Empire: Escape: Ethnogenesis
I write into a seething abyss. A maelstrom of cascading words and images drags on attention. Sometimes beautiful, brilliant, bitter with pith. Often empty.
What is there to say, to speak into the hurling gale? What might be the point? Who might listen? Who might care?
Will it make a difference?
Even so.
Who are you? I imagine: a child of the knowledge economy, and its "privilege" to hurtle through elite schools on a fast track to domesticated intelligence, the brushed steel fusions of metropolitan arthouse accessories to murder; sitting now beneath the palm thatch dripping warm and wet as barefoot children Jabber your iPhone.
I'm imagining things. I don't know you; just the parts of me I'm projecting into the abyss (see above). Let's start over.
Hail falls, and I stand under the pelting ice in glorious notice, for the sun gifts all the air with gold. In such a moment, I believe in my soul. In soul itself.
I want to trace a long and roundabout curve that asks you to believe in your soul. I do not think belief means what you think it means: not an intellectual decision to adopt a particular assertion about the world as true. I think allegience is closer; faith is a synonym, I think. Anyway, what I'm talking about is participation.
Participation in a larger whole.
So my goal is to tell some stories that help "you" -- your mind, your idea of yourself, the complex of habits and histories that dominate the actions you take -- participate in your soul, the larger whole of you. Because your soul -- unlike your mind, which is overwhelmed with the maelstrom and the subliminal horror of the apocalypse -- your soul is in touch with, interpenetrated by and redolent of the enchantment of the world.
We need that enchantment.
We need a Great Spell.
For us*, spells and prayers, miracles of all kinds, are hard to believe in, even if you believe in them. Most of us* live parallel lives -- many of them, really -- and in some versions, miracles are alive (maybe that's when we're in church, or the movie theater, or when our son is dying of leukemia), while in others they cannot be (playing the stock market, or buying dinner, or bitching about politics online).
This is because we live in a disenchanted world. A world in which a great sorcery has cut us off from our souls, and the souls of the world.
That sorcery has been attributed to different names: capitalism, modernity, scientific progress. I think it is some great animating necessity of the great socio-technico-ecological being that has gobbled the world, whatever we call it; the empire of now.
For all its power, our ensorcelment is incomplete. It encompasses everything (when we're in it), leaving no space for possibilities beyond the horizon; yet for all its ever-conquering energy, holographic fragments remain in which we are more than atoms. Still, so far, they are defeated.
This is the world entered by freshly trained ethnographers cast into the adventure of thick description. Famous are the struggles to mediate between the wrenching double consciousness of "participant-observation" and the dryly certifiable prose required by dissertation committee.
As the field creeps closer to home, as the old certainties fade, openings emerge for anthropologists to produce not just influential papers, but meaning among peoples. Openings: as close to home as the AAA.
Turn the ontological corner.
For those under a rock the last decade (or on extended fieldwork foray), the ontological turn has been a lot of complex sentences and fiery debate around a fairly straightforward set of propositions. What if cultures can't be broken down neatly into {people; practices; beliefs; world}? What if different cultures don't only understand things differently, but compose different things? Weave among people-practices-beliefs-worlds in different combinations, different patterns, different beings?
At its best, the turn asks us to consider not just how other cultures may understand the world the they do, but how that may affect how we do. It invites the things that other peoples know (as in relationships, not rationalities) into our lives.
So: what can we learn from animists about how the world works? Can we learn to believe in spirits -- I mean, can we admit as much in print?
OK, that's a hard one. Luckily, we have an unexpected ally. I think that science, nay, physics herself, is brushing up against magic.
This is important, I hope, because for many of us the organizing prestige and power of the scientific worldview, its rationalism and inarguable efficacy, remain cardinal. They move us, even unconsciously. Indeed, even when intellectually we may think we believe in God, or Mayan prophecies, or the Buddha-nature, we usually participate in a flattened world. "Reality" for us, day-to-day, is still constructed of the stuff of technology, and social relations orchestrated by massive equations of state.
So if science is discovering magic, we may have permission to discover our souls. And work wonders. (Not a moment too soon.)
For this, we'll need to question every thing.
A quick rehearsal of one version of the many turnings ontological:
Let's assume the world is a vast interwoven web of relationships. Then a "thing" is some part of that web (some process within it) that is relatively consistent and coherent. We call a carrot a thing distinct from the earth it grows in -- even though there are many ways it's continuous with the bacterial and fungal life of the soil, with the water, with the air -- because it holds together (mostly) when we pull it out, because we could (theoretically) watch it grow from a seed, because it tastes better.
Obviously, there are lots of different ways systems of relations can be stable relative to their surroundings. These are the orders of being.
Also, there are ways that systems are not stable. Sometimes we think they're more stable than they turn out to be. (Like a lot of things in life.)
Humans become people in cultures, of course -- or put another way, political economies metabolizing nature. These are systems of humans that reproduce themselves: finding and making and sharing food, water, shelter, poetry, death, meaning, etc. Living systems, we do this in ecologies with other life. Ideas, myths, theories, words are part of how human systems reproduce. In our brains and in the shared symbolic space among us, they make possible this intricate, involuted exchange between parts of the world.
One way of talking about the Empire version of this ecology is that it makes the separation between nature and culture as real as possible. I mean this materially: it's a vast organism for eating the wild complexity of the world and turning it into something (apparently) controllable by humans -- into grids and symbols -- and then living inside this domesticated space.
To be a bit vulgar, this is then echoed by the myth of subject and object, and the atomic individual, cartesianism, etc. So we think of thinking as being separate from things. We draw a system inside the heads of humans and call it a symbol; we draw another system out in the world, and call it a referent. And call the connection between them "truth".
But there are other ways to draw the systems. In particular, words and ideas (symbols) are the mediation of a process through which parts of the world enter into resonance or articulation through human brains, human cooperation, human nous. One way to stretch semiotics here would be to call this resonance " referent-sign-referent' " -- ie. parts of the world are related and thus changed through a human meaning-making. And of course language and meaning and the processes they mediate happen in the context of a specific system, a culture, a political economy as above.
Often, it may work better (another "truth") to consider that process a single system, not divided into pieces.
What are spirits, souls, and spells?
A "spirit" is a potent way of talking about, but more importantly talking to complex systems. Spirits, as words for things in the sense above, as mediations through humanity, are personified for good reason: they're how our souls are in relation with other wholes. In other words, "person" means a way of interacting with a complexly coherent system. Humans are one such system, and human relationships are an example of how to engage with complexity.
But humans are not the only persons.
The anthropological literature for a while has made ontological space for spirits in the context of human-related change: healing [ref djinn], curses, motivation, discipline, etc. This is improvement from metaphorical psychologization, where we pretend they just think they're relating with spirits, when really it's deep-seated repression, or hypnotic suggestion, or discursive masking of social relations. Improvement not only because it recognizes that the question of what is true, what exists, is open to the witness that the spirit-objects engaged by many peoples are profoundly effective within their cultural contexts. It's not just that belief in spirits works (for them), and therefore is true (for them).
It's the possibility that this reality can inform what works for us; that "spirits" can exist for us, too.
What can this mean, in practice?
In an important way, this is a question of how to adapt our thinking, our feeling, our sensitivity in a direction that has been structurally vestigial among academics for centuries. To help, and to expand the spirit-domain beyond the sphere of human bodies and minds, I suggest we draw on knowledges (and socio-discursive authority) from science.
This is explored more ?else -> Spirit of Quantum Biology ?where -> Spirit of Politics, but we as science-oriented westerners are starting to see emergent behaviors with chaotic patterns prevalent in a complex world far from equilibrium. So: ecosystems; societies; the planet as a whole. And many subsystems within these.
What it means to call these complex systems with emergent behaviors, is that even the most careful, detailed analysis of the relationships between constituent parts of the system cannot realistically predict the patterns of evolution of features of the whole.
Let's call the coherence of these systems a kind of being -- a spirit, or a soul. What this recognizes is that it is not a mere assemblage of parts, and that "knowing" the whole is not a matter of accounting for the details, but a kind of gestalt-relation with the higher-order patterns.
Does this language of spirit work to help us interact with these systems differently, more effectively, than we might by talking about them in mechanistic terms? This is of course an empirical question that mobilizes the framework above, that requires we look at the whole process of patterning a human to be sensitive and attuned to parts of the world, and to respond appropriately.
To answer whether spirits "exist", we explore particular processes in which some humans interact with what they call spirits, which we will be thinking of also as particular systems that we understand in a more material way, and we see whether they get information that is reliable, or change behaviors that are damaging, or feel good, or make things happen, or assess effectiveness in some other way (maybe their values, maybe ours).
So we look at spells, prayers, ceremonies as spiritual technologies to adjust and recalibrate humans as whole-systems resonators. To deepen or finetune or reinforce our role as mediators of meaning (referent-symbol-referent').
Do they work?
We expect the answer to be, "Yes!": if relevant systems are actually complex; and if humans have capacities to understand and respond to systemic wholes in ways other than analyzing, cataloguing, and making predictions based on reductionistic assumptions.
So far, this is just a step or two further (at most) than what people are already doing. It's becoming increasingly widespread to acknowledge that in many circumstances the effectiveness of god-talk is pretty compelling. In other words: in such contexts, at least, these spirits exist; these systems (spirit-human-spirit', or human-spirit-human') cohere.
This applies when the system we're saying operates as a spirit is something we already experience as a system, something we already name, and that we already interact with; and where the interactions are ones that we can "explain" using familiar senses and mechanisms. It's already a lot, but let's go further.
Because this is not all that people mean by spirits. For specificity, a brief suggestion of the vast diversity of spirit-beings:
- devas of place -- this tree, that mountain
- spirits of natural forces/systems -- rain, planet earth, Coyote
- archetypal deities -- war, love, wisdom, death
- gods-of-peoples -- Olympians, Yahweh, various pantheons, Hinduism/Catholicism/syncretisms
- ancestors -- filial piety, loa, hero, saints, ghosts
- sundry others -- angels & demons, some fairies
- cosmic -- the Creator-spirit of all things, various aspects of participation in the wholeness of being
This is the slightest smattering; it's an entire comparative discipline. There are endless contradictions in categorizing not merely types of spirit, but even different emanations or applications of spirits with the same name.
But what's clear is that many of these spirits -- considered as persons descriptive of complex systems -- do not simply map to the visible world we already know how to see.
Moreover, people describe relations with spirits -- communications and actions -- that are hard to understand as simply gestalt versions of familiar operations.
It's one thing to say that the living earth as a whole can be sensibly related to as Goddess, as Gaia, and that this can be demonstrably effective in helping do something effective (eg. stop killing the rest of life so much). It's quite another to enter a ritual and pray the rain spirits to pity us, and for the rains to fall.
What kind of 'mechanism' could make that relation 'work'?
Quantum.
Science is allergic to magic.
No, that's not strong enough. Science as a discipline is founded on the absolute, a priori rejection of magic. It is a cultural taboo, it is a category mistake, it is against everything scientists stand for, to speak of magic.
So what I am saying is deeply offensive. Sorry about that.
What is the difference between science and magic? A tired question. I am going to say simply: the difference is that between classical and quantum mechanics.
Immediately: of course these are both inside science! Yes, science as a social practice (this is its great glory) struggles with inconsistencies, with anomalies, and follows the equations that animate the apparatus of experiment. Even kicking and screaming (there has been so much kicking and screaming.)
So if I say that science::magic as classical::quantum, then what I'm talking about is scientific intuition, the "common-sense" framework that usually frames what's reputable. Scientists research "parapsychology", but it is "pseudoscience" to almost all their colleagues; not because their experiments uniformly find null hypotheses (they don't), or are poorly constructed (they aren't), but because the topic is simply impossible.
To put it more "scientifically": there is no known physical mechanism allowing for psychic (ie. magical) phenomena, so "extraordinary claims require extraordary proof" -- and anyway, it's professional suicide to associate yourself with the field.
Quantum is the exception because it was eventually unavoidable. Seeking smaller and smaller reality is at the heart of physics, and when you get small enough, the classical world simply vanishes. It doesn't work.
It isn't real.
For a hundred years, science has struggled with an existential crisis at its core. For all that time, it has quarantined the impossible contagion by asserting that quantum effects (like relativistic ones) only apply at the most extreme scales of cold, size, time. For a long time, the quarantine has leaked.
Now, the virulence is reaching all the way to us. Contracting our souls.
Why do I say that quantum is magic? (If this is review for you, skip and hop.)
Classical mechanics assumes a neutral background of time and space, in which independent objects move deterministically as they physically interact. Despite many additions (fluids, fields) and perturbations (stochastics, nonlinearity), this basic logic (familiar, yes?) remained.
Quantum mechanics assumes an utterly different reality. Spooky action at a distance. Coherent entanglement. Superposition. Collapse of the wavefunction. Kept at bay only by the argument that anything larger than an atom or two, longer than a moment or two, weaker than a hydrogen bomb, would necessarily revert to classicality.
But if quantum behaviors were to apply at macroscopic scales, it would mean that there would be at least potential mechanisms for "magical" behaviors. There would be no reason to exclude certain kinds of research. There would be no bounds.
This is happening: quantum biology. Quantum populations, quantum concepts. [refs]
This is a symptom of the possibility that quantum behaviors are widespread properties of complex systems -- perhaps even that one of the primary conditions of complexity is a dynamic interplay between classical and quantum forms of coherence.
In this kind of world, there any number of conceivable ways that humans could be already participating in, or could establish, forms of entanglement with other parts of the world that do not depend on familiar senses or mechanisms.
Moreover, many of the aspects of these systems may not map simply to more familiar physical systems. They may be a kind of "dark matter" of coherences that subtend many parts of otherwise-unrelated systems.
We just don't know. This doesn't prove anything.
It just helps us see how much isn't proven. Heretofore unknown unknowns.
Indeed, a live scientific question is: why do we see anything but quantum behaviors all the time? Why aren't we just always already inside a vast superposition of deterministically evolving Hamiltonians, with no possibility of collapse?
Why does the classical world appear?
It's a big question, but at least part of the answer probably has to do with the nature of science.
Scientifico-technical enterprise works by finding and amplifying the reproducible. It is a great "measurement-making machine" -- that is, a great collapser of wavefunctions.
Science has a hard time seeing macroscopic quantum behaviors, yes, because of its reductionistic toolboxes. [cf. Brezinski] But more than that: it is a core institution reproducing a biologico-technical ecology of classicality-causation.
Perhaps science is actively killing God. Well, gods, anyway. Spirits, souls, enchantments: maybe our industries of determination are excluding the substrates of their existence from more and more of our world.
Fine, the world is a vast heaving sea of quantum interconnectedness, and this Empire's just a raft of classically collapsed certainties pretending to preeminence. That doesn't mean spirits are real!
Ethnogenesis
I am not proposing that the above is any kind of "proof": either that spirits exist, or that quantum mechanisms actually do underlie our relations with the more-than-human world.
I am just letting the cat out of the bag. It's Schrodinger's, probably alive.
Because if magic is not impossible, then you may find ample evidence for it. Especially as an anthropologist: because much is possible does not mean everything is true, but probably some of it is.
You may not be able to do magic, to taste the blood of the divine, may not have experienced ecstatic communion; but you are a peculiarly crafted human, crafted to be immune to it. Perhaps we are crumbling that immunity, and soon you will feel the sultry stir of soulcraft along your spine; but for "evidence" the appropriate place to look is among those crafted to the Craft.
Witchcraft, of course, is the Old Religion of Europe. Your ancestors -- probably of blood, certainly of culture -- honored the women and men that walked the edges of wildness, the boundaries of classical domestication. They knew the spirits.
They were conquered, and burned.
Also conquered, but more recently and less totally, are thousands of indigeneities. Among them are spirit-workers and workings in endless variety, inhabiting various pscyhosocial worlds that support their honed sensitivity to soul. For generations, anthropologists have journeyed there, writing haughty or reserved or cautious tomes of description; and between the lines, so often, struggling with the call to stop writing and go native.
Many of them have seen things they cannot write, or are only barely learning to, daring to.
These are "Extraordinary Anthropologies".
If science is discovering magic, then perhaps anthropologists finally can, as well. Not just "out there", finding awkward ways to take "the Other" and their outlandish beliefs seriously, but "in here". In other words, maybe the "ontological turn" affords us the opportunity to discover ways to believe -- to participate -- in our own souls' sensitivity to the spirits.
People become people in cultures. The culture you and I were born to reproduce -- of TVs and neuroses and networks and drugs -- that culture must die. From the fertile offal of its decay, already, we must be going to have been growing new cultures, new ethnicities, that cultivate souls in alliance with the great wild will of the world.
The will to cast off the cancerous lesion (legion) and cast off into uncharted seas.
What does it take to become people of the earth? People attuned to the subtle bodies of the spirits? People allied to the gods of wildness?
What does it cost to leave the Empire, to release ourselves from reproductive bondage to Mammon and Pluto? What is the ceremonial coin of that transaction?
Can kinship emerge in a generation? Can the folkstuff once churning the unholy vehemence of racist nationalism become the raw belonging of a world in which many worlds fit?
This is dangerous. It is dangerous for the old reasons -- maybe the reason civilization (for all its discontents) was dreamed in the first place. For the world of witchcraft is uncanny, it is not friendly to us, it is not kind. (Or at least, not only friendly, not only kind.) When we open, we open to the wild danger of a world much larger, deeper, and darker than we knew.
But it is also dangerous because the hurtling deathtrap of our juggernaut demon-Empire will seize at any scope for colonizing growth. If it now can see the quantum foam, the spiritscape, it will plot (it is already plotting) to coopt and commodify and weaponize its resources.
Is God the next market? The next missile? The next sin?
If the world is re-enchanted and God returns from the dead, then anything is possible.
If the world is re-enchanted and God returns from the dead, then the stakes are greater than ever. Not just climate change and wars, suffering, ecocide: but, perhaps, far worse: the god-fuelled quantum sorcery to mock death even further by animating beyond the apocalyse the demon of our own creation, the cyborg of our collective psychosis, the empire of everything.
But if the world is re-enchanted, and god returns from the dead, then you have a soul.
And your soul and mine, we can learn to speak spells.
We can listen to the ancestors of our bodies and the elders of our allies, those who have not forgotten and those who are reclaiming anew: we can listen, we can learn, we can live the Great Spell.
The hail falls, the light is golden. Shivers of surprise! Surprise! You're home!