This is an email conversation between two colleagues who are part of the planning for the Sustainable Wisdom conference in September, 2016. David Abram (Wild Ethics) and Four Arrows clashed over the notion of “worldviews” and how many there are. Reading their conversation is a good way to learn about how different the dominant worldview is from that of most human societies across human existence, and how we must abandon it if we are to live wisely and sustainably.
Four Arrows: I think our conference fits as relates to the idea of there being only two essential worldviews relating to sustainable futures, the dominant one and the Indigenous one. I think this is what our conference does or can easily be framed as doing. Worldview study is emerging and although most scholars still cling to there being many worldviews, a substantial and growing literature is circling back to Redfield’s idea that these two are what require critical contrast and complementarity when possible as relates to survival on this planet.
David Abram: Dear Four Arrows, I’m not sure that we’d be well served by claiming that there’s “only two essential worldviews relating to sustainable futures” (in your comment just below)— although I surely understand and probably concur with your general meaning. But hear me out —
For one thing, the dominant worldview doesn’t relate to a sustainable future at all, so that doesn’t really count!
But my main difficulty with the thought that — as you say — there are only TWO worldviews, is that it sets up a neat dichotomy (between the dominant view and the indigenous view), wherein one side is clearly problematic and bad, and the other is clearly beneficial and good. Now while I might, at first blush, find myself agreeing with such a pat contrast, as soon as I feel deeper into this way of framing things I begin to sense that there’s something seriously amiss. Why? Because it’s only the dominant worldview that tends to think and articulate things according to such neat dichotomies or dualisms (“this good”/”that bad”) or to view things as though there is a pure Good (or God) working against a pure Evil (or DEvil).
Given that any indigenous worldview tends to draw deeply on the particular powers or agencies afoot in the surrounding earth (the various large and small animals that haunt the land thereabouts, including the particular wingeds and the specific finned folks that swim in these rivers or those lakes, or that migrate along that stretch of the coast), and the specific plants that grow in that broad bioregion, and the particular landforms and elements endemic to that place, including the specific weather powers that are operative in that part of the earth…etc.,, isn’t it more appropriate to affirm that an indigenous solidarity with the local earth inevitably yields a multiplicity of worldviews in accordance with the outrageous diversity of earth’s ecosystems or bioregions? Even just a couple hundred years ago it seems mighty unlikely any of the pueblo peoples dwelling here in this high desert region where I now live would have been willing to affirm much commonality, in their general view of the world, with the cosmology of any of the plains tribes, or with the cosmovision held by any of the northwest coast nations, or that of the Kayapo or the Huarani of the Amazon basin — much less with the Yoruba or the Dogon or the Bushmen, or with the Pintupi or Pitjantjarra of central Australia.
Certainly, sure, we can now see a broad range of common elements in these astonishingly diverse and divergent indigenous cosmologies, philosophies, and worldviews. But I think I would argue that one of those common elements is an openness to the radical plurality of things, an affirmation of the inherently multiple nature of the manifold powers that compose the world, and hence a kind of built-in resistance to dichotomous or dualistic reasoning that juxtaposes a pure good to a pure bad. Or that juxtaposes “the dominant worldview” to “the indigenous worldview” as though the indigenous worldview was just ONE THING!
Without a doubt we need to encourage and enact a replenishment of indigenous sensibilities throughout the biosphere, to prepare and embark on a re-indigenization of the human species. Yes indeed! But when we invite ourselves and others to walk out of the over-civilized way of seeing, to step through the threshold into an indigenous way of feeling and seeing and sensing, we invite them into a world of uncanny and inexhaustible multiplicity, a world wherein spiders and humpback whales and hummingbirds have each their own experience and perspective on the real, wherein a clump of sagebrush or an aspen grove and even a thunderstorm has its own sentience, and hence into a world of worlds within worlds within worlds… A space of radical and irreducible pluralism that simply confounds, it seems to me, any attempt to juxtapose it AS ONE THING set over against ANOTHER thing. If we frame our argument in such a dichotomous and binary fashion, I fear we risk falling into and reinscribing the very mindset that we wish to undermine…
Okay. Please forgive. I don’t mean to be a jerk here, Four Arrows, and again I reckon we deeply agree in all sortsa ways. I’m just raising a question about, well, strategy. (About our rhetorical strategy…)
blessings to all —
in wildness and shadowed wonder,
David
Four Arrows: David, first please know how much I appreciate your frank and heart-felt response and no, I don’t think you are a “jerk” at all for sharing as you have. I think it is a healthy dialogue of value to all of us. (Interestingly I had a similar conversation with another one of our colleagues about whether the ancient Greek philosophers agreed or not with Indigenous perspectives, in general). In my forthcoming book, show the difference is significant enough to talk about “different worldviews.” I’m going to very briefly respond to each of your main points but know that the disagreement we have seems to be in our defining of “worldviews.”
For clarification, although it requires reading all of Redfield’s last publications and some of his contradictory language, he is clear about claiming two essential worldviews. (By the way, the word “worldview” is what I choose to use but favors European sensibilities not Indigenous for whom “seeing” is but one small facet of understanding). For example the title of his book is The Primitive Worldview so the perspectives of the other cultures each with their own cultural beliefs and unique origin stories, stem from that which is a great encompassing worldview (The Primitive Worldview) that contrasts significantly (and Redfield says tragically) with the one that transformed the world. But as much as I admire Redfield, quoting dead white men is not needed to offer and argue in behalf of the theory that there are two historically observable and currently foundational worldviews operating today. What other two worldviews are contrasted? Do we refer to competing theories of education or medical treatment protocols or political ideologies and “worldview comparison?” Not if we want to go deeper into the foundational reasons that under the dominant worldview (1 % of human history), we have managed to bring all life systems to a tipping point. Is it the different cultures and theories we should start to evaluate for new results or something so obviously full of radically different orientations at the deepest level that will at long last yield results.
I sense that concerns about romanticizing the Indigenous “worldview”, or giving it “chosen people” status or ignoring the importance of complementarity is what is behind the many challenges get when I speak of the two worldviews. For example, some paragraphs from other work:
“Since it is obvious that these other-than-humans are very different from you, such reflections about how you rethink who they are in relationship to yourself opens the door to what is most amazing about Nature- its sense of complementarity.
“Graham strongly emphasizes that this is not about promoting an ideal system of expression and lifestyle, inferring that cultural manifestations beyond this basic “truth” about living on this planet are and will always be multiple and subject to an eventual balancing of opposites. In the same way there Hopi prophesize the white and red brother some day joining forces, the seeking of complementarity among apparent opposites is essential to Indigenous worldview.
Writing a book in which I emphasize strong contrasts and preferences between two worldviews may seem to be a contradiction with the Indigenous principle of complementarity, but if worldview is the water in which we swim and not the style of the swimming, then we can no longer afford to swim in polluted water. Also, seeking complementarity in all apparent opposites also calls realizing that not all opposites are ready for such symbiosis. The Quechua speaking peoples of the Andean mountains in Peru agree. In a research project described in her publication, “The Splendid and the Savage: The Dance of the Opposites in Indigenous Andean Thought,” Hillary S. Webb offers a comprehensive analysis of the meaning of three of their words, yanantin, masintin and chuya (69—93). “Yanantin” describes the idea of universal oneness that includes an understanding of a sort of pairing of opposites. “Masintin” is “the active process by which the yanantin pair becomes “paired” and thus moves from a state of antagonism and separateness to one of complementarity and interdependence…”(74). The word “chuya” refers to an entity that may be missing its potential complementary other or is still viewed as being unequal somehow. Even with regards to the oneness of yanantin, she learned that the Natives say that not all apparent opposites are suitable for pairing. Harrison, another researcher of yanantin concurs: “Quechua speakers persistently distinguish objects which are not well matched or ‘equal’” (149).
“Worldview” Reflection: I put this word in quotes because I am borrowing from Western culture and language an idea that is not sufficiently accurate to describe our original instructions but is the most user- friendly one available in English. This point is made by one of the chapters in my book, Unlearning the Language of Conquest, entitled “On the Very Idea of ‘a worldview’ and of “alternative worldviews’ by Bruce Wilshire:
“The first thing to be pointed out is the “worldview” is a European idea…So we must recognize initially that in speaking of an Indigenous worldview we may have already generated an egregiously distorted account, determined in advance by a European bias that gives priority to seeing and vision (261).
Other complications exist with this term as relates to the concern that a pan-Indian generalization about common assumptions held by diverse Indigenous nations can diminish the importance of such diversity and of tribal identity and its importance. After all “Indigenous” what it means to be Indigenous is all about living in accordance with the diverse understandings gleaned from local landscape and the life it contains. Nonetheless, I believe there is a need to expose and understand the pitfalls of and options to a worldview that does not recognize the importance of such diversity. The common features of the many Indigenous nations are significant and especially so as relates to how they contrast with those that exist in the diverse cultures that operate in most societies today. It is past time to reflect on these and start implementing the “authentic” ways of being part of Nature.
Finally, a concern about the use of “worldview” that David Abram has shared with me in private communications is that giving “worldview” status to how modern civilizations are living in the world elevates it inappropriately, especially if understood as an option to what I am calling the Indigenous worldview. David sees the “dominant worldview” as a misdirected diversion that branched off from our original relationships with Earth. I love his perspective and agree that it would seem there could be nothing else but a way of understanding the world that honors the realities of living in it (like keeping the water clean, etc). How can we be other than “indigenous” to the planet (small “i”)? My response is that the impact of what we are doing has unfortunately risen to the level of a worldview. As a result too many people now have unconscious belief systems (worldviews) that have a powerful influence in and on the world, enough to create an unnecessary mass extinction.
From Point of Departure: Returning to Our Authentic “Wordview” for Education and Survival by Four Arrows (IAP, Aug 2016).
David Abram: Dear Four Arrows and not-yet-met friends,
With huge apologies to you, and with a promise to never do this again in an email, I think I’d better clarify my comment earlier this week, which seems even to have prompted Four Arrows to shift his new book’s subtitle (I don’t think he should), and which Darcia has threatened to address in her Psychology Today blog (which would be cool). After what Four Arrows last sent out in an email, which I didn’t entirely understand (my own fault, not his), I realized that I’d better try to explain myself a little better. It’s about something that bears on what we’re all engaged in. But I don’t for a moment think that my angle is the only angle, or the best angle on this matter — not at all. it’s just my angle. Anyway, I feel sheepish that I even wrote in as I did, since after all I’ve been mostly silent and have missed most of the missives that have been sent back and forth regarding this wonderful conference (being hopelessly over my head in email correspondence. And so after this one email, I promise to cease and desist and never to send out a missive longer than a paragraph or two. I promise. Meanwhile, feel free to ignore this, or put it aside for a moment when you have time to read it through.
First: Four Arrows, dear man, I don’t think that you should put quotation marks around your term ‘worldviews’ in your subtitle. It just makes your title/subtitle more abstruse. And I haven’t any problem with the word worldview at all. you are working with it in yer own way — just be clear on that, and don’t be swayed by my slight disagreement regarding rhetorical strategy. I’m glad your doin’ what your doin,’ even if I’m up to something a bit different! Viva la difference!
Regarding what i had to say (when you and I spoke) about what you call the dominant worldview being a kind of divergence, or contortion, within the animistic worldview, umm…, I could never call it a “childish fascination” with magic, as you do just below. I meant only to be articulating something that I strongly believe, and that I wrote out in the very last footnote to The Spell of the Sensuous. (That footnote is kind of a skeleton key to the whole book.) As I wrote there:
“In contrast to a long-standing tendency of Western social science, this work has not attempted to provide a rational explanation of animistic beliefs and practices. On the contrary, it has presented an animistic or participatory account of rationality. It has suggested that civilized reason is sustained only by a deeply animistic engagement with our own signs. To tell the story in this manner — to provide an animistic account of reason, rather than the other way around — is to imply that animism is the wider and more inclusive term, and that oral, mimetic modes of experience still underlie, and support, all our literate and technological modes of reflection. When reflection’s rootedness in such bodily, participatory modes of experience is entirely unacknowledged or unconscious, reflective reason becomes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying the corporeal, sensuous world that sustains it.”
— from The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 303
To make crystal-clear what I meant in that passage, and also why I would never speak of writing or reading as a childish fascination, I would say that in my first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, I am hardly engaged in demeaning or denigrating the alphabet. To the contrary, I am arguing that the alphabet can best be understood as a new and uniquely powerful form of magic. Indeed I have tried to demonstrate that alphabetic literacy is an intensely concentrated form of animism, a synaesthetic participation so vivid that it readily eclipses all the other styles of participation, or magic, in which we humans once engaged. Hence The Spell of the Sensuous is not at all engaged in a put-down or a rejection of literacy; rather it suggests that alphabetic literacy should be recognized as an especially profound magic. For it is only by acknowledging its not-entirely-rational, world-altering power that we have a chance of wielding this power responsibly, rather than falling under its remarkable spell. (It is not, after all, by chance that the word “spell” has such a curious double-meaning: to cast a potent magic into the world, or to arrange the alphabetic letters in a correct manner.
The Hebrews — the very first culture of the alphabet — never lost this awareness of writing as a particularly potent magic; much of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, is concerned with the numinous and unruly powers inherent in the written letters themselves).If, however, we simply take the alphabet for granted, regarding it merely as a neutral, mechanical technique for recording spoken utterance, then we readily fall prey to a host of delusions — such as the assumption that meaningful speech is an exclusively human property; or a belief that the reflective mind is a wholly autonomous power, independent of the body and the earth; or the related faith that modern science will someday achieve a wholly objective representation of “what is.”
All of these peculiarly Western presumptions stem from the extraordinary self-reflexivity made possible by the alphabet, from the ability it offers us to continuously converse with our own signs in the complete absence of other expressive beings, and hence to neglect and finally forget the myriad non-verbal forms of exchange by which we are steadily nourished and sustained by the more-than-human earth.
Yet while such forgetfulness is made possible by the alphabet, the alphabet does not necessitate or cause this oblivion. The Spell of the Sensuous itself, after all, is intended to display a very different manner of wielding alphabetic reason, and there have always been writers who wrote in service to the more-than-human earth — from Goethe to Rilke, from John Muir to Jean Giono, from Willa Cather to Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver. Phonetic writing was likely a necessary ingredient in our estrangement from the more-than-human world; but it is hardly a sufficient cause of our obliviousness…
The reason I bring up all this is just to indicate that, besides framing the matter as two different worldviews — which is, I concede, a useful way of looking at it — there are other ways of framing the contrast between the dominant worldview and indigenous ways of seeing and sensing and knowing. I always try to avoid the out and out binary logic that it seems to me characterizes so much of the dominant discourse (the dichotomizing propensity to frame everything as a choice between TWO things, one of them good and the other one crummy). I just don’t trust that sorta logic, and I think it’s destroying our world. (for example, we in the US see radical Islam as evil, and ourselves in cahoots with the Good, while the radical Islamists feel themselves as perfectly righteous, and us as inherently Evil. And there are countless other examples.) My strategy is often to nest one side of the so-called dichotomy within the other, to show that one is often a subset of the other, albeit sometimes a distorted subset — a subset that has forgotten its dependence upon the wider set. That’s what I’m up to above, by showing that the deadening, objectivizing worldview can itself be recognized as an intensely concentrated form of animism, or magic. It’s also what I was up to when, disgusted by the poverty of our nomenclature, I got sick of writing about culture and nature as though these were two separate things, or writing of “human nature” and “non-human nature” as though these could still fall on two sides of a neat divide, and so I coined what was then a new phrase: “the more-than-human world” — in order to indicate that the human world is always CONTAINED within the more-than-human world, yet that the more-than-human world always EXCEEDS the human world. (Although few of the many writers and thinkers who now use that phrase think it through, I do think that all that is entailed by the simple formulation “the more-than-human world”).
Finally, to give a different example of how one can subvert the dichotomizing logic, toward the end of Becoming Animal I take up again the matter of writing, and literate culture. But now I am doing so by framing the contrast with oral culture as a matter of different layers of culture, which are also different layers of the breathing earth:
“…What should be obvious, now, is this: The globalizing culture of the internet, and the cosmopolitan culture of the book, both depend, for the integrity, upon the place-based conviviality of a thriving oral culture. Oral, storytelling culture – and the vernacular intimacy with the local land that goes hand-in-hand with such culture – is the forgotten ground that still supports these more abstract layers of culture. It is the neglected but necessary soil from whence civilization still draws its sustenance, the nourishing humus in which our humanity remains rooted.
When oral culture degrades, the mediated mind loses its bearings, forgetting its ongoing debt to the body and the breathing earth. Left to itself the literate mind, adrift in the play of signs, comes to view nature as a sign, or a complex of signs. It forgets that the land is not first and foremost an arcane text to be read, but a community of living, speaking beings to whom we are beholden. Adept at representing the world verbally, the literate intellect forgets how to orient in the midst of the world’s presence, how to hear those many voices that do not speak in words.
Similarly the computerized mind, when left to its own devices, all too easily overlooks the solid things of the earth. Skilled in the rapid manipulation of symbols, it neglects the stones and the grasses that symbolize nothing other than themselves. Dazzled by its own virtual creations, the digital self forgets its dependence upon a world that it did not create, overlooking its carnal emplacement in the very world that created it.
When oral stories are no longer being told in the woods, or along the banks of meandering rivers – when the land is no longer being honored ALOUD as an animate, expressive power – then the human senses lose their attunement to the more-than-human terrain. Fewer and fewer people are able to feel the particular pulse of their place; many are no longer able to hear, much less respond to, the many-voiced eloquence of the land. Increasingly blind, increasingly deaf – increasingly impervious to the sensuous world – the technological mind progressively lays waste to the animate earth.
Today our vaunted civilization pours its by-products into the winds and into the waters. The weather tilts toward catastrophe; ice-caps melt; the snowpack evaporates; water fit for human consumption hides in smaller and smaller oases within the desert of the real. Ever more creatures wane and vanish from this non-virtual reality, unable to adapt to the wrenching changes we’ve wrought. Massive animals and small animals, hoofed ones and clawed ones, antlered and quilled and bright-feathered ones, finned and tentacled and barnacled ones all steadily dwindling down to a few members before they dissolve entirely into the fever-dreams of memory.”
— Becoming Animal, pp. 286-288
and then again:
“…Renewing oral culture is thus not at all a matter of “turning back the clock,” but rather of stepping, now and then, out of clock time entirely. It is not a matter of “going back” to an earlier way of life, but of aligning ourselves with the full depth of the present, expanding awareness beyond the gleaming veneer of our mass-produced artifacts, dropping our attention beneath the recently sedimented strata of commercial civilization (beneath the inert, plastic layers of tossed-out toys and discarded water bottles) to make conscious contact with the darker humus in which our humanity is still rooted. The soil at that depth is made of dances, and songs, and the hushed cadence of spoken stories. By remembering ourselves at that depth, by tapping the nutrients in that timeless soil, we draw fresh water on up into the stems and leaves of the open present. We re-create civilization by tapping the primordial wellsprings of culture, replenishing the practice of wonder that lies at the indigenous heart of all culture.”
— Becoming Animal p. 292.
Okay. Nuf said. I do think that we need a thousand and one strategies, and I’m awfully glad that Four Arrows is pursuing his own approach with so much heart…
in wildness and shadowed wonder,
David
Four Arrows: David and I had a chat and I think I better understand that his concern about the binary of “only two worldviews” is not that it violates Indigenous emphasis on the lack of complementarity between apparent opposites but rather that what I am calling the “dominant worldview” should not be merited with anything close to an equal standing with the only rationale worldview, the Indigenous one. I actually love his thinking on this and feel it would be a brilliant endeavor to show that what I am calling the dominant worldview is but a pathological deviation from the Indigenous one. Perhaps, as David suggests, (in my words) a kind of childish fascination with the magic of written symbols and a narrowing of perspective that has had tragic repercussions. I hope David and others pursue this theory. I see him as the visionary to do it.
For me, a critical educator and theorist, I believe that what the dominant reality suggests is that a new worldview did emerge that based its new noun-oriented language and the writing that naturally came from it not on landscape and the animistic flux of observed life, but on categories in support of hierarchy and anthropocentric systems. Perhaps the philosophy in common between the great variety of cultures under the dominant worldview that drastically differs from the “worldview” in common with the great variety of Indigenous cultures is a subset hardly worth mentioning, but it is strong enough to destroy all life systems and the people unconsciously supporting it are doing so with a general perspective on the world that I want to show is insane but curable by returning to the original worldview it left behind around 10,000 years ago. I think we need the work that David is doing to vision and positively focus only on the return to the magic of what we experienced for 99% of human history. In the meantime, my small contribution is to get people willing to metacognitively realize that whatever we call what is allowing them to separate from Nature and its magic is problematic and that the original instructions are right in front of them, some of them usable immediately. I hope our conference follows both pathways (and I think it will).
References
David Abram (1996). Spell of the sensuous. New York, NY: Vintage Press.
David Abram (2010). Becoming animal. New York: Random House.
Four Arrows (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum to indigenize mainstream education. New York: Peter Lang.
Four Arrows (August, 2016). Point of departure: returning to our authentic “worldview” for education and survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Four Arrows, & Narvaez, D. (2015). A more authentic baseline. In N. McCrary & W. Ross (Eds.), Working for social justice inside and outside the classroom: A community of teachers, researchers, and activists (pp. 93-112). In series, Social justice across contexts in education (S.J. Miller & L.D. Burns, Eds.). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Mary Graham (2008). Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews. Australian Humanities Review, 45. Downloaded on February 28, 2016, from http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/g…
Darcia Narvaez (2013). The 99%–Development and socialization within an evolutionary context: Growing up to become “A good and useful human being.” In D. Fry (Ed.), War, Peace and Human Nature: The convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (pp. 643-672). New York: Oxford University Press.
Robert Redfield (1953). The primitive world and its transformation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hillary S. Webb (2013). The Splendid and the Savage: The Dance of the Opposites in Indigenous Andean Thought. Journal of Transpersonal Research, 4 (1). Downloaded on February 28, 2016, from http://philpapers.org/rec/WEBTSA