Keywords

Indigeneity within the post-Anthropocene discourse plays a significant but contradictory role in the future of the planet and its decolonization. The onto-logico-political turn in anthropology (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017) reframes Indigeneity (First Nations, Ameridian collectives, Indigenous Australians) as a means to the future, displacing their ‘premodernist’ status, racially disparaged as ‘primitivism’ or autochthonous natives, catapulting them into, not postmodernity, but more so towards the post-Anthropocene in their claims to possess ecological savvy. Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2017), for instance, claim such exceptionality. Although their technologization seems “simple,” they maintain that it is capable of “high-intensity syncretic assemblages.” They are “masters of technoprimitivist bricolage and politico-metaphysical metamorphosis,” presenting “one of the possible chances … of a subsistence of the future” (p. 123). A number of high-profile theoreticians have supported the resolve of this position, namely, Isabella Stengers, Donna Haraway, Phillipe Descola, Elisabeth Povinelli, and Bruno Latour. David Chandler and Julian Reid (2019) characterize this as ‘ontopolitical anthropology.’ It is their position that worries indigenous education. Clive Hamilton (2017) summarizes these difficulties when he reflects on this very tension that surrounds Indigeneity within the Anthropocene. “We made the mess and ‘going native’ ontologically is no answer. Looking upon Indigenous cultures with awe and regarding them as having magical potency is to fetishize them, a tendency now taken so far by some as to attribute to them the power to fix the climate and reverse the geological destabilization of the planet” (p. 79). Hamilton first calls on Descola, who also does not endorse premodern cultures in finding a way out of the Anthropocene: there are better ways of coping. Second, it seems that Western naturalism has become the ‘dominant’ ontology in this regard. Third, and most importantly, Indigenous peoples end up negotiating their existence to this changing Earth by developing hybrid cosmologies that enable them to retain traditions, especially through artforms that symbolize and preserve elements of their cultural past. The ‘old world’ cannot be clung to unless it enters into dialog with the present state of affairs. That said, Hamilton certainly recognizes that there are important ethical values to be gleaned and put into action that have their roots with Indigenous people. That much seems obvious.

Becoming Indigenous is the provocative title that Chandler and Reid give to their ontopolitical anthropology. Ontopolitics is Chandler’s (2018) critique of the new posthuman developments, which include the managerial style that has overwhelmed the Anthropocene, where algorithmic instrumentation provides solutions to problems as they occur. There is no long-term planning for the future. Becoming indigenous is part of the ontological perspectivism that has gripped the ‘new’ anthropology and the ‘new’ animism that concedes that there are multiple worldviews with value systems and cosmologies at odds with ‘settlement’ thought that turns land into resource and commodity. Difficulties present themselves immediately, it seems. Isabelle Stengers’ (2005) call for cosmopolitics to displace Kantian parochial allegiance to embrace a common world to overcome differences among humans (a transcendent cosmos) has not fared that well. The recognition of a pluriverse means the dissolution of ‘science’ as any sort of authority; the tensions between cosmos and politics are irresolvable. Stengers recognizes as much and calls on Deleuze’s ‘idiot’ to answer to this unresolvable problematic. Her definition of cosmos “refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (p. 995). Cosmopolitics, for Stengers (2011), is the ‘problematic’ of this age, but as she admits, it presents a ‘politics’ yet to be found, ending up in the specificity of a situation.

The onto-anthropological work of Mario Blaser (2016) provides insight into such cosmopolitical ‘situationality.’ He specifically shows the difficulties in preventing the caribou population in Newfound and Labrador, Canada, from extinction, given the rate of indigenous hunting practices. The province declared a five-year hunting ban, the local indigenous population, the Innu, would have none of that. According to their elders, the relationship between them and Kanipinikassikueu, the spirit master and protector of the atîku (their word for caribou), had set up protocols for the hunt. Elders complained that the younger generation of Innu did not follow the ritualized established protocols. A ban on hunting meant that it would be impossible to repair the relationship with atîku and its spirit master, as the hunting ban would not allow young people to recommit themselves to the established protocols of care (nataun) to save the atîku. Blaser’s ‘solution’ was to find a ‘translation’ (a sustained relation) that addressed their differences (and not a common world).

The differences are ‘uncommon,’ equivocal, and homonymic. It would require a negotiation to find such a both/and position. Blaser projected that if the ban was lifted and Innu protocols enforced, the caribou would be cared for by both sides, assuring that the caribou herds would continue to thrive. Such a solution follows what has been referred to as the ‘Law’ of the land as practiced by Australian Aborigines (Mathews, 2021). For Stengers (2005), this would be a “cosmic” event (p. 997), an ethological transformation that is “utopic” in its sense, a transformative event “that leaves no one unaffected” (p. 999). The politics here confront the ‘presence’ of a world order where both parties have insufficient knowledge. A suspension arrives at a place where a solution may emerge. Stengers says that this has to be a “slowing down” process, one where diplomats are involved; a “putting into equality,” in opposition to any notion of “equivalence” (p. 1003). The cosmos in her cosmopolitics “has no representative, no one talks in its name, and it can therefore be at stake in no particular consultative procedure” (p. 1003). The Innu elders evoking Kanipinikassikueu as possessing a code of relational conduct with the caribou is a trait with many indigenous people with animistic sensibilities. Anthropologist Jerome Lewis (2008a, 2008b, p. 9) draws attention to Mbendjele Yaka of Congo, who emphasize the importance of appropriate sharing through the guiding concept of ekila. Yaka are successful in their activities, as nature is abundant. If they are not, it is because they, or someone else, have ruined their ekila through inappropriate sharing, such as not sharing meat, being excessively successful, endangering envy, inappropriately sharing sexuality, or sharing laughter in such a way that the forest no longer rejoices. Ekila regulates Yaka’s environmental relations through proper conduct. It would seem that the Innu elders are at odds with their younger generation, raising questions regarding whether education should go back to traditional ways or whether some sort of integration can take place with a ‘scientific’ understanding of the carrying capacity of the land when it comes to saving the caribous thinning herd. Some form of reconciliation would need to take place.

Bruno Latour’s (2004) comment on cosmopolitics brings up the array of anthropologists who have developed the problematic of the ‘pluriverse’ as initialized by William James (multiple ontologies, multiple ‘worlds,’ as the disappearance of the ‘one cosmos’—mononaturalism). The most quoted are Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Martin Holbraad, Morten Pedersen, Philippe Descola, and Eduardo Kohn. Latour’s (2004) account of cosmopolitics, following Stengers, is to suggest an open system where the tensions between cosmos and politics are irresolvable—no peace but war over what is common. Latour (2015) is brutally ‘cheeky’ in his assessment of the Anthropocene and the bankrupt morality that blankets it. The feeling of Nature’s sublimity has all but vanished, replaced by horror and dread as the distance of its forces collapses with hurricanes, cycles, earthquakes and the like. However, his vision of Gaia is a ‘scientific’ one, by which he means “just a set of contingent positive and negative cybernetic loops” (p. 29). It is not a ‘superorganism’ that is ontologically unified. Latour also has no truck with ‘spiritualism.’ This is comparable to the ‘mechanosphere’ as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). The ‘indifference’ of Gaia to our plight (a position I maintain, jagodzinski, 2021) is presented as a paradox since the Earth (Gaia) is ‘sensitive’ to what we do on her ‘skin.’ One of the key differences between indigenous and settler differences is based on the way land is managed, cared for and treated. Soil is metonymic for exploring such a stated difference and a metonym for Gaia as well. How ‘learning’ takes place about soil is certainly a scientific endeavour researched by a broad range of environmental and agricultural sciences, covering economics, engineering, food science and technology and extension services. What follows, I review some of the shifts that have taken place to move the dial in the direction away from the agribusiness dynamic that exemplifies the model of the capitalist economic system with its overwhelming dominance in the way agricultural products are processed and distributed. I call this becoming-soil after the well-cited tenth chapter in Deleuze|Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, as there is an exchange that takes place when there is a change of perception toward its agency. The extreme case is the artist Jae Rhim Lee, who developed a ‘mushroom suit’ whose spores decompose dead human flesh, turning the corpse into soil.

Learning and Unlearning: Skin as Soil

Gaia skin is foremost ‘soil,’ to which humus, humane, and humanity are connected. Plants are its nerve feelers. Eric Guibert (2021) presents one response to the cosmopolitics Latour and Stengers are searching for. He is a ‘diplomat’ who becomes a spokesperson for soils. His ‘architectural animism’ or ‘ontopolitics’ is a response to the plight of soil. Through ‘anthropomorphic letters,’ he attempts to address his grasp of the exchanges that take place in the landscape that are nurturing, as well as recognition when they are harmful. An ongoing experimental cocreated ‘common’ world is created. He calls it a ‘singing together,’ rather than “magic” or “spells of witches” (p. 188). Guibert is on Latour’s side, so to speak, by being earth-bound. His practice combines four animistic dimensions: ontological, political, representational, and methodological. The last dimension is a recognition that this is a relational exchange that is open-ended. Guibert is quite aware that such ‘correspondence’ is meant to give the reader some ethical insights into human exchanges with soil. Although there is no mention in any dramatic way, it is his drawing and diagrams that also help him bridge the human-nonhuman divide; the drawings provide insight into soil’s life-world. It is part of his methodology of representation, which together provide an ecological architecture that is politically charged. His letters are a writing to and with soil, a writing towards an engaged presence, not a writing about soil. These letters do not belong to the genre of ecopoetics. Guibert succinctly provides the tensions of contemporary animistic thought when he writes: “Between at one extreme, a perception, or representation, of these being as ‘sprits’ or ‘souls,’ and practices of ‘magic,’ ‘spells’ and ‘witchcraft,’ and at the other, a ‘new-materialism’ or ‘systemic thinking’ that sees these agencies as the emergence of assemblages, complex systems, including human rationality” (p. 186).

Guibert’s approach to soil through animistic practices raises many questions with regard to learning when it comes to the relationality with nonhuman material that is ‘alive’ and ‘lively.’ Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2016) string of writings on soil-food-web as an ecological model shifts the anthropocentric motivations of soil health to relations of care and maintenance of life. Her ‘care networks’ (the web of inter-intra-relations, connections, dependencies that affect life and well-being) are often cited as a comprehensive grasp of what attentiveness and repair to nonhuman forms should take place. Care, attentiveness, and repair as values that overcome the culture|nature divide are always to be qualified by specific situations. Hannah Pitt (2018) queries the issues around care of ‘community gardens’ for instance, often thought as being directly connected to the earth, to the soil, concluding that there is a wide range of relationships with nonhumans (garden plants, slugs, weeds, bees, frogs, flowers) from killing to tending. She develops a seven-scale typology of such relationships that cover a range of emotions (from disgust, fear [slugs], suspicion, neglect [weeds], acknowledgment, observation [flowers], recognition enjoyment [holding frogs], cooperation [planting specifically for bees], through to care [tending to crops]). However, care must extend ‘beyond the garden’ in order to speak to a broader understanding of the interconnection of species everywhere. Without this outreach, Pitt says, not much learning takes place. What learning does occur happens between gardeners who share similar insights into the ‘how’ of care. Educationally, this would mean practical experience in the gardening field to embody such knowledge that emerges only through practical experience and sharing.

A similar concern is voiced by Kathryn Yusoff (2013). This time calling attention to what is ‘insensible,’ the nonhuman that we know nothing about, species never seen, catalogued or even counted. This addresses probiotic life that remains ‘invisible’ and out of sight: the ‘silent’ call of soil. Such ‘life’ remains imperceptible, which is the ‘reality’ of biodiversity. Therefore, just how do we relate to what remains invisible, out of sight and out of touch? (Some farmers ‘taste’ the soil to sense its health.) What to do with radical nonrelationality? Yusoff turns to the oblique (somewhat paradoxical) response that Jean-Luc Nancy (1997) provides in his exploration of the ‘sense of the world.’ As Nancy writes, “being-to or being toward-the world” (p. 28) is conditioned by responsibility that ends up being a ‘k(not),’ whose description is much like a Deleuzian ‘fold’: “neither interiority nor exteriority, but which, in being tied, ceaselessly makes the inside pass outside, each into (or by way of) the other, the outside inside, turning endlessly back on itself without returning to itself” (1997, p. 111, original emphasis). This k(not) is brought on by the insensible itself [as desire?], a circular-paradoxical argument that maintains responsiveness is always already [there?], toward the world where the insensible is intuited as an accommodation of strange words between natures. Yusoff ends up projecting that these k(nots) are (perhaps) experiences where imagination is unhinged, traveling beyond immediate experience, “to inhabit that which is strange nonintutive, insensible—that which is remote from human comprehension or intelligibility” (p. 225).

Nancy’s thought vivifies that the world is a ‘gift’ to be cherished. In this sense, he points to the metaphysics of sacredness. However, it is the limit of such thought that issues of care and responsibility become impossibly difficult to resolve. What do you do, for example, with the growing abundance of bed bugs, hookworms, and resistant antibiotic microbes that are now flourishing as other species go extinct—the ‘awkward’ species of pests, parasites, and pathogens? (Giraud et al., 2019). Their abundance is the opposite of loss. “[Such] abundance of life within the Anthropocene does not offer a site of hope for navigating the ‘ruins’ of capitalism” (p. 359), as often quoted and argued by Anna Tsing (2015) in relation to the resurgence of matsutake mushrooms in ‘blasted landscapes.’ “[I]n many instances abundance is not just bound up with colonial histories, but actively intensifies the unequal burden of living amidst the ruins wrought by prior industry and technological intervention” (Giraud, p. 368). Biodiversity itself is a problematic concept. Developed in the 1980s, the biodiversity of species is wedded to a ‘conservationist number’ that ‘preserves’ the species, which in turn is wedded to industrial ‘sustainable development.’ The more difficult problem is that of ‘bioproportionality,’ as argued by Freya Mathews (2016), where the abundance of a species is consistent with an ecologically proportionate abundance of the population in relation to all other species. All well and good, but what still is to be done with those ‘awkward’ species? It is unlikely that the radical position of bioproportionality would engage with the difficult question as to what proportionality of our species should be in relation to others. In other words, basically doing away with anthropocentrism quickly brings about debates that stretch from ‘pro-life’ (right-wing pro-natalism) to anti-natalism, voluntary suicide, and even de-extinction. A redistribution of fertility rights across species as a post-conservationist position as Mathews contends seems, at this historical moment, unlikely to receive any political support. Despite its suppression by the evangelical Christian right in the United States, abortion pro-choice rights are the prevailing sentiment of the population.

Yusoff provides a list of what are the strange insensible others, such as phytoplankton, fungi, and multicelled organs. Added to the list would be the importance of bacteria, widely discussed through the efforts of Lynn Margulis and furthered by Myra Hird (2010). These ‘insensible others’ provide a challenge to the thesis of attentiveness, ethics, and care. For example, the question of soil care becomes complicated by probiotic care networks (Lorimer, 2017). Their use cannot avoid an anthropocentric orientation, as argued by Anna Krzywoszynska (2019). Probiotics engage a biopolitics that manages human and ecosystem health by blurring the hygienic separation between human and nonhuman agents where the ‘strangeness’ of probiotics is simply overlooked. In Krzywoszynska’s own study of conventional farmers’ relations of care and attentiveness to the life of soil biota, more conventional techniques of soil conversation (minimizing soil disturbance, adding organic matter, maximizing the time soil is colonized by living roots, diversifying plant species via crop rotation, etc.) are embraced through conference attendance dominated by machinery manufacturers and agro-chemical companies. When it comes to soil biota (an ‘insensible other’), there is only indifference compared to worm activity or digging soil pits where cause and effect relationships are perceptually registered. Soil biota are a ‘ghostly’ presence that dwell in the soil, intuited as moving in only when there is a hospitable soil environment. Care networks that are established between farmers and scientists through online forums are able to make changes to the life of the soil, but this often requires major changes as to which crops are grown and the need to stop using synthetic nitrogen (Haber-Bosch system). Diversifying crops, planting cover crops, and growing herbal lays would lead to the necessary changes. Shifting to the care of soil biota would mean less profit and a change in temporal thinking. However, as Krzywoszynska says, this change in attitude retains its anthropocentrism. It is not the biotic life of soil that is specifically attended to; rather, it is more the shift from chemistry to biology. Microbiota become part of the ‘labor’ agents of the farming business. They have a ‘job’ to do. They are valued for their ability to regenerate exhausted and unproductive soils in the interest of the farmers who sustain and attempt to control their land ecologies. The bottom line is that the larger agro-businesses prevent current farming practices from having the ability to put in the time to reconfigure their business model so that the agential importance of soil biota can be highlighted.

This is not the ‘foodweb model’ that Puig Puig de la Bellacasa (2015) supports, which addresses the complex interactions among species that circulate nutrients and energy. She lists species that would be considered beings to which we are ‘insensible’ toward. “Soil foodweb species can include algae, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, athropods, earthworms, larger animals such as rabbits, and of course plants” (p. 702). This is the ‘web-like’ multispecies world ‘below,’ teeming with life that is always fragile. Puig de la Bellacasa ethics of care, maintenance, and repair calls for ‘care time,’ which appears ‘regressive’ and unproductive in regard to technoscientific innovations of soil technologies that stress yield and production. Her call is to ‘thicken’ the timescapes: ‘soil time’ presents the challenge of relational encounters with different timelines that may well be at odds with one another. To decenter anthropocentric temporality, she calls the need to move from being soil consumers into soil community members by attending to alternative timescapes that would enrich temporal imagining. Indigenous populations, especially in the Columbian plains of the Amazon, as sensitively approached by Kristina Marie Lyons (2020), are given credit for such an approach. Puig Puig de la Bellacasa (2019) attributes human–soil interdependent aliveness to a “‘material spirituality’ of a living death” (p. 400), a “metamorphic rearousal of the mystery of the ‘vital force’” (p. 403). This is a call for an experience of cosmic intimacy informed by universal energy: “‘Same’ matter, incessantly shape-sifting through a cosmic Earth. Rebirth and resurrection through elemental recirculation” (p. 401). “Decomposition as life politics,” in Lyons’ (2020) terms, addresses this spiritualized life-death relationship. This trajectory of thought is reminiscent of the artist, Jae Rhim Lee, mentioned earlier, who has designed a mushroom burial suit.

Plants, Forests, Weeds

While soil has received much attention within the Anthropocene human–nonhuman relationship, plant life follows as a model for survival and perseverance, traits that are attributed to Indigenous peoples as part of ‘becoming indigenous’ (Chandler & Reid, 2019). Anthropologist Natasha Myers’ (2017a) perspective on the ‘Planthopocene’ thought and practice is to develop a planthropology to document affective ecologies between plants and people so that plant ‘demands’ are listened to and “find ways to vegetalize our all-too-human sensorium” (p. 100, original italics). Myers mobilizes a variety of initiatives that counter anthropocentric alienating relations between humans and plants, the most obvious ones being plantations and industrial farms, and ‘edenic gardens’ (Myers, 2019) bent on the singular extraction for human convenience, functionality and control of production. She engages in art making that might be viewed as a ‘technology of the self’ (after Foucault) as it involves a deschooling: an unlearning to detune settler sensoria and deepen the experience of the sentience of the land, especially plants by working with indigenous Elders in Toronto’s 400-acre High Park, an ecology shaped by oak savannah (Myers, 2017b, 2017c). Becoming Sensor (with Ayelen Liberona) (https://becomingsensor.com/) is a twelve-minute synesthetic video installation for “detuning colonial common sense” in regard to High Park (Myers’ video voiceover). Plants are said to be “practitioners of a kind of alchemical cosmic mattering” (Myers, 2018). “We think plants can’t move, but they reach out across the cosmos drawing energy from the sun into their tissues so that they can work their terrestrial magic. Plants are world making conjurers pulling matter out of thin air; their elemental rearrangements teach us the most nuanced lessons about matter and mattering” (p. 56). Clearly, Meyers’ animism is pervasive in her art installations.

One detects in Myers’ voiceover a fidelity to biomimicry that Freya Mathews (2011) has tried to rethink in terms of ‘conativity,’ an impulse of living things to preserve and increase their own existence (after Spinoza), and in her notion of ‘synergy,’ which requires that humans attempt to intuit the ‘mind-set of nature,’ such as attempting to initiate a musical encounter with vocal species such as birds and whales to enlarge the musical signatures of both parties. This interspecies reaching out seems to be consonant with Myers’ projects. Plants and weeds, Chandler and Reid (2019, p. 74) point out, seem to be a trope that harnesses queer thinking to expand any narrow views of nature. An obvious example is the often-cited work of Anna Tsing. Her spores (2014), mushrooms (2015), and ‘Anthropocene weeds’ (2017), for instance, are anthropomorphized as “auto-rewildes” that are said to be “disturbance-lowering” and “disturbance-making.” They are “survivors in non-rationalized edge spaces; an abandoned industrial site is an edge made large” (p. 9). Tsing goes on to develop three anthropogenic sites where the agility of auto-rewilders is on display. These are the anthropogenic feral landscape assemblages of the moor, mine, and mess (the devastation of a former ecosystem), which play into her theme, “learn to live in ruins.” Her argument is that auto-rewildes have their own ‘ontics’ (worlds) in which “modes of being are enacted” (p. 15). In contrast to ontology, ontics are said to “touch, overlap, work around each other, layer, and mutate in each other’s presence” (ibid.). There is no human exceptionalism here. In contrast to the ontological turn where nonhumans are deprived of their ontic world, Tsing attempts to give spores, mushrooms, and weeds agental life. “The key task,” says Tsing, “is to figure out which kinds of weediness allow landscapes of more-than-human livability” (p. 17).

Cautionary Note

The above discussion on soil and plants is especially important since this would counter ‘settler ontology’ as an eradication of anima and predicated on extractivism, industrialism, and consumerism that is pitted against indigenous land use where relationality through kinship with animals as companion species are claimed to be ecological values of the highest order. Is that, however, a myth? The warning given by any overgeneralized comparisons made between indigenous animistic ‘religions’ and so-called global institutionalized religions should indeed be heeded. Isabel Laack (2020) carefully shows that no such comparisons should be easily made and best avoided, as the variations end up as singularities and not peculiarities. What to do with someone such as Nietzsche, who in his Will to Power had already made a connection between animal behavior and prophecy as the emergence of possibility. The corporeal dimension of the animal’s pain provides insight into what is about to happen: the way of the ‘seer.’ One assumes that many Elders can perceive—like the Innu chief of Newfoundland mentioned earlier—the tell-tale signs of the condition of the caribou herds. There is profound stress here as, once more, the tensions between Western anthropologists attempt to grasp shamanistic ‘vision’ and query indigenous believers who embrace the spirituality of animism. Historical confrontations cannot be so easily dismissed. A good example of this is the response by Adrian Tanner (2007) to Tim Ingold (1996, 2000), a highly respected and sensitive anthropologist whose sincerity when trying to grasp indigenous perception of animals cannot be denied. Yet, Tanner refuses any talk of socio-cultural construction concerning such beliefs, and insists on the importance of ritual. Tensions are obvious and perhaps irreconcilable. In Nietzsche’s case, the ‘prophet’ feels what cannot be consciously perceived, doing so by way of thought that operates at various speeds in multiple registers of being. The prophet and the poetic are intimately close to one another like William Blake, as one of a number of Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats), who animate the Earth through their words, a vital materialism that resulted in a stark reaction to, as well as a sense of wonder when it came to the flourishing of technologies that harnessed the forces of nature (coal, steam, oil, electricity).

The aesthetics of feeling, made through observations, dreams and the like, address the micropolitics of attunement of an aesthetic-affective education (i.e., Whitehead). What to do, for instance, with an anomaly such as Anna Pigott’s (2021) approach to soil care based on the cosmology of Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamics, a spiritual approach that is in a singularity of its own, yet with a global following? This is a holistic and spiritual approach. “Biodynamics seeks to promote soil fertility by administering special herbal preparations to fields and compost heaps at specific times of the year, which are intended to concentrate or build cosmic, ethereal and astral forces that shape animal and plant growth, enliven the soil and promote decay” (p. 1667). Should biodynamics be viewed as a ‘faux animism’? As Puig Puig de la Bellacasa (2019) asks, “who animates whom …in these enlivened more than human soil communities” [?] (p. 403, original emphasis). Involvement with soil’s animatedness is said to open up earthly connectedness; it intensifies and complicates a sense of ecological belonging for humans that are involved. “A material-spiritual trans-animation, a co-ensoulment” (p. 403, original emphasis). For Puig Puig de la Bellacasa (2016), spirit is not disembodied; rather, it is understood in the sense of its root meaning: spirare, ‘to breathe,’ a sentiment explored by David Abrams (2014) as an affinity between air and awareness. Pigott picks up this ‘spiritual’ call that pervades the biodynamic approach to soil, which is a three-dimensional interplay of air, land, and celestial bodies. Environmental rituals are also part of biodynamic farming, which changes temporalities and interdependent body postures and feelings toward the soil, thereby embodying its earthly energies. As a volunteer to a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group called Cae, Pigott is upfront about the way the ritual-magic side of biodynamic farming is repressed for the public. The anthropocentric aim is to produce nutritious healthy food to customers; at the same time, Pigott makes a strong case for the way rituals help form the communities of practice, suspending their disbelief in the recognition that there is a mysterious complexity to soils that is beyond them. The networks help bond these communities to a sense of place and purpose. Practices such as harvest parties, volunteer days, recipe sharing, and social media are all practices that increase the sense of ecological belonging.