The Peripatetic Tradition

As part of the Revisiting Religion and Place summer institute at UVA, we read Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Berry also came to the institute one day, spending a couple of hours with our group in thoughtful discussion about his book and related topics. He was richly and generously conversant with the group and it was a fun afternoon.

Early in the book, Berry brings up the topic of walking. I love to walk - it is a daily ritual of mine. And I walk for all sorts of reasons -- to take the dog out, to get my heart rate up, to go places around campus, to engage in solitude and contemplation. Walking has become a widely practiced ritual, associated with a healthy lifestyle. There were so many people who took up walking during the COVID lockdowns. I would see so many people walking in my neighborhood during that time. While it has fallen off as a practice again, everyone understands walking as part of a healthy lifestyle. Berry describes it as a "cult of walking" promulgated by doctors, public health officials, and fitness gurus as a practice promising "health, happiness, and wholeness to those who take up the ritual" - which suggests a type of religious or spiritual practice (56).

Walking is a practice that has been intertwined with religion - or at least reflection and contemplation - since Aristotle's Peripatetic school (Devoted to Nature, 49). Berry writes that walking has been "one of modernity's primary contemplative techniques" and lists Western philosophers--from Hobbes to Thoreau--whose walking was "integral to their thinking" (50). They developed a particular type of walking: rambling "disassociated from the pursuit of fixed goals and free of any agenda" (51). This sort of walking engages the body while freeing the mind - without a goal in mind and without the constraints of time, one's thoughts wander freely, stimulating new ideas and fresh ways of thinking.

Berry contrasts this philosophical rambling with the medieval pilgrimage. These pilgrimages were a type of scripted walking, he suggests. A pilgrimage is a walk structured around a purpose, a story or narrative,  a specific way, and a destination. Not only that, it was "often carefully managed and hierarchically organized" by ecclesiastical authorities (51). That is, many pilgrimages may have originated as spontaneous popular responses to highly charismatic people and powerful events, such as miraculous healings or events of martyrdom, but were often quickly routinized and monetized as packaged religious experiences. Of course, that does not preclude their importance as personal and meaningful religious experiences. 

While it was a vital part of medieval Christian practice, pilgrimage has long been practiced in many religious traditions. The Islamic Hajj may be the most well known - but Shiites have their own pilgrimage routes in Iraq and Syria. There are many, many piligrimage routes in Hinduism from Amarnath to Varanasi. Buddhism has its own routes including Bodh Gaya of course and the Japanese Shikoku pilgrimage among others. Jainism has its own peripatetic tradition of wandering saints. And pilgrimage continues in new contemporary forms as a secular practice of self-discovery, healing from trauma, or making a transition in life.

All this got me thinking about types of religious and spiritual walking. What are the religious ways of walking? In addition to pilgrimage, what are other ways that walking has been utilized for religious or spiritual ends?

• Walking meditation - regularly used in Zen practice, Thich Nhat Hahn made it a central practice in his teaching.
• Circumambulation - around Buddhist stupas, or as part of a Hindu puja
• Fire walking - for instance, the Thimithi Fire-Walking Ceremony in which devotees of Draupadi from the Mahabharata walk across beds of red-hot coals
• Labyrinth walking - in the medieval Catholic tradition and revived in the contemporary spirituality movement
• Conversion -  "walking the sawdust trail" in Protestant revivalism
• Processions and parades - think of Holy Week processions in which the statue of a saint is processed through a European town, or a murthi of Durga is taken to a body of water and immersed at the end of Navratri. In Germania, Tacitus described the Heathen wagon procession of the goddess Nerthus and I described a contemporary wagon procession of Thor in my book Being Viking
• Protest marching - think of religiously inspired Civil Rights marches, nuclear protest marches, peace marches, etc 

I would love to hear about other examples of distinctive religious types of walking!

Monsters and Perfection in Guardians of the Galaxy 3

What is far better than an evil genius, the High Evolutionary, tinkering with perfection and thereby creating monsters who are worth nothing - who can be incinerated without a second thought - the High Evolutionary treats them as valueless in comparison to the perfect ideal being that he is seeking.

"There is no god! That's why I stepped in!" the High Evolutionary exclaims. In Guardians 3, there is no god - just this pseudo-god, a sort of twisted demiurge, whose hubris and obsession with a vision of perfection turns him into a monster. And there is nothing worse than a powerful monster who demands nothing short of perfection, who cannot accept flaws, who is incapable of seeing or valuing the goodness of what falls short of his standard. 

In contrast to the hatred for all that falls short, the horrors - the monsters who are also victims - he has created as experiments by torturing and disfiguring their bodies  - they create something like a peaceable kingdom in their prison cages. These "monsters" - Floor the rabbit, Teefs the walrus, Lylla the otter, and Rocket the raccoon - extend humaneness (wrong word because they aren't human) to each other--the camaraderie of suffering. They are actually beautifully kind and caring. They extend value and intrinsic goodness to each other. They become friends and family. They give themselves names, refusing to be just numbers or barcodes to each other. They build a sort of happy life in each other's company, playing games, laughing, dreaming of a future together where the sky goes on forever.  

In a world without a beneficient god, it is this friendship that prevails. What is far better than the High Evolutionary's Counter-Earth is the companionship of the misfits, the monsters, in the real world. What we see emerge in the prison cages of the lab is also embodied in the Guardians. Even the evil ferocious battery eating beasts, the Abilisks, are called Mantis' "babies" and join the new society. Mantis says "they eat batteries, not people." In the midst of battle, she reenvisions the abilisks as "not-a-threat" - not enemies. She chooses to see the monster in a different humane way - transforming the monstrous into something relatable, someone who can be touched and empathized with - as persons with value. 

While the High Evolutionary was trying to create a "perfect race" and a perfect society - in the Arete lab - Arete is Greek for "excellence, perfection, virtue" a word given to something that is the ideal or fulfillment of its type. It is the Noah's ark of the Guardians Knowhere that all these misfits and monsters come together in friendship and companionship, caring for one another, that the real utopia emerges, symbolized in the dance party at the end of the movie. Even when things are far from perfect, happiness and joy can emerge by loving, being connected, choosing each other, caring for one another.

Two Types of Attachment

 

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell describes two types of attachment to places. 

These are two different ways that we “ascribe meaning to places, imbuing them with emotion and feeling, making them much more than the bundles of matter that they are, The individual attributes of a space emerge into something much more culturally meaningful: a neighborhood becomes the self-identity of a people a national park becomes for some visitors a lasting source of positive emotional attachment; a farm becomes more than fields and crops but the site of family ritual passed down to future generations.” (239)

The first is place attachment, which he explains as “members’ connection to the biophysical attributes” of a place, (Farrell, Battle, 239). Place attachment in his definition involves connection to the land. It doesn't necessarily have to do with social relationships, but concerns a deep attachment to the environment. People become attached to a landscape in various ways, through work, story, recreational experiences, etc. There is a significant body of literature on place attachment theory that is worth exploring.

The second is community attachment, which I am defining as "members’ connection to the social-relational community of a place." In this sense, attachment comes primarily through one's relationship to people, to a community of people who may also reside in a certain geographical locality--thus there is some conflation with place attachment. It is about social bonding.

Community attachment involves two factors. Group identity is about feeling connected to a group's purpose or character. An example might be identifying as a Corbin Redhound (our local high school mascot) - a strong sense of connection to this local school-based identity because one feels connected to the football team, or the band and their purpose. The other factor is interpersonal relational bonds between community members--real, lived relationships between members of this community. While group identity can be somewhat abstract, interpersonal bonds are very concrete and involve friendships, kinship, and other intimate personal connections between specific people.

"Community attachment relates to a person's sense of fit or belonging in a locality, which creates a sense of loyalty. . . . community attachment and community satisfaction should not be automatically equated with each other. People can be very attached to their community and yet highly dissatisfied with it." Ralph B. Brown "Community Attachment" in the Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, edited by:Karen Christensen & David Levinson. SAGE Publications, 2003.

I am trying to think about this in relation to Appalachia and other parts of Kentucky. I think you often have community attachment without a strong place attachment. This may be what Harry Caudill is pointing to when he writes about the woods, "The hill people probably know as little about their native heath as any folk on earth . . . . Today, a typical eastern Kentuckian cannot tell a black oak from a black gum or a hickory from a hornbeam. Though the people of China will pay more than sixty dollars for a pound of dried ginseng root most Kentuckians can walk past it without recognition" (Caudill, Darkness at Dawn, 38, 41). I see this exemplified in my wife's life – she has a strong attachment to the relationships and the relational network of extended family and friends that she grew up with in her small town. These are social bonds that have been forged for generations of living together. But she doesn’t have a strong connection to the land and its features, the environment and ecology of her local area. She doesn’t know the land or the geography, nor spend any time in it.

Now some of her family also has place attachment, which was formed through years of hunting, fishing, and farming the land.

Another issue of place attachment is that it might be super-local – families might be very attached to their holler or their mountain, but not so attached to the other side of the mountain. Families forge these sorts of super-local place bonds by generations of living in one certain place, the family holler or farm. Thus a very powerful place attachment might coincide with a negligent attitude toward environmental destruction someplace else. This sort of super-local place attachment for one’s own property but not the property of another fails to appreciate the interconnection between these “properties” defined by deeds rather than an interconnected landscape. It makes it more difficult to build joint or communal action to protect a landscape.

"Too Special to Drill"

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell writes that "some areas are ‘too special to drill,’ and some areas are not. Some ecosystems we plunder with impunity, and some ecosystems lead us to pause and reflect on repercussions" (Farrell, 238-39).  

I couldn't get my mind off this idea that in the history of industry in Appalachia, there was no place "too special to drill" - no place that shouldn't be logged, mined, or stripped. In Appalachia, no place was treated as "special." There were no sacred places, no sacred mountains. Every landscape, every mountain was devalued as "overburden."  

For instance Harry M. Caudill writes about the passivity, negligence, and complicity of local officials who handed over the rich Appalachian landscape to the rapacious machines of the logging and mining industries. "Kentucky mountaineers . . . transferred legal title to [the land] to 'furriners,' [foreigners] then routinely elected judges and legislators who steadfastly sided with the coal owners in all clashes between their rights and those of the resident population. These officials stood by while mining mangled mountains, ruined streams, and made broad areas into wastelands" (Caudill, A Darkness at Dawn, 46)

He further notes that "Appalachia's absentee landlords have had many willing helpers within the region. Their greed has been more than matched by that of local entrepreneurs who were, and are, all too willing to plunder their homeland and impoverish their kinsmen for profit" (Caudill, Darkness, 31)

Chad Montrie notes that some local Appalachian people supported and defended the destruction of the Appalachian environment, perpetuating the falsehood that Appalachia was a poor land, "not worth a plug nickel." As Caudill writes, all powerholders from legislators to educators "continued to spread the worn myth that Appalachian people are poor because their land is poor and, by implication at least, that the wisest course is to leave. Thus indifference on [college] campuses combined with greed in boardrooms to work the ruin of one of the fairest and most promising parts of the globe" (Caudill, Darkness, 43)

In a perverse logic, those complicit with the mining industry actually argued that Appalachia was improved by strip mining. They "defended surface coal mining as good for miners, the local economy, and even the land" saying, "it gives people work and the land that we strip is in 50 percent and a lot of times 100 percent better condition that it was when we came in there." Montrie writes "On one job they paid a man to mine a part of his property that ‘wasn’t worth a plug nickel,’ leveled it off flat and sowed grass all over, ‘'and now he’s got a pasture out there.’’ Other operations had created flat land for a college and an airport, which [was] believed to be a better use of the land" (Montrie, Making a Living, 89). 

Farrell asks “But what makes something more ‘special' than something else? Where do those moral boundaries come from?” His answer is "the stories we tell about a place"--pointing to the role of sacred story and myth, both personal and communal, that instills certain places with a sense of the sacred. People, individuals, and communities construct sacred places through these narratives that create attachment to places. “We rarely think about them explicitly, but these deep narrative and commitments that are inscribed in our identities and cultures inform what we judge to be more ‘special'" (Farrell, Battle, 238).

So where are the sacred stories of the Appalachian landscape? This is the chilling line from Caudill, "The lack of an Appalachian land epic made the hill people willing collaborators in the destruction of their own region" (Caudill, Darkness, 31, emphasis added). 

What are the sacred stories, myths, narratives, and folktales that enchant or re-chant the Appalachian hills? That's what I am looking for.  

Sources

Caudill, Harry M. A Darkness at Dawn: Appalachian Kentucky and the Future. University Press of Kentucky, 1976.

Farrell, Justin. The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. Princeton University Press, 2015.

 

Montrie, Chad. “Degrees of Separation: Nature and the Shift from Farmer to Miner to Factory Hand in Southern West Virginia.” In Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, 71–90. University of North Carolina Press, 2008.