The Feminist Biologist

You just met Donna Haraway! In her Cyborg Manifesto, we're introduced to the cyborg, a theoretical or sci-fi being with organic and biomechatronic parts. The cyborg is a dangerous fusion of nature and culture whose hybrid identity transgresses boundaries and destabilizes fixed categories. The uncanny world before you is aswarm with cyborg-like beings: humanoids with iPad's glued to their palms, Monsanto seeds, mood-altering designer drugs, and concrete towers full of people, wires, pets, and bacteria. Cyborg worlds demand cyborg rituals — naturecultural rituals for human and non-human alike — and ritual practitioners who are not afraid to include prostheses, contraptions, networks, electronic waste, and other complicated and sometimes repulsive orphans of anthropocentrism in their prayers and protocols.

The Native American Theologian

You just met Vine Deloria Jr.! In God is Red, we learn that Indigenous rituals are emergent not static or fixed — they adapt to real places (and, sometimes, the memory of a place). These rituals are inseparable from relationships with other forms of life: microfauna, weeds, mammals, geologic material, or glaciers. Place informs and is formed in practices. Attending to the details of a place uncovers sacred landscapes; sacred landscapes come with sacred responsibilities. Deloria argues that Eurochristian tradition has all but eliminated the dimension of land from ritual practice. Hebrew tribal memories have been uprooted and transposed into universal "truths" and responsibilities isolated from the complex relationships that emerge in places, ecologies, or communities.

The Scholar of Ritual Studies

You just met Ronald L. Grimes! In Rite Out of Place, he suggests that new and creative rituals are a necessary response to ecological crisis — ritual systems aren't separate from the earth or asphalt we walk on, swirls of airborne particulate, the air we take into our lungs, or the myriad animate or inert objects that surround us. For Grimes, religious rituals are a performances of identity and difference; "doing" ritual shapes matter (and what matters) around us.

The Rogue Ethnographer

You just met Frédérique Apffel-Marglin! In Subversive Spiritualities, ritual is presented as a feature of "agential reality," a term Apffel-Marglin teases out of feminist physicist Karen Barad's theory of agential realism. Agential reality suggests that objects (humans, bottlecaps, moss, galaxies, or fire ants, for example) do not "exist" but, instead, emerge as a condition of intra-action — what happens in, between, and around relationships. Rituals act to stabalize certain patters of intra-action and are radically creative acts that shape reality. By this definition, electron microscopes, urchins, fire escapes, and spirits (whether real or imagined) are participants in rituals and realities.

Guidebook!

To complete Level 1 you must meet each theorist and collect one each of their works.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

You just picked up Donna Haraway's text Simians, Cyborgs, and Women! This collection of ten essays, written between 1978 and 1989, establishes a link between the unlikely trio of simian (higher primate), cyborg, and woman to explore the destabilizing effect these "creatures" have had on the story Eurowestern technoscience tells about the nature of "nature."

God is Red

You just picked up Vine Deloria Jr.'s text God is Red! First published in 1972, this text outlines Indigenous ceremonial life as a system of knowledge and ritual based in responsibilities that arise from an awareness of the interconnectedness of all forms of life.

Rite Out of Place

You just picked up Ronald L. Grime's text Rite Out of Place! This 2006 collection of ten essays moves past the usual conservatism of ritual studies to explore connections and crossings between ritual and media culture, built space, videographic documentation practices, pedagogy, the events of 9/11, and environmental planning. Rituals, Grimes argues, are a "acts of marking off," performances which exclude or make new connections.

Subversive Spiritualities

You just picked up Frédérique Apffel-Marglin's text Subversive Spiritualities! This 2012 text proposes that the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world that are included in the beliefs and ritual practices of Indigenous peoples are "eco-metaphysically true." Many non-Eurowestern cultures recognize that humans are in relationship with a host of other beings (seen or unseen); these beings have names, narrative histories, and participate in our encounters with them.