Site of Riddu Riddu |
November 2014
San Diego, CA
Day Two:
Saturday Afternoon
After lunch I duly went
to the joint session of “Contemporary American Studies and Ritual Studies
Groups” on “The New Animism: Ritual and
Response to the Nonhuman World.”
No regrets, but to do
this I had to pass on three other sections scheduled at the same time slot:
- I Tantric Studies Group on “Funerary Practices in Tantric Tradition,” Featuring “Saving the Unfortunate: A Tantric Rite to Rescue the Dead,” Necorliberation in Early Sakyapa Funerary Manuals,” and The Five-Element Pagoda, the Mantra of Light, and the Six Paths: Tantric Elements in Medieval Japanese Funerary Practice.” As someone interested in both death and dying and rites of passage and other rituals, including the employment of bricolage within them,[1] I’m drawn to these types of presentation on the rare occasions they can be found.
- I Religion and the Social Sciences Section, Religious Conversions Group, Secularism and Secularity Group, and Sociology of Religion Group, on “The Shifting Boundaries of the Secular, Spiritual, and Religious.” This is another area of culture that I as a Pagan feel worthy of exploration, since we seem to be expanding in numbers, and even in diversity, as well as our having a face in the interfaith/multifaith movement for social change and social justice.
The
panel brought together “papers exploring the fluid, antagonistic, and
overlapping boundaries of the secular, spiritual and religious…how various
across draw these boundaries differently be relying on multiple understandings
of the religious and the secular and by creating hybrid identities that cut
across religions traditions or the secular/religious divide.”
Again,
as a Pagan who has always considered her religion to call for efforts at social
justice and political change, this panel called to me.
Such
papers as “Switching, Mixing, and Matching: Towards an Understanding of
Multireligiousness in Contemporary America” and “Qualitative Research on
Spiritual but Not Religious ‘Nones’: Heterogeneous yet Conceptually Converging,”
seemed that they would have addressed some of the attitudes I’ve encountered
frequently in my interfaith activities.
- I Body and Religion Group on “Fragmented and Digitized Bodies,” chaired by my friend Shaun Arthur, and including papers on ”The Fragmented Body: Alternative Cinematic Visions,” Discerning the Body in Cyberspace: Jaron Lanier, Merleau-Ponty, and Contested Personhood” – this seems very relevant to the presence and personalities of Paganisms online, as distinct from those in terraspace, a subject I touched in in my book Witchcraft and the Web: Creating Pagan Traditions Online --
- I Native Traditions in the Americas Group on “Native Traditions, Food, and Environmental Change: Restoring Right Relationships” “Plants and animals are an essential part of the complex relationships that are central to the religious frameworks of indigenous peoples…” From four different bioregions of North America, papers address the relationships between Native traditions, food and the environment “as expressed through sacred narratives, teachings about reciprocity, responsibility, and respect, traditional stories, ceremonies and rituals, and songs. Climate change, human manipulation of the environment, and the loss of traditional knowledge through government intervention are some of the ways these relationships have been altered, yet found within traditional knowledge are ways to restore these relationships. …presentations explore… different yet complimentary examples of indigenous peoples turning to their religious traditions to restore right relationships with food in the face of colonial legacies and climate change.” Here’s a list of the juicy-sounding papers in this session: “Restoring Himdag: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the Tohono O’odham,” “Of Coyotes and Culverts: Tribal Salmon Preservation in the Pacific Northwest,” “How Traditional Storytelling and Activities Help Make the Anishinaabeg Defenders of the Earth: A Case Study of Making Maple Syrup,” and “The Nature of Food: Dene Approaches to Caribou Hunting.” Isn’t it obvious how appealing these talks would be to a contemporary American Pagan whose existence, like the existence of all life as we know it, depends upon right relationship with our environment and food sources?
- I New Religious Movements Group. The five best paper proposals received in 2014; papers included:
o
Massimo
Introvigne on “Painting the Southern Border: New Religions, the Mexican
Revolution, and the Visual Arts”;
o
Stephanie
Yuhas on “The Relationship of Dark Green Religion to the Spiritual But Not
Religious Movement”’ – definitely Pagan flavored.
o
Erin Prophet
on “California Science Fiction, Atlantis, and New Age Apocalypticism: The
Constructino and Influence of Frederick S. Oliver’s Dweller on Two Planets by
Phylos the Thibetan”;
o
Shannon
Trosper Schorey: “’The Internet Is Holy.
Code Is Law’: New Religions and Sacral Materiality at the Intersections
of Technology and Policy”; and
o
Donald
Westbrook on “’A People’s History’ of the Church of Scientology: Conclusions
from Ethnographic Research in the United States.”
Here’s the session I went
to: “Contemporary American Studies and
Ritual Studies Groups” on “The New
Animism: Ritual and Response to the Nonhuman World.”
Ronald Grimes |
Arrived to greet several
Pagan scholar pals, only to see someone who’s a rock star in my world, Ronald
Grimes, now retired professor of
Ritual Studies. I’ve heard him speak at
past Ritual Studies Sections of the AAR.
I’ve read several of his books, and require students to read them when I
have the opportunity to teach ritual theory and liturgical design. In particular, Rite out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts, and Deeply into the Bone: Re-inventing Rites of
Passage. So, feeling emboldened, I
went up to him and told him I’d been worshipping him from afar for years, I
loved his work, and I used it in teaching.
I actually told him he was a rock star in my world. After all, we’re both of an age (the same
age) and I have nothing to prove one way or another, so appearing like a
teeny-bopper fan girl didn’t concern me.
It needn’t have anyway, because I found him to be a lovely fellow. He immediately invited me to sit next to him
during the session, which I did.
Unfortunately, I seem never to remember to take photos, so I blew the
opportunity to be in a shot with him.
Oh, well…
I was disappointed that
Donna Seamone was unable to present her paper, “’The Path Has a Mind of Its
Own’: Eco-Agri-Pilgrimage to the Corn Maze Performance – an Exercise of
Cross-Species Sociality.”
Folklorist Sabina Magliocco spoke
on “Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Animal Spirits in Contemporary Pagan Religions.”
* * *
Samuel Etikpal, from the
University of Oslo, spoke on “Transition Concepts in Ghanaian Festival Performance,”
specifically the annual Kundum Festival, “during
which diverse participants ritually express their conceptions of and wishes for
a health environment, spiritual protection, and socio-economic prosperity,
bringing into play those other-than-human agencies expected to uphold or oppose
these goals.”
First recorded by a Dutch
trader around 1704, the festival takes place in the Jomoro
District. With drumming, a canoe regatta, the pouring
of libations, the eating of special foods, for eight days or longer the people
seek to honor their ancestors and elders, and to ensure good health and
abundant crops. In rituals involving
communication between humans and non-humans, they appeal for protection. They honor a “God creator” and Mother Earth
Yaba.
Earth Mother Yaba |
Samuel also showed some
photos of a Kundum Festival held annually in Atlanta, Georgia. He has not attended the one in the U.S.;
rather, a friend sent him these photos.
Since, he’d emphasized the rituals honoring the local river goddess in
Jomoro, I asked him if the festival in Atlanta connected to the Chattahoochee
River in any way, but he wasn’t certain it did and suspected it did not.
* * *
Sami Flag by Jeltz |
I found fascinating Graham
Harvey’s paper, “Indigenous
Cultural Events, Sovereignty, and Inter-Species Relations,” about the Riddu Riđđu Festival he attended last Summer. Held in ‘the land of the midnight sun’ at a
time of year when the sun is visible round the clock, the festival, Sami in origin, is described as “an international
indigenous festival, which annually takes place in Kåfjord in Norway. The festival has programs for the whole
family. The program includes worldwide indigenous music, art, theater and
dance, youth camps with artistic and political workshops, children's festival,
seminars, film and literature.”
They begin with a
traditional greeting:
From our rivers to your rivers,
From our mountains to your mountains,
Form our people to your people.
Riddu Riđđu does not encourage travelers from afar because it discourages
anything that increases one’s carbon footprint, which air travel obviously does;
they nevertheless do welcome other indigenous peoples. This particular year Maori people from New Zealand were among the
participants.
Ándy Somby yoiking |
Singers perform
traditional Sami joiking, a personal and evocative vocalization in which
the singer “sings” or “becomes” persons, animals, and landscapes.
In semi-underground
lodges and outdoors they perform rituals around speaking to the food (meat and
plants) when dining. They emphasize
inter-species communication. They ask
not “What do you believe?” Rather, they
ask “What do you eat?” or “Whom do you eat?”
Just as the health of the
rivers of Ghana (and elsewhere) is threatened by oil drilling, so too is the
health of the rivers in the circumpolar regions. As Earth’s atmosphere heats and glaciers
melt, at temperatures of 30º F. and higher in the arctic summer, rivers flood,
resulting in the inability of trout to swim upstream to reproduce because the
rushing water is too strong and too cold.
More to come.
[Apologies for funky formatting.]
1 comment:
Your post reminded me of one of my favorite after-hours Anthropology Club lectures at UT El Paso, c. 1983 with David Eyde. He explored the cultural tensions in Mexican society via the murals of Orozco. If I remember correctly, the main thrust was on an Hispanic Father and a native (Mexican) mother, tensions being resolved by the mother, generally via the children. David put Orozco in a more or less straight line from both pre-Columbian artists and Spanish muralists of the 19th century. Watching him identify the continuity of motifs was fascinating, and I wish I still had the pictures from the lectures.
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