Thoughts on Reassembling our Oikouménē
Heonik Kwon's Ghosts of War in Vietnam, is not talking metaphor or historical analogy. In one of the many stories he tells, a poor survivor of My Lai passes his dead family on his way to his rice paddy. His ghostly wife squats on a stone near the remains of their burned house with her three children behind her. When she greets him scornfully, he knows he must rebury their remains in a more honorable grave. His efforts will be aided by the spirits. So, he takes up a small sum he has saved and goes to negotiate with a neighbor for a loan. At that moment, a wealthy businesswoman, a relative of his wife, arrives from a distant city. She relays how the spirit family had appeared in her dream asking for help and offers to share the cost of reburial.
Which bodies, what persons, contribute to a peaceable, sustainable earth? When we talk about the “Spirit” do we also include ethereal bodies – hungry ghosts, boramey, apparitions of Mary – as social beings? Sociologist Gordon Avery has noted that, ‘the ghost is not simply dead or a missing person, but a social figure.’[1] Langford in writing about Lao refugees struggling with American hospital protocols, asks, “How do we make sense of… ghostly figures …without “anthropologizing” or “psychologizing” them, that is, without reducing them to examples of cultural belief or psychic symbols of trauma?”[2]
In Oakland, while staff at Cambodian New Generation, I worked with Khmer boys on probation who’d joined the Crips because the Bloods’ colors were “too KR.” When I said I was going to Cambodia, one asked excitedly for “magic hair.” He opened a little satchel and I peered at a tangled wad of black hair. He spritzed it, “so that it will grow more.” There might be some on the wat grounds in Phnom Penh, he suggested. We don’t often hear about magic hair, or amulets that protect border crossings, apparitions of Mary (consider Egypt, where she keeps appearing) or Kwan Yin who appeared to Vietnamese boat people when their engines stall or pirates trail them. What do we do with Jesus appearing to a Buddhist prisoner of the Khmer Rouge with advice that saves him? Family stories like these disappear from the “refugee narrative” upon arrival in the United States, and they are not (often) in our theological texts either. Langford in writing about Lao refugees struggling with American hospital protocols, asks, “How do we make sense of… ghostly figures …without “anthropologizing” or “psychologizing” them, that is, without reducing them to examples of cultural belief or psychic symbols of trauma?”[3]
After many years working in peacemaking, I began to ask questions about the stories that didn’t make it into our narratives, stories from the refugee camp where I worked, or on the streets of Oakland about Kwan Anh or Mary appearing on the water when boats stalled, or were lost in transit.
In these “conditions of fragility,’ we cannot separate humans from the ecosystems we have so deeply affected. We must account for other bodies: bodies of what we might call existents,[4] entities, actants, quasi-objects. Some are gendered, but in multiple ways – asexual, dimorphic, hermaphrodite - some are not; some are invisible, spectral, some appallingly visual, others are inorganic. Some entities occupy other bodies; some are aggregates of other entities. I am interested in whether, or how, these bodies do what we humans call knowing and acting, but in different ways.
How, methodologically, do I, or anyone involved in these interactions, relay these tales? There is a rich discussion in academic circles about encounters with and affirmation of the “extra-ordinary” (Goulet)[5] and “super-natural” (Kripal), popular mysticism (Orsi, Hollywood). As a white American academic with religious proclivities and feminist activist, do I refer to my own encounter(s) as an inclination to “go native,” appropriating a Cambodian worldview? Or does one keep a skeptical distance? As a North American Christian lesbian in the secular age (Taylor 2007), I’ve for many years dismissed our “porous” bodies’ interaction with the spirits, trees, and dreams as peripheral to the real revolutionary work of materialist theory and political theology. I argue here ghosts, preta, and other nonhumans are inhabitants of our worlds, social actors often denied a voice in the stories we tell about war, survival, and post conflict. I consider the decolonial challenge to western modernity and propose that the ontological turn allows us a radically different way to experience the world, one in which simultaneous other worlds coexist with the quotidian world we occupy.
Ecumene as conflicted
Violent upheaval develops particular “conflict imaginaries.” Alan Feldman notes in Formations of Violence in Northern Ireland that violence informs person, time and space: communities know the corners that the banshee haunt and can recite an annual calendar of violence. There is a “spiritual insecurity”[6] in conflict imaginaries that reflect zones of spectral disruption. These zones of spectral disruption are geographies where relations among humans, non-humans (spirits, ghosts, statues, animals), and landscapes are disrupted. Invisible realms interpenetrate earthly space and entities move between them. The boundary between living and dead perforates; dead cross back and forth, the living are half-dead. The living cannot conduct rituals that maintain cosmic order. Both humans and spirits of the land are displaced, betrayed, violated, traumatized.
In a “post-conflict” imaginaire, then, one would assume that the recovery of restorative rituals, and a mapping of spirit-human interaction would help to determine a program for the intrapsychic task of recovery, particularly by attending to dreams. Since the conflicts occur in multiple realms among assemblages of human and nonhuman, peacemaking must be approached with a wider and more creative arch of analysis. We need to take seriously the case of spirits, gods, and ghosts as social actors in conflict zones, particularly in communities that are marginal and powerless. The communities who participate in spectral interactions are usually projected as aboriginal, or poor and superstitious, fundamentalist or Pentecostal or variously irrational. They are historically an irresistible target for economic integration, educational assistance and civilizational uplift.
The field of conflict studies and various peacebuilding organizations developed since World War II. I will use in my analysis Mennonite peacemaker John Paul Lederach’s concept of conflict transformation, which envisons and responds to the ebb and flow of social conflict as life-giving opportunities for creating constructive change processes that reduce violence increase justice in direct interaction and social structures, and respond to real-life problems in human relationships.[7]
Lederach now plays a key role in the academic field of religion and peacebuilding which emerged in the late 1990s and has clustered around what Israeli scholar Atalia Omer has characterized as the “exotic, good, and theatrical.”[8] Mark Juergensmeyer is a proponent of “strong religion,” an argument for the unique nature of contemporary religious political violence and the role of “cosmic war.” In other words, in the minds of those engaged in religious conflict, these current wars are conducted simultaneously on earth and in heaven. Juergensmeyer argues that the Abrahamic apocalyptic wars have justified extremist militancy and martyrdom.[9] While Jurgensmeyer refers to religious violence as spectacular, driven by holy dates and places, but he doesn’t address the phantasms it produces. This is not uncommon. Peg Levine, in Love and Dread in Cambodia. Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge argues that Cambodia trauma literature and “genocide literature” rarely refer to spirits, unfinished rituals and the attendant “cosmological angst.”[10]
Studies of religious violence consider cosmology, politics of identity, and symbolic violence, while studies of religious peacemaking are more often descriptive (case-based), theological, or ethical. [11] Juergensmeyer and others writing on religious violence argue how the convergence of apocalyptic texts, strong leaders, and a notion of cosmic war make these conflicts particularly compelling for radicalization and difficult for secular states to address. While one might argue that Empires hide behind the mystification of religion, communities caught in the midst of these conflicts, or surviving their aftermath also rely on various forces and entities in their cosmos to offer them invisible aid. These are primarily Global North Christian scholars with increasing inclusion of Jewish and Muslim colleagues focusing on interfaith dialogue, just peacemaking, theological sources of peace, faith-based diplomacy, forgiveness and reconciliation, and transitional and strategic justice. [12]
I have worked with resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States and a “processing center” in the Philippines since the late 1970s and then studied post conflict reconstruction after Cambodia’s 1992 Peace Accords.[13] From 2005 to 2010, I was a US faculty for an intensive, applied conflict transformation MA program in Phnom Penh. The Applied Conflict Transformation Studies program draws practitioners from peacebuilding programs throughout the region (Nepal, Burma, Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, Philippines). These peacebuilding programs are often faith-based INGOs such as World Vision, Mennonites, Quakers, Caritas and Catholic Relief Services with local ngos that are Buddhist or Muslim.
Lederach in The Moral Imagination acknowledges the messy, inspired, and indeterminate ways conflicts often are resolved.[14] But peacebuilding NGOs are driven by donors who have pressed to show measurable results, not an easy task in the field. Because of this, ngo staff aren’t often encouraged to reflect “soft” problems of the conflict -- the cultural, psychological and religious dimensions of the social problems they are called upon to address. What would it mean for peace practitioners, not only clergy and religious adepts, to consider a multivaried ecumene?
Ecumene as an empire of exclusion
The ecumene is not just a space but a concept taken up by theologians, geographers and anthropologists. As a space, it maps out the realms we consider “inhabited,” as a concept it distinguishes between realm of the known and unknown – in this sense it foregrounds de Sousa Santos’ notion of Abyssal thinking that I will refer to later. Biblical writers refer to the Greek word Oikouménē fifteen times in the New Testament as a code for the first century Roman empire. Joseph and Mary return to Bethlehem due to an imperial decree that “all the world” (oikoumene) be subject to census (Luke 2:1). Oikouménē literally means "the inhabited land." Greeks used this word to refer to their known and inhabited world beyond which were barbarian lands. When Rome colonized the Hellenized world, Oikoikmene referred to 'the entire Roman world;' and then 'the whole inhabited world." The church has taken another path, referring to the Oikoimene, the whole inhabited earth as God’s creation, recognizing “every human pursuit as subject to the healing ministry of Christ’s Spirit.” (WCC) Thus, the ecumenical world is the church united in its difference. [15] The gospel writers had a more subversive intent for this reference (that it refers to the Roman Empire and its ungodly inhabitants) that is closer to my intent here.
In the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires, maps of political territories were a visual hermeneutics with Jerusalem at the center and Christ overlooking the world, attended by angels. These early maps meant to show what cartographers knew of the known world; the terra incognita was left at the margins of the map. The famous Nuremberg Chronicle or “Book of Chronicles” appears in 1493 at the triumph of Spain’s Reconquesta with its sights on the New World. In this illustrated ecumene is nostalgic. Its biblical world history shows three continents populated by Noah’s sons, Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa and Japeth in Europe. Shunted to the periphery, the excluded races: one-footed Sciopods, reverse-footed Antipods, bearded women, and one-eyed monsters.[16]
This map hides its backstory. Dussel claims that as Europe advanced against the Islamic world to the east and “discovered” the Americas to the west, Europe was able to reposition itself at the very center of the world. Dussel asserts that by posing against an “other,” Europe could colonize “an alterity [otherness] that gave back its image of itself.”10 And so, in 1507, a decade after the Nuremberg Chronicles, Waldseemuller’s World Map has redrawn the known world. One of the most important maps in the history of European cartography, this map reveals a new continent, separated from Asia and a new ocean: the Pacific.[17] Though not visually present, Incas, Mayans, and other New World “savages” without souls replace the Sciopods at the margins.
Beyond the Abyss
From of this "American crucible." (Quijano and Wallerstein) emerge modern conceptions of ethnicity, race, gender, nation, labor, and economic development.[18] This “coloniality of power” is also epistemic, a pensiemente unico in which no alternative ways of thinking are possible. Indeed, scientific Eurocentrism offers a specific rationality and perspective of knowledge that subsumes other conceptual formations. Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls this Abyssal thinking. He offers an apt spatial metaphor for the way North-centric, Western-centric hegemony of knowledge that separates the modern universal episteme from its “primitive” particular Other. “Abyssal thinking” identifies the valid, true, rational, normal on one side. On the other side of this line – the periphery of the ecumene, so to speak -- reality is incomprehensible. [19] De Sousa argues that economic and social justice is founded on cognitive justice: a post-Abyssal thinking offersan “ecology of knowledge” to widen the territory of the knowable.[20] An ecology of knowledge would
Current challenges to this divide have proliferated across the academy. Subaltern historian Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe speaks to the problematics of applying Enlightenment concepts of secular modernity to colonized worlds. Chakrabarty argues in part for a history that takes into account how gods and spirits are experienced by the subjects of subaltern Indian history, but he himself, even as a subaltern historian, cannot “invoke the supernatural in explaining/describing and event” (106). For example, the 1855 Santal rebellion against the British was instigated, they claimed, by their deity, Thakur. As Chakrabarty notes , historians insisted that this version of the rebellion must be “anthropologized (that is, converted into someone’s belief or made into an object of anthropological analysis)… to ascribe to it any real agency in historical events will be to go against the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures for settling disputes about the past .”[21] New scholars push past Chakrabarty to argue for new historical narratives that include what they call the ‘Unbelieved. Such new historical scholarship, would, pace Sousa Santos, include both sides of the Abyss into the historical record. Taking up this same case, they show how historian’s “dogmatic secularism” obscures history it proposes to describe. [22]
Take the words of the human revolutionary Sido: “Thakur recruited me, and my brothers helped me.” We repeatedly see variations of “Sido's brothers helped him, and he claimed ‘Thakur’ recruited him.” We never see, “Recruited by Thakur, Sido claimed that ‘his brothers’ helped him.” We believe those parts of our sources that resonate with our prejudices; we discount those parts of our sources that we can smartly identify as literary tropes, or psychological projections, or the fulfillment of social needs. In Epistemology of the South, de Sousa Santos argues that the anti-imperial south is a non-geographical south, composed of many epistemological souths which share an experience of knowledge born in struggle. These “epistemologies of the south” are counter-knowledges and struggles of post-Abyssal thinking.
Ontological Politics
Anthropology’s "ontological turn" is a response in the 1980s to postmodern turn to culture as representation, emerging from the postmodern trend initiated by Writing Culture.[23] Rather than acknowledging ‘one world, many worldviews’, an ontological approach recognizes multiples worlds.[24] Ontological anthropologists do not explain difference by way of ‘representation’, ‘symbolism’ or ‘belief.” They argue that difference is due to existence and participation in alternative realities.
Viveiros de Castro’s “perspectival multinaturalism” is a key example of this “ontological turn.” [25] Drawing from his work on Amerindian cosmologies, he juxtaposes Western mononaturalism and Amerinisan multinaturalism. Western worldview posits that humans are animals and share the same bodies (mono-nature) as non humans. But humans are distinguished by their consciousness (their culture), so that humans begin as nature but then transcend it. From the raw to the cooked. On the other hand, the Amerindian notion is derived from a myth of an original state of nondifferentiation between humans and animals. Vivieros de Castro asserts that for Amerindian cosmology, “the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but, rather, humanity.” [26] At some point, animals lose qualities retained by humans. Jaguar, spirits, tamir all have souls that humans share, they share the same culture. But they have different bodies – nature. They are multi-natural, but culturally similar. For Viveiros de Castro, the Amerindian idea of perspectivism presupposes no transcendent point of view. “[E]very point in the universe, every being, every tree, every animal, every planet is a subject, and that’s the meaning of the perspectivity idea that the human is the default state of the universe. More importantly, perspectivism is an aid in the “ permanent decolonization of thought.”[27] It’s a concept, not an appropriation of Amerindian. It is important because every place is a privileged place. It “supposes a constant epistemology and various ontologies, the same representations and other objects, a single meaning and multiple referents.” [28]
Ecumene reassembled and relating
Deleuze also refers to a radical relationality that he terms in French, agencement, translated as assemblage. This concept clusters every ‘thing’, such as a statue, God, or a landmine, but also utterances, happenings or events, and all these are composites or assemblages of affective relations, rather than the traditionally held isolated substance.[29]
This in part is what Latour is doing when he “reassembles” the social. In his controversial critique of the fundamental basis of sociology, he defines the social as “not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling.”[30] For Latour, the social is a basis for associations. It does not exist a priori to that exchange and is not limited to humans. Reassembling is thus not an “add and stir” but a radical reconfiguring of agency, access, and being. Not enough to ask who belongs to a “reassembled ecumene” since Latour’s ANT theory is already provocative on this subject. Ecumene reassembled also addresses conflicting overlap of concepts – and hierarchy of being. But how does this assemblage affect the ways we interact, the channels of information – communication – we deem relevant. Not only, does the subaltern speak, but do glaciers listen?
Dream worlds and metaphysical bodies
Dreams offer an epistemological access of encounter for overlapping ontologies, where humans and spirit languages can be understood. Western psychological language refers to a dimension “within” the person, while in other cultures are attributed to an exterior realm. Dreams are considered borderlands of the visible/invisible, dead/living, awake/sleep in which figures come ”from outside.” As "porous selves" these dreamers consider their bodies available for such visitations. Integrated into the cosmos, the person with a detachable soul travels out of the body and spirits can travel into the dream.
Cecconi notes how Peruvian peasants during conflict between Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian army increasingly relied on multiple sources of information, including non rational epistemologies (prayer, dreams, omens, consulting mediums) for information about those who disappeared or died. Cambodians referred to dreams instructing when to flee, where to go, what will happen next. In Cecconi’s ethnography, she refers to political nightmares in which Peruvian community members received many premonition dreams and were visited by their dead. The case I offer is based on a particular kind of appearance: epiphany dreams. Epiphaneia means "manifestation." Epiphany dreams consist of the appearance to the dreamer of an authoritative personage who may be divine or represent a god, and this figure conveys instructions or information. Statue or relic recovery dreams are part of a corpus of epiphany dreams in both Christian and Buddhist legends.
Still concluding...
The ecumenes we have travelled have been the production of Eurocentric modernity that has obscured other knowledges, peoples and realities from our “whole inhabited earth.” If we as action scholars consider these critiques, and include the multiple ontologies and wider range of actors of communities in conflict, how does our methodology change? How does this influence conflict transformation and defining the “problem” and our interaction with those involved in the conflict process (pre, mid, post)?
And yet, and yet, there are multiple cautionaries to this approach. As an action scholar who is a progressive Christian and takes these worldviews as a form of the real, how we analyze also malicious actants, or expressions of evil? What “powers and principalities” are at work that are hostile to the ecumene’s continuity. How do we as Christian humans understand and respond? As we reassemble the Oikoimene to let more inhabitants in, which ones, and to whom must they declare allegiance?
[1] Avery Gordon, Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. (Mpls, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
[2] Langford, Jean. 2005. Spirits of Dissent: Southeast Asian Memories and Disciplines of Death, In Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (25) (2005): 43 See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000): 105
[3] Langford, Jean. 2005. Spirits of Dissent: Southeast Asian Memories and Disciplines of Death, In Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (25) (2005): 43 See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000): 105
[4] Povinelli, Elizabeth A. "Geontologies of the Otherwise." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, January 13, 2014. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/465-geontologies-of-the-otherwise
[5] Jean-Guy Goulet and Granville Miller, Eds. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007)
[6] Adam Ashforth refers to“spiritual insecurity”in Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago IL: University of Chicago, 2005).
[7] John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation. (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003). He distinguishes it from conflict resolution which is based on a negative assessment of conflicts which must be ended, inferring that they can actually be resolved in short-term interventions. He also critiques conflict management, which while understanding conflicts entrenched processes, assumes that communities can be controlled and that the purpose of this management is to take care of the conflict, not root problems.
[8] Atalia Omer, "Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical" in Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding. eds Atalia Omer; R. Scott Appleby, David Little (Cary: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[9] Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God : The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
[10] Peg Levine, Love and Dread in Cambodia. Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge, (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2010).
[11] Raymond Hemlick and Rodney Peterson. Eds. Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, & Conflict Transformation (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002); In the United States, the key religion and peacemaking graduate programs include University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Eastern Mennonite University’s Peace Studies program, Fuller School of Theology, and Emory University’s Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding.
New initiatives include the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s partnership with CDA Collaborative Learning and Search for Common Ground to convene leading global experts to develop better measure the effectiveness of inter- and intra-religious action for peacebuilding.
[12] Her overview included primarily key works by American scholars from US universities, including Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999); Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003); Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Douglas Johnston, Ed. Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003: and Daniel Philpott, Ed. The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation; The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); David Smock Ed. Interfaith Dialogue and Peacebuilding (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2002); Glenn Stassen, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War (Pilgrim Press, 2008); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, 1996), David R. Smock, Religious Contributions to Peacemaking: When Religion Brings Peace, Not War, PeaceWorks, no. 55, ed. David R. Smock (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
[13] There are several ways that ecumenical peacebuilding has developed in Southeast Asia. There is the CCA School for Peace, now in Cambodia, and the Philippine-founded People’s Forum on Peace for Life, of which I have been a long-term member. Peace and development “regimes” develop differently in each country of conflict, which includes an amalgam of government entities, military, academic programs, institutes, multilateral funders, a range of civil society organizations which include religious organizations, and international NGOs. I am most familiar with these in the Philippines through the CPP-NPA and post-conflict Cambodia.
[14] John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[15] In modern usage, the word embraces the unity of God’s whole creation and recognizes every human pursuit as subject to the healing ministry of Christ’s Spirit
[16]Karin Friedrich, review of Chronicle of the World: The Complete and Annotated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, by Hartmann Schedel, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Jul., 2004): 749-750
[17] First Maps of the New World. Columbia or America: 500 years of Controversy. Cornel University University https://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/columbia-or-america/maps
[18] Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein , “Americanity as a concept. Or The Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Journal of Social Sciences, no. 134 (Nov. 1992): 549-552
[19] Boaventura de Sousa Santos Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014):120. See also Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
[20] De Sousa Santos’ project is ultimately a way to develop a human rights language more liberatory for struggles of the south. In order to retrieve epistemologies of the South, he suggests three concepts, movements, or steps: critique, recognition, and dialogue
[21] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000): 105
[22] Clossey, L., Jackson, K., Marriott, B., Redden, A., and Vélez, K. (2016), The Unbelieved
and Historians, Part I: A Challenge, History Compass, 14, 594–602. doi: 10.1111/hic3.12360
[23] James Clifford, Introduction. in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds.) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 13.
[24] Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord, “Relativism and the ontological turn within anthropology, “Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43, No 1 (2012): 3 – 23; S. Venkatesen, ed. “Ontology is just another word for culture: Motion tabled at the 2008 meeting of the group for debates in anthropological theory,” University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology 30 No. 2 (2010): 152 – 200.
[25] Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge, 10, Issue 3, (Fall 2004):463-484.
[26] Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives,” 465.
[27] Peter Skafish, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Metaphysics of Extra-Moderns: On the Decolonization of Thought—A Conversation with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” Common Knowledge 22 Issue 3 (September 2016): 410.
[28] Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation,” Tipitií: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2 No 1 (2004): 6.
[29] Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
[30] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Which bodies, what persons, contribute to a peaceable, sustainable earth? When we talk about the “Spirit” do we also include ethereal bodies – hungry ghosts, boramey, apparitions of Mary – as social beings? Sociologist Gordon Avery has noted that, ‘the ghost is not simply dead or a missing person, but a social figure.’[1] Langford in writing about Lao refugees struggling with American hospital protocols, asks, “How do we make sense of… ghostly figures …without “anthropologizing” or “psychologizing” them, that is, without reducing them to examples of cultural belief or psychic symbols of trauma?”[2]
In Oakland, while staff at Cambodian New Generation, I worked with Khmer boys on probation who’d joined the Crips because the Bloods’ colors were “too KR.” When I said I was going to Cambodia, one asked excitedly for “magic hair.” He opened a little satchel and I peered at a tangled wad of black hair. He spritzed it, “so that it will grow more.” There might be some on the wat grounds in Phnom Penh, he suggested. We don’t often hear about magic hair, or amulets that protect border crossings, apparitions of Mary (consider Egypt, where she keeps appearing) or Kwan Yin who appeared to Vietnamese boat people when their engines stall or pirates trail them. What do we do with Jesus appearing to a Buddhist prisoner of the Khmer Rouge with advice that saves him? Family stories like these disappear from the “refugee narrative” upon arrival in the United States, and they are not (often) in our theological texts either. Langford in writing about Lao refugees struggling with American hospital protocols, asks, “How do we make sense of… ghostly figures …without “anthropologizing” or “psychologizing” them, that is, without reducing them to examples of cultural belief or psychic symbols of trauma?”[3]
After many years working in peacemaking, I began to ask questions about the stories that didn’t make it into our narratives, stories from the refugee camp where I worked, or on the streets of Oakland about Kwan Anh or Mary appearing on the water when boats stalled, or were lost in transit.
In these “conditions of fragility,’ we cannot separate humans from the ecosystems we have so deeply affected. We must account for other bodies: bodies of what we might call existents,[4] entities, actants, quasi-objects. Some are gendered, but in multiple ways – asexual, dimorphic, hermaphrodite - some are not; some are invisible, spectral, some appallingly visual, others are inorganic. Some entities occupy other bodies; some are aggregates of other entities. I am interested in whether, or how, these bodies do what we humans call knowing and acting, but in different ways.
How, methodologically, do I, or anyone involved in these interactions, relay these tales? There is a rich discussion in academic circles about encounters with and affirmation of the “extra-ordinary” (Goulet)[5] and “super-natural” (Kripal), popular mysticism (Orsi, Hollywood). As a white American academic with religious proclivities and feminist activist, do I refer to my own encounter(s) as an inclination to “go native,” appropriating a Cambodian worldview? Or does one keep a skeptical distance? As a North American Christian lesbian in the secular age (Taylor 2007), I’ve for many years dismissed our “porous” bodies’ interaction with the spirits, trees, and dreams as peripheral to the real revolutionary work of materialist theory and political theology. I argue here ghosts, preta, and other nonhumans are inhabitants of our worlds, social actors often denied a voice in the stories we tell about war, survival, and post conflict. I consider the decolonial challenge to western modernity and propose that the ontological turn allows us a radically different way to experience the world, one in which simultaneous other worlds coexist with the quotidian world we occupy.
Ecumene as conflicted
Violent upheaval develops particular “conflict imaginaries.” Alan Feldman notes in Formations of Violence in Northern Ireland that violence informs person, time and space: communities know the corners that the banshee haunt and can recite an annual calendar of violence. There is a “spiritual insecurity”[6] in conflict imaginaries that reflect zones of spectral disruption. These zones of spectral disruption are geographies where relations among humans, non-humans (spirits, ghosts, statues, animals), and landscapes are disrupted. Invisible realms interpenetrate earthly space and entities move between them. The boundary between living and dead perforates; dead cross back and forth, the living are half-dead. The living cannot conduct rituals that maintain cosmic order. Both humans and spirits of the land are displaced, betrayed, violated, traumatized.
In a “post-conflict” imaginaire, then, one would assume that the recovery of restorative rituals, and a mapping of spirit-human interaction would help to determine a program for the intrapsychic task of recovery, particularly by attending to dreams. Since the conflicts occur in multiple realms among assemblages of human and nonhuman, peacemaking must be approached with a wider and more creative arch of analysis. We need to take seriously the case of spirits, gods, and ghosts as social actors in conflict zones, particularly in communities that are marginal and powerless. The communities who participate in spectral interactions are usually projected as aboriginal, or poor and superstitious, fundamentalist or Pentecostal or variously irrational. They are historically an irresistible target for economic integration, educational assistance and civilizational uplift.
The field of conflict studies and various peacebuilding organizations developed since World War II. I will use in my analysis Mennonite peacemaker John Paul Lederach’s concept of conflict transformation, which envisons and responds to the ebb and flow of social conflict as life-giving opportunities for creating constructive change processes that reduce violence increase justice in direct interaction and social structures, and respond to real-life problems in human relationships.[7]
Lederach now plays a key role in the academic field of religion and peacebuilding which emerged in the late 1990s and has clustered around what Israeli scholar Atalia Omer has characterized as the “exotic, good, and theatrical.”[8] Mark Juergensmeyer is a proponent of “strong religion,” an argument for the unique nature of contemporary religious political violence and the role of “cosmic war.” In other words, in the minds of those engaged in religious conflict, these current wars are conducted simultaneously on earth and in heaven. Juergensmeyer argues that the Abrahamic apocalyptic wars have justified extremist militancy and martyrdom.[9] While Jurgensmeyer refers to religious violence as spectacular, driven by holy dates and places, but he doesn’t address the phantasms it produces. This is not uncommon. Peg Levine, in Love and Dread in Cambodia. Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge argues that Cambodia trauma literature and “genocide literature” rarely refer to spirits, unfinished rituals and the attendant “cosmological angst.”[10]
Studies of religious violence consider cosmology, politics of identity, and symbolic violence, while studies of religious peacemaking are more often descriptive (case-based), theological, or ethical. [11] Juergensmeyer and others writing on religious violence argue how the convergence of apocalyptic texts, strong leaders, and a notion of cosmic war make these conflicts particularly compelling for radicalization and difficult for secular states to address. While one might argue that Empires hide behind the mystification of religion, communities caught in the midst of these conflicts, or surviving their aftermath also rely on various forces and entities in their cosmos to offer them invisible aid. These are primarily Global North Christian scholars with increasing inclusion of Jewish and Muslim colleagues focusing on interfaith dialogue, just peacemaking, theological sources of peace, faith-based diplomacy, forgiveness and reconciliation, and transitional and strategic justice. [12]
I have worked with resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States and a “processing center” in the Philippines since the late 1970s and then studied post conflict reconstruction after Cambodia’s 1992 Peace Accords.[13] From 2005 to 2010, I was a US faculty for an intensive, applied conflict transformation MA program in Phnom Penh. The Applied Conflict Transformation Studies program draws practitioners from peacebuilding programs throughout the region (Nepal, Burma, Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, Philippines). These peacebuilding programs are often faith-based INGOs such as World Vision, Mennonites, Quakers, Caritas and Catholic Relief Services with local ngos that are Buddhist or Muslim.
Lederach in The Moral Imagination acknowledges the messy, inspired, and indeterminate ways conflicts often are resolved.[14] But peacebuilding NGOs are driven by donors who have pressed to show measurable results, not an easy task in the field. Because of this, ngo staff aren’t often encouraged to reflect “soft” problems of the conflict -- the cultural, psychological and religious dimensions of the social problems they are called upon to address. What would it mean for peace practitioners, not only clergy and religious adepts, to consider a multivaried ecumene?
Ecumene as an empire of exclusion
The ecumene is not just a space but a concept taken up by theologians, geographers and anthropologists. As a space, it maps out the realms we consider “inhabited,” as a concept it distinguishes between realm of the known and unknown – in this sense it foregrounds de Sousa Santos’ notion of Abyssal thinking that I will refer to later. Biblical writers refer to the Greek word Oikouménē fifteen times in the New Testament as a code for the first century Roman empire. Joseph and Mary return to Bethlehem due to an imperial decree that “all the world” (oikoumene) be subject to census (Luke 2:1). Oikouménē literally means "the inhabited land." Greeks used this word to refer to their known and inhabited world beyond which were barbarian lands. When Rome colonized the Hellenized world, Oikoikmene referred to 'the entire Roman world;' and then 'the whole inhabited world." The church has taken another path, referring to the Oikoimene, the whole inhabited earth as God’s creation, recognizing “every human pursuit as subject to the healing ministry of Christ’s Spirit.” (WCC) Thus, the ecumenical world is the church united in its difference. [15] The gospel writers had a more subversive intent for this reference (that it refers to the Roman Empire and its ungodly inhabitants) that is closer to my intent here.
In the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires, maps of political territories were a visual hermeneutics with Jerusalem at the center and Christ overlooking the world, attended by angels. These early maps meant to show what cartographers knew of the known world; the terra incognita was left at the margins of the map. The famous Nuremberg Chronicle or “Book of Chronicles” appears in 1493 at the triumph of Spain’s Reconquesta with its sights on the New World. In this illustrated ecumene is nostalgic. Its biblical world history shows three continents populated by Noah’s sons, Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa and Japeth in Europe. Shunted to the periphery, the excluded races: one-footed Sciopods, reverse-footed Antipods, bearded women, and one-eyed monsters.[16]
This map hides its backstory. Dussel claims that as Europe advanced against the Islamic world to the east and “discovered” the Americas to the west, Europe was able to reposition itself at the very center of the world. Dussel asserts that by posing against an “other,” Europe could colonize “an alterity [otherness] that gave back its image of itself.”10 And so, in 1507, a decade after the Nuremberg Chronicles, Waldseemuller’s World Map has redrawn the known world. One of the most important maps in the history of European cartography, this map reveals a new continent, separated from Asia and a new ocean: the Pacific.[17] Though not visually present, Incas, Mayans, and other New World “savages” without souls replace the Sciopods at the margins.
Beyond the Abyss
From of this "American crucible." (Quijano and Wallerstein) emerge modern conceptions of ethnicity, race, gender, nation, labor, and economic development.[18] This “coloniality of power” is also epistemic, a pensiemente unico in which no alternative ways of thinking are possible. Indeed, scientific Eurocentrism offers a specific rationality and perspective of knowledge that subsumes other conceptual formations. Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls this Abyssal thinking. He offers an apt spatial metaphor for the way North-centric, Western-centric hegemony of knowledge that separates the modern universal episteme from its “primitive” particular Other. “Abyssal thinking” identifies the valid, true, rational, normal on one side. On the other side of this line – the periphery of the ecumene, so to speak -- reality is incomprehensible. [19] De Sousa argues that economic and social justice is founded on cognitive justice: a post-Abyssal thinking offersan “ecology of knowledge” to widen the territory of the knowable.[20] An ecology of knowledge would
Current challenges to this divide have proliferated across the academy. Subaltern historian Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe speaks to the problematics of applying Enlightenment concepts of secular modernity to colonized worlds. Chakrabarty argues in part for a history that takes into account how gods and spirits are experienced by the subjects of subaltern Indian history, but he himself, even as a subaltern historian, cannot “invoke the supernatural in explaining/describing and event” (106). For example, the 1855 Santal rebellion against the British was instigated, they claimed, by their deity, Thakur. As Chakrabarty notes , historians insisted that this version of the rebellion must be “anthropologized (that is, converted into someone’s belief or made into an object of anthropological analysis)… to ascribe to it any real agency in historical events will be to go against the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures for settling disputes about the past .”[21] New scholars push past Chakrabarty to argue for new historical narratives that include what they call the ‘Unbelieved. Such new historical scholarship, would, pace Sousa Santos, include both sides of the Abyss into the historical record. Taking up this same case, they show how historian’s “dogmatic secularism” obscures history it proposes to describe. [22]
Take the words of the human revolutionary Sido: “Thakur recruited me, and my brothers helped me.” We repeatedly see variations of “Sido's brothers helped him, and he claimed ‘Thakur’ recruited him.” We never see, “Recruited by Thakur, Sido claimed that ‘his brothers’ helped him.” We believe those parts of our sources that resonate with our prejudices; we discount those parts of our sources that we can smartly identify as literary tropes, or psychological projections, or the fulfillment of social needs. In Epistemology of the South, de Sousa Santos argues that the anti-imperial south is a non-geographical south, composed of many epistemological souths which share an experience of knowledge born in struggle. These “epistemologies of the south” are counter-knowledges and struggles of post-Abyssal thinking.
Ontological Politics
Anthropology’s "ontological turn" is a response in the 1980s to postmodern turn to culture as representation, emerging from the postmodern trend initiated by Writing Culture.[23] Rather than acknowledging ‘one world, many worldviews’, an ontological approach recognizes multiples worlds.[24] Ontological anthropologists do not explain difference by way of ‘representation’, ‘symbolism’ or ‘belief.” They argue that difference is due to existence and participation in alternative realities.
Viveiros de Castro’s “perspectival multinaturalism” is a key example of this “ontological turn.” [25] Drawing from his work on Amerindian cosmologies, he juxtaposes Western mononaturalism and Amerinisan multinaturalism. Western worldview posits that humans are animals and share the same bodies (mono-nature) as non humans. But humans are distinguished by their consciousness (their culture), so that humans begin as nature but then transcend it. From the raw to the cooked. On the other hand, the Amerindian notion is derived from a myth of an original state of nondifferentiation between humans and animals. Vivieros de Castro asserts that for Amerindian cosmology, “the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but, rather, humanity.” [26] At some point, animals lose qualities retained by humans. Jaguar, spirits, tamir all have souls that humans share, they share the same culture. But they have different bodies – nature. They are multi-natural, but culturally similar. For Viveiros de Castro, the Amerindian idea of perspectivism presupposes no transcendent point of view. “[E]very point in the universe, every being, every tree, every animal, every planet is a subject, and that’s the meaning of the perspectivity idea that the human is the default state of the universe. More importantly, perspectivism is an aid in the “ permanent decolonization of thought.”[27] It’s a concept, not an appropriation of Amerindian. It is important because every place is a privileged place. It “supposes a constant epistemology and various ontologies, the same representations and other objects, a single meaning and multiple referents.” [28]
Ecumene reassembled and relating
Deleuze also refers to a radical relationality that he terms in French, agencement, translated as assemblage. This concept clusters every ‘thing’, such as a statue, God, or a landmine, but also utterances, happenings or events, and all these are composites or assemblages of affective relations, rather than the traditionally held isolated substance.[29]
This in part is what Latour is doing when he “reassembles” the social. In his controversial critique of the fundamental basis of sociology, he defines the social as “not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling.”[30] For Latour, the social is a basis for associations. It does not exist a priori to that exchange and is not limited to humans. Reassembling is thus not an “add and stir” but a radical reconfiguring of agency, access, and being. Not enough to ask who belongs to a “reassembled ecumene” since Latour’s ANT theory is already provocative on this subject. Ecumene reassembled also addresses conflicting overlap of concepts – and hierarchy of being. But how does this assemblage affect the ways we interact, the channels of information – communication – we deem relevant. Not only, does the subaltern speak, but do glaciers listen?
Dream worlds and metaphysical bodies
Dreams offer an epistemological access of encounter for overlapping ontologies, where humans and spirit languages can be understood. Western psychological language refers to a dimension “within” the person, while in other cultures are attributed to an exterior realm. Dreams are considered borderlands of the visible/invisible, dead/living, awake/sleep in which figures come ”from outside.” As "porous selves" these dreamers consider their bodies available for such visitations. Integrated into the cosmos, the person with a detachable soul travels out of the body and spirits can travel into the dream.
Cecconi notes how Peruvian peasants during conflict between Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian army increasingly relied on multiple sources of information, including non rational epistemologies (prayer, dreams, omens, consulting mediums) for information about those who disappeared or died. Cambodians referred to dreams instructing when to flee, where to go, what will happen next. In Cecconi’s ethnography, she refers to political nightmares in which Peruvian community members received many premonition dreams and were visited by their dead. The case I offer is based on a particular kind of appearance: epiphany dreams. Epiphaneia means "manifestation." Epiphany dreams consist of the appearance to the dreamer of an authoritative personage who may be divine or represent a god, and this figure conveys instructions or information. Statue or relic recovery dreams are part of a corpus of epiphany dreams in both Christian and Buddhist legends.
Still concluding...
The ecumenes we have travelled have been the production of Eurocentric modernity that has obscured other knowledges, peoples and realities from our “whole inhabited earth.” If we as action scholars consider these critiques, and include the multiple ontologies and wider range of actors of communities in conflict, how does our methodology change? How does this influence conflict transformation and defining the “problem” and our interaction with those involved in the conflict process (pre, mid, post)?
And yet, and yet, there are multiple cautionaries to this approach. As an action scholar who is a progressive Christian and takes these worldviews as a form of the real, how we analyze also malicious actants, or expressions of evil? What “powers and principalities” are at work that are hostile to the ecumene’s continuity. How do we as Christian humans understand and respond? As we reassemble the Oikoimene to let more inhabitants in, which ones, and to whom must they declare allegiance?
[1] Avery Gordon, Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. (Mpls, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
[2] Langford, Jean. 2005. Spirits of Dissent: Southeast Asian Memories and Disciplines of Death, In Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (25) (2005): 43 See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000): 105
[3] Langford, Jean. 2005. Spirits of Dissent: Southeast Asian Memories and Disciplines of Death, In Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (25) (2005): 43 See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000): 105
[4] Povinelli, Elizabeth A. "Geontologies of the Otherwise." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, January 13, 2014. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/465-geontologies-of-the-otherwise
[5] Jean-Guy Goulet and Granville Miller, Eds. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007)
[6] Adam Ashforth refers to“spiritual insecurity”in Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago IL: University of Chicago, 2005).
[7] John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation. (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003). He distinguishes it from conflict resolution which is based on a negative assessment of conflicts which must be ended, inferring that they can actually be resolved in short-term interventions. He also critiques conflict management, which while understanding conflicts entrenched processes, assumes that communities can be controlled and that the purpose of this management is to take care of the conflict, not root problems.
[8] Atalia Omer, "Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical" in Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding. eds Atalia Omer; R. Scott Appleby, David Little (Cary: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[9] Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God : The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
[10] Peg Levine, Love and Dread in Cambodia. Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge, (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2010).
[11] Raymond Hemlick and Rodney Peterson. Eds. Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, & Conflict Transformation (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002); In the United States, the key religion and peacemaking graduate programs include University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Eastern Mennonite University’s Peace Studies program, Fuller School of Theology, and Emory University’s Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding.
New initiatives include the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s partnership with CDA Collaborative Learning and Search for Common Ground to convene leading global experts to develop better measure the effectiveness of inter- and intra-religious action for peacebuilding.
[12] Her overview included primarily key works by American scholars from US universities, including Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999); Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003); Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Douglas Johnston, Ed. Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003: and Daniel Philpott, Ed. The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation; The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); David Smock Ed. Interfaith Dialogue and Peacebuilding (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2002); Glenn Stassen, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War (Pilgrim Press, 2008); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, 1996), David R. Smock, Religious Contributions to Peacemaking: When Religion Brings Peace, Not War, PeaceWorks, no. 55, ed. David R. Smock (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
[13] There are several ways that ecumenical peacebuilding has developed in Southeast Asia. There is the CCA School for Peace, now in Cambodia, and the Philippine-founded People’s Forum on Peace for Life, of which I have been a long-term member. Peace and development “regimes” develop differently in each country of conflict, which includes an amalgam of government entities, military, academic programs, institutes, multilateral funders, a range of civil society organizations which include religious organizations, and international NGOs. I am most familiar with these in the Philippines through the CPP-NPA and post-conflict Cambodia.
[14] John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[15] In modern usage, the word embraces the unity of God’s whole creation and recognizes every human pursuit as subject to the healing ministry of Christ’s Spirit
[16]Karin Friedrich, review of Chronicle of the World: The Complete and Annotated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, by Hartmann Schedel, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Jul., 2004): 749-750
[17] First Maps of the New World. Columbia or America: 500 years of Controversy. Cornel University University https://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/columbia-or-america/maps
[18] Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein , “Americanity as a concept. Or The Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Journal of Social Sciences, no. 134 (Nov. 1992): 549-552
[19] Boaventura de Sousa Santos Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014):120. See also Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
[20] De Sousa Santos’ project is ultimately a way to develop a human rights language more liberatory for struggles of the south. In order to retrieve epistemologies of the South, he suggests three concepts, movements, or steps: critique, recognition, and dialogue
[21] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000): 105
[22] Clossey, L., Jackson, K., Marriott, B., Redden, A., and Vélez, K. (2016), The Unbelieved
and Historians, Part I: A Challenge, History Compass, 14, 594–602. doi: 10.1111/hic3.12360
[23] James Clifford, Introduction. in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds.) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 13.
[24] Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord, “Relativism and the ontological turn within anthropology, “Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43, No 1 (2012): 3 – 23; S. Venkatesen, ed. “Ontology is just another word for culture: Motion tabled at the 2008 meeting of the group for debates in anthropological theory,” University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology 30 No. 2 (2010): 152 – 200.
[25] Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge, 10, Issue 3, (Fall 2004):463-484.
[26] Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives,” 465.
[27] Peter Skafish, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Metaphysics of Extra-Moderns: On the Decolonization of Thought—A Conversation with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” Common Knowledge 22 Issue 3 (September 2016): 410.
[28] Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation,” Tipitií: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2 No 1 (2004): 6.
[29] Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
[30] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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