The Fifth World:Spirit of place (Feel)
From The Fifth World
Spirit of place (genius loci in Latin) refers to an important animist understanding that the landscape participates as more than a passive backdrop. In fact, the spirit of place acts as the primary protagonists; the various human (and other-than-human) persons who might figure in a particular story exist, both literally and figuratively, as aspects of the land. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, as the same place tells the same stories in different times with different people. Similar themes emerge, replayed in differing contexts. Animists understand their cultures not as anthropogenic creations, but as duties to the land and ways of living as part of the land. Thus, they understand other-than-human persons like animals and plants to engage in the same culture, rooted in the same land, upholding the wolf or oak ceremonies and songs, just as they uphold the human ceremonies or songs.
In mundane terms, Fifth World cultures have tended towards ancient precedents. Faced with the same climatic and ecological challenges, with the same plant and animal neighbors to rely upon to meet those challenges, feral cultures have tended towards wild precedents, even unconsciously, simply because the wild way worked best under those circumstances. Even seemingly arbitrary aspects of culture, like language and art, have tended towards wild antecedents. Feral languages, like wild languages, rely heavily on the ecological soundscape of the land, from animal calls to bird songs, to the prevalence of sounds like streams, rainfall, or winds passing through particular species of tree. Art uses similar media, inspired by similar scenes, so common artistic styles have re-emerged.
Of course, neither have feral cultures simply recapitulated their wild predecessors. Feral cultures come from a different point of origin, and carry that legacy with them. Though they have become native to the same lands, and the lands live the same cycles and patterns through them, they nonetheless find varying expression when they pass through different persons. Even wild humans did not express the same land quite the same way as their wolf or oak neighbors; neither do feral humans express the land quite the same way as wild humans once did.
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[edit] Related fiction
[edit] Film
- Apocalypto (2006) (IMDB, Wikipedia) Taken away from his home, the main character barely survives. When he makes it back to the threshold of his land, he proclaims his relationship to the place: "I am Jaguar Paw, son of Flint Sky. My Father hunted this forest before me. My name is Jaguar Paw. I am a hunter. This is my forest. And my sons will hunt it with their sons after I am gone." He undergoes an initiation to the land in the quick sand, and proceeds to destroy his enemies not by his own strength, but notably by orchestrating the strength of the land itself against them.
- Pathfinder (2007) (IMDB, Wikipedia) Interestingly begins with the standard action plotline, but that strategy eventually leads to defeat. The main character ultimately succeeds by abandoning his personal strength, and instead relying on the strength of the land and his relationship and knowledge of it to defeat his enemies.
[edit] Examples
- One place might currently have a new growth forest beginning to heal from the changes of the end of the Fourth World. It might have a very different mix of species, discovering new ways of relating to each other and forming an ecology. Where once packs of wolves maintained population levels, you might have the wolves gone extinct, and instead larger, coyote-wolf hybrids that hunt in packs becoming more and more like wolves. In this land, you might have a fledgling human culture also trying to find its place. This scenario occurred more frequently at the beginning of the Fifth World, in the centuries prior to the official timeline, but it illustrates how the land tells the same story through the humans, wolves and trees living on it in slightly different ways.
- Other animals have their own shamans, participate in their own ceremonies, and engage in a different level of the same culture as humans.
- While other-than-human persons in the same land relate like kin, even humans from other lands do not. Family and land form the most basic relationships; people from other lands, for all practical purposes, might as well come from other planets.
- One's native land empowers a feral human. Feral humans understand the flight patterns and alarm calls of birds, the various animal calls around them, and even the subtle changes of the weather. When something happens, the whole land tells them about it immediately. The whole land acts like an extended set of senses for them. Outside of their land, that works against them; they experience the disconnection from their land as profoundly as losing one of their other senses, like gouging out their eyes or cutting off their ears, differing only in that they can reverse that state of affairs if they can make it back home.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- "The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred" by Joe Sheridan & Roronhiakewen "He Clears the Sky" Dan Longboat. Space and Culture, vol. 9, no. 4, 365-381 (2006)
- "The Place and the Story: Where Ecopsychology and Bioregionalism Meet" by Ralph Metzner, The Trumpeter, vol 12, no 3 (1995)
