Ⅰ. Introduction
1. Understanding the background of the article: ecology
Ecology is the analysis and description of interconnectedness, relationships of the living world. Ernst Haeckel(1834-1919), German zoologist, named ‘oecologie’ in 1866. The term has the terminological root in Greek ‘oikos’ denoting ‘home’. As quoted from Haeckel (1866), “by ecology, we mean the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence’. These are partly organic, partly inorganic in nature...”( Stauffer 1957, 140). Haeckel’s ecology is about biotic and abiotic factors interacting to make whole earth or ecosystem. The core concept is relationality among the constituent parts and between the parts and the whole. A part exists in relation to the other parts, and to the whole.
Ecology, beyond the natural science, has affected social science, humanities and arts. Especially in the 1960s, “mainly in America the term lost its exclusively scientific connotation and was gradually associated with more ethics...”(Stalpaert and Byttebier 2014, 67). The scientific ecological/environmental texts describing the environmental disaster, gained popular interest like as ‘Silent Spring’ (Carson 1962). As people experienced so many environmental disasters, ecology became more and more concerned with moral connotation. The pivotal concept ‘relationality’ among natural beings denotes scientific ecological fact. But people made ‘ecology’ as the state of the world to be accomplished with ethical approach. Environmental movements were empowered by ecological envision which was composed of scientific pursuits embodied with ethical concerns, with consciousness and feelings about all beings in ‘just’ relationship. The environmental movements were mainly grassroot ones. They were “marked by their bottom-up structure and inventive actions such as sit-ins and street theatre”(Stalpaert and Byttebier 2014, 68).
Ecology began as a natural and biological science. But now it is identified with broader worldviews. Cognitive, emotional, and spiritual phenomena coined with natural ones have been illuminated under the name of ecology. Ecology has become a synthesis of disciplines, worldviews, and sensorial constructions, beyond natural science and systematic explanation. From the last century environmental activists have performed, as non-violent disobedience, ‘tree-sit’ or ‘tree-hug’ to block clear cut logging. The Chipko movement of India in the 1970s affected all over the world, making ‘tree-hug’ as representative action of ‘care’. These actions are at the same time ecosomatic practices that realize ecological embeddedness of body into the earth or that realize ecological connectedness between body and tree. Thus, environmental movements have given birth to various ‘ecological’ performances. In turn. artists have created their open grounds connecting human communities and more-than-human world. Now a lot of ecosomatic practices and dances are performed to realize connectivity and reciprocity between body and earth, to call ecological worldview and ethics.
2. Purpose of the article: exploring people’s experience of connectivity
The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits such as dancing (Merlo-Ponty 1962, 169).
Merlo-Ponty’s comment on body in performance like dancing tells the essence of this article. This article is on the body and movements in the ecological world. From a view of ecological anthropology, rituals, dances and all expressive behaviors functionally take places of subsistence and biological survival. But they transcend this dimension. Body engages in ecological relations to signify the meaning of life, and sustain the significance of the relations.
Scholars and artists have posed incipient thematic questions as a key to open the door toward the ecological world. Basic questions are on relationality between human beings and ‘more-than-human world’, using David Abram’s term to denote the world and all other than human beings who are living there (Abram 1996). What are the forms and contents that the relationality takes in a certain time and space? How is the relationality made up?
Eco-arts and performances are human intervention into the ecological world where human beings and more-than-human beings make specific relations on a common ground. Eco-arts and performances become the constituents of the relations and at the same time the media which connect human beings to the more-than-human world.
As for visual arts, the early works were land arts. Land art seemed somewhat to be mere physical visualization on natural land. But it was not a mere decoration or description of objects. It was also intervention into the relations of natural landscape elements to make change the whole. Italian movement of Art Povera in the 1970s clearly expressed human intervention. It gave a birth to ecologically significant art works like as Guiseppe Penon’s work. Penon tried a connection between a tree and human body. He attached a bronze human hand at the trunk, which looked like a branch. It meant the intervention to the growing, to the creating new connection among human, artifact and tree (Kaye 2005, 274-276).
The horizon or ground of eco-arts and performances are quite different from that of the conventional arts. It is beyond conventional theater boundary. Confronting anthropocene Una Chaudhuri tried ecological theater to engage in human and more-than-human interaction (Chaudhri 1994). As a reaction to climate change many scholars and artists have thought of overcoming the anthropocentrism. Lisa Woynarski, thinking about the performance for all beings’ agency (subjectivity), suggests the recognition of “the way in which humans and the more-than-human operate as an interconnected confederation” (Woynarski 2015, 167).
Eco-arts and performances are not the figurative descriptions of objective nature or the praise of natural beauty. They do not describe about nature. They engage in the relations of nature, interact with nature. They make co-existence and co-evolution. Artists, artifacts and nature where all beings live in are all agencies sustaining or changing relations and the whole together. The relationality is the key to know, to sense the world, to make sustainability toward ‘just’ ecological world.
This article focuses on the connectivity realized by rituals, dances, and general body movements. Connectivity is the abstract term signifying the feature of concrete connectedness. Connectivity embodies relationality. To explore the ecological relation is to find out ‘what connectedness the beings realize’, and ‘how the connectedness is performed’. To explore the ecological world to find out the concrete connection is the initial step.
Rituals, dances, and body movements are relational ones. They embody relationality. All these artifacts are somatic practices. Like Fraleigh’s convenient usage of ‘somatics’ (Fraleigh 2015, XX), which integrates ‘soma’ (body) and ‘psyche’(soul-spirit-mind), these artifacts and human body are subjects of somatic practices. They are not-separated corporeal, sensorial, perceptual entities. People do the exploration into the ecological world with these somatic practices to realize corporeal perception of the relationality, to do sensorial touch or embeddedness and being touched as reciprocity. In this article the rituals, dances and body movements are in the ecological relations. They are constituents of the relations, and at the same time they are the media to realize relationship between human beings and more-than-human world. So they are ‘ecosomatic’ practices (Bauer 2008;Rufo 2021). The ecological corporeality, relations, mind, and spirituality are embodied in the movements realizing or envisioning ecological whole.
Connectedness is the concrete representation of relationality. David Keller and Frank Golley (2000, 1-3) classify two views on ‘ecology’. One is restricted view on natural science of organism. The other regards ecology as synthesis. It takes the principles of natural science but expansively connects natural, social, cultural, spiritual phenomena of ecology. Here, in both cases, Keller and Golley emphasize the common meanings. The interaction and connection reside in the meanings as essence. For example, they say that “all livings and nonliving things are integral parts of the biospherical web (ontological interconnectedness)”, “the essence or identity of a living thing is an expression of connections and context (internal relations)”, and “to understand the makeup of the biosphere, connections and relations between parts must be considered, not just the parts themselves (holism)”(Keller and Golley 2000, 2).
This article is the quest for the connectedness realized by rituals, dances and body movements. They are ecosomatic practices to explore ecological relations, to realize ecological world, and to embody ecological ethics, values, and worldviews in the current state of ecological crisis. Firstly, this article tells about some scholars’ and artists’ envisions on ecocentric world beyond anthropocentric, mechanical and objectified world. Secondly, this article tells about a case on general configuration of connectivity. Thirdly, it tells about some cases of various ways or modes of connectivity. Lastly, it interprets the cases.
Ⅱ. Toward the ground of rituals, dances and body movements: ecocentric world
Lynn White, Jr. gave a lecture “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” on December 26th, 1966. The journal Science published the lecture in 1967. Here he expressed his thought about the history of ecological relationship. He emphasized human thought, mentality, and attitude on nature.
What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny--that is, by religion (White 1967, 1205).
He told that the fundamental change of ecological relation occurred in the ages of Industrial Revolution. It was the time when human exploitation of nature made turning point. But, he traced the consistent anthropocentric thought, beliefs, attitude and mentality on nature. These ideational phenomena in western societies could be traceable up to the medieval Christianity. These ideas had sustained their effects on exploitative relations toward nature. The nature had been conceptualized as objects dominated by human suject/agency. He explained the relations and historical roots of modern ecological crisis as follows. The representative explanation of the relations are on the Genesis.
Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God’s image (White, 1205).
White told that Christianity destroyed pagan animism. Then “Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects” (White, 1205). In a sense White seems to think of pagan animism as unified or coexistent mind-matter world. His thought corresponds to current new materialism, new animism and multi-species ontology. These current academic tendencies recognize subject/agency of matters, and that of ‘more-than-human world’ (Abram 1996, 7, 24). David Abram began to depict all other beings and nature where the beings live in as ‘more-than-human’ beings and ‘more-than-human world’ (Abram 1996).
Then, for White, Judeo-Christian ideas on man-nature relationship backuped by God’s design is on the ground of dualism. Ideas determinate matters existence and the relation between human and the matters. These Christian concepts destroyed pagan animism which has conferred all beings a common ground or horizon of existence.
David Pepper advocates ecology from somewhat different respect. He explains two different conceptualizations of nature. One is that of ‘classical science’. He says that classical science concerns with dualism. It is the dualism between human subject and mechanic object. Dualism is a conception of nature as a “manipulatable machine from which human society is separate and distinct” (Pepper 1996, 4). The other is ‘greens’. It is “like Romantics in the nineteenth century” (Ibid., 6). In this category Pepper includes modern environmentalism with ecocentric perspectives too. He also describes about deep ecology, oriental ontologies of nature, and philosophy of modern physics (Pepper 1996).
Jessica, Walsh and Wamsler tell about the importance of the human view on the relationship between man and nature. They say it is the matter of lives. In their paper, realization of sustainability depends upon people’s behavioral, mental, and ideational patterns in real life. Prior to focusing on sustainability, they looked at the mechanistic paradigm which is dominant and hindering the sustainable lifestyles. Their summary of hindering patterns of thought is noteworthy. They enumerate three patterns; ‘humans are separable from and above nature’, ‘humans are able to control nature’, ‘nature is a machine, and can be known and addressed by reducing it to its parts’ (Jessica, Walsh and Wamsler 2021). They say these three patterns of thought block people’s proper lifestyles. Their discourse tells about the necessity to set up or recover proper patterns of thought on human-nature relationship.
In fact, ‘mechanical paradigm’ has been analyzed by many scholars such as Val Plumwood. She saw Cartesian dualism as mechanical reduction, separation of mechanized objects, and hierarchical duality.
Cartesian mind/body dualism requires an understanding of its intimate connection to human hyperseparation and to the dualisms of human/nature, male/female and subject/object, as well as its political origins in the wider network of reason/nature dualisms (Plumwood 1993, 190).
Plumwood in another book suggests relational thought and action, relational (inter)dependency toward sustainable life.
The deterioration of the global ecological context of human life demands from our species a clear and adequate response, but we are seemingly immobilised, even though it is clear that at the technological level we already have the means to accomplish the changes needed to live sustainably on and with the earth. So the problem is not primarily about more knowledge or technology; it is about developing an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the non-human sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live and impact on the non-human world (Plumwood 2002, 3).
She asserts for paradigm shift from the reductionists’ mechanical, binary opposition. The shift is toward the culture of relations among coexisting natural beings, among lively interacting subjects.
Arturo Escobar tells about the perception of the world. He advocates the perception of the world as ‘pluriverse’ in contrast to ‘universe’. He envisions plural subjects’ autonomous existence, interdependence, politics of relationality and the commune of the plural beings (Escobar 2017). Here, he describes about the flow of socionatural life. For him, Cartesian dualism is just like the dominant license of reason or logic quite abstract and separated from real matters.
“Cartesian license” ... which not only placed “man” on the highest rung of the ladder of being but led science to investigate reality by separating mind and matter, body and soul, and life and nonlife what they call a kind of forgery that imagined a dead cosmos of inanimate matter (Escobar 2017, 81).
Escobar’s critique on dualism is at the same time the critique on forgery of the reality by separating the real relational subjects as inanimate, objectified, passive matters. Instead he envisions pluriverse where communal, relational, diverse beings interact, intersect. For him this is his design of world to make resolution for current ecological crisis through the cultural realm of life.
On the eco-arts and performances, on the environmental dance and ecosomatic practices, the perception of relationality, the perception of the world are crucial. In a sense the prefix ‘eco’ means ‘home’. Extending the meaning, ‘eco’ denotes all beings’ dwelling and interaction on the common ground earth into which they are rooted. Ecological relations are not those between dominating, animate subject and dominated, inanimate object. Even on the ‘food chain’, traditional, preindustrial views have been usually as gift exchange between subject agencies. Arts and performances engaged in ecological world have been related to this ontological theme.
Using the term ‘environmental dance’ as an umbrella term covering all ecologically related dances and somatic practices, Nigel Stewart lists two ways of thought that should be put aside. One is res extensa, with which people see the world as “value-free physical entities reducible to mathematical and causal relations...” (Stewart 2010, 33). The other is res cogitans which reminds of Descarts’ cogito. Thus, Stewart explains about the effect.
Thus, the res cogitans would include epistemologies of non-human nature that reduce nature itself to no more than a set of human discourses about nature or anthropocentric and androcentric representations of nature (Stewart 2010, 33).
Res extensa is a way of thought based on dualism between anthropocentric subject and mechanical, objectified, and value-free world. Res cogitans is also based on dualism. On human-nature relationship, nature is reduced to human discourses, human representation. Stewart’s cutting off these two ways of thought is for a consideration on ‘what the environmental dance is?’ Environmental dance is axiological in that it explores into and express the intrinsic values in nature. It is ontological in that it defines and express human existence as a part of nature with non-human nature (Ibid., 32). Thus, environmental dance has a “unique capacity for bringing to expression …our relation with nature and the experience of value rooted in this relation” (Ibid., 33).
Susan Bauer clearly asserts the existence of interconnected body and nature (earth). Bauer explains the experiential aspects of ecosomatics.
To add the notion of ecology, or “eco” begins to include an organism’s relationship to its environment...Somatics allows us to say, here I am; this is how I move, how I feel in my relation to my movement, what I am learning, what my questions are; ecosomatics supports us to locate ourselves within the whole; this is my place in my body, in the dance, in my daily life, in my community. Ecosomatics can also help us to reawaken to our interconnection with nature in a profound and personal way (Bauer 2008, 8-9).
Bauer says that ecosomatics is on the ground of organism’s relationship to its environment. The relation is not hierarchical, dualistic one. Bauer sometimes depicts the relation as interconnection between body (soma, embodied with self) and nature. Sometimes she depicts it as ‘body in earth’ or ‘body in whole’. As for the latter she describes the connection of body and earth as the moving body in the womb (Ibid., 8). The latter description reminds of human beings’ incipient experience of dance movement following the pulses in mother’s womb. And the connection between the body in the whole is not mere physical one. Somatic processes include corporeal, sensorial, emotional, spiritual and cognitive subject’s immersion and dwelling in the earth as a reactive, animate whole. Also they include holistic interactions between self and earth.
Many dance artists, ecosomatic practitioners, and dance educators have made workshops, produced articles, and tried experimental performance on the bodily connection with earth. Traditional rituals and ceremonies contain the concrete processes and ideas of connectivity. Various modes or styles of connection have been investigated. Rufo (2021), as a dance artist and scholar, made art-based-research on the bodily exploration into more-than-human beings. He danced in the forest and wrote about the experiences of relations. Different modes of connections he quested accessing with corresponding ecosomatic practices respectively. Ecosomatics is an umbrella which covers all various modes. ‘Body and earth’ and ‘body in earth’ are the words which express most direct connectivity. But in fact these two groups of words have not been used for the distinctive classification. Sometimes they denotes a mode of connectivity. Sometimes a group denotes several modes. Andrea Olsen made workshops with the slogan ‘body is earth’. In the workshop, various steps, various modes were set up. She produced a text of detailed concepts, modes and processes of connectivity and somatics (Olsen 2020).
Ecosomatic practices such as dances, rituals and body movements have been engaged in making connections and realizing relationality among all beings. Some cases of ritual and dance in rural societies, some artists’ and scholars’ field studies are reviewed for the description of the modes of connectivity, as following chapters.
Ⅲ. Outline of connectedness in dance, ritual and body movement
1. Discourses on connectedness
Confronting present socio-ecological crisis many scholars began to consider human society, culture and nature in terms of connection. Underlying assumption is that current crisis is consequence of “perceived separateness between humans and nature” (Laidlaw and Beer 2018, 284). To overcome the consequence, Laidlaw and Beer emphasize “(re)connection with the more-than-human as a transformational tool for cultivating more ethical relations with our environments” (Laidlaw and Beer, 283). Philosopher of plants and materiality Coccia, transcending the connection beween subjects, talks about mixed existence, convergence of beings, and alternation of role between beings and place (Cossia 2019, 27).
Experience of connection is an effective way of bodily knowing, sensing and performing the ecological world. Flowers, Lipsett and Barrett apply a method for experiencing connection in the dance education. It is the “attention to subtle energies and contemplative art-making in shifting us into nature connection” (Flowers, Lipsett and Barrett 2014, 112).
The connection between body and earth is realized through the material/spiritual interaction between two entities. Here the interacting matters are not inanimate or lifeless ones. They are vivrant agencies (Bennett 2010). Considering the context of vivrant matters Woynarski talks about detailed modes of perception. She suggests immersion, dewelling and eco-cosmopolitanism (Woynarski 2015, 10). Here immersion and dwelling give birth to the modes of connection with their features of corporeal, bodily encounter between subjects. Woynarski also says “immersion suggests our experience of ecological relationships stems from a point of environmental immersion, engaged in sensorial/corporeal reciprocity with the world” (Woynarski 2015, 10).
What does it mean the immersion in ecosomatic practices and dances? There is not clear explanation. Rather, I could get an intuitive understanding from everyday subsistent activities of a villager. In Soando Island, Southern Sea, Korea, 70 years old woman diver Kim Duk-Soon is still diving. She earned quite a lot of money. She even gave the management position of her elegant seafood restaurant to her son. She needs not money any more. But she still lives in a humble house where her colleague divers gather. She still goes to the sea. What is the motivation? I asked. She answered with long narratives of her life history and experience. But the total theme is simple, economic one. The underwater landscape is not mere physical landscape. It is like a bank deposit or the gift from earth. Meeting with the opportunities of the ocean, “why not?”, she answered. But the motivation goes further beyond the economic one. She said affluent seaweed plants, clams, fishes, and habitats make her happy. For some years eelgrass beds had disapeared in the adjoining sea because of water pollution. Fish assemblages in the eelgrass beds dissapeared. The disapearance was the indicator of the economic loss, as well as the indicator of the environmental deficiency. But it was more for the women divers who had been closely connected with the ocean. Eelgrass beds were, for them, submarine forests full of swimming fishes, seabed creatures, and waving grasses. Immersion into the underwater forests, swimming among the grasses, touching and being touched by the moving landscape had been the sources of their aesthetic valuation on their earth and their lives. Kim Duk-Soon expresses the valuation with some brief words, “good to see”. The words go further from the landscape vision. The words express her feeling of self-fulfillment from her immersive moving and encouter with abundant biosphere. She had felt comfortableness and stability with her swimming, encounter and visual appreciation in the eelgrass ecosystem, which were source of aesthetic valuation ‘good to see’. Since the years of 2017 and 2018, as the villagers blocked the water pollution sources, the eelgrasses have been regenerated. Then the women divers’ access to the adjoing sea became active. Kim Duk-Soon’s economic and aethetic motivation to dive became more vivid.
Immersion is just like what Kim Duk-Soon had done with her body. From the position of being immersed in underwater she sensed her body and underwater world moving, touching, and interacting together. It was the connection between immersive beings who are moving and being moved, sensing and being sensed reciprocally.
2. Sts’ales First Nation people’s ecological world
Indigenous people’s lives have been always concerned with relational thinking. Decolonization, resilience of their lives, and identity quests have been concerned with the state of socio-political relations among human groups and socio-ecological relations between human being and earth.
In Coast Salish societies, Sts’ailes First Nation, BC, Canada has inherited relatively affluent tradition of living with more-than-human world. The people call themselves ‘people of the river’. Surrounded by diverse ecosystems, their cosmovision of natural, cultural world has reflected the biodiversity and cultural diversity in their territory. Their cosmovision has been expressed in visual artifacts, rock painting, blankets, drums, et cetera. Also it is expressed in a riverside panel. In the panel, Hemlock Valley mountains, Chehalis River, Harrison River, houses, longhouse, cedar trees, animals and fishes are interrelated by the canoeing people. Also all these entities are interrelated by the spiral figure, which means the time path for people’s lives and sustainability. The legendary being Sasquatch, with animal head and human body, is connector. He, living in the sacred forest, crosses the river to the villages, connecting forest, river, and human beings. People say that it is good fortune to see Sasquatch for he supports the orderly relations of Sts’ailes natural and cultural beings and offers well connected places. Drums, dances, songs are connectors too. These matters are on the center of the drawings for their affecting power to all. Performances call forth connections among human bodies and more-than-human bodies. Even under the policy of banning the rituals in the past, people sustained the rituals secretly. Since 1990s cerca the rituals have become more and more vitalized. For the people, to sustain the cosmovision filled with the orderly relations was the matter of survival. And it was the matter of decolonization making themselves free from colonized cosmovision. Recent vitalizations of ritual means that people try more and more decolonization of themselves and their society rooted in their earth. Sts’ailes way of connection and (re)connection of the body to their nature and culture is a component of this socio-political and socio-ecological vitalization.
Recently, First Salmon Ceremony has been revitalized in many indigenous societies. Sts’ailes is the representative activist of the revitalization. The ceremony has the effect of resolution. The ceremony heals the conflicting relation made by human being who depends on salmon ‘people’. It does (re)connect human being, river and salmon people. People eat salmon and they deliver remaining bones and skins to the river. This ritual behavior means realization of reciprocal connection between human being and the river, between human being and salmon, From the river people get gift, the salmon. In return, by walking to the river and giving back salmon bones, people offer ‘imagined’ energy to the river. Also this is the sending respect to the salmon people. Confronting climate change the people realize the significance of the reciprocal relations with more-than-human. They have revitalized the ceremony as the way for connection or (re)connection with the earth and with salmon people. It is for the sustainability based on symbolic realization of connection and reciprocity.
3. Saemangeum Tidal Flat: the site of ecological interaction.
By the huge reclamation and embankment over 33 kilometers, enormous tidal flats, coasts, islands had been in crisis at a western coast of Korean peninsula from the late 1990s. The whole area was named ‘Saemangeum’. In 2005 last embankment was finished. After that all living marine ecosystem began to diminish. The reclamation has been continued up to now.
In the early 2000s a lot of environmental movements occurred. At the initial stage of resistance a few small transportation containers were set up at a spot called Haechanggetbul (Haechang tidal flat). They were set up for the temporary Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, and Won-Buddhism churches. Priests made prayer tours, opened regular worships every sunday. Lay believers and visitors gathered. The temporary churches became destination places of pilgrimage. All churches expressed slogans in the banners, wall drawings, and even in the small pebbles. The common agenda was to save the lives and their intrinsic values. The agenda emphasized the values not for human use but for the lives’ world. It was quite impressive that the churches imagined, defined and illuminated the values to be intrinsic in the lives themselves. The lives were to be saved for their own values, in other words, for their existences themselves. The anthropocentric, functional values were illuminated too. But the priests’ ecological world were far more deeply affiliated with the intrinsic values of the lives, which the priests imagined as ubiquitous all over the tidal flat. From the point of scientific view the tidal flat is a geological, abiotic matter. But at that time tidal flat was imagined as living organism, breathing earth. They imagined ‘mud earth breathes’. The body movements of sit-in at the churches or at the beaches were regarded as being rooted in earth, as being in the community of all lives. The sit-in triggered ontological and axiological ideas. Fishes, seaweeds, clams, crabs, birds, water microcosms, as well as human beings were called as ‘mutsaengmyoung’. The prefix ‘mut’ means ‘all, plain, and ubiquitous ways of existence’. The word ‘saengmyoung’ means ‘life’. Thus ‘mutsaengmyoung’ becomes ‘all lives’ in a non-hierarchical relation, in a non-centric horizon. The word ‘mutsaengmyoung’ contained a connotation of political ecology. ‘Respect mutsaengmyoung’ is expression of the attitude and ethics in an ecocentric manner. It was contrasted to the developmentalists’ devotion to the huge ‘built environment’. Environmentalists lamented at the developmentalists’ devotion to the myth of huge monoculture, which blocked specific, small, diverse worlds of lives and people’s specific connection and appreciation. After some years the churches became the places for local activists’ meditation and non-violent sit-in.
For the time being the churches and the beach in front of the churches were starting points of walking, gathering places for rituals, artists’ work places, and local NGOs’ protest places. When people walked into the tidal flat they thought that they were immersed into the world of ‘mutsaengmyoung’. Walking was a way of connection. In this case, walking was accompanied by the local tradition of ‘visiting-looking after’. In southwestern coasts and islands of Korea, there has been a culture of visit. It does not have name. People used to say ‘look into, look after’. Every morning old farmers walk into the rice fields. On the way their steps shake off the dews on the grasses. So in some villages people called the walk ‘dew drop’. Old farmers visit the rice. They look into the rice and listen to the voice of rice. They become joyful with the affluent shapes. They look after the rice. It is a commection in a reciprocal way. Among the coastal villagers there have been a casual visit to some seaweed beds to get images of ‘good to see’. This aesthetic valuation is linked to the images of affulent lives and livable earth. At Haechanggetbul in early 2000s, there were priests’, villagers’, activists’ and visitors’ walk, visit, looking into, and looking after in the mutsaengmyoung world. They were the connective behaviors quite similar with pilgrimage connection to sacred beings.
The tidal spot Haechanggetbul became the sacred, ecocritical, cutural place by the empowerment of human activities. Saemangeum became one articulation in the mental map of world environmental activists. Local artists installed hundred of jangseung, Korean totem pole. at Haechanggetbul. Some poles represent the composition of marine, intertidal animals, and supernatural being. Some poles represent nest for migratory birds. In the early 2000s. a Maori carver stayed several months, carving the totem poles. The artifacts and the carving processes made the place as ‘living lab’. As more designs added the spot became the pluriverse of ecology and culture.
4. Invention of Sts’ailes tradition at Saemangeum
On September 29th 2002, a performance made Haechanggetbul more diverse world. Eight elders, leaders and performers from Sts’ailes First Nation improvised a ritual at the site. Exactly speaking it was an ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm 1992), in that the adjustment of the traditional artifacts to current situation occurred.
They live in the mainland mountains and riverside approximately 150 kilometers apart from the marine coast. So they could not even imagine what the tidal flat means for people. The ritual at Saemangeum was improvised as a resonance effect between different but corresponding experiences of environmental degradation. They understood that the earth and people of Saemangeum reflect Sts’ailes situation. At that time they were suffered by the scars in a sacred forest. The scars made their body-mind wounded.
On a day in August, 2002, I met Cha-qua-wet (Wille Charlie) and his younger brother Tixweltel (Kelsey Charlie) at Chehalis reservation. Chehalis is the previous name of Sts’ailes. Chehalis is the place name by English pronunciation. In the middle of 2000s ‘Sts’ailes’ was recognized as official name of the place and the First Nation. It means ‘beating heart’. It tells traditional, ontological tranformation in the spectrum of supernatural-human-ambiguous-non human beings. Quite long ago ‘medicine doctor’, a supernatural being with human shape was deprived of his heart by Xa:ls, the protector of the people. Xa:ls threw the heart from a mountain to a Harrison riverside. Then the spot became the origine of people’s dwelling. People called their ethnic group ‘beating heart’. Up to now people identify themselves as ‘people of the river’. They play drum beating which connects forest, river, all dwellings, and themselves. In 2002 the scars of environment occurred at the riverside forest Kweh-Kwuch-Hum, where people perform religious visit to the ancestors’ grave mounds, to the trees on which they hang their dancing gears for the memory and for the glory of sacred forest. Kweh-Kwuch-Hum is also the living place of the legendary ‘big foot’ person Sasquatch, an ambiguous being with animal head and human body. People believe that Sasquatch sometimes walks from the forest, crossing the river, to the human village. The person connects forest, river, and the village. Also the person connects the people and more-than-human beings/world. The figures of the person are in so many drawings. In the hanging blanket the drums are at the center. People play the drums where the artists draw the person at the center. The drum sound resonate mountains, forests, river, and the village.
The scars in the riverside forest was hurtful to all beings and connections. On the day, I was at a boat for the trip of the Harrison riversides. The trip was a welcoming gift from Cha-qua-wet and Tixweltel who were in charge of cultural affairs. On the way to the cultural relics along the river, Cha-qua-wet was drumming and singing a welcome song. Suddenly he stopped it and grabbed his chest. Sts’ailes cultural advisor Gordon Mohs told me that he got hurt at his heart. At the spot we saw one helicopter pulling logs and discharging them to the river. Clearcut logging was making big scars on many spots of the forest. The hurts of forest were connected to the hurt of Cha-qua-wet’s heart. In Sts’ailes people regard human beings’, animals’, and plants’ hurts as those of body and mind. Pain of physical body represents pain of mind. In winter ceremonies people get pains in their heart. They are the physical pains as well as the pains of their spirits. It occurs when the animal spirit enters into the person’s body. Each animal spirit enters into the each body respectively. At the Harrison river Cha-qua-wet got hurt at his heart as a body and as a mind. Everybody felt the hurt as the matter of body-mind connection. Also it was resonating reaction to the hurt of the forest.
Sts’ailes ritual at Haechangetbul was, in the first, the resonant behavior. On the way to Saemangeum they decided to improvise a ritual through the re-composition of several ritual processes. It was for adjustment to different situation. They learned about the crisis of Saemangeum tidal flat. Through their experience of Kweh-Kwuch-Hum, they perceived Saemangeum as the hurt of earth. The focus was on the (re)connection to heal the hurt. It is their culture of healing to call forth all beings by dedication of themselves to them. Making proper relations gives holistic, sustainable healing. The hurt is at the earth but it corresponds with people’s hurt at body-mind.
The ritual opening was walking dance with paddling song. It was usual behavior for entry. The opening speeches followed. In Sts’ailes speech is not mere verbal discourse. As Stewart (2010) puts aside res cogitans, the speech is not separate discourse which determinate inanimate objects. Speech is the performance of voice which has root in body. Speech is materialized, bodily voice. The mother Sel-yaal (Patricia Charlie) spoke in the first as a pray for the people and earth. She told that mother earth is crying with tears, wounds. The daughters are rising up to heal the tears, to make the ways proper. In the turn to Cha-qua-wet, he delivered the poetic words adjusting to the theme of the day. The address began with offering the ritual words to all beings including wind, four footed animals, plant people, and people swimming in water. Using Sts’ailes ecology and ontology he talked about proper ways of beings, proper relations of world. He told that human being and all other beings are XWEL-MEXW (people of earth). All beings belong to MEXW (earth). His final words were about ‘why we are here’. He uttered quite empathic words that ‘they are at this honorable site to encourage the ways to people’s oneness and the ways to heal the crying mother earth wounded by human exploitation. For the ways, he said that ‘we share our some portions of culture’.
All eight Sts’ailes people’s ritual dance followed. They utilized their traditional concept of four directions. They communicated with spirits of more-than-human in the directions. The directional ritual dances and body movements are, in Sts’ailes, highlighted bodily, spiritual efforts. Subtle energy and spirit come to the body, making arms and hands tremble. Nobody can record and talk about it. These behaviors are banned because they might become spiritual noises to ruin the sacred instances, to hurt the dancers. At Saemangeum, just like the dance education by Flower et al. about subtle energy (2015), Sts’ailes’ efforts of ritual and dances made the highly attentive, highly empowered (re)connection among four directional beings. It is healing the earth and making the proper world.
In Haechanggetbul, Sts’ailes dancers put efforts to make really authentic practice. It was, in a sense, ecosomatic one. It was the bodily exploration from inner body to the more-than-human world.
The end of the ritual was a gift ceremony. Sts’ailes dancers walked to the environment protectors of Saemangeum, wrapped their shoulders with ceremonial blankets, brushed their heads with cedar leaves, and gave eagle feathers. The ceremonial movements represented the gift of mother earth’s touch. After this ceremony they gave to all audience the parts of wind dried salmon, small drums, small paddles, cedar leaves, and cedar ashes. The audience might not be affected by the theme of ritual. But the ritual, at least, gave them the feeling of being appreciated and the feeling of empathetic resonance from Sts’ailes.
Haechanggetbul became more and more ‘pluriverse’, using Escobar’s term. Different artifacts, different people, and different ideas were pluralizing entities. They became connected at the base of the earth. On the liason different ones expanded. It was pluriverse, in some cases, of mutual resonance, in some cases of direct touch.
In March 2003, Vietnamese Buddhist priest Thich Nhat Hanh visited Haechanggetbul practicing his walking at the mud flats. On March 28th 2003, Catholic priest Moon Gyu-Hyun, Buddhist priest Sukyoung, Protestant Christian minister Lee Hee-Woon, Won-Buddhism priest Kim Kyoung-Il launched a penance march from Haechanggetbul to Seoul. The march called Samboilbae (three steps one bow) took 165 days. Different religious traditions gathered on the common ground to save the lives. The penance march kept the bodily exploration and efforts connecting body-mind-earth. This work needs another illumination.
Ⅳ. The ways of connection between body and earth
1. Spiritual being on the way to imagined other earth
Ssitgimgut in southwestern mainland and islands of Korea, is a ritual for the fate of deceased person to be treated with ecological way. Symbols of body and spirit are treated. In 1987, the oldest hereditary shaman Chae Jannye in Jindo Island left some comments on the ritual. She said that almost all elders have three aspirations. One is colorfully decorated bier full of flowers. Second, they want the double funeral custom, chobun. Last one is Ssitgimgut. First one is the aspiration for the death be treated with beautiful glory. Second one is that for purifying real deceased body and for safe settlement in earth. Real treatment of body is connected to the consciousness of spiritual well-being in the other world. Last one is that of ritual treatment. Ritual is on the spirit of the deceased. In this case body and spirit are not regarded as separate ones. Symbols of spirit take the form of body and clothes. Shaman treats symbols of embodied spirits. Ssitgimgut. is the ritual of corporeal-spiritual unity. The symbols are regarded as moving entities from this world to the other world. She described the way in detail. For the elders the way and world are ’good to think’. She explained that there are typical encounters. Through the religious treatment the spirit is animated and armed with ‘will to go’. The evidence of the spirit’s will appears through the spirit’s (paper ornamentation of spirit symbol) depart from the head of the bereaved. Then it goes through the investigation by other world beings, through the resolution process of all dirts, misbehaviors, and resentments. Finally the paper spirit boards on the long, white cotton cloth. The spirit meets the roads, hills and crosses the river. Crossing the river is typical process. At last it arrives at the other world. Elders regard the most desirable world is full of trees, shrubs and flowers. Immersion into the affluent nature, to be embedded in the lives are ‘good to think’. Ssitgimgut is a ritual of shaman’s dance and movement. It animates spiritual body and makes the body to enter the ecological world desired by the elders.
It is noteworthy that all these customs are based on the mode of connection ‘body in earth’. In chobun custom, people want deceased body in proper earth. If a man died in the lunar month of January when all beings are believed to be in unstable, transient state, people can not dig the earth. Body in earth is extreme disturbance of world. Instead people should put deceased body on the surface of earth and make ‘home’ with rice straws. For several years the flesh diminishes, then people believe the deceased person become purified. Then people another funeral ritual for the bones and move it into the earth, the permanent home. As time goes by the body as a content and the earth as container become one.
Ssitgimgut is a ritual to quest for the state of ‘body in earth’. At the last stage of the ritual is passage to ecological world. It is symbolic process but has efficacy to people’s ecological consciousness, especially to the consciousness of natural order. In the passage symbolic body is contained in the rice bowl. And be moved to symbolic vessel on the long cotton cloth. Shaman moves the body contained in vessel along the cloth. In the cloth all roads, roadside flowers, hills, and river are described by shaman’s songs, dances and movements. Arrival place is bright, warm and comfortable earth filled with all plants. The symbolic body’s way and settlement are regarded as being embedded in the earth, as entering the ecological circulation of the body to earth. It is the order and fate of all lives. The elders in Jindo Island had the desire to die in this ecological relation expressed by body in earth connection. Susan Bauer’s ecosomatics (2008) is about living body in earth. Ssitgimgut is a ritual performance about symbolic movement for body in earth, with symbolic realization of ecological relationship as the natual order and fate.
2. Immersion into the earth, danced by fear
The Eco-arts and performance on May 19th 2012 at Yongsan Village, Muan County, Korea was, for a dancer, an instance of unique experience. In the performance there was a ritual of ‘embedding juniper logs’ in the tidal flat. Following old tradition of local community this ‘invented’ ritual was for the coastal ecosystem’s sustainability. The ritual was based on the concepts of contagious magic among human beings, logs and earth. After the ritual a contemporary dance followed. Choreographer Park So Jung had visited all the tidal flat spots, village, an ecology center in the village, meeting with villagers. On the day in the morning, four dancers and the choreographer talked about concepts, surrounding landscapes, physical state of tidal flat spots. They discussed on the choreographic line, body movement. The title was ‘Bodies in the Mud, Lives in the Mud’. Among audience nobody made any sound. They were shocked by unexpected immersive movements in the hot sunlights, in the burning, sticky tidal flats, in the combined bodies and deep mud. After a few days, at lunch. Male dancer Ahn Jisuk expressed his experience. He had thought of this dancing just same as the conventional one. He thought ‘following the choreography and concepts, just dancing on the design... that is okay’. But as dancing process went on, He felt sudden attack of penetrating fear. He was confronting the vast earth and sky open in front of him. Then he felt he was dancing not on the conventional design but on the vast surroundings and air. Feared by this encounter he even felt religious sentiment. He surrendered himself to this aura of the place. He continued his dancing not on his imagined design but on the whole place, devoting himself to the vast terrain dreadfully opened to him. His immersion was into the terrain, visionary vast one and mentally fearful one in his feeling.
This case of experience tells that immersion occurred from the experience of connectedness with conventional theatrical surroundings to that of connectedness with vastly open earth. Ecosomatic practice where body is in earth, made, using the term of Chaudhri (1994), ecological theater where ecological connections are realized.
3. Dance as a exploration of the reciprocity between connected beings
Neither the perceiver nor the perceived, then, is wholly passive in the event of perception ... In the act of perception, in other words, I enter into a sympathetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style. Perception, in this sense, is an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own tones and textures(Abram 1996, 41-42).
David Abram, with his academic quest on intersection of ecology and eco-phenomenology, with his practice of magician touch on animism world, told about realm of human beings (including human culture) and more-than-human beings. The phrase ‘more-than-human’ was coined by David Abram. Since the phrase was used at h is b o o k The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, it has been the representative term for denoting nonhuman beings in nature.
Abram describes about perception not as a mechanical, dual one between subject and passive object. “The sensible world, in other words, is described as active, animate, and, in some curious manner” (Abram, 42). Then he describes about ‘what’s going on’ in other book, as follows;
Wander over to that oak, or to a maple, or a sycamore; reach out your hand to feel the surface of a single, many-pointed leaf between your thumb and fingers. Note the coolness of that leaf against your skin, the veined texture your fingertips discover as they roam across it. But notice, too, another slightly different sensation: that you are also being touched by the tree. That the leaf itself is gently exploring your fingers, its pores sampling the chemistry of your skin, feeling the smooth and bulging texture of your thumb even as the thumb moves upon it ... Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain (Abram 2010, 58).
He describes the perception of connectivity by sensorial, bodily encounter with more-than-human beings and world.
Many scholars, artists and practitioners have paid attention to this connection between human being and more-than-human. Then they have proceeded further to the modes of connection, to the somatic processes of sensing and knowing, to extending mode from physical access to holistic connection. Here in these all explorations David Abram’s description (2010) on ‘what is happening, between who, with what features, toward what world’ have afforded a lot of inspiration to the scholars and artists.
Raffaele Rufo’s huge thematic quest in his dancing and research, as well as in his review of other scholars’ works starts from the Abram’s description.
He describes his somatic research as the experience of being ‘danced by the tree’. He conceptualize it as a mode of ecological embodiment (Rufo 2021). As a tango dancer he tried to access the more-than-human world with tango dancing body and bodily inquiry to the world. Then a shift from tango to exploring movement began. Experience of reciprocity is well expressed in his description of ‘weaving threads between sensing and being sensed’.
When I lie under the tree and observe how body and earth are scanning each other, I can meet the movement of the tree in the complex microcosmos unfolding between its fallen leaves, the soil and the vegetal and animal beings participating in the process of decomposition occurring above and around its roots. I can meet the movement of the tree also in the exploration of grounding when pouring weight with my feet into and out of the soil in which the roots of the tree are embedded while leaning with my body on its trunk. In this case, it is possible for me to sense how reciprocity is incarnated in the transmission of movement impulses occurring across the circuit created by the tactile connection between land, body and tree (Rufo, 26-27).
He described his experiences of body-earth connection following his body movements and bodily inquiries. These are themes in his explorations; earth-body awareness, grounding the tree, shaping into the body of the tree, weaving threads between sensing and being sensed, weaving threads between sensing and being sensed.
4. Body to earth and body as microcosm
Anrea Olsen describes connectivity between body and earth in terms of inner awareness while attending to the outer world’(Olsen 2014, 4). In other words, for her, body is a medium for awareness of outer word. At the same time for her ‘body is earth’ , ‘humans are nature’. “You inhabit an inner landscape as well as the outer”(Olsen 2014, 227). As a medium and at the same time as a part of nature, body participates in nature’s interconnectedness with its awareness, knowledge medium for the connection to the whole. Art is the materialized, expressive medium for human awareness. For Olsen, art is about wholeness connecting seperate parts into a united view (Olsen 2014, 228). Olsen made a specific body practice workshop for body-earth connection. Body as a first environment, the workshop emphasizes body’s inner awareness and emotion, movements’ function of connecting to the whole.
The most synthetic illustration of connectivity between body and earth might be Anna Halprin’s performance in Eeo Stubblefield’s film.
The sun was setting. I was just really quite incidental... I want surrender to the forces of Nature to see where it will take me...We can look at all our individual body as a microcosm of a larger body...The water, the waves, the wind...the wind is breath. The ground underneath is our support. The rivers are like our veins carring our blood. All kinds of connection between what we experience within ourselves and what we experience in nature. And that connection creates a home...creat a home. We are not center of the universe. We are part of the universe. we are not in control (Stubblefield 2003).
Anna Halprin told about her experience at the film Returning Home of Eeo Stubblefield (2003). The above citation tells essence of her experience on body, earth and relationality. Anna Halprin’s was lying on the beach rolling her body following waves, facing the sunset quietly. In the dusk everything was quite except the sound of waves. In the film she talks about her perception of her body, self and surroundings. She says she describes her feeling, emotion, recognition and thought after this still and slow moving at the beach. She says she wants to surrender. This is the ex post facto recollection about the perception at the beach. ‘Surrender to the forces on nature’ is quite emotional reaction to the deeply felt, overwhelming power of nature. For her ‘surrender to the forces of nature’ might give birth to ontology of human body as microcosm and that of nature as ‘larger body’. For her, connection is formed between what human beings experience within themselves and what human beings experience within nature. She is raising the issue of connection between ontological beings. It is not connection of objectified entities, not merely between physical microcosm and larger body. It is between experiential subjects, human body and nature.
5. Becoming more-than-human
As Anna Halprin’s case suggests I need to explore connectivity in ontological interactions. In indigenous societies this phenomenon is conspicuous. In North American indigenous societies dance and body movements express or lever transformation of being, making dancings and body movements more-than-human beings’ coming into human body and human body’s becoming more-than-human. Deleuze and Guattari told about the becoming as happening in real beings, like the emergence from their pluralized world of rhizome(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10-14). Haraway also told about becoming in real world of natureculture and hybridity of beings. But Haraway criticizes Deleuze and Guattari in that they did not notice becoming occurs in relations (Haraway 2008, 27-29).
Koons’s study of ethnomusicology and dance in Muskogee Creek American Indian community, US, shows clear cases of human becoming ‘other’. In the community’s dances and rituals, usually named as surrounding animals’ dance, includes human becoming the animal respectively. He says these phenomena are ritualized ones and occur in relations(Koons 2016, 244-247).
In my fieldwork the becoming occurs usually in ritual and dancing. Also there are a lot of cases in legends and myths. The becoming is usually accompanied by transformation of being. Nowadays as environmental crisis and sustainability become hot issues indigenous people have raised their worldview of connection as the alternative way of attitude and ethics to make resilient relationship with nature. Traditional first salmon ceremonies, spirit dance, and other have been more activated for their ecological identity and for their manifestation of soft power toward ecocentric world. Here under the oneness ideology the connectivity is expressed. Especially on the ontological dimension, the connectivity though human being’s transformation, becoming in the web of life have been focused.
In Sts’ailes there is a case of winter ceremony spirit dance. It shows ontological transformation and becoming. But the current ceremony does not show well the transformed being. It might be common in current Coast Salish societies where Sts’ailes belongs to.
Coast Salish indigenous societies located in southern west coast, BC, Canada, in northern west coast, Washington State, US, their winter ceremony called as spirit dance include guardian spirits’ entering the people’s bodies on the rites of passage. People’s seizures and reactive dances follow accompanied by heartbeat drums and songs. In Sts’ailes, ritual leader Tixweltel would not talk about dance, songs and ritual for they have affecting powers which should not be disclosed by words. For him dance, songs, rituals are materialized ones on the same oneness horizon of things, earth, natural beings. All of them have the subtle energies and efficacies. Talking about dance, song, and ritual is very cautious one for it is triggering dangerous affection to all. But in some casual talkings with him I learned that the dances of ‘babies’, who are on the initiation rite are reactive to seizure by entering guardian spirit. The dance is emerged one from the seizure. Song is clearly endowed one by supernatural beings though winds. The dancers, after getting seizures, walk on the ground one by one dancing and groaning. After walking on circle the dancer returns to their seats respectively, yelling painfully. Moving patterns are simillar each other and movements are culturally expected. But the people in initiation are making individually subtle, unique dances and body movements respectively.
Many scholors of spirit dance have not clearly reported ‘who enter the people’s body’. Amoss (1978) and Kew (1970) wrote about Coast Salish spirit dance in the changing political, cultural conditions. Pamela Amoss had researched in Nusaac Indian Band, US. She paid attention to the sustainability, continuity or resurgence of spirit dances in the 1970s, in the colonized, capitalized modern conditions. She thought main principle, function and perspective to the world have made spirit dance sustainable in the changing social, cultural conditions. Kew described detailed processes of spirit dance in Musquiam First Nation, BC, Canada in 1970s. But both of them do not specify who the guardian spirits are. In Sts’ailes too, it is quite hard to be informed of ‘who they are’. Also the guardian spirit is abstract one behind, or has material form, it is not clear. It is known that people at their initiation stage, dream the spirit. But they do not talk about the dreamed spirit.
I could have partial informations from some Sts’ailes people in the end of 2000s. In February 2007, there was a spirit dance for some ‘babies’ in transition. It was special ritual for it was initiation for newly becoming ‘dancers’. The dancers have very privileged status in ritual. At that spirit dance, Tixweltel’s son Keegan Charlie was initiated as a prospective dancer. His father Tixweltel performed drum and Keegan’s song. Tixweltel told that the song is delivered through wind. Keegan got up from his sit, yelled in the seizure state. He began to walk on the ground, and at some spots he spreaded two arms, fully making big round turn. It was ‘eagle’. His guardian spirit might be eagle itself or the one mediated by eagle. Anyway eagle spirit entered Keegan’s body and Keegan danced eagle’s one. He expressed bodily transformation, becoming more-than-human by the eagle dance. Since the time of his becoming, Keegan had been connected with more-than-human world of eagle and its ecological web of life. Now Keegan is middle age adult. He also, like his father, joins the spirit dance of his neighbours and of kins far away, as a dancer and drummer. He helps neighbours’ becoming some nonhuman being, through his companion songs of the initiated and his afterward dance of eagle. Becoming occurs in relations, in companions of different persons and different nonhuman spirits.
In Sts’ailes eagle is noteworthy. People’s main dwelling site is inside of Harrison River. In the past the site was at the beach. Traditional longhouse style houses, made of cedar panels were built along the riverside. So they call themselves as ‘river people’. Approximately one hundred years ago they were forced to move inside, to build western style houses. But their identity and lifeways have been kept as river people. Their subsistence, mentality, social relations, relations with more-than-human beings have been formed mainly at the ecological continuum from the forest to the river and to the village.
In the ecosystem eagle population is at the highest tropic level. People had to make relationships with eagle in anyway. Late summer when sockye salmons begin to enter the Harrison River from the main Fraser River, several hundreds of bald eagles gather upon the reddish flows of salmons. Deep riverside forests, high cedars, douglas firs, bushes, calm and shining emerald river with affluent nourishment are best habitats for eagles and related food chain. So, for Sts’ailes people eagles are conspicuous. They live together occupying same ecosystem. They had to adapt to this coexistence. Now as environmental degradation have proceeded further, Sts’ailes’ coexistence with this high status animal, eagle, became the symbol of the people’s environmental dignity. In many places in BC, the presence of eagle is a source pride of the local people.
In 2007 summer I often visited Rose Charlie, former indigenous Governer General of BC, at her home in Sts’ailes. She recalled her experience of initiation long ago. She said she had identified herself as eagle since the initiation ritual. Her identity as eagle made her more attentively be present at the riverside. During the days of Governer General she supported conservation movements of wildlife. At that time her identity consciousness and memory of her presence in Harison river eagles made her supporting activity. Listening to her words I could understand her estimation on livability with eagles. The visibility of the eagles made her feeling of responsibility and aesthetics of good life.
The experiences of becoming more-than-human, of the ontological transformation are ecosomatic ones which are based on interspecies connection. In indigenous societies so many cultural affairs flourish. They express interspecies linkage and transformation. Dance, theater, rituals of becoming other, naming of plants and animals from the consciousness of same kind, human voices of animals are some illustrations. Nowadays these cultural affairs are reactive ones for the indigenous claim of identity, rights, and design connected with natural beings. The claims intentionally express indigenous culture’s power in resolution of anthropocene. More and more indigenous culture’s significance in posthuman relation is growing.
Ⅴ. Consideration
This article describes the cases on the modes of connectivity. The priests and visitors’ sit-in and walk at Saemangeum Tidal Flat, the story of Sts’ailes’ cosmovision, their ritual in Saemangeum show the general outline of people’s bodily exploration for the connection.
The dancer at the tidal flat of Muan County, Korea experienced the connectedness to open earth. It soon made him to be more immersive into the place. The case shows that immersion occurs when the cutting off conventional ideas on dance and experiential body scape occurs. Immersion as the experience of deep connection with earth made an instance of ecosomatic exploration.
Ssitgimgut in Jindo Island tells about the spiritual body in the ritual. The ritual expresses body-earth connection with symbolic body’s transition to the other world, the desired world of ecological embeddedness. This case shows Korean conceptualization of body, movement, transition of identity through the desired ecology of life and death, ecology of body and earth.
Italian tango dancer and scholar Raffaele Rufo made a body exploration into the forest. He experienced the human and more-than-human connection in the reciprocal way. He surrendered to the forest and rendered himself to the trees in a sensorial exploration. And in return he had the experience of ‘danced by tree’. The process of reciprocity shows representative way of ecosomatic exploration into the deep body in earth connection.
Beyond encounter, immersion and reciprocity, Anrea Olsen has tried dance practice to be the experience of body-earth intra connection, to be the experience of oneness, that is ‘body is earth’.
Anna Halprin experienced sitting in, moving in, being embedded in beach, mud, and shrubs, in sunset and darkness. She talked about body as microcosm connected to the larger body. Anna Halprin gives a clue to explore the connnectivity in the ontological dimension.
Recently North American indigenous societies’ rituals are reconsidered as alternative ways of ecological consciousness. Now the people participate in the rituals with broader vision of ecological world. The experiences of becoming more-than-human, of the ontological transformation are ecosomatic ones which are based on interspecies connection. Nowadays the becoming other, ontological transformation in rituals and dance are regarded as the cultural resource of making connectivity for the alternative world beyond anthropocene.
All these modes of connection are concrete realizations of relationality. As the ecosomatic practices, these modes of connection and relationality are intersubjective ones beyond the relationship of dualism. This article described about the theme of body and earth connection, about the extended concept of ecology, that is worldview about man and nature, about the aspects of connections in dance and ecosomatic practices. Body as embodied one with mind, ideas, emotion is vividly moving subject/agency which could not be reduced to mechanical object. This article illuminates various cases of connection under this theme.
But still more considerations of connectivity are needed. ‘How bodies speak and make communicative competence?’ Scholars have told about body subject. But, what are the subjective features making the bodily communication? For the dance studies, philosopher Karen Barad’s critics on dominating representationalism and linguistic mode of thinking is illuminating. He would liberate matters, materiality including things, places, bodies from the passive object status (Barad 2003, 801-803). It seems important to explore further in the dancing bodies’ and more-than-human bodies’ agency in their communication.
