Where does the belief that human beings are destined to rule over the natural world have its roots?

Glossary

Animism

Belief in spiritual beings. The term is associated with the anthropology of E. B. Tylor, who described the origin of religion and primitive beliefs in terms of animism in Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor considered animism a minimum definition of religion and asserted that all religions, from the simplest to the most complex, involve some form of animism. From Latin anima, ‘breath’ or ‘soul’.

The diversity of life in any of its manifestations, biological and cultural, which are interrelated (and likely coevolved) within a complex social–ecological adaptive system.

Codes that exert a palpable influence on human behavior. Embedded in worldviews, ethics provide models to emulate, goals to strive for, and norms by which to evaluate actual behavior.

Belief in the unity of the Godhead, or in one God, as opposed to pantheism and polytheism. Monotheism is a firm tenet of Islam and Judaism. Christianity, with its concept of Trinity, alone among the three monotheistic religions, dilutes monotheism. From Greek mono, ‘one’, and Greek theos, ‘god’.

The doctrine that identifies the universe with God. In Western thought, the term is associated with the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. His view represents an important criticism of the ‘orthodox’ view of a god whose reality is somehow external to the reality of the world. From Greek pan, ‘all’, and Greek theos, ‘god’.

Human recognition of superhuman controlling power, and especially of a personal God or gods entitled to obedience and worship; the effect of such recognition on conduct or mental attitude.

Areas of land and water having special spiritual significance to people and communities.

To hold something in trust for another, as in the Biblical (human) responsibility for husbanding God's gifts. In the present context, examples include Australian aboriginal ‘looking after country’, Andean Quechua ‘caring for Mother Earth’, and Canadian Ojibwa ‘keeping the land’.

A cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment. It is a subset of indigenous knowledge, which is local knowledge held by indigenous people or local knowledge unique to a given culture or society.

Groups in which knowledge, practice, and belief are handed down through generations largely by cultural transmission. Tradition itself evolves by adaptive processes, but not all tradition is necessarily adaptive.

The larger conceptual complex in which ethics are embedded. A.N. Whitehead called it the conceptual order, or one's general way of conceiving the universe, which supplies the concepts by which one's observations of nature are invariably interpreted. In general, worldviews limit and inspire human behavior, shape observations, and perceptions. Arnold Toynbee's Weltanschauung.

Religion and Worldview

Shamans and shamanism are probably the most evocative symbols of circumpolar religion and worldview (see Shamanism). There is no doubt that – until recently – most Arctic communities had religious functionaries who were able to communicate with and to ‘master’ spirits. These ‘shamans’ were engaged in healing and other activities aimed at improving communal and individual well-being. In the small-scale societies under consideration here, these functionaries held extremely important social positions, which sometimes led to an abuse of power. However, the notion of ‘shamanism’ can easily be misconstrued as a unified system of beliefs, which it never was in the Arctic. Instead, in addition to a limited number of common elements, circumpolar shamanisms show profound differences in the belief systems with which they are associated. Especially in northern Eurasia, elements of worldviews associated with highly organized religions (such as Buddhism or Christianity) found their way into localized forms of shamanism long before the direct impacts of colonialism.

Animism – the belief that all natural phenomena, including human beings, animals, and plants, but also rocks, lakes, mountains, weather, and so on, share one vital quality – the soul or spirit that energizes them – is at the core of most Arctic belief systems. This means that humans are not the only ones capable of independent action; an innocuous-looking pond, for example, is just as capable of rising up to kill an unsuspecting person as is a human enemy. Another fundamental principle of Arctic religious life is the concept of humans being endowed with multiple souls. The notion that at least one soul must be ‘free’ to leave the human body is basic to the shaman's ability to communicate with the spirits.

Since the killing and consumption of animals provides the basic sustenance of circumpolar communities, ritual care taking of animal souls is of utmost importance. Throughout the North, rituals in which animal souls are ‘returned’ to their spirit masters are widespread, thus ensuring the spiritual cycle of life. While most prey animals receive some form of ritual attention, there is significant variation in the elaboration of these ceremonies. One animal particularly revered throughout the North is the bear (both brown and black), as has been demonstrated by Hallowell (1926) in his classic comparative study of ‘bear ceremonialism.’ A recent phenomenological study of the spiritual dangers of hunting among the Siberian Yukaghirs was provided by Willerslev (2007).

The ontologies and cosmologies of the circumpolar north are not unique. Many elements of animistic and shamanic worldviews are widespread among hunter-gatherers anywhere. Similarities among the ontologies of American Indian and Siberian peoples might also have historical foundations, since the peopling of the Americas is thought to have happened through northeastern Asia. Recently, a volume devoted to exploring the similarities and differences between notions of nonhuman personhood in Siberia and Amazonia has conceptually and geographically extended the notion of Arctic animism (Brightman et al., 2012).

By the twentieth century, hardly any Arctic community had not yet felt the impact of Christian missionary activity. However, there is considerable variation as to when these activities commenced: Christianity reached the Arctic areas of Europe almost 1000 years ago, while the indigenous inhabitants of the Chukchi Peninsula (Russia) had little first-hand experience of Christianity before the 1990s. Generally speaking, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mark the major periods of religious conversion in the Arctic. Although no other major world religion has significantly impacted the North, the spectrum of Christian denominations represented in the Arctic is considerable. There is also considerable variation in how ‘nativized’ the individual churches have become. A good example for the latter, the indigenization of Christianity, are the developments in the southern parts of Alaska after the sale of Russian America to the United States in 1867. These regions – inhabited primarily by Aleut, Alutiiq, Eyak, and Tlingit people, as well as by some Denaina and Yupik groups – came under Russian cultural and religious influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While this initial spread of Russian Orthodox Christianity is not different from colonial processes elsewhere on the globe, the persistence of the faith after the end of Russia's colonial rule deserves attention and explanation. Such explanations include references to the specifics of the Orthodox religion (e.g., Mousalimas, 1995), to analogies between indigenous and Russian religious concepts (e.g., Csoba DeHass, 2009), as well as to the identity politics of the early US period of Alaska (e.g., Kan, 1999).

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have experienced renewed missionary activities by ‘new’ churches throughout the Arctic. A particular focus of missionary activity has been the Russian Arctic, which has been viewed by outside (evangelical) churches as a kind of religious terra nullius after 70 years of state atheism.

The Environment

Humanism enters into environmental ethics through the question of whether nonhuman natural entities have rights and/or a ‘voice’ that should be represented or heard equally with those of human beings. It cannot be claimed that humanistic thought of the Renaissance originated the idea of human beings as ‘superior’ to other natural entities. Only in animistic religion, or animism, are all natural entities endowed with a language that enables them to interact with human beings on an equal or even superior footing. Such natural entities include not only nonhuman animals but also rocks, trees, rivers, and so on. Human beings as the apex of the natural hierarchy is an idea dating back, within Judeo-Christian thought, at least as far as the book of Genesis. Medieval European thought, centering on God, tended to see the created world as existing only to reveal God’s purposes to human beings, and ‘reading God’s book’ of nature was a common metaphor. However, Renaissance thought, in moving the emphasis to human rather than divine purposes, did not change the subordinate place of other natural entities.

Accretions to humanism after the Renaissance were particularly effective in confirming nonhuman natural entities in the status of ‘thing.’ Descartes identified reason as the very source of existence, and (himself an experimenter upon animals) he denied that the cries of ‘nonreasoning’ animals could even signify pain. Following Descartes came a tradition of scientific experiment up until the present in which the human being is the controlling ‘subject’ and other natural entities are the acted-upon ‘objects.’ The explicit goal of much experimentation and observation has been technological: the manipulation and control of the nonhuman world and its entities for the well-being and profit of humankind. Although Karl Marx stressed human beings as a part of nature, Capital clearly established nonhuman ‘nature’ as destined to become ‘one of the organs of human activity,’ annexed to our own bodily organs. Marx’s follower George Lukas expressed a similar thought by saying, in History and Class Consciousness, that “nature is a societal category.”

Most recently, some environmentalists (‘social ecologists’) have defended the unique position of human beings within nature, based on the claimed ability of human beings to determine their own evolutionary direction. This position stresses the importance of human reasoning power both to defend the rights of all natural entities and to devise balanced environmental outcomes. A concern is that human beings, especially the poor and persons of color, suffer from adverse health and economic effects when too much stress is laid on the preservation of nonhuman nature. Both scientists within the bourgeois capitalist world and utopian Marxians, then, have found compelling reasons to view the nonhuman world as limited in its rights and purposes independent of human ones.

3.3 Religion and Worldview

Shamans and shamanism are probably the most evocative symbols of circumpolar religion and worldview (see Shamanism). There is no doubt that—until recently—most Arctic communities had religious functionaries who were able to communicate with and to ‘master’ spirits. These ‘shamans’ were engaged in healing and other activities aimed at improving communal and individual well-being. In the small-scale societies under consideration here, these functionaries held extremely important social positions, which sometimes led to an abuse of power. However, the notion of ‘shamanism’ can easily be misconstrued as a unified system of beliefs, which it never was in the Arctic. Instead, in addition to a limited number of common elements, circumpolar shamanisms show profound differences in the belief systems with which they are associated. Especially in northern Eurasia, elements of worldviews associated with highly organized religions (such as Buddhism or Christianity) found their way into localized forms of shamanism long before the direct impacts of colonialism.

Animism—the belief that all natural phenomena, including human beings, animals, and plants, but also rocks, lakes, mountains, weather, and so on, share one vital quality—the soul or spirit that energizes them—is at the core of most Arctic belief systems. This means that humans are not the only ones capable of independent action; an innocuous-looking pond, for example, is just as capable of rising up to kill an unsuspecting person as is a human enemy. Another fundamental principle of Arctic religious life is the concept of humans being endowed with multiple souls. The notion that at least one soul must be ‘free’ to leave the human body is basic to the shaman's ability to communicate with the spirits.

Since the killing and consumption of animals provides the basic sustenance of circumpolar communities, ritual care-taking of animal souls is of utmost importance. Throughout the North, rituals in which animal souls are ‘returned’ to their spirit masters are widespread, thus ensuring the spiritual cycle of life. While most prey animals receive some form of ritual attention, there is significant variation in the elaboration of these ceremonies. One animal particularly revered throughout the North is the bear (both brown and black), as has been demonstrated by Hallowell (1926) in his classic comparative study of ‘bear ceremonialism.’

By the twentieth century, hardly any Arctic community had not yet felt the impact of Christian missionary activity. However, there is considerable variation as to when these activities commenced: Christianity reached the Arctic areas of Europe almost 1,000 years ago, while the indigenous inhabitants of the Chukchi Peninsula (Russia) had little first-hand experience of Christianity before the 1990s. Generally speaking, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mark the major periods of religious conversion in the Arctic. Although no other major world religion has significantly impacted the North, the spectrum of Christian denominations represented in the Arctic is considerable. There is also considerable variation in how ‘nativized’ the individual churches have become.

21.3.3 The Strategic Use of Religious Symbols: The Wearing of the Veil

In the above discussion, we have focused attention on the endogenous choice of a particular type of religion by people who pursue certain objectives. Such an approach implies that people’s religious beliefs do not necessarily respond to purely emotional drives, but may be grounded in rational, selfish calculations. This is especially true of those who choose to convert into a new religion or to abandon animism for a monotheistic faith. In the same line, in some recent literature, both economic and sociological, we find the idea that people may rationally choose to display religious symbols pertaining to a given religion regardless of the true nature of their deep beliefs. Thus, educated and urbanized women wearing the Islamic veil may do so as a manner of escaping traditional norms that control their physical movements outside the family space. By manifesting their belief in a pure Islam, they claim the right to relate directly to God, so as to be dispensed with the need to follow repressive rules enforced by men in the name of Islam and thereby obtain access to public life: the wearing of the veil is ‘the sign of submission to God and not to men’ (Boubekeur, 2004, p. 151; see also Adelkhah, 1991; Göle, 1993). The very fact that the veil allows them to conceal more fully their body provides an astute rebuttal of the argument according to which women’s free movements in the outside space threaten the honor of the whole family. Carvalho (2013) offers us a slightly different argument that he elaborates theoretically: according to him, veiling is a commitment mechanism that Muslim women use to limit temptation to deviate from religious norms of behavior. The intuition is as follows. Women, particularly educated women with an urban, middle-class background, are eager to seize new economic opportunities available outside their own community. However, responding to these opportunities involves exposure to environments in which liberal mores and opportunities for religiously prohibited behavior prevail. This is a problem inasmuch as it may cause social disapproval within the women’s community. In order to avoid paying this social price of economic integration, women therefore opt for veiling, which is a costly commitment mechanism that reduces temptation to engage in religiously prohibited behavior. In other words, veiling is a protection that automatically guards women against the risk of indulging into improper behavior, such as getting mixed up in the alien (Western) culture.10 When veiling is thus conceived as a strategy for integration that allows women to seize outside economic opportunities while preserving their reputation within the community or protecting the honor of their family, we become able to explain why the spread of (private) religious values have gained (public) expression through increasing veiling, not only among religious types, but also through increased pressure on secular types to veil. It is interesting to observe, in this respect, that in many countries the new veiling movement appears to have originated among urban, educated, middle-class women who work outside the home, that many veiled women are not members of a religious group, and that veiling does not seem to limit the time women spend on secular activities (Carvalho, 2013).

There exist other rationalistic accounts of veiling, yet they do not purport to explain the recent spread of the phenomenon, whether in the Middle East and Asia (e.g. Indonesia) or among the Muslim communities residing in Europe and North America. For example, a well-known explanation of the wearing of the veil is that it serves as a signaling device whereby a woman (possibly at the behest of her husband) manifests that she belongs to a rather high social class that dispenses her with the necessity to work. Barfield (2010, p. 202) explicitly refers to this motive in order to explain why the use of the full veil has become more widespread in the Afghan countryside during the recent decades. According to him, indeed, the veil is a social marker adopted by rural women because it had previously been a practice followed only by the urban upper class, whose women did not need to work.

This argument of the use of veiling as a mechanism to overcome information asymmetries is also related to some earlier work, in different contexts, in particular by Iannaccone (1992) and Berman (2000). Iannaccone (1992) poses the question why many religions and sects require its members to undertake rituals that involve substantial sacrifice. He argues that this has little to do with subjective belief, forced indoctrination, or irrationality. The fact these sacrifices seem aimed at destroying valuable resources is crucial: for the author, this can be reconciled with the observed continuing success of groups with such behavioral requirements and seemingly inefficient prohibitions. The explanation is as follows: religion is a club good that displays positive returns to ‘participatory crowding’. The collective character of religious activity implies a free-rider problem that is difficult to overcome by monitoring. However, the free-rider problem can be mitigated by the costly rituals that serve to screen out people whose participation would otherwise be low, while at the same time increasing participation among those who do join. As a consequence, the utility of group members can increase when apparently unproductive sacrifices are required. Berman (2000) uses a similar screening argument to explain why the Israeli ultra-Orthodox men who choose to study full-time in a yeshiva until age 40 choose yeshiva over work (and remain poor). He argues that yeshiva attendance signals commitment to the community, which provides mutual insurance to members. One consequence of the prohibitions is that while they strengthen communities by effectively taxing real wages, they also induce high fertility. The novelty of this paper with respect to Iannaccone’s argument is that it shows how a conventional rational choice model, augmented with social interactions and excludability, produces extremely large behavioral responses to interventions.

In a recent contribution, Levy and Razin 2012a analyze the relation between religious beliefs, religious participation, and social cooperation. They focus on religions that instill beliefs about the connection between rewards and punishments and social behavior. The paper asserts that religious organizations arise endogenously, analyze their effect on social interactions in society, and identify a spiritual as well as a material payoff for being religious. The main finding is that religious groups that are more demanding in their rituals are smaller, more cohesive, and are composed of individuals whose beliefs are more extreme.

In another paper, Levy and Razin (2012b) compare ritual-based religions to discipline-based ones, again exploiting the idea of religiosity as a social signal of cooperative behavior in religious organizations. The model embeds a ritual-based religious organization in which signaling arises through the use of costly rituals and a discipline-based religious organization in which such signaling occurs through the monitoring of past behavior. The authors show that ritual-based religions, while using a costly and wasteful signal, also imply a higher level of coordination of behavior in social interactions and a higher incidence of mutual cooperation. The normative analysis in the paper suggests that communities are more likely to support a switch to a discipline-based religion if strategic complementarities are high and if there is a sufficiently high level of public information about social behavior. This accords with the success of Calvin’s Reformation in Switzerland and France – a process characterized by the reduction of rituals along with the creation of institutions to monitor and publicize individuals’ behavior, such as the Consistory.

10.10.2 The Diversity of the World's Religions

A chapter on the proper appreciation of religion as a powerful diversity variable ought to contain a terse summary of the major religions and their major distinctives, but such a summary would fill an entire chapter itself and do an injustice to the exquisitely complex realities of the religious faiths. Instead an attempt will be made to mention some of the most important dimensions on which religions vary.

Several caveats are in order. First, it should be noted that there is the need for humility in attempting to understand different religions; few people are experts in the world religions and all their variants (for orienting surveys, see Nielsen; 1993; Noss & Noss, 1993; Smart, 1989), and even less can people truly be appreciative supporters of all religions equally. There should be a readiness to acknowledge the limits of knowledge, and of the limited attitudinal flexibility which can be mustered in confronting beliefs that are different. Of particular danger to psychologists is the temptation to confuse their personal synthesis of religions, often via some sort of psychological functional analysis, with a genuine appreciation of all religions. Such a synthesis is necessarily a variant on religious belief itself and hence in tension with other religious beliefs; for example, an analysis of all religions as “particularistic cognitive renderings of the universal human pursuit of transcendent purpose, the ethical good, and of community” is a competing definition of, rather than an apt summary of, any particular religion.

Second, often there is greater diversity within religious categorizations than across them. For example, conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants have, on many dimensions, more in common than liberal and conservative Protestants. Hence, some very diverse religious groups are able to build remarkable consensus on certain foundational issues.

There have been many attempts to do what amounts to a conceptual factor analysis of religion, with varying outcomes (there have been empirical attempts as well; see Gorsuch, 1984). This chapter draws on the work of Glock (1962), Smart (1989), and others and discusses the multidimensionality of the religions in terms of their cognitive dimension (religious beliefs), ritualistic and symbolic dimension (religious practice), moral dimension (religious action), institutional dimension (religious organization), community and lifestyle dimension (religious community), and experiential dimension (religious feelings).

Myth and Landscape

The relevance of myth in social regulation, which has come to the attention of geographers over the last few years, leads us to appraise the territorial process of the Gourmantché people with regard to the sacredness of the cliff. Research has extensively shown that in the construction of territory, as well as in the attribution of meaning to the environment, these African people see spirituality as both the moral and the logical foundation of life and of social reproduction.29 The principles used to sanction the natural order derive from the values society has retained in its own metaphysical “safe.” These are conveyed by myth, a narration that translates such principles into norms whereby communal life and its actions are ensured, above all in the construction of territory.

It is here impossible for us to consider adequately all the manifestations of the Gourmantché territorial process. We can, however, dwell on the persistence and the centrality of myth as a narrative model among those people. On a descriptive level, myth informs the principles and on a normative level it prescribes the rules whereby the territorial process must be fulfilled. With regard to the former, myth intimates the presence of a supernatural entity that made the settlement possible. And about the latter, myth ensures the legitimacy of territorial action in accordance with that supernatural link. It should be recalled that, in myth-based societies, the relation established with the world is the very expression of the relationship society has with the deity. One is not allowed to do as one wishes with the land or on the land. There must be, instead, an ongoing process of transformation compatible with the representational system used by myth. Consequently, territorial action takes on a sort of double meaning: on the one hand it is a sign of divine goodwill granting its fulfillment; on the other it is an invitation to act responsibly and in harmony with nature. For myth is based on the fact that a given geographic layout carries an intrinsic property: it is a frame for human action which fully exercises its autonomy by observing and interpreting divine will. As such, myth ensures the transition from a mythical to a historical universe. And the territorialization process marks the shift from a grateful acknowledgment of divine munificence to an ethical view of human responsibility towards nature. Ultimately, being the lawful inhabitant of a place does not depend merely on the original pact sealed with the gods but from human action performed in accordance with divine will.30

Clearly, ‘’African animism” goes well beyond the manifestation of a “naïve” acknowledgement of nature as endowed with a soul.31 Rather, it appears as an elaborate tool for grasping reality and, therefore, a tool of rationalization and knowledge offered to the entire social group. Hence individuals are not left on their own to cope with the risk of failures, but helped by the whole society, which takes on such risk and avoids failure by constantly relying on tradition, a true social grammar for translating myth into history. A very elaborate set of knowledge ensures the functioning and reproduction of the community and minimizes the risk of error. It does so by adopting a social structure anchored to the genealogy of lineage and, therefore, to the ancestors/founders of the village and, through them, to the elderly specialists of the word, the guardians of sites of worship and the technicians of the sacred (prophets, visionaries, foretellers, etc.). The seniority principle is thus the cornerstone whereby myth is passed down in order to maintain society within the cosmic order, to form social relationships and, ultimately, to hypostatize the power relations that ensure its functioning.

Along the same principle, even the cliff is seen as a sign of myth and its natural meaning is transferred from a denotative level to a cultural, connotative level through the meaning that is sedimented in its name. Those who activate the topomorphosis process mentioned earlier, which turns natural space into a source of social legitimization, promote such process of sedimentation: established norms, inspired words, decisions taken at a given site take on the characteristics of the sacred through a mythical narrative. Ultimately, topomorphosis comes across as a powerful ally to myth seen as a construct of the tradition that topomorphosis upholds. As such, topomorphosis perpetuates the setup and the political hierarchy of a given society.

To recover the social meaning of the cliff landscape is thus to consider the ways in which its mythical value, the foundation of Gourmantché territoriality, is represented. In effect, we repeatedly stated that the relationship between territory and landscape obtains at the level of communication. Territory is the outcome of a process of spatial transformation, brought forth by a social agent and rooted in multiple actions that are not always made manifest visibly. Landscape, on the other hand, is the empirical manifestation that an observer conveys through representation.32 Landscape is closely related to the presence of an observer, on which element we need to dwell (Fig. 5.3).

The elaboration and communication of the landscape concept may be in the form of an articulate and conscious activity or, conversely and more generally, in the form of practical knowledge, a sort of understanding shared by those who partake in a given cultural system. Be this as it may, such understanding is the source of an awareness of landscape. As a cultural asset, territory ultimately becomes a value in its landscape form via the intervention of the observer, who consciously interprets it. We stated it before: the action of the observer is cooperative. It does not convey merely what the eye records, but reconfigures perceptive data according to his or her values, performing an intellectual process. This is indeed an identity narrative, in which the set of values, meanings, knowledge and interpretations refer to three semantic levels (present, past, future) which show landscape as endowed with anthropological value, historical heritage and propensities for future planning. Landscape then conveys the values of territory by casting them as a cultural whole, as heritage able to preserve and communicate the identity of the community that inhabits the place. It should therefore be clear that landscape, as the result of a communicative act, comes from a specific set of skills and values, both physical and metaphysical, which are typical of a given society (Fig. 5.4).

Landscape and Gourmantché Culture

In this sense, Gobnangou is a powerful identitarian factor which may be read on two levels: 1) that of external cohesion, since the cliff is taken as the distinctive feature of the ethnic group one belongs to across the Gulmu; 2) that of internal distinction, since the cliff recalls the foundation myth and identifies each single village which is granted partial use of the cliff’s side for its symbolic practices. To be more exact, each village holds an exclusive relationship to the cliff, which at the same time helps to consolidate the wider network of relations across the whole Gobnangou area. The interpretation of belonging, unequivocal and binding, takes shape among the inhabitants across a wide gamut of local nuances. So the social role of belonging is elevated to a transcalar dimension. To each village, the cliff provides the grounding that supports development by tuning it to the pressures of modernity. At the same time, each village is anchored to the origins and its belonging to the réseau of tradition is confirmed.33 At the regional level, Gobnangou holds a sacral meaning somewhat related and yet distinct from the one recognized to Pagou, a small hill nearby invested with a powerful mystical aura (Fig. 5.5). Pagou, whose name (honor and you shall obtain what you seek) evokes the expectations ascribed to it by the Gourmantché throughout West Africa, plays a different role from the cliff: it is the elective site of the ultimate sense of sacredness, a source of inspiration and solution to the difficulties that individuals must face in their existence. Conversely, the sacredness of Gobnangou refers to the founding myths and to the regulation of the relationship with the Earth and, therefore, it is the environmental model one must refer to in the exercise of one’s autonomy towards the World. We should recall that identity discourse responds to a dual model: environmental or social. By referring to such a model, we can understand in which contexts and by what procedures the sense of belonging evolves and consolidates, and especially from what values it derives.34 In the case of the cliff, it is clear that it emanates from the natural values expressed by territoriality: the set of cultural aspects which, by shaping behavior, establish the social backdrop of the sacral relationship with nature and with it the right to inhabit the place.

Figure 5.5. The Pagou sacred site. (See a color reproduction at the address: booksite.elsevier.com/9780128035092.)

We may recall that Gobnangou marks the place where the spirits of nature reside. The cliff’s vegetation and its steep walls allow for several iconemes in the form of obulo, or sacred sites: Utanfalu (the mysterious cave), Pundougou (the fall used in initiation rites), Tanfoldjaga (the place for the endowing of mystical powers), Aguanda (the rock hidden by vegetation), Kuoli (the stone struck during sacrificial rites). The cliff is the site of myth and ritual par excellence. Few are the privileged ones who are entitled access to it. Although the cliff is plainly visible to everyone, only a few elect may access its secret meaning: the village authorities, those who wield religious power (perkiamo and/or parkiamo) or political power (bado and/or nikpélo), who are entitled to maintain an ongoing relationship and to draw advice for human action.35 These are the places that were revealed to the nikpélo by the divinity of nature through an incarnation in animal form or the appearance of signs which, deciphered by the geomancer (tambipwaba), indicate the ideal place for the foundation of the new settlement. In this way, the cliff attests and affirms the social status of the villages that lie at its feet, perpetuating the tradition and loyalty to the values on which Gourmantché society is based.

The symbolic role of Gobnangou is traceable even in territorial actions that followed the founding of the villages: the presence of cultivated fields crossed by the network of paths that ensure access to the various settlements is the outcome of a territorial action that sets the populated area apart from the one left in its original state. In fact, while routes of communication twist along the foot of the cliff, its slopes are characterized by signs of nature: only a few paths venture through vegetation, giving access to the few villages located on the top or in the south through narrow gorges such as Utanfolbu. The founding legend holds that the latter was discovered by a hunter, who is invested with divine powers in the exercise of his activity (Fig. 5.6).

Figure 5.6. The Utanfolbu Gorge. (See a color reproduction at the address: booksite.elsevier.com/9780128035092.)

Gobnangou also communicates a wide range of performative information derived from safeguarded knowledge, which people carefully hand down from generation to generation. So the cliff tells us of the relationship established with the villages over time: as well as determining their ideal conditions of settlement, it played the role of a retreat and hideout during internecine warfare. The protection guaranteed by the metaphysical presences of nature was enhanced through artifacts such as Sapiakpéli (ancient defense stronghold) or Soguilafoli (archaic barns in the rock with the function of hiding people and/or things) (Fig. 5.7). The cliff tells of future villages, because Gobnangou also means “reserve of land.” To villagers, it offers fertile areas on its top, only partially tilled, and ready to stem ever-higher demographic pressure.

Figure 5.7. The ancient Soguilafoli grain silos. (See a color reproduction at the address: booksite.elsevier.com/9780128035092.)

In short, the Gourmantché culture managed to produce a seamless transition from myth to history through the prism of territoriality, which reflects a real culture of activity. It is a political culture, deeply integrated with spirituality, which sets the geographic conditions for physical existence and the legitimization of identity.

3.3 Kol tribe

The Kol Tribe inhabits the central region of India, primarily in the states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.33 These groups, particularly in Madhya Pradesh, are primarily a landless community and work as agricultural labourers. They worship a mix of Hinduism and traditional animism. In the past, Kol women have had a tattoo of rose flower or female fairy figures on their right arm. Also, women have other floral pattern tattoos on the calf above the ankle. Additionally, tattoos can be found along the front side of upper arms, specific dot and plus-shaped patterns.34 However, it must be noted that this practice largely has been abandoned by recent generations.34

Do the vitalism tasks make on-line EF demands?

The viability of the expression alone hypothesis depends upon showing that deploying one's conceptual knowledge of biology, while being questioned about that very knowledge, does in fact draw on EF resources. If so, typical adults' (perhaps even biology professors') judgments should be impaired under conditions that do not allow them to deploy the effortful and slow EFs. Goldberg and Thompson-Schill (2009) administered the Animism interview to college undergraduates in a speeded presentation. Under these conditions, college students make the same errors that young children make under non-speeded conditions, attributing life to inanimate objects associated with activity and movement, and denying life to plants. Although biology professors make no errors, their response times reflect this same pattern; they are slower to say a tree is alive than to say a dog is alive and they are slower to say the sun is not alive than to say a table is not alive. These data are consistent with the conclusion that the vitalist pattern of judgments requires inhibition of the responses that would be generated by the developmentally prior agency theory (see also Shtulman & Valcarel, 2012).

Another prediction of the hypothesis that EF resources are required for the expression of vitalist biology is that participants with impaired EFs should perform worse on the vitalist battery than do participants with intact EFs. Consistent with this prediction, Zaitchik and Solomon (2008a, 2008b) found that patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, as well as some healthy elderly controls, were more likely to judge that inanimate objects (e.g. the sun) are alive, and were more likely to deny that plants are alive) than were young adults on the animism interview. Aging and Alzheimer's disease both result in decreases in EF. A follow-up study (Tardiff, Bascandziev, Sandor, Carey, & Zaitchik, 2015) replicating these earlier findings also compared the performance of typical young adults with that of healthy elderly subjects on an EF battery as well as a biology battery. The elderly adults performed worse than young adults not only on the EF measures but on the Animism interview too, attributing life to inanimate objects associated with activity and movement. Furthermore, measures of EF predicted which healthy elderly participants provided animist responses. Importantly, the healthy elderly subjects did not differ from young adults on the Body Parts and on the Death interview. These results suggest that the vitalist theory of biology in healthy elderly subjects is intact and they only show decreased performance on questions that elicit prepotent (animist) responses. In sum, there is convincing evidence that EF is required for the on-line expression of a vitalist understanding, especially on the animism interview. Still, this conclusion is consistent with the possibility that EF is also drawn upon in the processes of construction of a vitalist biology.

Transformative, transgressive learning processes influenced by critical phenomenology

We can also observe transgressive and transformative learning processes in an eclectic collection of phenomenological work from various different disciplines, that span over a century, specifically that which emerged from deep ecology [33–36], social sculpture [37–40], Goetean observation [41,42], Animism [43,44], Anthroposophy [45,46], aesthetic education [47,48] and embodied ecological citizenship/education [11,49–53]. What these different explorations into phenomenology have in common is a need to transgress the boundaries between inner and outer worlds in the human being, as a means of transformation and transgressive agency development.

With deep ecology, embodied ecological citizenship, animism and social sculpture, there is a clear impetus to address the body-blindness that occurs in contemporary technocratic managerial ideologies of industrial capitalism that have influenced education. Reid and Taylor [54b] observe these as complexly entangled in the Western history of thinking in subject/object dualisms. They offer the philosophy of art developed by John Dewey [47] as a valuable contribution to developing non-dualistic understanding of the individual within a matrix, and connecting this to democratic freedom [49]. The aesthetic dimension of public culture, is seen by Dewey [47] as central in overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that impair participatory engagement [49] and indeed transformative and transgressive social learning. Understanding that learning that involves the phenomenological experience of the learner provides new opportunities for inquiry that does not separate object and subject or place and person, as Greenwood [53] explains, ‘place-based inquiry and direct encounters with communities lead to democratic participation and social action within the local environment’ (p. 275), therefore expanding the possibility for transformation and indeed transgressive learning. Similarly McKenzie et al. [51] describe how ‘culture and place are deeply intertwined’ (p. 7) and result in the potential for places and geographies as transformative/transgressive forces that are profoundly pedagogical in themselves.

Phenomenology relies heavily on developing intuitive sensitivities, which Zumdick [42] in his work on aesthetic education and poetic imagination of the human being for the 21st century described as the third force or third key capacity for social and ecological change. He explains that the first two forces of imagination and inspiration that occur through inward reflecting and experiences of inner and outer worlds are not fantasy or escapism, but really a phenomenological encounter with the substances of both realities. They are preceded by this third intensified force of the ‘will’, which he described as what occurs when we are closely connected to an encounter. He also explains that our thinking and feeling is enhanced and we are mobilised and motivated in a way that propels us to act, which is derived from real encounters with the world, and so enables us to be less frantic and more confident in ourselves, to be more confident about what needs to be done, and we shift our stance from one of manipulation to one of reciprocity [42].

Zumdick [42] described our world today as a huge laboratory, where millions of people are looking for new forms of living, new forms of participation, new materials, and new techniques. Yet, as he argues, this laboratory also has to change from the technical, scientific, political and economic sense into a laboratory that also researches our inner abilities and potentialities: that investigates Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Zumdick [42] explained, ‘If we are able to realize this, our relationship to the outer world will become more and more responsive, and might better serve us in developing what is usually described as a sustainable future.’ (p. 5) Neither McKenzie et al. [51], nor Jickling [52] advocate for an abandonment of scientific and philosophical reasoning, they argue that rather emotional or phenomenological experience adds vital dimensions to learning, and expands learning. Significant to a re-thinking of higher education pedagogy, Jickling [52] says, ‘experiential understandings adds flesh and life to the bones so often polished smooth and white by analytical thought.’ (p. 168, our emphasis)