To me it feels true that there are places where orenda is closer to the surface of the material world, more accessible to humans, as you’ve suggested. By extension this implies that there are places where the orenda has been damaged or covered up. In part I think this is caused by the cruft of materialist modernity that overlays so many of our places. The sprawl and the strip malls, the asphalt and corporate retail. The culture of consumption and profit that keep us too busy to notice what is real.
In the places that have conserved more natural spaces, (which to me do seem like better places to live), our culture typically does this for reasons such as scenery, outdoor recreation, tourism. Not that these are bad things, but they’re limited to surface-level human utility, rather than a deeper recognition of and respect for anything else nonhuman. And so in these places especially it seems more possible for us moderns to start recognizing the orenda of a place, and being able to contribute to and draw from it as we live and die.
In thinking of my own quest for somewhere to make a life for my family, I know that it’s a privilege to be able to just leave a place in search of somewhere “better.” This is also due to how our ties to nature and place have been severed, which allows us to view our surroundings as something we can consume (such as scenery or tourism), without actually being in relationship with the place.
yes, absolutely. i think the move toward "stewardship" is an important corrective; it gets us away from the entitled mindset of finding "the perfect place," i.e. one that will meet all our needs with little to no effort or obligation from us. still—it presumes that we are in control, and that (to crib a bit from Dougald Hine) management is something that the land needs from us.
while the freedom to move is definitely a privilege, i think it's tempered by the recognition that—wherever we go—we're moving into a web of obligations that's been obscured by our myopic worldviews. if we can work hard at staying humble within those obligations, and let go of the idea that a place owes us anything we didn't work for, we at least won't be completely oblivious. orenda seems like a good tool for managing our disability, at the very least.
even just within the Abrahamic tradition—people forget that God granted us dominion (itself a problematic term) over *just this physical earth*. that's since been conflated with "the entire cosmos", but if you look at it right, there is a whole lot that isn't covered under our lease. for example, the realm of spirits, as well as any neighboring dimensions whose denizens might occasionally wander through. it's a big, wide, weird world out there.
the short version would probably be "the dominion of the immaterial," or, a cosmovision that recognizes the supremacy of metaphysical powers and non-corporeal entities over the material world. there are lot of adjacent concepts like shamanism and animism and panpsychism that are useful to a point, but i feel like they've been anthropologized into so many different containers that they no longer describe the totality of it. just an idea i'm playing around with.
🤯 Ah! Ok well this explains a lot haha. It's so true though, we use words in so many contexts that they start to lose all meaning and we need to invent new ones. A lot of people thought I should use a word other than "utopian" to describe my work for that very reason, but I was like "no I'm reclaiming it, this will be used in the literary thinking sense just as it originally was!" I relate to the struggle! Phasmatopia it is!
Am I the rube for never having heard of Hewitt before?--you've pulled some really great insights from this source, and drawn a wonderful line through the concepts of "orenda" and "will," all pulled back in the end to a point that's rooted in the actual ground beneath our (your) feet.
I also really like this use of "phasmatopian" to denote a particular strain of cultural ontology, in lieu of "indigenous" or "traditional," which carry a lot of baggage better left untouched here. The further you can remove your points of argument from the vernacular du jour, the better position you're in to explore these potent concepts on your own terms. That's a very good turn.
Another great entry, and I'm truly excited to see Part 2 of this.
i'm not sure how well-known he was outside the field of anthropology, but his essay is super interesting once you reverse engineer the old-timey scientific chauvinism out of it. local lad, too, so that's fun. there's a lot to work with; hopefully i can do it justice.
hey, thanks Jeff! great question about animism. i could probably write a whole post answering that.
just off the top of my head—animism is important because it recognizes the personhood of non-human entities. however, there's nothing in it that directly challenges the presumption of materiality as the highest order of existence. as an academic term, animism retains the noblesse oblige of Western anthropologists granting recognition to a more pervasive reality than they can fully understand.
i think most phasmatopian cultures recognized that we live in the spirits' world, and not the other way around; because our existence here is so brief, from their perspective, we are the ghosts haunting their home. in that sense, "phasmatopian" is an inversion of materialism.
lots more to say about that… i'll have to see if there's room for that post on my calendar. thanks for reading, and for the question!
damn! i knew Caroline was stateside but didn't know if she was doing anything publicly, or what her itinerary would be... still working my way into the cool kids' club. maybe next time.
shoot up a flare if you or anybody else is near the Finger Lakes. i've got limited mobility while i'm looking after the kids, but it'd be great to do something IRL.
To me it feels true that there are places where orenda is closer to the surface of the material world, more accessible to humans, as you’ve suggested. By extension this implies that there are places where the orenda has been damaged or covered up. In part I think this is caused by the cruft of materialist modernity that overlays so many of our places. The sprawl and the strip malls, the asphalt and corporate retail. The culture of consumption and profit that keep us too busy to notice what is real.
In the places that have conserved more natural spaces, (which to me do seem like better places to live), our culture typically does this for reasons such as scenery, outdoor recreation, tourism. Not that these are bad things, but they’re limited to surface-level human utility, rather than a deeper recognition of and respect for anything else nonhuman. And so in these places especially it seems more possible for us moderns to start recognizing the orenda of a place, and being able to contribute to and draw from it as we live and die.
In thinking of my own quest for somewhere to make a life for my family, I know that it’s a privilege to be able to just leave a place in search of somewhere “better.” This is also due to how our ties to nature and place have been severed, which allows us to view our surroundings as something we can consume (such as scenery or tourism), without actually being in relationship with the place.
yes, absolutely. i think the move toward "stewardship" is an important corrective; it gets us away from the entitled mindset of finding "the perfect place," i.e. one that will meet all our needs with little to no effort or obligation from us. still—it presumes that we are in control, and that (to crib a bit from Dougald Hine) management is something that the land needs from us.
while the freedom to move is definitely a privilege, i think it's tempered by the recognition that—wherever we go—we're moving into a web of obligations that's been obscured by our myopic worldviews. if we can work hard at staying humble within those obligations, and let go of the idea that a place owes us anything we didn't work for, we at least won't be completely oblivious. orenda seems like a good tool for managing our disability, at the very least.
even just within the Abrahamic tradition—people forget that God granted us dominion (itself a problematic term) over *just this physical earth*. that's since been conflated with "the entire cosmos", but if you look at it right, there is a whole lot that isn't covered under our lease. for example, the realm of spirits, as well as any neighboring dimensions whose denizens might occasionally wander through. it's a big, wide, weird world out there.
What does “phasmatopia” mean? Maybe I’m being ignorant but Google is not turning up anything and I would love to understand the context! ☺️
ah ha! it's a word i made up 😁 i started to define it a little bit in the latter half of this post—https://phasmatopia.substack.com/p/announcing-phasmatopia
—but i'm still building out the concept.
the short version would probably be "the dominion of the immaterial," or, a cosmovision that recognizes the supremacy of metaphysical powers and non-corporeal entities over the material world. there are lot of adjacent concepts like shamanism and animism and panpsychism that are useful to a point, but i feel like they've been anthropologized into so many different containers that they no longer describe the totality of it. just an idea i'm playing around with.
🤯 Ah! Ok well this explains a lot haha. It's so true though, we use words in so many contexts that they start to lose all meaning and we need to invent new ones. A lot of people thought I should use a word other than "utopian" to describe my work for that very reason, but I was like "no I'm reclaiming it, this will be used in the literary thinking sense just as it originally was!" I relate to the struggle! Phasmatopia it is!
Am I the rube for never having heard of Hewitt before?--you've pulled some really great insights from this source, and drawn a wonderful line through the concepts of "orenda" and "will," all pulled back in the end to a point that's rooted in the actual ground beneath our (your) feet.
I also really like this use of "phasmatopian" to denote a particular strain of cultural ontology, in lieu of "indigenous" or "traditional," which carry a lot of baggage better left untouched here. The further you can remove your points of argument from the vernacular du jour, the better position you're in to explore these potent concepts on your own terms. That's a very good turn.
Another great entry, and I'm truly excited to see Part 2 of this.
i'm not sure how well-known he was outside the field of anthropology, but his essay is super interesting once you reverse engineer the old-timey scientific chauvinism out of it. local lad, too, so that's fun. there's a lot to work with; hopefully i can do it justice.
An interesting vein of writing you have hit here! Looking forward to Part II.
Although I like your term "Phasmatopian", how does the term "Animist" fit here? What does it miss?
hey, thanks Jeff! great question about animism. i could probably write a whole post answering that.
just off the top of my head—animism is important because it recognizes the personhood of non-human entities. however, there's nothing in it that directly challenges the presumption of materiality as the highest order of existence. as an academic term, animism retains the noblesse oblige of Western anthropologists granting recognition to a more pervasive reality than they can fully understand.
i think most phasmatopian cultures recognized that we live in the spirits' world, and not the other way around; because our existence here is so brief, from their perspective, we are the ghosts haunting their home. in that sense, "phasmatopian" is an inversion of materialism.
lots more to say about that… i'll have to see if there's room for that post on my calendar. thanks for reading, and for the question!
ahhh, no way! what was happening in Saratoga Springs? that's like right down the road from me.
also, good to see you back in action.
damn! i knew Caroline was stateside but didn't know if she was doing anything publicly, or what her itinerary would be... still working my way into the cool kids' club. maybe next time.
shoot up a flare if you or anybody else is near the Finger Lakes. i've got limited mobility while i'm looking after the kids, but it'd be great to do something IRL.