Françoise Dussart - Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics

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Title: Contemporary Indigenous cosmologies and pragmatics / Franoise Dussart and Sylvie Poirier, editors.

Names: Dussart, Franoise, editor. | Poirier, Sylvie, 1953 editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210309288 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210314184 | ISBN 9781772125825 (softcover) | ISBN 9781772125924 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781772125931 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Cosmology. | LCSH: Indigenous peoplesReligious life. | LCSH: Indigenous peoples. | LCSH: Spirituality. | LCSH: Religions.

Classification: LCC BD 511 . C 66 2021 | DDC 202/.4dc23

First edition, rst printing, 2021.

First electronic edition, 2022.

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Copyediting and proofreading by Kay Rollans.

Indexing by Judy Dunlop.

Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

Cover image : Terry R. Awashish,
Photomontage , 16" 24", 2017.

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CONTENTS

INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGIES,
ENTANGLED RELIGIOSITIES, AND GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

A Theoretical Overview

FRANOISE DUSSART & SYLVIE POIRIER

IN THE LAST FEW DECADES, anthropologists and other social scientists have shown growing ethnographic and analytical interests in the indigenization of global religions and the local entanglements of Indigenous and global traditions. There is now a growing literature analyzing the ongoing Indigenous creative drive to revisit their cosmological expressions and ritual practices in order to meet the pragmatics of their changing (and increasingly interconnected) worlds (see, e.g., Goulet, 1998; Hefner 1993; Brock 2005; Niezen 2000; Bousquet and Crpeau 2012; Poirier 2013; Charlesworth, Dussart, and Morphy 2005; Schwarz and Dussart 2010; Laugrand and Delge 2008; Laugrand and Oosten 2010; Laugrand and Crpeau 2015; Harvey and Whitehead 2018).

While scholars have often stressed the so-called Indigenous attachment to their traditions, Indigenous peoples cosmological and ritual expressions have nevertheless always been characterized by a fair degree of openness, flexibility, and creativity, and thus anchored in dynamic modes of trans-actions and trans-formations. Indigenous peoples have reconstructed themselves through the Christian colonial project. Such cosmologies in the making (Barth 1987) are the products of Indigenous peoples ongoing and multifaceted encounters, dialogues, frictions, and negotiations amongst the knowledge and values inherited from their ancestors, Christian and Charismatic churches, political modernity (Chakrabarty 2000; see also Friedman 2002) and the globalizing world (Tsing 2005, 2008). In continuity with the colonial encounter, the responses of Indigenous peoples to neocolonial and globalizing forces are informed by their ontological and epistemological principles and cultural backgrounds, including in the domain of cosmology. In this volume, we pay specific attention to the ways Indigenous peoples are exploring, despite many constraints and much suffering, in order to (re)produce and (re)configure their worlds and their identities at the cosmological and ritual levels, as well as their sense of being at home in the world (Jackson 1995).

In this volume, we engage with the concept of indigeneity as defined succinctly by Francesca Merlan (2009, 304):

Indigeneity is taken to imply first-order connections (usually at small scale) between group and locality. It connotes belonging and originariness and deeply felt processes of attachment and identification, and thus it distinguishes natives from others. Indigeneity as it has expanded in its meaning to define an international category is taken to refer to peoples who have great moral claims on nation-states and on international society, often because of inhumane, unequal, and exclusionary treatment.

The question of what constitutes indigeneity raises complex issues often fraught with debates over what indigeneity means, how it is lived, and how colonial histories have shaped it. The authors in this volume provide ethnographic examples highlighting the complex ways in which Indigenous people articulate their Indigenous identity through forms of resistance and engagement, even at times embracing essentialist notions of Indigenous categorization, as they are confronted with a global world. In their seminal volume, Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (2007, 4) have underlined how indigeneity is at once historically contingent and encompassing of the nonindigenous. Thus, being Indigenous is not a fixed state of being (11). It is relational, emergent, and in dialogue with whatever is contrasted with it.

With a focus on contemporary Indigenous cosmologies, the chapters in this volume examine the fluidity of the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ontological worlds. They look at how performances of indigeneity unravel locally and globally and are thus open to change. They consider, moreover, the ways in which these dialogues and changes take place for people who are too often perceived to not control the means and forms of their representation globally (Tsing 2005). As highlighted in the recent edited collection by Graham Harvey and Amy Whitehead, Indigenous cosmologies are tethered to place, kin, and multifaceted relationships. We focus most specifically in this volume on the relational ontologies of Indigenous cosmologies in contrast with the dualistic ontology of the modern Western tradition. We pay attention to the processes of change and the negotiation of indigeneity within this mobile, networked global world (Harvey and Whitehead 2018, 1:12).

Such reflections on contemporary, changing Indigenous worlds and cosmologies, as well as pragmatic actions and forms of engagement in the global world, have been the raison dtre of the ERSAI (quipe de recherche sur les spiritualits amrindiennes et inuit), a research group created in 2005 under the initiative of Robert Crpeau (Universit de Montral). The present volume was conceived after a ERSAI panel organized by Franoise Dussart and Sylvie Poirier at the 34th Conference of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion ( ISSR ) held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July 2017. The original title of our panel was Indigenous Contemporary Religiosities: Between Solidarity, Contestation, Convergence and Renewal. The contributors to this volume include twelve anthropologists and one scholar in Indigenous arts. Among them, Robert Crpeau, Frdric Laugrand, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jrme, Anne-Marie Colpron, Antonella Tassinari, Sylvie Poirier, and Caroline Nepton Hotte are members or collaborators of ERSAI . The remaining contributorsFranoise Dussart, James MacKenzie, Kathryn Rountree, Ksenia Pimenova, and Petronella Vaarzon-Morelpresented papers at the ISSR conference. These contributors draw on timely ethnographic experiences among and works by Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Malta, and Russia to explore how contemporary Indigenous peoples mediate cosmologies, secularisms, and histories; how conversions often turn out to be double gestures of commitment; and how cosmological and ritual plurality, which we here call entangled religiosity, has become the new normal in Indigenous worlds. Overall, the goal of this volume is to consider the complex connections among religiosity, politics, activism, and resistance within specific, local contexts, as well as the ways in which globalization shapes these processes.