Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics

Françoise Dussart, Sylvie Poirier, Françoise Dussart, Sylvie Poirier

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781772125924
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

In this timely collection, the authors examine Indigenous peoples' negotiations with different cosmologies in a globalized world. Dussart and Poirier outline a sophisticated theory of change that accounts for the complexity of Indigenous peoples' engagement with Christianity and other cosmologies, their own colonial experiences, as well as their ongoing relationships to place and kin. The contributors offer fine-grained ethnographic studies that highlight the complex and pragmatic ways in which Indigenous peoples enact their cosmologies and articulate their identity as forms of affirmation. This collection is a major contribution to the anthropology of religion, religious studies, and Indigenous studies worldwide.Contributors: Anne-Marie Colpron, Robert R. Crépeau, Françoise Dussart, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jérôme, Frédéric Laugrand, C. James MacKenzie, Caroline Nepton Hotte, Ksenia Pimenova, Sylvie Poirier, Kathryn Rountree, Antonella Tassinari, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

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INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGIES,
ENTANGLED RELIGIOSITIES, AND GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

A Theoretical Overview

FRANÇOISE DUSSART & SYLVIE POIRIER

IN THE LAST FEW DECADES, anthropologists and other social scientists have shown growing ethnographic and analytical interests in the indigenization of global religions and the local entanglements of Indigenous and global traditions. There is now a growing literature analyzing the ongoing Indigenous creative drive to revisit their cosmological expressions and ritual practices in order to meet the pragmatics of their changing (and increasingly interconnected) worlds (see, e.g., Goulet, 1998; Hefner 1993; Brock 2005; Niezen 2000; Bousquet and Crépeau 2012; Poirier 2013; Charlesworth, Dussart, and Morphy 2005; Schwarz and Dussart 2010; Laugrand and Delâge 2008; Laugrand and Oosten 2010; Laugrand and Crépeau 2015; Harvey and Whitehead 2018).

While scholars have often stressed the so-called Indigenous attachment to their “traditions,” Indigenous peoples’ cosmological and ritual expressions have nevertheless always been characterized by a fair degree of openness, flexibility, and creativity, and thus anchored in dynamic modes of trans-actions and trans-formations. Indigenous peoples have reconstructed themselves through the Christian colonial project. Such “cosmologies in the making” (Barth 1987) are the products of Indigenous peoples’ ongoing and multifaceted encounters, dialogues, frictions, and negotiations amongst the knowledge and values inherited from their ancestors, Christian and Charismatic churches, “political modernity” (Chakrabarty 2000; see also Friedman 2002) and the globalizing world (Tsing 2005, 2008). In continuity with the colonial encounter, the responses of Indigenous peoples to neocolonial and globalizing forces are informed by their ontological and epistemological principles and cultural backgrounds, including in the domain of cosmology. In this volume, we pay specific attention to the ways Indigenous peoples are exploring, despite many constraints and much suffering, in order to (re)produce and (re)configure their worlds and their identities at the cosmological and ritual levels, as well as their sense of being “at home in the world” (Jackson 1995).

In this volume, we engage with the concept of indigeneity as defined succinctly by Francesca Merlan (2009, 304):

Indigeneity is taken to imply first-order connections (usually at small scale) between group and locality. It connotes belonging and originariness and deeply felt processes of attachment and identification, and thus it distinguishes “natives” from others. Indigeneity as it has expanded in its meaning to define an international category is taken to refer to peoples who have great moral claims on nation-states and on international society, often because of inhumane, unequal, and exclusionary treatment.

The question of what constitutes “indigeneity” raises complex issues often fraught with debates over what indigeneity means, how it is lived, and how colonial histories have shaped it. The authors in this volume provide ethnographic examples highlighting the complex ways in which Indigenous people articulate their Indigenous identity through forms of resistance and engagement, even at times embracing essentialist notions of Indigenous categorization, as they are confronted with a global world. In their seminal volume, Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (2007, 4) have underlined how indigeneity “is at once historically contingent and encompassing of the nonindigenous.” Thus, being Indigenous is not “a fixed state of being” (11). It is relational, emergent, and in dialogue with whatever is contrasted with it.

With a focus on contemporary Indigenous cosmologies, the chapters in this volume examine the fluidity of the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ontological worlds. They look at how performances of indigeneity unravel locally and globally and are thus open to change. They consider, moreover, the ways in which these dialogues and changes take place for people who are too often perceived to not control the means and forms of their representation globally (Tsing 2005). As highlighted in the recent edited collection by Graham Harvey and Amy Whitehead, Indigenous cosmologies are tethered to place, kin, and multifaceted relationships. We focus most specifically in this volume on the relational ontologies of Indigenous cosmologies in contrast with the dualistic ontology of the modern Western tradition. We pay attention to the processes of change and “the negotiation of indigeneity within this mobile, networked global world” (Harvey and Whitehead 2018, 1:12).

Such reflections on contemporary, changing Indigenous worlds and cosmologies, as well as pragmatic actions and forms of engagement in the global world, have been the raison d’être of the ERSAI (Équipe de recherche sur les spiritualités amérindiennes et inuit),1 a research group created in 2005 under the initiative of Robert Crépeau (Université de Montréal). The present volume was conceived after a ERSAI panel organized by Françoise Dussart and Sylvie Poirier at the 34th Conference of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July 2017. The original title of our panel was “Indigenous Contemporary Religiosities: Between Solidarity, Contestation, Convergence and Renewal.” The contributors to this volume include twelve anthropologists and one scholar in Indigenous arts. Among them, Robert Crépeau, Frédéric Laugrand, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jérôme, Anne-Marie Colpron, Antonella Tassinari, Sylvie Poirier, and Caroline Nepton Hotte are members or collaborators of ERSAI. The remaining contributors—Françoise Dussart, James MacKenzie, Kathryn Rountree, Ksenia Pimenova, and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel—presented papers at the ISSR conference. These contributors draw on timely ethnographic experiences among and works by Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Malta, and Russia to explore how contemporary Indigenous peoples mediate cosmologies, secularisms, and histories; how conversions often turn out to be double gestures of commitment; and how cosmological and ritual plurality, which we here call “entangled religiosity,” has become the new normal in Indigenous worlds. Overall, the goal of this volume is to consider the complex connections among religiosity, politics, activism, and resistance within specific, local contexts, as well as the ways in which globalization shapes these processes.

Relational Ontologies

Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have always stressed the paramount value and reality of relationships and relatedness in Indigenous world-making and ways of being (see, e.g., Deloria 2006; Myers 1986; Alfred 2005; Starblanket and Stark 2018; Simpson 2008; Blaser et al. 2010; Harvey and Whitehead 2018). Indeed, “most Indigenous cosmologies build on the notion that relationships constitute the very fabric of reality: without relations there is no world or life” (Blaser et al. 2010, 8). More recently, and still in contrast with the dualistic ontology of Western modern thought, these relationships have been conceptualized as “relationality.” As Blaser et al. (2010, 7) note: “In Indigenous people’s own ontologies and epistemologies, relationality in varying forms rather than separation flourished”; thus, in Indigenous worlds, “being well is therefore relational; it happens through balanced relations with one’s family, one’s community, and with other human and non-human entities.” While there are various ways to express the meaning of relationality, at the ontological level, “a core principle is that all the things of the world are made of entities that do not preexist the relationships that constitute them” (Escobar 2018, 75; our translation).

In Indigenous conceptions and experiences, relations and relationality are thus constitutive not only of local forms of sociality, but also of being-in-the-world (Bird-David 2017). They are central to the production of the person (human and other-than-human). In other words, the inner logic of Indigenous cosmologies and socialities, as well as local forms of (inter)subjectivities and historicities, express themselves in complex relational patterns (Myers 1986), including relations with human and other-than-human kin, the land, the spirits and ancestors, and various forms of sacred power and knowledge, both local and “foreign.” Such relationality continues to guide Indigenous cosmological (re)configurations and ritual practices. In these relational ontologies (Dussart and Poirier 2017a; Poirier 2008, 2013; Harvey and Whitehead 2018; Escobar 2018), “relationality is ontologically primary” (Scott 2017, 52; see also Vaarzon-Morel, this volume). Furthermore, in Indigenous worlds, relationships and relationality nourish an underlying and deep sense of care and responsibility, which is addressed, in one way or another, by the contributors to this volume. Also addressed are the ways in which the colonial encounter, the conversion to Christianity and more recently to Charismatic churches, and the hyperconnectivity of the global situation2 have engendered the proliferation of relations emanating from different worlds and cosmologies. Managing these diverse sets of relations at the cosmological, ritual, and political levels is indeed, to use an Australian Aboriginal-English expression, “hard work.”

Apart from Irving Hallowell’s (1960) classic text on Ojibwa ontology, “ontology” was, for a long time, not part of the anthropologist’s conceptual tool kit. Since the 1990s, anthropologists such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, Tim Ingold, and Bruno Latour have hastened the “turn to ontology” and offered novel and contested avenues to think about differences, alterities, and relational worlds (Poirier 2016b). “Ontologies, as we wrote elsewhere, are not only metaphysical and concerned with theories of being and reality, but have real practical, political, aesthetic, and phenomenological implications” (Dussart and Poirier 2017a, 8; see also Clammer, Poirier, and Schwimmer 2004). Within our discipline, the ontological turn has given rise to significant debates about the meanings and uses of the concept of “ontology” (Venkatesan 2010; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007). The turn has highlighted the ongoing crisis of alterity and difference that stems from globalization and the hegemonic character of Western modernity, which tends to “normalize” ontological and cultural differences. Anthropologists who engage with the ontological turn investigate not so much the diversity of worldviews—that is, varying representations and cultural constructions of the same world—but the multiplicity of worlds themselves, and thus the different ways of being human and of making worlds. This also implies that “rituals and performances are not ‘symbolic’ or ‘representational’ of something else. They are power” (Harvey and Whitehead 2018, 2:2; emphasis in the original). Thus, the ontological perspective offers conceptual tools to seriously consider other ways of being-in-the-world and to reconfigure our understanding of cultural encounters and spaces of interculturality in today’s context. Approaching differences and alterity through an ontological perspective requires taking some distance from the naturalist ontology and Western/modern model of a universal human nature and its various cultural expressions. The authors in this volume adopt an ontological perspective and highlight the differences with cultural others and/or the social construction of Indigenous subjectivities to bring us closer to understanding subjugated knowledges and worlds.

Alongside relationality and relational ontologies, cosmologies are one of the core concepts of the volume. Anthropological inquiries demonstrate the ongoing importance of cosmologies to an understanding of contemporary worlds and their varied entanglements (Abramson and Holbraad 2014; see also Harvey and Whitehead 2018). We consider the concept of cosmology far more encompassing than those of “religion” or “spirituality” (Laugrand 2013). Cosmology refers to local theories elaborated by social groups about the origin, composition, and dynamics of the cosmos; about its spatial and temporal proprieties; about the beings, objects, and powers that constitute it; about the nature of the relations between all these “existents” and forms of agencies; and finally about the place that humans occupy within it (Poirier 2016a). Cosmologies convey within their narratives particular ontological and epistemological principles. Indigenous cosmologies are always in the making: they are knowledge in movement and “a dynamic source of change” (Abramson and Holbraad 2014, 21) inscribed in a local historicity. To ensure their transmission and reproduction, cosmologies must be open to the world and able to integrate new elements. We agree with Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad (2014, 15) when they write that such “cosmological openness” illuminates “the plethora of actual ways in which foreign forms (e.g., mines, money, medicines, white persons, white gods) are not only incorporated into customary ‘ways of life’ but are radically re-signified within and through existing cosmological frames,” ontological principles and cultural idioms. Marshall Sahlins’s (1985, 1995) and Michael Taussig’s (1983) seminal works were particularly eloquent on these issues. In Indigenous worlds, these processes of cosmological reframing and reconfiguration have accelerated during the colonial period and conversions to Christianity. They continue to accelerate today in the face of neocolonial and neoliberal forces and global encounters and connections.

Furthermore, by proposing to consider “seriously” other cosmologies and rationaliti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Indigenous Cosmologies, Entangled Religiosities, and Global Connections
• 2 Embracing Christianity, Rejecting Western Individualism?
• 3 Engaging Religiosities
• 4 Making People
• 5 Discourses on the Advent of New Times among the Kaingang People of Southern Brazil
• 6 From Unknown to Hypermediatized
• 7 Tying Down the Soul of a Potato in the Southern Peruvian Andes
• 8 Negotiating Indigenous-Global Relationships in Contemporary Shamanism
• 9 Indigenous Cosmologies and Social Media
• 10 Human Remains and Indigenous Religiosity in the Museum Space
• 11 Shaman, Christian, Bureaucrat, Cop
• Contributors
• Index
• Other Titles from University of Alberta Press