Decolonizers of the imaginary
Christoph D. D. Rupprecht1* [email protected]
Ayako Kawai1,2 [email protected]
1) FEAST Project, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto (Japan) 2) Fenner School of Society and Environment, Australian National University
Note: This manuscript represents a pre-peer-review version / preprint of the paper submitted to ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies on October 8th, 2018. It is based on presentations at and generous feedback from participants of the AAG 2017, Degrowth Malmö 2018 and Degrowth Mexico City 2018 conferences.
Keywords: degrowth, decolonization, more-than-human, radical imaginary
Abstract
The human radical imaginary, or the capacity to see in a thing what it is not (Castoriadis 1987), determines the possibilities we consider when we think about how the world should look like. Sustainability research pioneer Donna Meadows has thus called the power to transcend mind sets or paradigms out of which a system arises the most potent leverage point for interventions. One barrier to such interventions is the colonization of the imaginary by capitalism, the root cause of environmental destruction and addiction to economic growth. Latouche argues as part of the debate on degrowth that the colonized Western imaginary must thus be decolonized. In this paper, we ask how this might be achieved and propose (re)introducing human traditions of seeking knowledge that transcend established Western norms and conventions. Drawing upon concrete examples, we describe four types of decolonizers and how they might help decolonize Western imaginaries: 1) Future generations; 2) past generations; 3) non-humans, and 4) spiritual beings and concepts. We conclude by briefly outlining ways to invite these decolonizers of the imaginary individually and institutionally.
Introduction
It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. (Jameson, 1994, xi)
Another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe. Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire, World Social Forum 2003
Industrialized societies and people socialized in their contexts are struggling to find modes of being less destructive for the environment, the people exploited through global capitalism locally and afar. Alternatives to capitalism have been proposed since its early stages. The violent oppression of attempts to implement them, for example of Chile’s Allende government, suggest these alternatives are not without appeal. Yet socialists, anarchists, communists, degrowthers and other proponents of alternative economic and political orders often struggle to gain sufficient political support for large-scale system changes. This can only partly be explained by historic experiments and their sometimes-disastrous outcomes. But what if we could envision a better world, a world enticing enough to radically change the goals and shape of the industrialized societies responsible for the majority of environmental damage?
Imagining alternatives to the current system is surprisingly challenging. Meadows (1999) proposes a list of leverage points, places to intervene in a system. Those most malleable to change, such as subsidies, taxes or standards, she argues, are also the least effective. Instead, more effective places to intervene are the goals of systems and the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises. The most effective one in Meadow’s list is the power to transcend paradigms. Paradigms she defines as “the shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions – unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them, [… the] deepest set of beliefs about how the world works” (1999, 17). With Thomas Kuhn, she suggests working with active change agents and “the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded” to change paradigms. The power to transcend paradigms in turn entails “to let go into Not Knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment”, because “if no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose”, and “it is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, found religions, get locked up or ‘disappeared’ or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia” (1999, 19). Yet she also cautions that with increasing effectiveness of a leverage point, the resistance of the system to change likewise rises.
What holds us back from letting go of our belief in particular paradigms? Fukao (2012, 90) identifies what she calls the colonization of the soul, something that occurs when “the process of learning works to suppress as much as possible the affect that is directly coupled with our own feelings, or when the process of learning is malevolently used for this purpose, […] in the context of the home, the workplace, a rural community, a circle of friends, or through the media in the form of ‘education’ or ‘propaganda’”. She holds this process responsible for economic development as well as environmental destruction. Like a curse, it forces individuals to act against their own interests without allowing them to escape and take a different action (Fukao, 2012, 88f). To escape, Takebata continues the argument, means to remove ones framework of reference (2012, 143). This requires a profound change of mind that is difficult to achieve, as not questioning the assumptions underlying everyday life is the choice requiring less effort. However, this choice unconditionally and uncritically reinforces one’s worldview, which in this case is identical with Fukao’s curse that forms one’s frame of reference. Fukao here uses the metaphor of a lid on the colonized soul that isolates and oppresses it, while the persona above the lid reproduces the curse by rejecting the possibility of change (Fukao, 2012, 22; Takebata, 2012, 167). Similar to Meadow, the goal is then to recognize the fatalistic worldview as nothing more than one possible worldview, striving to open the lid on the soul, and achieving a meta-recognition to act in a way oneself can be at peace with (Takebata, 2012, 167).
How do the dynamics of transcending paradigms and decolonizing the soul play out on a societal scale? Castoriadis provides insight by examining two additional questions: “What is it that holds a society together?” and “What is it that brings about other and new forms of society?” (1984, 148f). He argues that societies are held together by the “institution of a society as a whole”, including its norms, values, language, tools, procedures and ways of doing things, in addition to individuals themselves (Castoriadis, 1987, 1984, 149). Validity is ensured sometimes by coercion and sanctions, though more often by adherence, support, consensus, legitimacy, belief. These reflect a more fundamental process, “the formation (fabrication) of the human raw material into a social individual, in which they and the ‘mechanisms’ of their perpetuation are embedded” (Castoriadis, 1984, 149f). Society is thus an ever-shifting “magma of social imaginary significations, […] spirits, gods, God; citizen, nation, state, party; commodity, money, capital, interest rate; taboo, virtue, sin”(Castoriadis, 1984, 150). The imaginary quality of the significations is derived from their independence from elements existing in reality, as well as from their dependence on being instituted and shared by a collective.
The key leverage point or escape from the curse, however, for Castoriadis lies in the radical imaginary – “the capacity to see in a thing what it is not, to see it other than it is”(Castoriadis, 1987, 81). It creates the imaginary significations that institute society (the social imaginary, or for individuals the actual imaginary). Castoriadis thus answers his second question about changes in the form of societies by arguing that it happens through a process of creation of new significations (1984, 157f). He uses the rise of capitalism as an example, and notes how what he calls a neo-Darwinian approach would expect to find a large number of random social varieties that are eliminated, with only capitalism as the fit social form left. Noting that this does not represent what happened historically, he identifies as the actual cause “the emergence of a new social imaginary signification, the unlimited expansion of ‘rational’ mastery (instrumented, to begin with, in the unlimited expansion of productive forces)” (Castoriadis, 1984, 158). Latouche (2015) then draws upon the anthropological critique of imperialism to point out that this obsession with economic growth can be read as a colonization of the imaginary by capitalism. The colonization of the imaginary can thus be understood as a society-scale process echoing the colonization of the soul as described by Fukao.
The use of the term colonization here is not unproblematic. Latouche’s colonization of the imaginary must not be conflated with the very concrete, historical violence of colonization and its physical, psychological and systemic traumas, continuing to this day in many places around the world. Colonization as a concept, however, can help understand how the effects of Westernized, industrialized lifestyles cause suffering for humans, and for the non-humans the capitalist system excels at isolating those living such lifestyles from. Indeed, one could argue that regardless of location, unsustainable lifestyles make those living them colonial settlers of the globe through their ecological footprint (Kanemoto et al., 2016). We thus argue that (de-)colonization of the imaginary is a concept of analytical use – not by casting ecological footprint settlers as colonized victims and thereby excuse inaction, but by emphasizing that it is their (our) responsibility to decolonize imaginaries and thereby help to stop perpetuating new forms of colonial violence. This must happen in addition to, not instead of the ongoing struggle of decolonization around the world. To decolonize the social imaginary, it is then necessary to draw on the radical imaginary to create new imaginary significations:
[W]hat is required is a new imaginary creation of a size unparalleled in the past, a creation that would put at the center of human life other significations than the expansion of production and consumption, that would lay down different objectives for life, ones that might be recognized by human beings as worth pursuing. “…” Such is the immense difficulty to which we have to face up. We ought to want a society in which economic values have ceased to be central (or unique), in which the economy is put back in its place as a mere means for human life and not as its ultimate end, in which one therefore renounces this mad race toward ever-increasing consumption. That is necessary not only in order to avoid the definitive destruction of the terrestrial environment but also and especially in order to escape from the psychical and moral poverty of contemporary human beings. (Castoriadis, 2003, 143f)
How to overcome the obstacles to creating a new imaginary pointed out above? They are present at the level of the system (following Meadows, the resistance of the system to change proportionately to the radicality of change), the individual (following Fukao and Takebata, the inertia resulting from the effort required to question beliefs, as well as the reinforcing effect of inaction), and society (the process of socialization). However, if we accept Castoriadis’ proposed explanation, the creation of new imaginary significations would overwrite both system paradigms and remove the lid on the colonized soul. This leaves the actual task of creating a new imaginary, or decolonizing the imaginary.
In this paper we aim to outline one potential method: to recognize the limit of our individual (actual) and collective (social) imaginary, and humbly seek help with the creation of a new imaginary from what we call ‘decolonizers of the imaginary’: future generations, past generations, non-humans, and spiritual beings and concepts. Before we take a look at each of these four types of decolonizers, however, we want to address objections readers might have at this point. Does not such a quest for help ignore methods easily available and more within our control? While a review and rebuttal of all theories of overcoming social norms and ingrained behaviors lies beyond the scope of this paper, we briefly examine two alternative methods that can be seen as representative for larger groups. First, we return to Castoriadis and his approach, what he calls autonomy (as opposed to closure to change, or heteronomy). He argues that autonomy is what characterizes societies
calling into question their own institution, their representation of the world, their social imaginary significations. This is, of course, what is entailed by the creation of democracy and philosophy, both of which break up the closure of the instituted society prevailing until then and open up a space where the activities of thinking and of politics lead to putting again and again into question not only the given forms of the social institution and of the social representation of the world, but the possible ground for any such forms. Autonomy here takes the meaning of a self-institution of society which is, from now on, more or less explicit: we make the laws, we know it, and thus we are responsible for our laws and have to ask ourselves every time, “Why this law rather than another one?” (Castoriadis, 1984, 160) This questioning, facilitated by philosophy and democracy, opens up space for other forms of social representations of the world. Yet while it may be a precondition for decolonizing the imaginary, it does not assist us in the prior step of identifying non-capitalist imaginaries of sustainability and well-being.
The second alternative method, the use of psychoactive substances, shares this problem. Throughout human history, humans have experimented with stimulants to actively influence perception, consciousness, and the imagination. Recent research has begun to re- examine traditional practices involving such substances to treat ailments including depression (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012; Osório et al., 2015), and drugs such as LSD and MDMA appear to improve structural and functional neural plasticity (Ly et al., 2018). The publicity around the topic has led to participatory journalistic investigations (Pollan, 2018) and widening debates as well as legal reform of medicinal and recreational drug use in some countries such as the United States (McGinty et al., 2016). However, apart from limited availability and strict regulation remaining the legal norm, one of the concerns is the risk for experiencing distress (a ‘bad trip’) rather than an enhanced consciousness or imagination (Johnson et al., 2008). These aspects thus limit the role of psychoactive substances might play. Nevertheless, one insight can be gained from the depth of tradition in using such substances. Often, transcendental knowledge was not sought from drug use itself; it rather represented a tool to facilitate a connection or communication with sources of insight beyond the human domain. With this small excursion we return to the method proposed in this paper.
The method of seeking the help of decolonizers to create new imaginaries of sustainability and well-being is based on three premises. The first concerns the mechanism of the proposed process. We argue that by exposing ourselves to stimuli in the variety represented by the decolonizers, we may be able to increase the capacity of our radical imaginary (following Castoriadis). As this process is deliberate, imaginary significations to be considered can be actively selected rather than being subjected to them at random (as with psychoactive substances). The second premise is that our past provides us with lessons about sustainability. Many forms of human social organization in the past, such as hunter-gatherer societies, have been characterized by both well-being of the individuals as well as environmental sustainability (Gowdy, 1997). Drawing upon such existing imaginaries, imaginary significations that likely still remain within Castoriadis’ magma, should prove easier than creating new ones from scratch. The third premise is that some approaches are more likely to succeed than others. In particular, we argue that approaches actively rejecting the significations that have invited unsustainable societies should provide a more effective corrective function than those (such as sustainable development or green capitalism) relying on the very reasons for the predicament we find ourselves and our world in: capitalism and its addiction to growth, the ‘unlimited expansion of rational mastery’ (Castoriadis), and a disregard for non-human life (anthropocentrism).
The remainder of this paper will address the following two research questions: 1) Who can we turn to for seeking their help as decolonizers of the imaginary?, 2) How could they specifically help us to decolonize by enhancing our radical imaginary capacity? For this purpose, we will use a range of examples to examine four groups of decolonizers: future generations, past generations, non-humans, and spiritual beings and concepts. We then briefly discuss existing and possible ways of practically implementing the proposed method individually and institutionally. Decolonizers of the imaginary
1. Future generations
To begin we consider actual future generations, from children to those yet unborn. These generations can act as decolonizers of the imaginary by reminding us to widen our economic and political time horizon underlying our actions, or phrased provocatively, “dismantle the dictatorship of the present over the future”(Grözinger, 1993). This dictatorship consists of two elements. First, representation of interests in modern democracies remains limited to a fraction of the population. Despite a historic trend of extending active and passive voting rights (e.g. women suffrage), those who hold a stake in the future – children as well as those yet unborn – rely on having their interests considered by adult voters and policy makers, while having neither the right to a hearing nor a way to sanction decisions. Second, major political (electoral) and economic (quarterly/yearly reporting) cycles are focused on the short term, from the immediate present to four to five years in the future, as mechanisms of taking responsibility for policy decisions and electoral/stakeholder feedback evaluate in these time frames. This setup intrinsically disincentivizes long-term thinking, and thereby disadvantages future-stakeholders. These two elements are often discussed in the context of intergenerational justice. Van Parijs (1998) examines four different approaches to achieve such justice: age-differentiated political rights, the parents’ vote, population policy, and guardians. Of these we focus here on the fourth, as guardians appear to hold the most promise in achieving the goal of decolonizing the imaginary, rather than (following Meadows) the remaining three approaches of intervening in lower-rank leverage points. The idea of the guardian is to provide both representation and a veto mechanism for future generations, thereby aiming to address both elements of the dictatorship described above. Such a guardian is imaginable in various forms, as an appointed officer, an expert commission, or a full-scale institution (Van Parijs, 1998, 320). To gain a better understanding of how implementations might look, we briefly review three examples: a conceptual approach, a formal institutional approach, and a participatory planning-based approach. In the first example, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), a Native American confederacy, refer to the unborn of the future Nation and their interests that are to be kept in mind during deliberations in their confederate council (Arenas and Rodrigo, 2013). Future generations are not sitting at the table but are due consideration. In contrast, institutional representation has been implemented in various ways across countries, from Israel’s Knesset Commission for Future Generations to Hungary’s ombudsman for future generations. This approach attempts to provide indirect representation of the interests and rights. The third example is that of Future Design, a participatory planning tool to facilitate intergenerational deliberation through having a group roleplaying imaginary future generations (Hara et al., 2017). This pilot test in a Japanese municipality indicated that use of the planning tool led to modified deliberation styles and resulted in more than half of the cases a selection of policy measures proposed by the imaginary future generation groups. Here, the difference to institutional approaches lies in the embodying of stakeholders at the table for concrete policy deliberations, rather than a controlling instance subject to personnel politics and varying degrees of power.
Another group of future generations are those whose tales are told in science fiction and speculative literature. Arguably the most direct creation of writers’, artists’ and other creatives’ imagination, they nevertheless tend to take on lives of their own and often heavily influence how we see things in the present (e.g., our language, in which authors such as Orwell have become adjectives to describe socio-political organisation). These efforts can be deliberate. Kerslake (2007, 187) points out that some modern science fiction, for example Ian M. Banks’ Culture series, is “asking us to hypothesize what may happen in the space beyond empire, as new generations of readers demand an end to the imposition of a social heritage no longer theirs in fact or ideology” – a direct effort to decolonize the imaginary. Such trends are also reflected in the evolution of the genre as a whole. Recent years have seen works by people of colour (e.g., N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series), women (e.g., Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy), non-English (e.g., Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy), and LGBT+ authors (e.g., Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series) enjoy tremendous popularity as well as critical success in winning major genre awards (e.g., Hugo and Nebula awards). Moreover, there are signs that this success is only the tip of the iceberg. While critical postcolonial science fiction predates this recent trend (Smith, 2012), the year 2013 is one plausible date for the beginning of the new science fiction subgenre solarpunk with the publication of a Brazilian anthology titled “Solarpunk – Ecological and fantastic stories in a sustainable world”(Lodi-Ribeiro, 2013). International attention and discussion on weblogs followed, with young writers, artists and readers alike exploring how their experience growing up with an awareness of Earth’s ecological destruction drove them to seek ways to overcome unsustainable and unjust ways of life. Flynn (2014) argues that
It’s hard out here for futurists under 30. As we percolated through our respective nations’ education systems, we were exposed to WorldChanging and TED talks, to artfully-designed green consumerism and sustainable development NGOs. Yet we also grew up with doomsday predictions slated to hit before our expected retirement ages, with the slow but inexorable militarization of metropolitan police departments, with the failure of the existing political order to deal with the existential-but-not-yet- urgent threat of climate change. Many of us feel it’s unethical to bring children into a world like ours. We have grown up under a shadow, and if we sometimes resemble fungus it should be taken as a credit to our adaptability.
We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.
The promises offered by most Singulatarians and Transhumanists are individualist and unsustainable: How many of them are scoped for a world where energy is not cheap and plentiful, to say nothing of rare earth elements?
Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us – i.e., extending human life at the species level, rather than individually. Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community [emphasis from original text].
Solarpunk thus refuses to surrender to the temptation of violent, dystopian post- apocalypse imaginaries which simply give up on future generations. Instead, it makes an ethical argument for efforts to envision positive imaginaries of sustainability. Future generations in solarpunk art, literature and games who grapple with the world we leave them thereby help us to reject the capitalist credo of self-interest. They remind us that not only do our actions have consequences, but that building the future happens in the present (a notion expressed also in the concept of prefigurative politics (Yates, 2015)). Their power to decolonize stems from the fact that they are grounded in the culture they arise from are but oriented towards the imaginary, making them both “connected and free” (Kerslake, 2007, 192).
2. Past generations
Many cultures share the concept of ancestors who play a strongly normative role and give directions for how to act in the present. As Lakos (2009, 156) points out, in the Chinese context “it is from the ancestors that the present generation finds a sense of value, and an understanding of what is right and wrong, good and evil. The ancestors provide both the values and the structural model for social unity.” This influence extends to decisions affecting people’s relationship with nature. For example, in a study on carbon sequestration through land-management decision in tropical homegardens in Kerala, India, ancestors most strongly influenced farmer’s decisions about management practices among a range of sociopsychological factors (Saha et al., 2011). Similarly, a study on the Liberian Loma people’s agro-ecological practices found that the Loma’s ‘ancestral habitus’ led to forgoing opportunities to expand production on African dark earth (fertile carbon-rich anthropogenic soils) (Fraser et al., 2015). The term ancestral habitus here refers to a “set of social and religious institutions and practices”, an “ontology which, through its ancestors, other supernatural agencies and initiation societies, shapes ‘substantive’ rationalities that inform everyday life and land tenure and land management decisions”, thereby maintaining sustainability (Fraser et al., 2015, 235). In comparison, a study of agropastoralism of the Tandroy people in Madagascar frames the ancestral influence as a social-ancestral contract, drawing upon Taylor’s social imaginary theory as an analytical tool for identity, morality and institutions of a society or culture (von Heland and Folke, 2014). The authors describe this contract as follows (2014, 258):
The conception and birth of a Tandroy child into the world of the living establishes a contract with the clan, with living clan members, with ancestral spirits and with the tradition established by the ancestors’ historical deeds. The contract grants the living the right to a life within the clan and to the land, it defines the moral and practical relationship between the living and the land and its non-human inhabitants—cattle, cacti, trees, etc.—and it spells out the ancestral duties and laws governing life in the clan. “…” We suggest that the social-ancestral contract serves as a moral attractor that assembles the social–ecological entities of the system and sustains critical ecosystem services. The persistence of the ecosystem services emerging from the agropastoral system in southern Androy is a result of clan social imaginary and its moral order, which articulate and mobilize social practices that nurture those fellow organisms in the landscape considered necessary for restoration of the agropastoral system at large, for bringing honor to the living members of the clan and for acquisition of the zebu capital required for key rituals. This human-to-organism assistance is especially visible following prolonged droughts, when cattle, cacti and crops require sustenance to regain their former condition.
From these examples we can identify two ways in which past generations can act as decolonizers of the imaginary in a broad sense. The first way is preventive: past generations and their normative influence work to counteract the attraction of maximizing short-term gains of perceived well-being, which can be understood as a resilience against the colonization of the imaginary. To act as active decolonizers of an already colonized imaginary, the second way proposed here, past generations could be included into decision- making processes in democracies by borrowing either the formal institution approach or the participatory democracy approach discussed for future generation in the previous section. Both ways would enhance the radical imaginary by lengthening the time frame and remove the present generations from being the sole focus of societal efforts.
3. Non-humans
Decolonizers of the imaginary do not need to be former or future humans. Once we reject that all non-human life is simply a variety of ‘natural resources’ humans can and may exploit at will to increase human wellbeing, we may find non-humans to be powerful champions for escaping the illusion that humans are the center of the universe. In fact, since the 1990s several fields have developed that seek to explore points of view beyond anthropocentrism, and a detailed examination exceeds the scopes of this paper. We thus provide a limited number of examples and encourage readers to seek out these salient literatures around the topic of non-humans. (Sub)fields engaged in this endeavor include those under the name ‘more-than-human’, from geography (Panelli, 2010; Rupprecht, 2017; Wright, 2014) to anthropology (Abram, 2012), ethnography (Tsing, 2015) and others, as well as multispecies studies (van Dooren et al., 2016; Van Dooren and Rose, 2012), animal studies (Marvin and McHugh, 2014), animal geography (Buller, 2014; Philo and Wilbert, 2000), plant geography (Head and Atchison, 2008), ecocriticism (Cohen and Duckert, 2015) and the environmental humanities (Cohen, 2015; Ginn et al., 2014), science and technology studies (Haraway, 2006), inter- and transdisciplinary studies (Wright, 2018), posthumanism (Papadopoulos, 2010), speculative ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), urban planning (Houston et al., 2017; Metzger, 2014) and others. Whether we look at the city from the perspective of animals (Wolch, 2002), think through being eaten as a plant (Marder, 2013), or reconsider what it means to be human when we are kept alive by our microbiome (Rees et al., 2018) – taking non-humans seriously as persons with agency allows us to de-center humans, to notice how limited our field of sight becomes when fixated by the idea of the Anthropocene.
Far from remaining a matter of theoretical discussion, non-humans are increasingly influencing social, political and legal realities. The idea of animal rights and personhood has fueled growing vegetarian and vegan movements, in the process forcing us to acknowledge not just the immediate ethical questions of eating living beings capable of pain and feelings, but also the necessity of reducing meat consumption in the light of its ecological footprint. Legal explorations of non-humans being recognized as stakeholders came to the conclusion that several such management processes could accommodate non-humans as well (Starik, 1995). Experiments such as allowing residents of Melbourne to send the trees coinhabiting the city emails powerfully demonstrated that such considerations are underpinned by the deep care and connection between human and non-human urban dwellers. The ‘one world one health’ concept was initially focused on interconnected risks for animal and public health, but has since been complicated to evoke more-than-human solidarity (Hinchliffe, 2015; Rock and Degeling, 2015; Wolf, 2015).
This increasing awareness of our more-than-human world should not be mistaken as a new idea or perspective on the world. Far too often, narratives of development place industrialized, Westernized nation states at the forefront of progress. Yet it is these nation states and their people that have finally begun to address the paucity of their social imaginaries, struggling to catch up with indigenous and other non-capitalist cultures’ understanding of the interdependence of life. The journey in pursuit of more-than-human worlds for Westernized people is thus a daunting attempt to understand indigenous knowledges and truths woven over thousands of years. Recent research will be crucial in guiding this journey. Johnson and Larsen (2017, 2) tell us of the call of place as a “summons to encounters, dialogues of the humans and nonhumans who share the landscape” in the Cheslatta Carrier Nation traditional territory in British Columbia, Canada, the Wakarusa Wetlands in northeastern Kansas, United States, and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds in Aotearoa/New Zealand. They emphasize (Johnson and Larsen, 2017, 21f) that
…it is here, being-together-in-place, where we are brought into the vitalities of coexistence and our entanglements with others; where humans and nonhumans are working to decolonize their relationships; where communities are coming together in protest and ceremony to defend land under threat; where reciprocal guardianship is being stitched back together in new and unanticipated ways; and where a new kind of “place thinking” is emerging on the border of colonial power in the embodied scales of coexistence.
We argue that these efforts are among the most striking demonstrations of practiced, embodied radical imaginary in the sense of Castoriadis.
4. Spiritual beings & concepts
The Western separation of the natural world (exempting it of intrinsic meaning, value and normative power) from the spiritual world, followed by the rejection of spiritual thinking and the ‘unlimited expansion of rational mastery’ (Castoriadis), represents a loss in ontological capacity, as it creates a monoculture of meaning. It is thus unsurprising that in many indigenous cultures, the distinction between natural and spiritual world is fluid. Moreover, finding statements about how people should relate to nature in religious belief systems is the norm rather than the exception. These guidelines take different forms. For many indigenous peoples of Australia, living with and taking care of the land is an inherently spiritual practice (Rose et al., 2003). Both in Islam and Christianity, stewardship for Earth is humankind's God-given responsibility (Denny; Hessel). This notion has been recently reemphasized by pope Francis in his encyclical "Laudato Si" ("On care for our common home"), a reminder and call to action to prioritize the environment over consumption and development (Francis, 2015).
While an exhaustive review of normative views on human-nature relations across world religions is beyond the scope of this paper, Asia's rich history of religious thought on nature merits a closer look. We focus here on non-dominant examples rather than those associated with Buddhism or Shintoism. A case from Vietnam describes the worldview of the Ma Lieng people, an ethnic minority group, and their land use practice reflecting spiritual values (Social Policy Ecology Research Institute, 2013). The Ma Lieng people consider Earth and Sun Mother and Father. The natural world is created by these parents, including rivers, hills, forests, trees, and plants, which in turn humans originate from. Their respect to the Mother and worship for her holiness is ingrained in their practice of land acquisition. In a ceremony, a request for land expansion is first made by the head of a household to the head of a clan, which is reported to the village elder and then to the spiritual leader. The spiritual leader will choose a desirable day and all family members gather at the land which they made a request of. The spiritual leader then contacts the Mother, the Father, and other spirits of rivers and mountains on behalf of the whole community. The vital moment of the ceremony is a coin flipping, by which the leader asks spiritual beings for permission to use the land. If the spirits accept, one of the coins shows the head and the other the tail. The family is then allowed to continue the ceremony of breaking ground. Alternatively, spirits would express their disagreement by showing both coins facing the head. The ground breaking of the land in such a case would be considered to lead to misfortune for the villagers. Should both of the coins face the tail, people can ask the spirits again by conducting another coin flipping.
The concept of envisioning spiritual beings in non-humans and subsequently considering that these can potentially harm humans if mistreated is frequently found in societies. The Naxi people who mainly reside in southeast China worship the spirit or god called ‘Shu’ that governs nature (Xu et al., 2005). According to Naxi oral history, Shu and human progenitors came from the same father and later separated. After separation, Shu received forests, rivers, mountains, and wild animals whereas humans received domestic animals, crops, and valleys. The Naxi people believe that humans have once invaded the property of Shu and incurred its wrath. Shu took revenge against humans and challenged them for their survival. In order to calm Shu’s anger, humans needed cultural specialists for negotiation. In the end, Shu agreed that both humans and Shu would not harm each other. Under this agreement, humans may source necessary resources such as timber and wild plants, provided that humans regularly worship Shu. Every year, Naxi people thus gather to worship Shu and present offerings as repayment for harvested natural resources (Xu et al., 2005). Similarly, the Dai people who live across South-East Asian countries consider that forested holly hills are places where deities reside (Pei, 1985). These hills usually composed of secondary woodlands, home gardens, and paddy fields. All the plants and animals in these hills are sacred companions of the deity. To maintain human well-being and peace, appropriate actions and respects for deities are considered important to avoid punishment through misfortunes. Such views are reflected in the Dai villagers’ natural resources management practices, including the establishment of the local association of religious plant conservation group which teaches traditional knowledge to the local young and encourages them to apply it for biodiversity conservation (Liu et al., 2002). The Dai people’s practice based on their worldview has contributed to the conservation of local landscapes as well as local endangered plant species (Xu et al., 2005). Spiritual practices, worship of past generations and practices involving non-humans may thus overlap, meaning a clear distinction between different decolonizers of the imaginary may be neither possible nor necessary.
Towards embracing decolonizers of the imaginary
The four groups of decolonizers discussed in this paper each possess a depth that makes the task of introducing them briefly daunting. We thus emphasize that we may have failed to do the described examples justice and encourage readers to engage with them in any way that seems promising and appropriate. To conclude, we end with a brief outlook on how to embrace the decolonizers in both in personal lifeworlds and in the systems of our societies. For this purpose, we briefly showcase several examples, again with the explicit acknowledgement that these are not the only possible ways. We also refer readers to a recent themed section in this journal on concrete ways to decolonize research (Vol. 17 No. 3).
Everyday life interactions with decolonizers might entail spiritual practices such as meditation and nature contact. A growing body of scientific literature provides evidence for the benefits of meditative practices such as mindfulness (Piet and Hougaard, 2011; Smith et al., 2005; Zenner et al., 2014), possibly a sign of a slow move towards richer, less Eurocentric epistemologies. Common views about the benefits of encountering nature are similarly now underpinned by countless studies (Keniger et al., 2013), be it in the form of hiking in a national park, meeting the plants and animals in an urban vacant lot, or caring for potted plants. Even a hobby of reading speculative fiction or playing video games that challenge our preconceived ideas of the world might help us learning to "see things as they are not" (Castoriadis).
Embracing decolonizers of the imaginary is also possible in a systemic way. One example is the inclusion of non-human stakeholders in educational and applied participatory planning and decision-making processes, thereby making these processes less anthropocentric. This also entails acknowledging the uncertainty of governance in a complex world full of beings with agency. Such uncertainty, as well as the fundamental unknowability of how the future unfolds, are central notions in anticipatory governance, an approach seeking to overcome a misplaced faith in predictions by orthodox strategic planning models (Vervoort and Gupta, 2018). Such endeavors complement, and have much to learn from the rich variety of approaches challenging Western models of development in the context of postdevelopment (Demaria and Kothari, 2017). Yet the possibly most powerful intervention might be the introduction of decolonizers into formal and informal education and other public spheres. What better way to decolonize than to avoid colonization of our children's imaginaries in schools and through advertising in the first place? Acknowledgments
The authors are deeply grateful to their colleagues for being generous with time and feedback, to the participants of the two 2018 conferences on Degrowth in Sweden and Mexico as well as of the 2017 AAG session on Degrowth for their kind and helpful feedback. This research was supported by the FEAST Project (No. 14200116), Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), and in part supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP17K08179, JP17K15407. References
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