The ethnography of an abrupt marine storm will allow to grasp the net of agencies involved in these rituals. This will also allow to consider the role of ritual to face reactive, out of control agents within the context of Anthropocene.
Benoit Verjat (Paris Nanterre) Patrick Degeorges (Hagrath)
Paper short abstract:
In the context of the return of wolves in the Limousine mountains, a group of inhabitants and breeders, accompanied by mediators, naturalists, artists and designers, are designing a "pastoral assembly", a movement practice aiming to transform the participant in the long term by reformulating situations and experience alternative narratives.
Paper long abstract:
Rituals are experiences that allow stories to transform those who produce them. Instead of thinking of an experience outside of ourselves that should not affect us, the experience of ritual allows for the intrusion of narratives or knowledge that can be profoundly changing. Such situations are now being explored and created by artists who seek to support communities in passage by making present their attachments or by investigating the conditions of their survival.
In the Limousin mountains, since 2017, a group composed of breeders, naturalists, hunters, elected officials and inhabitants has been participating in an investigation aimed at developing artistic forms that propose the experience of putting oneself in the place of non-humans in order to think of new ways of living together with the return of the wolf. The bifurcation of an artistic form, "a pastoral assembly (UAP)" which has become a collective body practice, proposes to create a space for knowledge, speculation and transformation. Starting from a given situation or landscape, the participants, from an animal being whose starting form is their human being, will experience the situation and observe the movements it allows in them. This practice of knowledge repeated over the year is also a ritual in which everyone participates, mixing elements of the real and the imagined in order to work on the story of the return of the great predator. The purpose of this communication is to describe the creation process of the UAP movement practice.
Verónica Calvo Valenzuela (Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (CNRSEPHE-PSL))
Paper short abstract:
The ethnography of workshops of “conversion to the earth" developed by an institution of research and theological teaching in Paris, will allow us to question the ritual dimension of these spiritual exercises, to understand how the inner transformation of the participants operates, carrying new forms of relationship to the Creation.
Paper long abstract:
In 2015 was published Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato si'. In this encyclical the Pope enjoins the Church to be sensitive to the "cry of the earth and the cry of the poor". This text, with an original style and theology, has been received differently according to the countries, the groups, and the territories. I am interested in its reception by a group of theologians and researchers in human sciences attached to the diocese of Paris who have conceived workshops of "conversion to the earth”. These workshops are being developed in parishes, dioceses and congregations throughout France and are designed as a path of conversion to Christ through a new attention to Creation, in the context of the ecological crisis.
The objective of these workshops is to bring about an inner transformation in the participants through a practice of self-description of their living conditions. Contrary to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola (one of the sources of inspiration for these workshops), these "earthly" exercises are carried out in groups. Being myself a facilitator of these workshops, I propose to return to data drawn from my participant observation in order to question the ritual springs of this "inner transformation" which is supposed to be translated into a new sensitivity to what we depend on to live. What role does the collective practice of these exercises play in this spiritual transformation? Does it carry a ritual dimension and how is it produced? (Turns of speech, writing, prayer). The analysis of this "spiritual pragmatics" will allow us to question what the role of the ritual dimension plays in the transformation of the relations of participants to the "threatened Creation”.