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Within the social sciences, other-than-human being's agency has often been denied and interbeings relationships have not been fully addressed. However, many indigenous worldviews and Western contemporary spiritual practices are shaping a very different reality, with various attempts to share the world with non-human beings, animate or inanimate, creating forms of relationships to "the living".
This edited volume documents how humans deal with non-human entities in a large variety of cultural contexts. It focuses on ritual processes and how ritual creativity is mobilised to invent new ways of relating with more-than-humans. Comprising nine case studies, the volume is divided into three main sections that address successively daily interactions, political implications, and spiritual engagements. Cooperative interactions, kinship relations, senses of belonging, traditional healing techniques, non-human beings' legal personality attribution, transformative experiences, and phenomenological relationalities are examined in various locations: West Africa, Buryatia, Estonia, Finland, France, Mexico, Nepalese Himalayas, Sweden and Wales.
Chapters "Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World-An Introduction" and "Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
List of contents
1. Relating with More-Than-Humans. Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World. An Introduction.- PART 1. LIVING WITH MORE-THAN-HUMANS: THE ROLE OF DAILY RITES.- 2. Inter-species interaction rituals in yak herding practices in Nepal.- 3. Urban Wixárika and more-than-human beings: The case of Tate i Niwetsika ("Our Mother Corn") in Western Mexico.- 4. The peasant and the soil in Southwestern French Biodynamic Agriculture: a ritualistic creative relationship entangled in a holistic commitment.- PART II. MORE-THAN-HUMAN POLITICS: BELONGING, IDENTITY, INDIGENEITY AND THE RIGHTS OF NATURE.- 5. Human-resource connections as articulations of belonging in Buryatia.- 6. "Behind-the-curtain Work": Animal Ingredients, Divine Collaboration, and Ritual Substitution in West African Healthcare.- 7. Ritual Animism. Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks.- PART III. MORE-THAN-HUMAN SPIRITUALITIES: LIMINALITY, EMBODIMENT AND INTIMATE EXPERIENCES OF PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION.- 8. Escaping the Modern Predicament: Nature as Refuge and Community in Contemporary Health Practices in Wales, Sweden, and Finland.- 9. Crossing thresholds with nature spirits: ritual design, liminality, and transformation in Northwestern France.- 10. Crystals as Other-than-human Persons for New Spirituality Estonians: Phenomenological Relationality in Animist Materialism.- 11. Afterword: In Among the More-than-Humans.
About the author
Jean Chamel is Senior SNSF Researcher in the Institute of Geography and Sustainability at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Yael Dansac is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
Report
"One greatest strength of the book is the roughly equal balance between studies focused on indigeneous studies ... and those concerned with spiritual practice in the cosmopolitan and urbanized west. ... This collection stands out for both its diversity and its depth of methodological and theoretical sophistication. I look forward to teaching these exciting case studies in the semester ahead." (Dan McKanan, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Vol. 8 (1-2), 2024)
