Fields
Winter 2013 -
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“a specific position and point of view in the general ecology of relations” (Descola 2006:4). Communing with these not only gives us a larger perspective of the world which can inform our poetics, but as we have seen, gives us a larger poetics, itself. This puts into perspective the importance that shamanism often takes on within these societies. The shaman’s role is to perform the impossible act of transforming into an Other and in doing so navigate and heal interpersonal/ interspecies relations. In some, more limited, ways this is the function and task of the anthropologist. This perhaps defines the role of the activist anthropologist that has emerged within contemporary anthropology. The anthropologist is attempting to translate. This is as well the task of the poet. Poetry has shamanistic as well as anthropological qualities. It seeks both to attempt to become others and in so doing, understand them and their perspective. This breach enables poesis to correct imbalances of the mind and the heart, which reverberate outward the repopulated world.
(Shepard 1999:9), they are the nonhuman living within us. This biomimcry, thinking and feeling through what the forest thinks through us, is what will enable poetry to understand, convey, and reinstate our kinship with the world beyond the human. This lends a much more profound meaning to the traditional phrase, “art imitates life.” But just as we have learned from animals, and innovated on their basis, animals have done so on ours. There is the “beluga whale who mimicked the cadence and rhythms of human vocalizations” and the elephant who discovered a way to place his trunk in his mouth, manipulating sound in order to mimic us, to speak five human words (Moe 2012b; The Guardian 2012a,b). Thus life imitates art as well. As the texts merge, human and nonhuman, as we learn about each, from each other, learning together, and becoming together, crafting an intertexual fabric that bridges, we can again become companions, on the page and beyond. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo......... References: Castro, Eduardo Viveiros De 1998 Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3):469-88. Cummings, E. E. 1959 100 Selected Poems. New York: Grove. Descola, Phillipe 2006 Beyond Nature and Culture. Proceedings of the British Academy 139:137-55. The Guardian 2012a Koshik the Elephant ‘talks’ to his Trainer. 2012b Talking Whale Named Noc Mimics Human Speech. Kohn, Eduardo n.d. How Forests Think. Laozi 1963 Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin. Leith, Brian, and Dale Templar 2011 Oceans:Into the Blue. In Human Planet: BBC.
Betwixt and Between The more-than-human world has already infected our lives. We have never been without them. Moe writes: In “The Origin of Metaphor: The Animal Connection,” Shepard observes a host of animal infinitives within human language that suggest an etymology, not in Latin or Greek, but in the rhetorical energy of animals. He writes, “The great zoo of animal infinitives—to bear, to lark, to hound, to quail, to worm, to badger, to skunk—is likewise irreducible” (9). Though Shepard does not use the term “rhetorical energy,” he surmises how these words emerged from humans who, as hunters and gatherers, engage with the gestures of nonhuman animals that quail, bear, lark, hound, worm, and badger. (Moe 2012a:49)
These are words of “self-consciousness, because they are verbs that describe our actions”
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