Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene

[Music] we didn't know what a rockstar Edoardo cone is so here we are we're learning good evening and welcome to the Center for the Study of world religions my name is Charles Stang I'm the new director here and I'd like to thank you all for coming out this evening and I'd like to thank the center's staff especially Ariela Ruth for making this evening possible I have the distinct honor and pleasure of welcoming professor Eduardo Cohen from McGill University whose lecture inaugurates one of the center's new programming series a series entitled matter and spirit ecology and the non human turn so permit me a word on this thread before I introduce professor cone and xsplit how he fits into this new series recent work in the humanities and social sciences has generated new interest in the age-old religious question of the relationship between matter and spirit and its relevance for the environmental crisis we now face on the one hand vibrant materialists such as the political theorist Jane Bennett asks us to revise our view of matter as an inert object we manipulate and invite us instead to think of the vibrancy of non-human and allegedly inanimate things that is their agency and their creativity this promises to cultivate a different ecological sensibility and different sorts of political interventions in the environmental crisis on the other hand anthropologists have revived interest in spirits and their interactions with humans taking these phenomena seriously if not literally as occasions to widen our notion of agency perhaps humans are just one expression of a more widely distributed agency an agency spread across the full spectrum of the alleged antinomy of matter and spirit richard Grusin of the center for 21st century studies calls this decentering of the human quote the nonhuman turn could it be that by shifting our focus away from the human to quote animals effectivity bodies materiality technologies and organic and geophysical systems could it be by doing that we might actually summon an ecological imagination that better safeguards humans precisely by displacing them from the center of all inquiry we hazard to guess that questions such as these might help us reinvigorate our thinking about religion and ecology what can these fields of inquiry teach religious studies about cultivating an ecological imagination and a potent activism and what can religious studies in turn contribute to these fields I was thrilled when Professor Cohen accepted our invitation to inaugurate this series his 2013 book how forests think toward an anthropology beyond the human is at the very heart of this debate refreshingly he takes strong stands in this book based on extensive ethnographic research among the runa of Ecuador's upper Amazon Cohn explores how humans interact with beings beyond them and how they not only think about those living beings and think with them but are also thought by them and here lies the rub we humans are thought by something else by someone else we are the objects of others thinking now what does cone mean well with the help of the philosopher Charles purse he argues that all life is semiotic that is that all living things are Minds that deploy and interpret signs and that this sign use is what it means to think thus we humans are not the only minds in this world not it's only thinkers we are distinguished instead by our symbolic thinking language which we erroneously assume is the only type of sign use the only type of thinking we measure the world by this symbolic or linguistic standard and we find that it falls short short of thought this brings new meaning to Stephen Jay Gould phrase the MIS measure of man for according to Cohn we miss measure not fellow human beings of course we do that too but we miss measure fellow living beings we measure them by our standard and our exercise amounts to a narcissistic confirmation of our unique place in the world as thinkers in cones hands or more accurately in the hands of his runa friends animals plants and spirits emerge as thinking selves and the Amazonian canopy shelters an especially dense ecology of overlapping cells not bound by species nor even bound by the borders of skin nor the exigencies of time as he puts it we are not the only we Donna Haraway from the University of California Santa Cruz says this of cones book a thinking forest is not a metaphor say that again a thinking forest is not a metaphor this book is a powerfully good read she says one that changed my dreams and reworked my settled habits of interpretation even the multi-species ones so cone initiates us into what he calls a Sylvan way of thinking but to what end he closes his book with these words quote my own ethnographic meditation has been an attempt to liberate our thinking opening our thinking in this way might allow us to realize a greater us and us that can flourish not just in our lives but in the lives of those who live beyond us that would be our gift however modest to the living future notice those three words liberation realization flourishing if in today's world of planetary crisis Sylvan thinking can deliver on those and to those who live beyond us it will be no modest gift so please join me in welcoming professor Eduardo Cohen for his lecture anthropology as cosmic diplomacy toward an ecological ethics for the Anthropocene [Applause] [Music] Thank You Charles for such a wonderful and generous introduction it's it's a real pleasure to be here a pleasure to have a moment to share ideas that I've care about and to to learn from you I'm gonna be presenting things that are new for me and put me and you know maybe I might be in a vulnerable position here and that's part of what I'm doing so please I hope we can have a conversation around these things so yes I'll just I'll just jump right in I'm I'm an anthropologist and my job is to immerse myself at my graphically to char relations and to find new ways to listen garbed in the flesh and skin I've come to quit with protected by my words and the stories that we've together with them I take these tools that make me human into the world we call the field perhaps today our vocations name might feel a bit outdated given that our task to immerse ourselves can take us to fields where not all of the beings we encounter are of the anthropic sort working as I do in and around indigenous communities of the ecuadorian amazon threatened by the destruction of ecologies of relational worlds these other than human beings include plants animals and even and perhaps especially spirits learning to listen to these other kinds of others has forced me to divest myself of some of the human trappings that equip me and to thus travel beyond the schemas through which I normally think despite the fact that it's theories are fashioned almost entirely from our human equipment anthropology thanks to its immersive method is a vocation that can uniquely open us to the worlds these other kinds of beings inhabit our attempts to grapple with what we learned there as well as how we learn it can allow us to capacitate other kinds of concepts perhaps even as monadic menotti or Shiva my soppida brother and colleague suggests other kinds of God's giving life to these other kinds of concepts involves understanding thought from one world in terms of those from another with a view to grasping the emergent concepts that might unite these thoughts as one in this sense a synonym for anthropologist is yachak or no word which is the key to a word the humans I work with use for shaman moving among world is not merely a scholarly endeavor it's a political act we do so in order to recognize the way we take part in that larger flow of life that today is under grave threat in this sense another synonym for anthropologist might be diplomat more accurately in Bruno motors terms a cosmic diplomat diplomat for the aim of moving on the aim of moving among worlds is to find ways to avoid a cosmic by which I mean an ecological Cataclysm in recognition of the ways in which culture is now a force of nature some geologists have proposed the term Anthropocene for the geological epoch in which we live living in the so called time of humans requires us to rethink what we mean by the human and to rethink for the future for the setback is far from over a kind of ethics appropriate to a time in which separating from humans humans from nonhumans is no longer practically or metaphysically practical or thinkable this involves recapturing the shamanic and diplomatic valances of the anthropological vocation donning other kinds of clothing and equipping ourselves with other kinds of tools not all of which are of the human sort working as I do in the Amazonian rainforest my task is a cosmic diplomat is to allow Sylvan cells the plants animals and especially spirits that also make their homes in the forest a mode of expression that can be heard within our scholarly biological political and legal idioms with this end in mind I wrote a book called how forests think based on long-term fieldwork in and around Avila Keats was speaking bruna community in the northwestern part of Ecuador's Ecuador's Amazon region when I say the force think I don't as a metaphor as Donna Haraway says nor am i referring to a culturally embedded belief the claim is rather part of a diplomatic effort to convince you of the reality of things that can sometimes go unnoticed given the limits of certain metaphysical assumptions that form the foundations for Western scholarly thought including anthropological thought by saying that force think I mean that life is mine that life is thought while we share with other beings in so much our bodies but our capacity to think mind here refers to that process wherever in the universe it's found of learning by experience evolutionary dynamics in the sense our mental dynamics because they imply the ways in which a lineage over time and via natural selection learned something about its environment wings as they evolved have come to increasingly represent something about the currents of air on which they glide for those lineages of organisms that have them this is an example of thought it's a kind of intelligence one could say in philosopher Charles purses terms that it's a scientific intelligence this kind of thought like all true by which I mean living thought does something flying becomes a new mode of being for a new kind of avian creature when thought is alive it is because it makes this kind of worldly difference there are places in this world where this kind of mental dynamic is amplified places where there's more mind more thought places that exhibit more scientific intelligence one such place is Ecuador's mega-diverse Amazon region if lives our minds these dense tropical ecosystems would be sites for the emergence of ecology is made up of an unprecedented multitude of minds thinking an equally unprecedented multitude of thoughts we humans have developed many techniques to amplify this kind of thinking the great success of the scientific method is part and do the great success of the scientific method is due in part I'm well aware of the the power structures in which science operates but what makes science as a method successful is the fact that it's a form of thinking that can self-consciously tap to the ways in which evolutionary dynamics themselves learn by experience that is the scientific method and the coming community that thinks through it harnesses and amplifies the ways in which the world itself thinks it is its own evolutionary dynamic that has learned to think by listening to the scientific intelligence already operant in the living world but it's not the only kind of science Amazonian shamanistic practices that involve the ingestion of the psychedelic decoction ayahuasca or the cultivation and interpretation of dreams to give just two examples are also sciences in the sense that they constitute specific techniques to accelerate and amplify a process of learning by experience their great advantage over the other sciences is that they're particularly involves the systemic disruption of some of our human schemas for thinking that these practices have unfolded in that place on our planet with the richest proliferation of non-human Minds is no coincidence and it makes them a privileged form of thinking scientifically with the scientific intelligence inherent to life I find the etymology of the word psychedelic productive to think with from the Greek psyche solar mind and deljuan to make manifest ayahuasca makes manifest to us the mind of those thinking forests that are themselves mind manifesting so forests think but how do they think the biggest obstacle we face and grasping this kind of thought is that we confuse what thinking is with a specifically human form of thinking that tends to erase other more expansive but more fragile forms of thought what makes human thinking distinctive is a representational dynamic that following Purse can be termed symbolic symbols come to mean by virtue of the relations they have to so to a system of other symbols which form the interpretive contexts that give them meaning the English word dog for example refers to the animal in question indirectly thanks to a prior relation to the system of symbols that gives it meaning thinking in symbols is what makes us so special as humans it is the basis for language culture and consciousness but we're also open to other forms of thinking that reach well beyond the human forms of thought that we share with all other living cells this kind of thinking has another kind of dynamic whose logic is based more on the image than on the word it traffics in to non symbolic representation of modalities those that are iconic and those that are indexical of these indices are easiest to grasp the index is a kind of sign that corresponds to or correlates with something it's not for example a monkeys cry of danger is not the dangerous entity it indicates in indices however the product of complex interactions among a much more counterintuitive sign process that underlies it icons icons refer to their objects of reference not by pointing to them they don't actually enter no themselves refer at all and then if they therefore exist at the very margins of semiosis and of thought but the way they refers by sharing in and of themselves something of the properties of the object in question so if ontology in the classic sense in which I use the term is the exploration of those realities that are independent of how we humans might relate to them then iconicity being the kind of sign that is what it is regardless of how it relates to its object might confer an interesting vantage from which to explore such realities indices and icons make up the form of thinking proper to forests when for example a spot wing damper alarm when for example a spot winged ant birds alarm called points to a Jaguars presence and hunters and a hunter simulates that call he heard in a way that resembles it both partake in a form of thinking that is imagistic and when we cultivate our dreams or take ayahuasca we were also thinking with and like forests for these techniques temporarily break parts of the symbolic systems that house and sustain us as humans permitting our thoughts to rejoin that kind of thinking that goes beyond the human this form of thinking which is living selves is something that is also ours I call Sylvan as in Sahaj Sylvan thinking that real bonsai Sauvage like all good scientific intelligences amplifies and thus makes available for further thought certain properties of the Sylvan worlds of the widget thinks it has a psychedelic potential to my mind the phenomenon we're calling the Anthropocene is an actualization of the dualism inherent to symbolic thinking symbolic thought creates virtual and relatively closed thought worlds that relate indirectly to the more concrete worlds to which they also referred a Greek ultra animal husbandry the rise of cities and states the Industrial Revolution the accelerated flow of capital and information are increasing perhaps historically contingent realizations of this human tendency to create realms of culture that are increasingly separable perhaps alienated from nature to such a degree that that culture can eventually become a force of nature a great danger of being human is to get too caught up in what makes us distinctively human Trump's particular brand of me-first thoughtlessness and that's a term from donna haraway which aligns individual national racial gender and even species narcissism with within an ever-expanding arc exhibiting a brutal fractal like symmetry is a chilling consequence of this isolation from the worlds that hold us in this regard the human scientists haven't helped conceptual tools that grow out of working with the distinctive symbolic properties of human thought and I'm thinking particularly of social construction and all of its variants make it even more difficult to understand a way of thinking beyond the sort of dualism that pulls humans out of those worlds that both make us and are not us harnessing the logic of Silvan thinking given the ways in which our lives and thoughts are so entangled with dualism how can thinking with forests help us self in thinking holds dualism in the sense that it's a form of thinking that is larger than the human and this can help us work conceptually with the connections we have to the nonhuman despite the separation that our distinctive formative thought creates cultivating Sylvan thinking as an ethical orientation for the Anthropocene involves harnessing some of its other than human properties and I'm going to tear talk briefly about four of them Sylvan thinking involves images absences play and something I'll call generals cellphone thinking's imagistic quality confers on it a host of counterintuitive properties consider the cryptically camouflaged Amazonian katydid cyclop torus speculator which is pictured here how does such a katydid come to look so much like a leaf this doesn't depend on anyone noticing this resemblance our usual understanding of how likeness works rather it's likeness is the product of the fact that the ancestors of its potential predators did not notice its ancestors these potential predators fail to notice the differences between these ancestors and actual leaves over evolutionary time those lineages of katydids that were least noticed survived thanks to all the proto cryptic katiedids that were noticed and eaten because they differed from their environments sake laughter a speculator came to be more like the world of leaves around it so how this K that came to be so invisible reveals important properties of iconicity iconicity that the most basic kind of sign process is highly counterintuitive because it involves a dynamic in which two things are not distinguished we tend to think of the icon as a sign that points the similarities among things we know to be different but semiosis does not begin with the recognition of any intrinsic similarity or difference rather it begins with not noticing possible differences it begins with in distinction or confusion let me say something else about the imagistic logic that characterizes Silvan thinking it's deeply personal icons share something in common with the objects they represent in the way they are they're objects there's an emotional correlate to this a feeling of identification a feeling of knowing a feeling of oneness but convincing others of this could be quite difficult to get an icon you have to feel it for yourself in my lectures I often illustrate iconic thinking by having people guess at the meaning of a key to an imagistic word such as subpool which is used to describe an object making contact with and then submerging underwater to pool I then contrast this with other words in Quechua that are much more standard conventional words which being conventional conventional don't have this kind of sonic imagistic connection to what they mean so once I tell people to pose meaning many people in an audience and I think already heard it today will immediately come to feel what it means it's a likeness of an object plunging that they feel inside them invariably however some will not feel it and no argument I can make will make them feel it sylvans thinking shares these qualities the only way to grasp this imagistic logic is to feel it for yourself doing so requires a being becoming being or becoming Sylvan insofar as you need to find within you some of its qualities that you already share to iconically identify with its mode of being and this has important methodological implications for how we should go about thinking with forests to which I'll return thinking with cryptic insects leads me to my second observation about Sylvan thinking that it has an app sensual quality we usually think of nature in terms of presence matter materiality and existence of the foundations for our metaphysics but absence is central to life it's a kind of non-existence that is real think of the ways in which such cases are multiplied absentia l-- they have become invisible that is absent because they reap resent an absent leafy environment the environment is absent in the sense that after all these candidates aren't their environment they aren't in fact leaves and katiedids do this for an absent future generation the future candidates in the lineage of candidates and they can do so thanks to the absent dead who were noticed and eaten by predators my third observation about Sylvan thinking's that involves play by play I mean a dynamic in which previously tightly coupled means ends relations are loosened such that something new can emerge play is a Bic with us in the living world but this is because means-ends relations are intrinsic to the living world not just something we humans impose on it in this technical Varian sense the forest is not disenchanted i guess you could say to enchant it by saying that life is semiotic that forest think I'm also saying that function representation purpose and Telos and short ends are part and parcel of the living world but if we think of means and ends as tightly coupled as transitive and deductive there's no room for something new for growth for flourishing which is of course also central to life and this is where play comes in the biological production of variation is a form of play Gregory Bateson's NIP that byte that denotes the byte but not that which the byte denotes the sort of ludecke suspension of aggression esau and dogs and other social mammals is also a form of play and any relaxation on selection creates a space for play growth requires play in the sense and we should remember that also for levy Strauss the balsa Sauvage is also a form of play in that it's a kind of thought that asks for no return the final observation about Sylvan thinking's that involves generality thanks to all the katiedids that were not noticed there's now more leaf enos in this world not only are there are their leaves that are leafy but so too are some insects generalities are real property of the world not just one that's part of the realm of life sorry general generality is a real property of the world one that actually grows in the realm of life life proliferates generals through a process of constrained confusion living dynamics create kinds think of von uke skills tick the one that is ruled world poor because it doesn't do a lot of differentiation by not discriminating between humans and deer indiscriminately parasitizing both confusing them it creates a kind a kind of being through which for example in these parts of the world lyme disease might pass the world then is not just a continuum waiting to be categorized by human minds and cultures so this logic extends to biological concepts such as a distinction between individual and lineage it may be that only the individual exists but the lineage is the reality that makes that existence possible and the individual katydid is only what it is by virtue of a lineage that temporally exceeds it this is also true of a species it too has the kind of general reality in this regard the species is not unlike the Amerindian concept of the master of the animals of spirit master of the animals a master of animals is a being that is the protector in general instantiation of the species in question all hunting passes through this generality hunters dream with them or about this domain of the general in order to connect with the individual that will become meet this generalities is real even if its existence is only instantiated in the forest encounter the reality of forest spirits then is on par with the reality of a species or a lineage out of an ecology of selves or emerges an ecology of spirits or gods as well and this reality is not reducible to the social it is to this emergent spirit life that we must also learn to attend for these gods or other light or others like them we'll be the ones who can orient us in the way that a kind Orient's an individual and a dream Orient's the hunter an ethical orientation for the Anthropocene must thus necessarily also involve a spiritual reorientation spirits gods and souls are part and parcel of the Sylvan thinking we need to inhabit once again the politics of Sylvan thinking having thought a great deal about Sylvan thinking and convinced that thinking with it can provide a ways to think for our times my current research projects focus on finding spaces of collaboration with others who seek to sustain incapacitate domains of Sylvan thinking by tapping into their imagistic absentia playful and general logics this has brought me into close collaboration with the far-flung community of thinkers whose human members members range from indigenous leaders and shamans like Minotti to environmental activists and conceptual conceptual artists and human rights lawyers on the nonhuman side it has led me to explore ways to think with the spirits of the forest the obdurate animus II of wider wind on earth as they make themselves present to me this in turn has raised many questions what methods should one develop to listen to these other beings and given that the modern constitution has relegated spirits to the realm of belief how can one bring them back into concept work and conversation without being branded a believer I should say at the outset that Ecuador is a privileged place to cultivate an ethics of Sylvan theme for the Anthropocene first off as I've mentioned this is because it houses an unprecedented amount of biodiversity and diverse communities of people who continue to thing with it especially but not only in its Amazonian forest not all of which are at least for the moment in ruins this kind of life and human forms of living with it are given unprecedented recognition in Ecuador's 2008 Constitution which was the first in the world to recognize the rights of nature this constitution was also framed in terms of sumach cows I or when we read an idea of living well that is not based on the modern metrics of progress and unfettered economic growth as well as respect for indigenous blury nationalism and self-determination but as lofty as this document appears its aspirations are rarely given a practical existence although written at the beginning of Rafael Cortes presidency the Korea regime was characterized by an increasing suppression of alternative voices Silvan and otherwise and a ratcheting up of extra extracted policies and practices large-scale mining projects roads hydroelectric dams and oil concessions have proliferated and many of these are funded by China to whom Ecuador now has massive debts Ecuador's new extractive his tendency as his logic is often called in Latin America runs counter to these innovative constitutional principles and it has sought to feed a state whose top-down logic became increasingly amplified under the increasingly authoritarian correr regime if a vibrant democracy should resemble a dense forest Ecuador is increasingly becoming a monocrop plantation and this is the terrain through which Sylvan thought must learn to navigate so now I just want to turn to three examples of how so when thinking goes political and these are the three projects I'm working on the first involves SATA yaku the community of SATA yaku and it involves their concept of the living forest or cows Akasha satiric was a key to speak munna community located on the bobo nasa river in pastaza province and it's famous throughout Ecuador and the world for a kind of political activism focusing on territorial rights and indigenous self-determination that harnesses the logic of Sylvan thinking as a way to resist the imposition of top-down state oriented relational modes and this has had tangible results including the legal titling to indigenous commuters of over a million hectares of land in the south-central Amazon and a 2012 and landmark victory in the inter-american Court of Human Rights against the Ecuadorian state for conducting oil exploration on on their territory without prior consultation in October 215 Saudi aqua leaders asked me to help with a document they were due to present at the cop21 climate summit in Paris later that year so just we're now we're now in the cop 23 meeting this document now this document known as Cossack SATA or living forest sought to present a radical rethinking of territory and sovereignty based wholly on animist principles based wholly on the idea that the forests are made up essentially of persons it's a call for a new way of relating to the forest and it's beings by recognizing it is a vast ecology of intercommunicating living cells rather than as a collection of objects to be exploited for human gain my responsibility has been to do the diplomatic work of translating Amazonian concepts into idioms that would be I would highlight the conceptual impact on Western modes of thinking about nature the next project that I was involved with is it how's the temperature in the room as I go feeling hot this is okay just it's good it's kind of warm it's kind of warm here that's okay with me but he's gonna make sure okay so the other project involves Satya capita and he they this up in a nation heard about my work with the people of SATA yaku so my Nadia she whether the the person I mentioned earlier who's the leader of the stop animation contacted me they inhabit a territory just to the north and east of SATA Yakub there's some images of folks there and they contact me to see if I could help them write a document that would communicate their own understanding of the animate forest Menotti is a spiritual and political leader in fact he doesn't distinguish between these two facets of his vocation is that the climate March in Washington last year when I first met him he told me about the conversation he had had the night before with President Rafael Correa Cortez stash of tobacco had run low and he had come to monatti asking him for some a clear sign that his presidency was in crisis it took me a few moments to realize that Menotti was talking about a dream encounter manami's intense or narak activity takes him all over the world in the cosmos he often wakes up exhausted he's told me of nighttime battles with the Chinese oil company that takes him to China and because this company is the one that has recently acquired a concession on top of the territory and he's told me also journeys to explore the origins of the universe what was so exciting about working with the stop at a document involved our approach to it traditional ethnographic methods as the work proceeded were increasingly made over by the Sylvan thinking we sought to channel part of this involved ingesting ayahuasca as Minotti advised me one should only take ayahuasca with the clear intention otherwise one risks getting lost and the many cosmic wormholes this decoction might open up my primary intention would be to better understand with what the spore spirits want to tell the world that's what we're trying to do and write this document we're trying to channel this but this Minotti made clear could only be approached by asking a more fundamental question I need to first understand Who I am and how this fits with the question of who we that emergent self made up of myself the stop it uh people in the force they inhabit are according to Minotti the future does not exist in and of itself it's an effect of correctly recognizing and aligning oneself as a self with the trajectory I suggested by one's past this has an imagistic iconic logic for Who I am even as I emerge as a new kind of I can only stand in some sort of imagistic continuity with my previous self Menotti which means caiman in separa kind of alligator attest to this it was the nickname given to his father the son adopted it as his leadership role increasingly led him to inhabit his father's mantle and what Greg Urban calls the projective eye that father and son share I've worked in the Amazon for 25 years and in personal as well as in formal terms I've become convinced that the rainforest constitutes a vast ecology of cells that thinks it's only however during this last couple of years that I've been exploring this communicative cosmos through more manifestly shamanic vehicles such as ayahuasca these experiences have been terrifying as well as exhilarating and needless to say I've grown from them I only I touch only on a few of the things I've learned and only as they pertain to the political project of giving life to Sylvan thought so I mean part of my indulgence please indulge me of my indulgence it's for a reason and it's also something to discuss in my experiences with ayahuasca first insider yeah Qin Yun Chao McCourt yeah my daddy's home community the first thing that happened was an erasure of everything I held dear It was as if before I could begin thinking anew any conceptual tenant had to be abandoned having worked so hard to articulate a vision of Sylvan thought of something supremely natural and one that involves holes in generals my initial vision was an eat of an e omelet universe composed entirely of atomistic lego-like bits of plastic I felt like the butt of a great cosmic joke could everything I had ever thought about the forest be false but later what became more disturbing was the growing realization of the truth of what I'd written in this book how forests think it's one thing to write of shamanic metamorphosis it's quite another to feel my human flesh peeling away as I became nothing more than a yawning Jaguars throat channeling the forests cosmic life force a tube-like convert for the life that was flowing through a me that no long existed in any embodied form that I could reckon as my own in those days I'd been thinking a lot about purses aphorism that quote the individual since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error so far as he is anything apart from his fellows and from what he and they are to be is only a negation smugly smugly quoting this which is something often did when discussing with folks in Sedalia Qin Yun Chao ChaCha how to write a document whose author is the forest is one thing it's quite another to experience my individual self would dissolve as I abandoned myself that night to the reality of that larger flow of life that vastly exceeded my errant self the political question that Menotti and other members of the community kept coming back to for they too would interrogate me and their dreams and their visions is what role eyes and I would plain and giving life to Sylvan thought answering to this for myself required going back to my childhood to my adolescence to the lives of my parents and grandparents back thousands of years to the world of my priestly ancestors the Kohanim and defined nodes where that trajectory aligned with the one of the forests and the south but of people not all of these pasts involved filial relations of particular province prominence was a boulder perched in front of our suburban Princeton house with whom as a child I developed a lasting but long since suppressed friendship I just recently found these pictures that's me and not poncho and type version whatever else a tremendous sense of gratitude for my parents emerged for not disrupting the sensuous relation I develop I developed with that other kind and those relations I called up that were filial also involved relations with other kinds of beings I saw my grandmother an amateur archaeologist who first introduced me as a child to my future vocation I saw her swoop in on the back of an enormous cobalt winged Jaguar and later I thought back to the daughter of one of her neighbors in Quito that's again me crouched and the daughter and in my late teens I had annealing I mean me kneeling there in my late teens I had such a crush on her that I decided to transform a short visit with my grandparents to a semester long stay that's when I discovered my first true love the Amazon forest this young woman's brother was exiled this young woman's brother whose there pictures as well was exiled to France first political activism in the 80s it was a fairly repressive regime in Ecuador where he completed an advanced degree in linguistics at the Sorbonne on his return to Ecuador he wrote the first stop at a dictionary this endeavor is credited by the sadhus for revitalizing their culture and is an immediate precursor for UNESCO as recognition of the sapota cultural languages oral and intangible Heritage of Humanity forty-five years ago my path was already merging with that of us up at a nation my I was part of our week only on that night on the banks of the river was I able to recognize this and only by recognizing this am I now able to act on it now this opening to a larger we has not been easy since that night I've had several or narak and psychedelic experiences which I give up being myself and be become part of this projective eye where monatti voices is I we now share through a me and I've tried a part of I'm grappling this through this archaeological project that you heal about in a bit and through drawing in images so these are all sort of images about this kind of relationship this process of becoming odd cannon Donna Haraway sturms her brothers as Minotti he says has been so frightening precisely because it requires I dissolved that which delimits me as an individual self if my thoughts if and when they are true to the world are wholly subsumed by the thoughts of the world what is there left for me as an individual to do how could I be part of a greater I who nonetheless in keeping some vestiges of my individual self might also be a novel causal locus in ways that could consider I could contribute to that greater I why this life the question applies to me as well as to the we that includes the forest thus up at a document amplifies the spiritual and personal nature of a living forest regarding the spiritual thus upon a secret speak of a mythic time before the current division between the spiritual the material where the world was just spirit and they think of themselves as sharing a unique personal connection through dreams and visions with the spirit origins of the world they are its emissaries because persons of all kinds are nothing more than the stabilized forms assumed by the emergent concepts or gods that think them the forest which is that base and ecology of persons is more appropriately in ecology of spirits and this means that any ecological politics aimed at giving life to Sylvan thinking will also be a spiritual politics regarding the personal the document argues that if the force is made entirely of subjects then knowing these on their own terms requires developing a personal relationship to them this has an imagistic logic icons can only be known from the inside so to speak through a process of recognizing that one already embodies a likeness of the object in question icon ism can never be felt then from the third-person this of course has its dangers the only way to verify such experiences is to have them oneself and not having them can serve as a ready position from which to refute the generalizable validity of iconic experiences I'm well aware that bringing my personal life and my shamanic forays into scholarly discussion makes me vulnerable to ease critique for this very reason it's part of the nature of this thing if only eyes and I can know the eyes of the forest how to encourage others to come to know these in recognition of the ways in which true knowledge of the animate force would must always be personal knowledge the sapidus have created a healing center called naka naku or forest in sapa where outsiders come to the community to establish their own personal relations with the forest spirits the hope is that through this a reciprocal relation will emerge with the help of their support of guides visitors find ways through this immersion and Sylvan thought to cure themselves of humanity's ills as they take on an increasing role in protecting the forest that great font of Sylvan thinking from the ill that we might call humanism writing this document I realized would require me to cultivate and maintain my own personal and spiritual connection to the beings of the forest I got to know Indian shaman kurta back in Quito I would only write the document before sunrise and only after ingesting juice made from the tobacco that had been given to me on my forest visits when I would meet with monatti to discuss the document it would again only be done before sunrise outdoors facing eaten o of the mountain on whose flanks I was living and whose spirits Minotti felt welcomed our endeavour and only after having taking my use of tea and tobacco menotti would listen to what I'd written within here for how the spirits of his forest home reacted to it there were parts of the spirit there were parts of the spirits didn't like and we changed these there were other parts that agitated in the bit and some of these we decided to keep cosmic diplomacy moves in multiple directions so I want to now talk about the final project thanks for your patience bear with me we're wrapping up soon and and then I'll just conclude during this period I was also involved with donating the archaeological collection belonging to my grandmother Costanza dekapwaa to a museum in Quito she amassed this collection in the 1960s and 1970s and thought with it until her death in 2008 it comprises over 3,800 ceramic objects seated shamans Jaguar persons anaconda vessels snuff files so nurse instruments and the like all shamanic attempts to access the vast animistic forest universe of the Ecuadorian Coast and the millenia before the Spanish conquest when I took ayahuasca and yamaguchi I had a striking vision of one of the figures from this collection a seated hammock waka shaman with large blank eyes upon my return to Quito I went into the collection to find this figurine which I didn't I hadn't seen in many years in fact I've been looking for it and then I stumbled across another one that looked just like the shot stopped at a shamans as I saw them in my visions when monatti was in Quito I brought him to see the collection and he took it upon himself to communicate with the spirits of these figures in order to explain to them what we were doing his schedule that day was packed with meetings with government officials in a trip to Peru as we left the museum and were driving to get him to his first meeting he asked me to turn the car around and go to my grandmother's house I was kind of surprised because I thought he was so busy I met had mentioned him earlier that my grandmother had some young Chama bark cloth probably fabricated in the 1960s or 1970s of the kind used traditionally by the sadhus to make clothing and that today is used to make the ceremonial gowns that menotti and others opera leaders wear in political context at the house I found the cloth in a storeroom dusted it off and presented it to mati as a posthumous gift from my grandmother and thanks for his interest in the collection he observed the quality of the cloth and found that comments that was much higher than what is produced today and we mused that perhaps it had been fashioned by his own father and that this was another way in which our pasts form part of a common trajectory one that we could recognize as such if we could just stop long enough to do so I've come to the realization that caring for these rqa archaic pieces might be part of the same political project of capacitating Sylvan thought for the time we call the Anthropocene part of the conceptual challenge of thinking in the Anthropocene is to grasp as deepest Chakrabarti has noted how different temporalities historical geological and perhaps even that of spirits become coeval Menotti first part is a cest with time how it speeds up and slows how he can learn to work it in and Amazonian shamans think deeply with clocks and watches my ayahuasca vision led me to reflect on this in one INT a cosmic time extort flanked by a sea of watch wielding Amazonian shamans which took me to a renewed appreciation of Lisa Stevenson's chapter y2 clocks in her book life beside itself as is a fascination in the 1950s with Inuit coming off the land they would often have timepieces in their tents but they usually would have more than one there are multiple ones this and there's another way of being in time emerged when tank realities are multiplied I feel that learning to listen to these archaic pre-hispanic figures might tell us something about the Anthropocene as a temporal problem accordingly I'm designing a permanent archeological exhibit that would be part of his larger project to listen to listen to and give voice to the generals that emerge from an archaic animal world and it take to look at these as anachronistic guides for a world in ecological crisis this is a collaborative effort involving Menotti and the south animation the conceptual artists Fabiano Cueva critical museum refers architects the sound artists Ruben Silva who is versed in the craft of exploring the Sonos qualities of pre-hispanic artifacts it involves experimental research methods to give voice to these spirits that the pieces conjure and I've been sort of exploring some of this through imagistic techniques a lot through up and drawing as you've seen this is part of my research method and I'm just gonna run through without I'm not going to talk about these I just let these I'm going to run through some images let them wash over you we could we could talk about them afterwards minetti's interpretation of that seemed acceded shaman highlighted the distributed nature of the self the man on top is the father guiding him just as my nanny's deceased father continues to guide Menotti through dreams and visions to understand this figure as part of a lineage to understand its spirit life I tried different things I tried drawing it within attentions as a relationship between the two eyes I have also taken to adopting theater techniques Lisa Stevenson and I have been working on with Colombian refugees it's part of Lisa's project and we brought our colleague Christiana Giordano to Ecuador to work we do theater work with the refugees and I've used some of these to understand imagistic alee some of these figures and to sort of pneumatically understand them and this is at a the set sail spa in paris with bruno latour workshop a few months ago my grandmother's collection like so many private collections in Ecuador of the time is the product of what Katia the informal often violent and manifestly unscientific excavation of pieces by locals with a view of selling them to collectors the standard interpretive context that archeology demands is missing the destruction of archaeological sites by what kadhi is of course highly problematic but this has to be understood as a distant aftershock of the much greater cataclysm of conquest that destroying that destroyed that world that produced these how can something true to that world and ours emerge from those ruins is there a way to allow the beings these figures imagistic aliy represent a mode of expression we might comprehend what might be learn I began to realize that perhaps the the fact that they were free of context might in fact liberate them my grandmother somehow already knew this in fact she practiced something I've taken to calling a sensory archeology which is a form of inquiry that she cultivated that privileges and appreciation of forms patterns and the tactile as legitimate modes of archaeological knowing and it just show this is a from a clip of a movie that Lisa and I made you know the last year of her life just just a sense of her way of interaction tactile me too in its disruptions of the discursive and contextual her particular kind of psychology was psychedelic and and as such it fits with the psychedelic orientation of the figurines which being shamanic are tapping into Sylvan thinking in ways that break the human symbolic logic that creates the systemic structures and meaning that classical archaeology seeks to reconstruct might not a sensory archeology be more appropriate to their mode of being today the last vestige of that force that animistic world that made up the equatorial region of current day Ecuador and that extended into the Aires where these ceramic theaters were produced lies in the Amazon this is where they're still forest and habited by spirits and humans that live in relationship to them what can we learn about those archaic but a potentially living forests by entering the living forest that produced them via and Amazonian portal what might they as generals have to tell us about the conditions necessary for their in our life in order to get at this we got permission from the museum to take the collections fifty of the collections honors instruments to the Amazon in order to try to better listen for the messages they may transmit we played them in the forest by the river in ayahuasca ceremonies we even played them at night such that that they attracted a wild Bush dog which is one of the rarest creatures in the Amazon very few people have seen them in these experiments we tried hard not to bring conventional musical phrasings to the instruments but rather to allow the vast orchestra of Sylvan sounds with which these instruments were participating to think themselves through us these recordings will be part of an exhibit and our question to those who come to immerse themselves in it will be can this open a conduit to a spirit world in a way that can allow us allow you to capacitate Sylvan thinking as part of an ethical orientation for the Anthropocene so I want you to hear a snippet of this and then I have literally a sentence of a conclusion and then and then will be done so I want to show you a sound clip into what this what you're going to see now is the little movie clip that it has the recording what you're going to see is the piece a demo of the recordings that we made in the in sorry I just want to get this right in in the Amazon so you'll hear what you're gonna hear is some forest sounds then you're gonna hear Menotti a shamanic chant which was part of the ritual that a ceremony in which we had the forest and then you're gonna hear the forest instruments come in and the other thing that's interesting is that it's it's overlaying with some video that Lisa shot in the tropical forest in the on the coast the area where these pieces come from and Minotti was with us a few weeks ago and he got really interested in the use of experimental film as a form of doing this not just standard documentary but experimental film is a form of bringing capacitating these images and he edited he chose the edits of which which images to go where and then he had a whole bunch of interesting visions and dreams about these things so I'll just play this for a bit and then I'll conclude so just to conclude I see these three examples as small steps towards cultivating a pet and capacity for our time a kind of Sylvan thinking with the political goal of holding open spaces where such thinking might continue to flourish as its own ethical practice Sylvan thinking would take as a legitimate form of knowing the logic of the image it would cultivate a potential dynamics as causal modalities alter to the pull and push and pull agency of our metaphysics its object would be to hold open the spaces of play from which it continuously emerges and it would operate under the guidance of its own general emergent psychedelic properties which in other words we may call spirit thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music] I unconscious the fact that some of you are probably sitting uncomfortably Eduardo's agreed to take questions but if you need to leave this is a obvious break in the program where where you might do so but otherwise I'll let it were to take some questions I'm sure there are some thanks so much for sitting through a long talk so yeah do feel free to to leave if that's you need to go places or but yeah if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to I'm really interested in a conversation yes reach surrounding people right so my my general take on this is a very complicated question we use the the category of belief a belief is a is a I think is a very modern thing we believe because ultimately we are skeptics so we believe is our overcoming of skepticism and it's a product of skepticism and what I'm interested in this discussion of iconic thinking is to say there's a space before doubt of something which is which is and so that's sort of the place from which I want to start with with these things it's a very complicated question because in some sense you know I felt fairly comfortable in my book how force think that I could speak about these things you know in a through a formal framework that could I could describe many of these things formally through the logic of semiotics and in a way that I think is ultimately quite consistent with what biological science is or should be now I'm in a situation where things are a bit more complicated that doesn't quite some of the things I'm talking about don't I've had experience of them I know them as real and I've tried to show you the various sort of ways in which that's happened to me but they don't fully square with the ways I've been talking about things before and I don't yet have an analytical language for that and yet I don't want to call them belief either this I yeah right the explosion well it's a funny it's a funny thing I mean in some ways I thought it was a great failure of mine in my research so they didn't do this that's quite scared of it and it just didn't work out in the particular place that was in and it's all for the good but the interesting thing is that the the interesting thing is that I don't see these as I don't see this as as my ayahuasca experience is a negation of this I see it as a continuity even though there are tensions and in fact what I find interesting about my work now is that the reason I mean I was kind of hermit like in this book I mean I kind of in my I mean the whole process of doing the research and writing a dissertation and writing this thing and it's only because of that that I am actually of service to people in this more shamanic world they this is why because I can but it's still imperfect I still need to work out the framework isn't right thank you thank you thank you yes is you have a question you mentioned something about something about these techniques is being it seems like they're so richly context-dependent so brightening yet with the material realities of the forests right and the cultures that have developed in relationship to the poorest but so it's curious to know like is there only image silver logic instead of context neutral is it like require a literal material forest for this kind of thinking to be an active that's a great one yeah I mean just the last thing is like if not then what would that mean application to my RM context so I think you know one of the things I thought a lot about in my book and I'm still think about is this question of what context is so I think what happens is that we often when we think about context we sneak in a kind of linguistic or symbolic or human assumptions what context is in context for us is about historically contingent sometimes arbitrary conventional systems that have form the conditions of possibility for something so that's what a culture context is or historical context is um the thing that's interesting for me about iconic and indexical forms of representation is that they don't rely on that kind of context so for example the word support you don't need to know teach what to understand super well that it's context-free in that sense that it's not context-free in another in another sense if you haven't been in a world in which objects make contact with and penetrate water the way they do with the kind of gravity that we have here on this planet you're not going to get it right so you need that kind of a context but I don't have the right word for it but those are two different things right so that's one general thing so Sylvan thinking insofar as it's about it's a call to recognize the iconic and indexical as forms of legitimate forms of thought that grounds thought on that is context in the symbolic sense freak and the call for that is free now how things like spirits travel that's a much more complicated question and I think what's so interesting about shamanism in general is that it's highly it's great shamans are constantly breaking the cultural context they don't have them you know they're taking things from everywhere they're doing all sorts of things and I think that there is some sort of travel there I mean but how much what kinds of context do spirit life is what kinds of Holy's do they require the only thing I'm sure that is not a symbolic context the way we know it in in social theory and but it is some sort of context yes what are the methods by which any of us can cultivate and my particular focus is how can you know a very highly wrote the applications facilitating the development so been thinking and as I was just thinking about that question it suddenly occurred to me and I don't know there's it's not the case like everything else is connected it's not the case that symbolic languages necessarily totally do disconnected from indexical I'm thinking but nonetheless it does seem a kind of backwards way you know I mean a much better way would be to be born here and to be raised in this forest in the academy being a very analytical book and that really helped well the thing I mean the thing about the wave I mean my claim about semiotic suppose a person very deacon way is that symbolic thought I mean the the ontological reality of symbolic thought is that it is always grounded in something larger right the way that you makes you know if you made sense of something in this talk if it stayed at the level of symbols of men that you didn't understand it when you get it that getting any kind of thing is it is an icon ultimately in a seminar when we share and idea together and get it we are we're we're a we're one one person that sense of sharing is is it is is there in any kind of symbolic communication that works right the problem with tomography reason that doesn't work is that you know you can end up in a world you get lost in in that in in that stuff and never get down to the image so that is a claim about the general properties of these things and sometimes it makes sense to get certain things straight to figure out you know what were the metaphysical mistakes that we made to do all this complicated stuff but ultimately it's going to have to cash out an image and do you in your vote do you explain how process of that cash now yeah yeah I go through that I run through how that in a very technical hey yeah I mean it's a it's a description but it happens you know and I think good you know good teachers and I still struggle to do this but a good teacher you can see how they can do this how can you tell a big story in a picture and how that picture also be a Packard I've got lucky in my IRA didn't like this a title how horse think and I got lucky I got to keep it but that's an image right so pictured it actually unpacked with this little thing yes this approach and still think yeah I think you know I think self is a super important that there's definitely a self there's lots of cells the question is I think that's part of what it is to be a growing self is to have been a situation where you can disrupt a cell sense of constantly excels that become stultified itself to no longer cells it's a weird kind of I mean I think of it a lot in my own life in terms of sort of you know when I get depressed what's the depression it's just a constant for me I mean every iteration it's not a breaking up of my myself and I think that's actually why is something like psychedelics are so useful and as antidepressants because they actually remove yourself you get it for a moment and of course then you can very easily fall into your habits but you kind of fur fur or you actually it breaks down but then reconfigures I think the selves are real I just think they're also open they have a kind of and they're not necessarily to be found it just found it to an individual and I think spirits have some kind of self like quality what's that I still have yeah yeah yeah yes first to comment and then curiosity you know from the classical archaeological point of view your use of the terms of diplomacy is really interesting because this term is so long been thought as a kind of state centric proto bureaucratic genre writing letters and reports between states and but my I'm really struck by your presentation and you did a wonderful job and all the extra textual I chronic and sensory dynamics at play which I think do a lovely job of suggesting some ways of some practicable and teachable ways of communicating what you mean by Sylvan thinking but I'm particularly interested in both the content and the form and the genre and context and Austin Ian sense of the reports that you helped write this climate summit yeah and I was wondering do you talk a little bit more about what goes into the kind of translation and in text realization of Sylvan thought visa be a global summit of states and just to kind of throw this out there to be provocative might we call this a kind of Sylvan writing Thursday and if so how would you think of that kind of writing in relation to something like yeah so I mean the first thing regarding the term diplomacy like several of the terms in my talk I'm not so sure about that term for the very reasons you've use that means something that I've got from the tour and which were often using this kind of very status sort of ideas I'm not sure that I want to use the images of warfare and diplomacy so I've been using it now but I'm not sure that in terms of the the reports the report that they presented at the meeting I didn't go to the meeting but my sense is that these were often presented in you know they weren't in the negotiations some fairly important para Paris parasites the the one one thing that was super excitement emerge from that meeting so the document itself is a short two or three page document that lays out this vision of what they call Kazakhstan chat and that particular document was the product of many been several drafts have been have been written by people in the community and then they called me in to sort of get it to a forum and and organize it and introduce you know some words that would you know appropriately translate things based on this super exciting sort of almost like this seminar where we were just sort of throwing around ideas criticizing really super exciting and this kind of thinking in that particular community continues the the document for the sockos is different I wrote it myself in a sense that I it was I'm the only person who did the writing but it was really an attempt to channel what what what what we were what we were what I was hearing I was trying to I don't know if it's Sylvan writing it is in the same sense ultimately in the sense of can you take a whole bunch can you can you use writing in a way that brings out that transmits images ultimately all good writing should even technical things but poetry obviously does this well but also we know much more technical thank you yes more question so yeah question about the large-scale political potential in terms of bringing about radical to me this seems like a a model way to sort of get the bit maybe I'm misunderstanding into western rations and scientific rations so I'm wondering do you have any vision for that and what like that what what might that mean because I there's a sense of you know I mean as you're presenting you get a sense of some form of nostalgia that I'm not sure but is are we in any way discounting the things that have that that Western rationalism has made possible my scientific thinking and Western rationalism so I'm really wondering how is there if this is a cultural politic is there way that the two can be combined and is there a way that the way that the market is working now consumerism doesn't heat this in some way that this isn't just a form of escapism that we take our our drugs and we have our psychedelic experiences and then we come back to our academic personas and our our Western rationale is their deep cultural yeah changed you really objective I mean I think you're bringing up a lot of things I think that there's a huge danger in what I'm doing and I can sense by the sort of interest I having these things like both psychedelics there is a sense that this is a easy kind of fix right that you can that you can and of course we've gone through this before I mean there have been already there have had at least one psychedelic revolution started right here right sadly yeah so so I think there's a huge danger this [Laughter] [Music] yeah so I think it's very dangerous what I'm doing and I think that I'm trying to you know dangers not like I'm not being heroic and and I think is it's it's a very difficult thing but also I also think thinking about the psychedelics is that I mean what's interesting about it for me is that yeah I mean it it gives you a certain sense of possibilities that you can actually act on but the acting is going to be the real hard work of acting on it um but yes please follow up because I want to just I'm just casing is there a way to do it by reading I mean in a way it's a shift of the area right so if we look at how cosmology shift over time right we're shifting of human narrative scientific rationalism is a cosmology so I mean I think is absolutely fascinating but I wonder is there a way to generalize what you're doing so I mean this is very individualized it's very much about bringing in these these experiences at the shamanistic experiences that could open things up to yourself so is there a way that we could generalize these things that we can start culturally as a collective rewriting their narratives that in a way that brought about some of these more spiritual in my modern aspects but in a way that kept what's positive about you know what's happened over the last I mean I think clearly you know first of all I think this one thing that was trying to make clear but what monatti was trying to say in terms of my own self it's like you're not gonna if you want it you can't just jump into some sort of other nests to do this you have to actually find how this is already in you so it's not about going to the Amazon and going to them indigenous people and looking for this solution in that so it's about finding these things and that's why this idea the icon is so important but the date the hard thing about that is it does have to be individual and personal because that's how icons work and of course icons are a double-edged sword I mean you know a master I talked about Trump's thoughtlessness but also he's a master of iconic thinking I mean this is serious spirit movement he's doing and it works so you know all kinds of this is used a lot and marketing uses it so it's not like icons is just gonna you know iconicity and my niece is going to just answer stuff but working learning somehow how to work with it is [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

Views: 5,666

Rating: 4.9322033 out of 5

Keywords: forests, anthropocene, diplomacy, ecology, forests think, sylvan, Eduardo Kohn

Id: 87yJKnVSd0k

Length: 84min 3sec (5043 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2017