Play & Community Animism Part 3 Community without Communitas
What happens to ceremony in the absence of a foundational community and how does this absence affect animism?
Communitas Without Community
So we conveniently pack a ceremony in to a few hours, a retreat in to a weekend, or stretch out a conference space over the course of a few months, as these are more compatible with our busy lifestyles and limited schedules. But how does this limited engagement affect our get-togethers with the more-than-human? We come together briefly, usually anonymously and never to meet again. Socially, no time to establish trust, or get to know one another, for commitment or regularity. With the land, like I talked about in the previous entry, we haven’t developed a childlike animism with the places we are communing with.
Like I talked about in Part 1, there are an array of motivations for ceremony: the connection we long for, the problems we wish to solve, the unease we seek to heal. Animist ceremony seems to have been sucked in to the fixation on self-improvement as another technique towards our healing and to rise above; or conversely, we focus on the more-than-human, avoiding connection with one another, because they are better than we are, they haven’t destroyed the planet, we have.
Can we treat our loneliness by trying to emulate ancestral-style sacred gatherings? Or is a community-building foundation necessary beforehand? In the previous entry I asked about engaging in ceremony without really knowing the land or having had the experience of embodied upbringing in the land. In this entry I’m asking about the importance of community-building in partnership with these ceremonies or as a necessary precursor and then how vital human-to-human relationship is to our relationship with the more than human-world. And what I have noticed in these phenomenons is that it seems like there is a desire for communitas without community.
What is Communitas? What do you Mean by Community?
Communitas
So while I really enjoyed that the title of this essay had this nice alliteration, I should probably explain what I mean by communitas and community. My use of these terms borrows heavily from and is at times paraphrased from chapter 6 of Ethnoautobiography, by Jurgen Werner Kremer and River Jackson-Paton, in case you want to check in out.
Cited in Ethnoautobiography, Edith Turner describes communitas as “a group’s pleasure in shared experience with one’s fellow.” The experience of communitas occurs during ceremonial group gatherings with the intention of experiencing love and bonding in a self-transcendent manner through an “alteration in awareness, where participants enter a milder or stronger form of an integrated state of consciousness,” Turner states.
An affliction of modernity is being left with a spiritual hunger for these types of experiences, hoping they remedy the voids of our suppressed wildness or the absence of community and presence of intense loneliness. Without a cultural container of rituals, stories, or guidance from elders, however, we are more susceptible to abusing these experiences. They can become sort of transference spaces for our frustrations and more ego-centric desires.
Having stamped out these practices, labeled as as pagan and savage both within Europe and abroad, with our colonization traveling overseas, the descendants of these cultural exterminators (and self-exterminators) now search their past and the traditions of other continents for these experiences.
For the past few decades spiritual interest has focused on the self, on our own breath, as being the creators of our own reality, that everything we need is inside of ourselves and to let go of all external influence and that the self is all one needs to be happy or whole.
Inevitably, the world-wide interest in spiritual practices has not led to masses of people finding enlightenment and inner peace and so in the search for new horizons for feeling better, I think “tribe” might be becoming the new focus point for spiritual experience or healing. However, this search for one’s tribe or soul-family often looks like coming together in a non-comital way to a workshop hosted by a self-taught sort of therapist-facilitator who sells her services as using the “power of the group or Mother Earth” for healing or peace.
But this just seems strange to me, coming together for a profound experience with Source or Mother Nature or the Monster and then everyone goes back to having to cope with the stress of capitalism, or historical trauma on their own?
And just so it doesn’t seem like I’m only picking on spiritual and self-improvement spaces, the spaces I have been involved in also have similar issues, spaces at the confluence of animism, decoloniality and hospicing modernity are also avoiding community and relationship, feeling more comfortable with ceremonies or activities that are highly conceptual, usually prepared by academics or intellectuals. Rather than the language of new age spirituality they might talk about the web of relations or the monster or queer ecology, but they also aren’t really establishing any trust or consent with one another or taking the time to revive a childlike animism. They even highlight the importance of relationality but usually stay in their introverted conceptual comfort zones.
The point I’m trying to make, is that we’re all resistant and have blocks surrounding community building, we all have social and interpersonal wounds yet we are creating arenas for profound experience without a concomitant practice of building relationships with one another that can become more long-lasting cultural organisms.
Community
So, while a lot of the ceremonial spaces use terms like community or tribe, or emphasize relationality as one of their core principles, what does a community actually entail? What are its features? And how is community important to group ceremony. How is it related to animism?
First of all, what its not. The small-town modernity-concept of community where everybody is friendly, civically engaged, and subdivided in to private homes, where everyone is properly domesticated and contributing to society, where everyone owns their own property and has their own bank account is not what I mean by community. These communities rely on coloniality and systems of violence in order to allow them levels of prosperity that affords them a lifestyle where they can remain emotionally and economically separate, as well as ignorant of their natural surroundings.
Community is a feedback loop within which relationships are built and maintained on a daily basis and where those relationships in turn keep the community recreated every day. They are emotionally supportive, economically entangled, where trauma is collectively held, with no one having to be isolated when they go through a depression or turbulent, painful times. People do not have to be relegated to marginalization when they are low-functioning or have any sort of disability. There is a spirit of everyone inhabiting a common organism and being interested in one another’s growth and well-being rather than being simply a collections of social spaces where each person is pursuing their own life-goals awhile trying to navigate the politics of these spaces.
When I think about community, I think its interesting to ask questions. Once again, I’m borrowing from Ethnoautobiography and now the work Of Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti in Hospicing Modernity and her GTDF website.
Does community serve the individual and the individual serve the community?
Is there a sense of obligation and responsibility, equality/respect?
Who is included explicitly or implicitly? Does community serve me or those around me?
Is there accountability? For example, are we taking in to account the resources we consume, the harm we do, the people we rely on and what they give us?
Is there collective responsibility? Is there a willingness to forego individualism, personal careers, thinking about safety or one’s life as an individual concept and begin to consider well-being and basic needs as a group concept?
Trust? Do you feel like people will be there for you you if you slip and fall? Are there good intentions in dealings where people honor their word?
Consent? Are we learning each other’s needs and behaving with one another in ways that respect each other’s boundaries? Are we taking the time to learn one another’s shadows as well as working on our own so that consent is clear and candid? Are we slowing down in order to make sure consent is there, both with one another and the more-than-human, even when more “productive” work goals are asking for our time?
Reciprocity? Are we giving back to what sustains us? Do we give without a strict policy of quid pro quo? Are we building alternatives to the privileges of modernity when they are not in reciprocity? Are we challenging ourselves to realize when our work goals and ambitions make us feel like we deserve more than we do, or when they make us believe we should be centered and that our ideas are the ones that should be fed?
Relationality? Do we nurture and conversely allow ourselves to be nurtured? Are we learning one another’s personalities and goals and seeing our lives as entwined, rather than each individual figuring out their own life? Our we centering our relationships in our projects, as in realizing the relationship is the project and allowing building relationship to take precedence over accomplishing goals or completing events? Do we send our gifts to members of our community freely while accepting the ones that come our way?
Are we looking to the margins? Rather than focusing on a singular thinker or teacher, are we creating spaces that are horizontal and allow for a group intelligence to emerge? Are we trying to help develop the talents and skills of marginalized voices, of those who may usually be quiet in those more top-down events focused on intellectual figures.
So, Is there really community in our ceremonies?
I don’t know, it always felt weird to me, people are facing different economic situations, different socio-political and racial privileges and or disadvantages, different trauma backgrounds and they are supposed to leave that all at the door and then come together and cosplay as a tribe? Or in my case, come in with grief that could last for days, have to hold that in because a two or three hour session is not enough to allow me to go through my whole process or trust that a container of strangers will be there for me while giving up my need to really know the other people present before allowing myself to be so vulnerable?
I’ve mentioned that usually the ceremonies center around more high-functioning, intellectual (usually gifted speakers or writers) or charismatic (willing to do promotion around their events and maintain a constant public presence) accomplishment-oriented types charging others to attend their events and making a career out of it? I’ve noticed this creates a soft hierarchy that centers around the values and terminologies of the thinker, who ends up setting the agenda while the group usually goes along with whatever concept the thinker happens to be focusing on or interested in at the moment, sometimes in the hopes that the thinker has a special perspective on the times and answers. I would like to see the space and time taken to allow groups to get know one another and emergently allow whatever issues are most relevant to them to arise naturally for themselves, rather than taking cues from a centered figured. To give examples for the sake of transparency, I’ve experienced this in places like Advaya or the Emergent Network/Vunja spaces and I’ve felt very alone with the people I have met and tried to get to know in these spaces.
So I don’t think we’re taking the time to build an “everybody in the same boat, mutual aid” kind of feeling in these spaces, nor do I feel these spaces are emergent or bottom-up. And once again, this is no one’s fault, there are no bad guys here. Its just that we’re still in the programming of modernity, focusing on the event or ceremony, the project, rather than on one another, on the relationships.
So yeah, it always felt off to me to come together for something sacred and then each go back to their separate lives and ignoring one another in the quotidian. Like to attend these events I would have to mask my pain and other personal issues in order to fit in and allow the events run smoothly and as planned. But then once the event was over, it was always going back to dealing with my issues and problems as an individual. I’m always left with the question, why is ceremony a community thing, but facing how to make a living, how to deal with trauma, how to learn and grow and individual thing?
Ceremony On a Foundation of Land and Community
Making the World Together Sets up Relational Animism
I don’t think we can just bypass the daily community that builds life together. Yeah we’re all busy and scattered around the world and trying to figure out how to turn our passion for the more-than-human world in to some sort of work or project, but I just don’t think we can keep doing this as individuals. We’re going to have to figure out how to myceliate some sort of group structures as modernity crumbles.
Cultures who have maintained traditions of ceremony that date back to their ancestors, it seems to me from my research, had been weaving life together over the course of generations of interdependence. Communities are organisms that recreate life every day together: the daily hands kneading the dough the neighbor eats, sewing the colorful clothing of the children, or living under a roof that the whole village has helped to erect. A group of anonymous Westerners or acquaintances who get together from time to time, just doesn’t feel the same. Perhaps we can’t yet build one another’s homes, but we can make housing a collective effort?
I think this container of being there for one another, whether its in a traditional village or in a creative hospicing modernity project doing their best to navigate these times, is essential to relationship and I think human to human relationship is essential to developing our ability to relate to the more-than-human.
Human Relationship Opens Up Relationship With the More than Human
So, in addition to upbringings of childlike animism, which I spoke about in the previous entry, I feel like this foundation of trust and collective responsibility in a life shared together, hones and matures our relational abilities, as well as creating a container for and giving meaning to animist ceremony. The more I have healed my own relational trauma, the easier it has been to relate to nature, to really feel it.
The more people I have treated me with compassion, the more I have felt loving care and resonance with the extrahuman world. I think our ability to relate to one another is the same faculty that relates to the more-than-human. Rejection, in turn, especially in situations where people abandon you to try to “figure out their own life” rather than try and build something together, has often numbed my ability to connect.
Conclusion
If our ability to relate to the multi-species web is shaped in our childhoods, not just by the experiences outdoors I talked about in the last entry, but also by human attachments, by life in community, I wonder, what would my relationship to nature be like If I had been a part of a village? How would being a part of that close-knit social group deepen my ability to relate to the more-than-human? I always wonder if it is possible to truly know relationship with the more than-human as a human, if we have never experienced the type of closely knit social group that we have evolved with?
And to be frank, my impression is that, for most of us, our relational abilities are stunted, we want to dive in to the ceremonial stuff with the spirits of the land, with nature but we haven’t healed those relational abilities. Our wildness, our sensitivity to the world is buried under a lot of layers of hurt. But maybe healing those hurts doesn’t happen in those nature ceremonies, maybe they are healed in doing the uncomfortable work of learning in to relationships and group projects with other people, slowly figuring out how to prioritize one another over meeting the demands of modernity.
So in the next and final entry, I want to talk about bringing it together, how a childlike animism and relationships in community help our ability to listen to the land, how listening to the land can in turn offer us back lessons for community and how to live with them and finally how maybe ceremony is an emergent property of this eco-cultural feedback loop rather than a hack towards it.