In the Land of the Living #6

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,Q#WKH#/DQG#RI#WKH#/LYLQJ a journal of anarcho-primitivism and christianity

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Seasons In this issue we’ve tried to emphasize anthropological and archaeological sources related to hunter gatherers. we think it’s crucial to make in-depth anthropological writings accessible, especially since a critique of civilization has become more and more common place over the past few years. Films like Avatar and books like Pandora’s Seed have essentially laid out an anti-civilization critique which resonates strongly in the face of ecocidal decay and spiritual atrophy. But, as we’ve seen with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen and others, a critique of civilization/ an anti-civilization stance, tends to break down when a serious critique of origins comes into play. An anarcho-primitivist critique really hinges on an indepth understanding of where power dynamics originate and how culture interacts with our place in the world as a species among other species. By understanding the differences between tribes and bands, the consequences of sedentism, and all the ever present forms of variation that really are the norm. We hope to make some of the common misconceptions and outright lies about gatherer- hunters a little easier to counter. Of course by emphasizing anthropology in this issue We’re leaving out many, many quality pieces relating to resistance, prisoner support, rewilding, theology etc… It’s not our intent to put anthropological sources on a pedestal, set apart from the experiential/ daily life focus. We hope the practical elements of engaging with and learning about variations of band society will speak for itself and blend with the afore mentioned topics that aren’t covered as much in this issue. Next issue will have a heavy emphasis on midrash—get your submissions in soon.

So much has changed over the past few years. I believe seasons are a better representation of the cycle we’ve passed through. Snow, leaves, sun and sprouts mark the timelessness to which our hearts beat the cadence... We turn inward, the words fall away, life pulses through our veins and we unfurl all that we have held so closely to our hearts. The symbols which once rang true have either fallen away or broken under their own dead weight. Even the words which ! !

once burned with wild rage have now melted into warm embers, a mere shell of the wild fire we once danced with. The nights of a chaotic soul are difficult to embrace, but love and rage illuminate the void nonetheless. The eyes become attuned, the ears perk up and the wild creeps in.

The sickness, sadness, envy, hatred and despair do not disappear but move with the inhalation of life and the exhalation of death.

May we find the grace to move with those chaotic winds of health, happiness, contentment, love and hope; may they yet take root.

May we fight fervently for these seeds and the land in which they are nourished.

If Christ is your slave master, kill him!

If Christ is your liberator, Liberate!

The politics decays but the spirit remains, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!a$QDUFK\ a$QDUFK\!

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Contents Seasons, Introduction to ITLOTL Vol. 6……………………… i Table of Contents……………………………………………… iii Gender Relations in Hunter-Gatherer Societies ……………… 1 - Karen L. Endicott A-P & C: Thoughts on Jacque Ellul and John Zerzan ………... 16 - Andy Lewis The Way We Used to Be………………………………………. 22 - John Zerzan Relationship Between Christianity & A-P ……………………. 35 - James Perkison & Lilly Mendoza Overcoming Alienation ………………………………………. 47 - T. Brandon Lane Excerpt from Essay on the Ends of Time …………………..… 55 - John Tracy Burying the Dead ………………………………………………57 - Andy Lewis Lame Ass Christian Liberal of the Year Award…………….……………

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The Green Scare ……………………………………….……… 59 - Michael Becker A Critique of Movement Building……………………………. 61 -Andy Lewis How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways …. 64 - Peter Gray On Time and Breathing ……………………………………….. 73 - T. Brandon Lane When Anarchists and Native Americans Team Up……...75 On Christian Animism …………………………………………79 - Ric Hudgens Excerpt from Historical Context of the New Testament ……… 83 - John Tracy Chaos ………………………………………………………….. 87 - Andy Lewis Excerpt from Who Shall Be the Sun ………………………….. 91 - David Wagoner

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AP&C: In Defense of Wildness………………………………. 92 -Dave Grace Excerpt from Savages Again ………………………… ……… 98 - Paul Shepard It's That Time Again ………………………………………….. 100 - Derek Menno-Bloom Huck Finn on Hell ……………………………………………. 104 A Holy Queering……………………………………………… 105 - Chelsea Collonge & Liza Minno-Bloom The Beginning of Wisdom…………………………………..…110 -Jack Donovan The Land Will Find Its Rest ………………………………….. 119 - Ric Hudgens Pandora's Seed Review ……………………………………….. 121 - Andy Lewis

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Gender relations in hunter-gatherer societies – Karen L. Endicott, Dartmouth College For years many feminist anthropologists and hunter-gatherer specialists have been at odds in their interpretations of gender relations in foraging societies. This chapter presents overviews of gender relations in various hunter-gatherer societies, explores interpretative differences, and examines some common misconceptions about hunter-gatherer gender relations.

Anthropology traditionally neglected to study women; this led to theories that overly emphasized men. Durkheim (1961 [1915]:53) categorized Aboriginal men as sacred and women as relatively profane. Radcliffe-Brown (1930) concluded that the patrilineal, patrilocal “horde” was the basic unit of Aboriginal society. Service (1966) postulated that the patrilocal band, which kept male hunters together, was the natural form of social organization for huntergatherer societies. However, beginning with Phyllis Kaberry (1939), who showed that East Kimberley Aboriginal women had their own sacred ceremonies and ties to the Dreamtime, a few voices gradually spoke up for hunter-gatherer women (see Berndt 1965, Turnbull 1965, Lee and Devore 1968, Goodale 1971, Briggs 1970).

Fueled by feminism in the 1970s, the anthropology of women focused new attention on hunter-gatherer women, especially “woman the gatherer” (see Dahlberg 1981, Reiter 1975). Underscoring that biology is not destiny, anthropologists dropped the term “sex roles” and adopted “gender” to refer more broadly to the ways societies define, elaborate and evaluate sexual dimorphism. How, they asked, is gender used as a tool for organizing social life? Ironically, however, some feminist anthropologists carried over anthropology’s emphasis on males and developed gender theories that interfere with understanding gender complexities in hunter-gatherer societies.

Rosaldo and Lamphere asserted that male dominance and sexual asymmetry are universals (1974:3). Friedl (1975, 1995) argued that sexual asymmetry is unavoidable in hunter-gatherer societies because "! !

! men hunt and distribute meat beyond the family. Collier and Rosaldo (1981) contended that women are merely objects of male manipulations in the marriage systems of simple societies, including hunter-gatherers.

Various anthropologists who have done fieldwork with huntergatherers have described gender relations in at least some foraging societies as symmetrical, complementary, nonhierarchical, or egalitarian. Turnbull writes of the Mbuti: “A woman is in no way the social inferior of a man” (1965:271). Draper notes that “the !Kung society may be the least sexist of any we have experienced” (1975:77), and Lee describes the !Kung (now known as Ju/’hoansi) as “fiercely egalitarian” (1979:244). Estioko-Griffin and Griffin report: “Agta women are equal to men” (1981:140). Batek men and women are free to decide their own movements, activities, and relationships, and neither gender holds an economic, religious, or social advantage over the other (K. L. Endicott 1979, 1981, 1992, K. M. Endicott 1979). Gardner reports that Paliyans value individual autonomy and economic self-sufficiency, and “seem to carry egalitarianism, common to so many simple societies, to an extreme” (1972:405). Stressing complementarity, Sharp observes that women are as fully involved with and responsible for generating Chipewyan culture as are the men (1995:47). Leacock (1981) interprets the historical record on seventeenth-century Montagnais-Naskapi (Innu) gender relations as egalitarian, with individuals, male and female, making decisions about their own lives and activities. In short, differences between what men and women do in these societies make no difference. Instead of reinforcing inequalities and constructing hierarchies, these societies deliberately level differences.

Some anthropologists dismiss the term “egalitarian” as a Western political concept inapplicable to non-Western cultures. (The same can be said about “inequality,” yet that concept continues to be considered a useful analytical tool.” It is true, for example, that the Batek do not articulate their egalitarianism as a kind of political #! !

! philosophy. But as Woodburn observes in general, “The verbal rhetoric of equality may or may not be elaborated but actions speak loudly: equality is repeatedly acted out, publicly demonstrated, in opposition to possible inequality” (1982:432). There is no theoretical justification for anthropologists to accept that many societies construct gender inequalities but to deny that some construct gender equalities or that some societies create inequalities in some aspects of life and equalities in others.

What do men and women do in foraging societies?

The stereotype of man the hunter, woman the gatherer accurately describes only how many forager peoples divide daily work responsibilities. In reality, many hunter-gatherer men also gather vegetable foods and women procure animal foods, though the latter is not always called hunting.

Where vegetable foods comprise the dietary staple, women commonly take responsibility for gathering them on a regular basis.

The general pattern is that women from each household collect vegetable foods for their own household needs. Women’s gathering provided as much as 60 to 80 percent by weight of the diet of the Ju/’hoansi (Lee 1968:33) and of Australia’s Western and Central Desert Aborigines (Tonkinson 1991:43, citing Gould 1969:258 and Meggitt 1962). Foragers may or may not define gathering as women’s work. The Batek, for example, do not, even though women take primary responsibility for gathering. The Nyae Nyae Ju/’hoansi, on the other hand, say that gathering “is what women are made for” (Marshall 1976:96).

Still, Ju/’hoansi men, like Agta, Hill Pandaram, Hadza, Australian Aboriginal, and many other hunter-gatherer men, gather vegetable foods when the need or opportunity arises (Marshall 1976-7, Shostak 1981:14, Lee 1979:192, 262, Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981:133, Morris 1982:100, 101, Gardner 1993:117, Tonkinson 1978:35, Woodburn 1968:51). Ju/’hoansi “men account for as much as 20% of '! !

! all food gathered” (Shostak 1981:244). Batek men gather when hunting fails, when wives are tired or sick, or when they come across large wild yams. In 1975-6, Batek men’s gathering, and their procurement of rice and other cultivated foods through trading rattan, accounted for 42 percent of the diet by weight; women’s similar efforts accounted for 43 percent. Hadza men gather most of their own vegetable foods, while women gather most of the vegetable food they and their children consume (Woodburn 1968:51). Men’s gathering adds flexibility to a group’s food-procurement necessary. The Tiwi are a notable exception: They consider it “wrong” for men to collect vegetable foods (Goodale 1971:154).

In most foraging societies, a man’s primary work responsibility is hunting, especially hunting for game that is large enough to be subject to the society’s sharing rules, but often women also hunt.

Anthropologists have tended to say that men hunt meat but that women gather or collect it, even when the animals are the same.

Tonkinson (1974:35) reports that Australian Western Desert men “hunt lizards and smaller game, “while Shostak (1981:244) writes that Ju/’hoansi women “collect lizards, snakes…as well as occasional small or immature animals.” It is often unclear whether the different terms reflect anthropologists’ own analyses and biases, or the foragers’ indigenous distinctions.

Linguistically distinguished or not, men’s and women’s hunting techniques and/or quarries often differ. Australian Western Desert men use spears, whereas “women never hunt large game with spears, but may use their dogs to run down kangaroos, emus, etc. and then club them to death” (Tonkinson n.k.:6). Ju/’hoansi women procure game but are prohibited from touching the bows and arrows men use (Marshall 1976:177). Aché women have occasionally killed animals; however, they have never used bows and arrows, despite there being no taboo against touching men’s equipment (Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado, personal communication). Batek women are free to use blowpipes to hunt, as do men, but most Batek women &! !

! concentrate on game they can dispatch with digging sticks. The Jahai prohibit women from handling blowpipes and poison darts because, they say, children who accompany the women “might prick themselves with the darts or lick the poison and die” (vander Sluys, this volume). Andamanese women, emically defined as the gender that bleeds, avoid hunting that causes animals to bleed, and instead catch fish and crabs in nets and baskets (V. Pandya, personal communication; Pandya 1993). In the nineteenth century Yahgan:Yamana women dived for shellfish in frigid waters while men hunted marine mammals and birds (Steward and Faron 1959:398-9); Vidal, this volume). The Tiwi define several species of land animals, including bandicoot and opossum, as foods that women traditionally procured (Goodale 1971:152). “Tiwi women not only provide the majority of the daily food supplies, but also the daily protein” (Goodale 1971:337).

In some societies women routinely participate in communal hunts. In Mbuti net-hunting and begbe bow-and-arrow hunts, women act as beaters to drive game within range of the armed men (Turnbull 1965:157, 162). When Batak were hunting pigs, women would drive them towards the men, who would shoot them (James Eder, personal communication). Netsilik women and children help men with seal hunting and everyone used to fish (Balikci 1970:34, 82-83).

Inuit women participate in the hunting economy in other ways as well. If an Inuit family has no sons, the father may train one or two daughters to hunt (Briggs 1970:271). (Similarly, families with few daughters may teach sons sewing and other female skills, and orphans learn both men’s and women’s skills. [Briggs 1970:270-1].)

Inuit women sew the clothes that make hunting possible, and process skins, meat, and fish. Countering the stereotype that Arctic women do no economic work, Halperin argues that if we expand the definition of division of labor to include such work, “we find a basically egalitarian pattern of labor division for hunter-gatherers in a variety of latitudes” (Halperin 1980:379, 1988:87).

The most extreme case of women hunters is probably the Agta %! !

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(Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981:121-51), who put most of their food-getting efforts into trading meat for foods cultivated by their agricultural neighbors. Agta women regularly hunt, either in pairs or with men, using machetes or bows and arrows and hunting dogs.

Women forgo hunting altogether only during late pregnancy and the first months following childbirth.

Many hunter-gatherers engage in sporadic horticulture or trade.

Commonly, men clear and help plant the fields, and women plant, tend, and harvest them. But the exact division of labor derives from particular historical circumstances rather than constant biological or social causes. In 1990, for example, some Batek women avoided horticultural work because they feared their children would follow them into the fields and die from the heat, as they said had happened previously. Trade commonly is undertaken by whoever happens to produce what the market demands. For example, when rattan is in demand, Batek men and women collect it, but when incense wood is in demand, young men tend to do the work. Penan women make rattan baskets and mats for trade; in the past men traded resin and wild latex (Brosius 1995.) Toba women make handicrafts, and men, who are more proficient in Spanish, market them (Gastón Gordillo, personal communication).

Hunter-gatherer societies variously divide non-food-getting tasks.

Men and women tend to perform jobs ancillary to their food-getting work. Other tasks are more variable from society to society. Inuit men construct igloos and women organize the interior. Batek women usually construct lean-to shelters, though men know how and sometimes do. Healing and the performance of rituals may be highly specialized and gender specific or open to whoever wants to learn the skills. Australian Aboriginal men keep certain rituals secret from women and uninitiated men, and many Aboriginal women perform ceremonies of their own (Kaberry 1973 [1939], Berndt 1965, Goodale 1971, Hamilton 1981, Bell 1983, Tonkinson 1993). Among $! !

! the Iukagir, both men and women could become shamans (Ivanov, this volume). Tlingit men and women could become both shamans and witches (Klein 1995:36). Tolowa shamans were always women or transvestites (Halperin 1980:388). Only Batak men become shamans, while women make the music that enables the shaman/curer to contact his spirit familiars (James Eder, personal communication). A few Batek, usually men become shamans who communicate with spirits through trance, but any Batak man or woman can experience spirit communication through dreams and participation in communal singing and dancing rituals. Similarly, Shoshone men and women have developed relationships with sprits through dreams and visions (Fowler, this volume).

Women tend to be the primary caregivers for infants and very young children. Fathers help to varying degrees. Aka fathers play major childcare roles (Hewlett 1992), as do Batek fathers (K. L. Endicott 1992). Andamanese regard men and women as equally responsible for raising children (Pandya 1993:263-79). Young children learn the skills they see their mothers perform, especially gathering. As children grow up, boys accompany their fathers and other male relatives on hunts and learn the various skills men perform, while girls deepen their knowledge of women’s skills. If ritual knowledge is gender-specific, as in Australia, men and women provide separate training to their sons and daughters, though Catherine Berndt (1983:21) observes that in Australia mothers and other women provide a boy’s and girl’s first exposure to religion. Some huntergatherers, including the Mbuti, Ju/’hoansi, Ongee Andamanese, Aché, and many Australian Aborigines, perform puberty ceremonies, while others, like the Batek, do not.

A few hunter-gatherer societies recognize a third gender. Three percent of Aché men behave like women, collecting foods and doing childcare but remaining uninvolved sexually with either sex (Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado, personal communication). Itenm’I B! !

! transvestite men wore women’s clothing and did women’s work (Shnirelman, this volume).

Does meat-sharing lead to male power?

Arguing universal sexual asymmetry, some scholars contend that male dominance is unavoidable in hunter-gatherer societies because male hunters share the societies’ most valued commodity (meat) beyond the household, thus gaining prestige and creating debts that can be used to exert power over others (Friedl 1975:12-45, 1995, Collier and Rosaldo 1981:281, Collier 1988). The argument makes several unwarranted or faulty assumptions: that meat is always the most valued commodity, that men have a monopoly on supplying meat, that dealings in the “public” sphere outside the household are more prestigious or valued than dealings within the household (Rosaldo 1974:23-42), and that hunters can turn prestige into power (see Friedl 1975:12-45).

Evidence from hunter-gatherers contradicts these assumptions. The Batek, for example, do not prefer meat over all other foods; they usually mention fruit as the favored food of both humans and spirit beings. Women’s hunting in many hunter-gatherer societies undercuts the idea that men have a monopoly on meat. Many huntergatherer societies do not recognize a public sphere versus a domestic sphere, and there is no evidence that they value extra-familial activities more than familial activities. The ill-defined notion of prestige is problematic. Is it admiration or something more? Some anthropologists unjustifiably assume that activities prestigious in our society (for example, leadership and politics) are prestigious in hunter-gatherer societies – or assume that men’s activities are always the most prestigious (Mead 1935:302; cf. Sanday 1990:2 and Sacks 1979:88-93). The Batek admire industriousness, whatever the activity and whoever the worker; so do the Gidjingali (Meehan 1982:119). Even where people admire successful hunters, people usually undermine any hunter’s attempt to exert power over others.

Ultimately the argument that meat-sharing gives men power A! !

! misinterprets hunter-gatherer sharing practices. Many scholars think of sharing as two separate networks: women share vegetable foods within the family and men share meat beyond the family. Yet, vegetable and meat sharing are two parts of the same process of generalized reciprocity among camp members. The difference is that vegetables are more reliable food sources than animals. Most gatherers are likely to succeed in finding food each day, obviating the need to regulate sharing. I some societies gatherers are expected to feed their families first; further sharing is up to the gatherer.

Elsewhere gatherers share more routinely. “Among the Hadza it would be out of the question for a woman to hoard food while others are hungry” (Woodburn 1982:442). Batek families often send children to five vegetable food to other families in camp, even when everyone has managed to gather food.

Hunters are far less likely to succeed in taking large game each day.

The success rate for Ju/’hoansi hunting is 25 percent (Lee 1968:40), and for Batek hunting 50 percent. Small game is commonly exempt from obligatory sharing. Large game must be shared. Many scholars interpret meat-sharing as generosity, but many societies make sure that the hunter does not have a choice. Some foragers have set rules about which cut of meat goes to which relative, while others assign distribution rights to people other than the hunter. The Ju/’hoansi say that the owner of the arrow that killed the animal is the owner/distributor of the meat (Marshall 1976:296, Lee 1979:247).

Either a man or a woman can own the arrow. “There is much giving and lending of arrows. The society seems to want to extinguish in every way possible the concept of the meat belonging to the hunter” (Marshall 1976:297). By this and other leveling mechanism – including ridiculing the meat and cutting cocky hunters down to size – the Ju/’hoansi prevent hunters from turning the sharing network into a political power base (Lee 1979:244, 246). The Ju/’hoansi actively encourage hunting through rituals, admiration of hunters, and nagging, then just as actively prevent hunters from using their )! !

! successes for personal advantage.

Do hunter-gatherer men control women?

Anthropologists have argued that hunter-gatherer men control women through arranging marriages, appropriating women’s labor, excluding women from prestigious or authority-laden activities or realms of knowledge (such as hunting, religion, or politics), or through violence. Empirically there is wide variation in how men and women divide authority and control.

Not all hunter-gatherers have arranged marriages, and in those that do, generally both parents have a say in arrangements for their sons and daughters. Defining marriage as wife-exchange is one way anthropologists inadvertently overlook women’s influence over their own marriages and those of their children. Like many foragers, Batek men and women choose their own spouses. Ju/’hoansi parents arrange first and sometimes second marriages for their young sons and daughters (Marshall 1976:266). But unhappily married young daughters may move back home or divorce (Shostak 1981:127-30, 158) Adult Ju/’hoansi parents arrange first and sometimes second marriages for their young sons and daughters (Marshall 1976:266) But unhappily married young daughters may move back home or divorce (Shostak 1981:127-30, 158). Adult Ju/’hoansi women and men select subsequent marriage partners for themselves (Marshall 1976:266). The Tiwi defined women as wives, even before their births. Although a girl’s grandfather, father, or brothers formally arranged her marriage, her mother’s relationship with the prospective groom most influenced whether the marriage would take place (Goodale 1971:54-6). A prospective son-in-law had to please his future mother-in-law by doing all she asked of him, or she could void the contract (Goodale 1971:56). Though anthropologists often interpret Tiwi society as men exchanging women, Tiwi women exercised their own control of men through the mother-in-law relationship and extramarital affairs (Goodale 1971:130-1). "(! !

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Rather than assigning all authority in economic, political, or religious matters to one gender or the other, hunter-gatherers tend to leave decision-making about men’s work and areas of expertise to men, and about women’s work and expertise to women, either as groups or individuals. When decisions affect an extended household or group, age and gender are factored in in various ways. Older men and women may coordinate the activities of a household, as among Evenki (Anderson, this volume). Netsilik husbands decided where families moved; wives were autonomous in their domains and often influenced their husband’s decisions (Balikci 1970:109). Guemple (1995:22) reports that in Inuit interpersonal “politics” the general rule is that younger answer to older and females answer to males; men may “give the orders” at home but don not interfere with women’s work; moreover, Inuit men tend to defer to their grandmothers. Observing that Chipewyan women defer to their husbands in public but not in private, Sharp cautions against assuming this means that men control women: “If public deference, or the appearance of it, is an expression of power between the genders, it is a most uncertain and imperfect measure of power relations. Polite behavior can be most misleading precisely because of its conspicuousness” (Sharp 1995:53). Some foragers place the formalities of decision-making in male hands, but expect women to influence or ratify the decisions. Gitxsan male chiefs do not support community-wide initiatives without their mothers’ and aunts’ approval (Richard Daly, personal communication). Andamanese men act together to make a decision, then get women to endorse it before its implementation. Sometimes, too, women instruct men to undertake specific tasks (V. Pandya, on the Andamanese, personal communication). Other foragers expect both men and women to participate in group decisions. Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado (personal communication) report that Aché men and women traditionally participated in band-level decisions, though “some men commanded more respect and held more personal power than any woman.” The Batek expect individual men and women to have their ""! !

! say; when interests diverge, families or individuals may leave a camp group to pursue their own plans.

In addition to consensus and discussion as the means of decisionmaking, some foragers have leaders, either formal or informal. The oldest Netsilik male in an extended family is considered the headman for that group. He coordinates hunting activities and his wife distributes the food (Balikci 1970:118). Various Australian Aborigines recognize ritual leaders, usually elders. Some societies, like the Batek, have “headmen” positions that were introduced by outsiders to serve as liaisons. Such people may or may not have a “following.” The Batek, like some other foragers, also have “natural” or informal leaders, whose intelligence and abilities tend to attract people who seek their advice. Some Batek natural leaders are women. Commonly, if leaders—whether formal or informal – try to coerce others, families and individuals move away from them.

Indeed, many hunter-gatherers limit authority to specific situations like organizing rituals or arranging marriages, and leave individuals to exercise personal autonomy in broad areas of everyday life (Leacock 1978, Ingold 1987:223-40, Woodburn 1982, Hamilton 1981:85). People cannot extend such situational authority. For example, children may refuse arranged marriages or may divorce shortly after the marriage takes place, even when the parent has had the right to make the arrangement. Personal autonomy and situational authority apply to both men and women, though the configurations may differ in each society. Nowhere do men or women control all aspects of each other’s lives. Some anthropologists argue that men have an ultimate advantage over women because men are stronger and will tend to be the winners in violent confrontations. In any human interaction violence is a possibility, and women may well be the losers. The real question is whether the society institutionalizes violence, especially against women. Among some foragers, like the Batek, violence is strictly taboo and violators are scorned. For the "#! !

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Mbuti, “a certain amount of wife-beating is considered good, and the wife is expected to fight back” (Turnbull 1965:287), but too much violence results in intervention by kin or in divorce. Some Australian Aboriginal men use threats of gang-rape to keep women away from their secret ceremonies. Burbank argues that Aborigines accept physical aggression as a “legitimate form of social action” and limit it through ritual (1994:31, 29). Further, women know how to deal with physical aggression, unlike their Western counterparts (Burbank 1994:19). According to Bell (1983:37, 41, 161), Australian men’s violence toward women increased with settlement life, largely under the influence of alcohol.

Do foragers symbolically devalue women?

There are few systematic accounts of gender symbolism in specific foraging societies, but even partial accounts suggest that foragers’ ideas about gender lack the kind of overt sexual antagonisms found in the ideologies of many South American and New Guinea horticultural societies. Often both male and female characters are prominent in foragers’ myths and cosmologies. Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime” myths are replete with male and female creator beings. In Arnhem Land ceremonies men repeat “the actions of the creative feminine ancestresses, the Wauwalak sisters” (Hamilton 1981:81). The Batek alternatively describe a punitive thundergod as a single male, two brothers, and a brother/sister pair; reflecting widespread Asian ideas, they picture the punitive underground deity as a huge snake or an old woman. Various foragers view men and women as different in some ways and the same in others, without attaching greater value to either gender.

Corporeal distinctions often focus on menstruation, but even societies that consider menstruation dangerous or polluting may limit these qualities to menstruation itself rather than extending them to womanhood in general. For example, the Batek say that menstrual blood smells bad, but they do not consider women themselves to be offensive. "'! !

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Gender may matter little in beliefs about the human spirit. In the traditional Inuit “ontological formulation of humanity, maleness and femaleness are only transitory states of being” (Guemple 1995:27).

The same named personality that circles between the spiritual and corporeal world can attach to either a male or female (Guemple 1995:27). The same named personality that circles between the spiritual and corporeal world can attach to either a male or female (Guemple 1995:27). “Since the Native theory holds that the inheritor of a name assumes the identity of the spirit associated with it – and becomes that person in adulthood – there can be no fundamental difference in the statuses of individual Eskimos, because gender is not an essential attribute of being as such” (Guemple 1995:27).

Netsilik beliefs about the afterlife reflect non-hierarchical yet genderspecific values. “Energy, endurance, fearlessness for young men and the ability to endure suffering for women are the qualities most rewarded in the afterlife. Laziness, idleness, apathy, and refusal to accept pain are punished” (Balikci 1970:215).

Does incorporation into nation-states affect gender relations?

For some societies contact with outsiders and incorporation into nation-states undermined gender relations, especially women’s lives.

Leacock (1978, 1981:37) argued that the fur trade broke down egalitarian gender relations among the Montagnais-Naskapi by separating foraging groups into single household units in which women were increasingly cut off from economic activity. She also argued that this made it easier for Jesuits to introduce changes that deliberately undercut traditional Montagnais-Naskapi gender relations (Leacock 1980:38, for other analyses, see Anderson 1985 and Van Kirk 1987). Draper (1975) documented how Ju/’hoansi sedentization disrupted work and sharing patterns: men found work with neighboring pastoralists, and women became dependent on men.

Bell (1983) argued that Kaytej Aboriginal women were less autonomous in settlements than in the bush, though conversely their ritual life increased, and government welfare checks enabled women "&! !

! to live independently of men if they so chose. Among the Batak, government and non-government organizations have created more opportunities for men than women (James Eder, personal communication).

Elsewhere contact increased options for women. Tonkinson (1990) reports that Mardu women in Western Australia acted as liaisons between Aborigines and missions and cattle stations. The women learned more English than the men and earned money through employment opportunities, including prostitution, which they did not view pejoratively. More recently, government welfare checks have given women more independence than ever. Government checks have similarly increased Dhipewyan women’s economic independence and have enabled young people to reject arranged marriages (Sharp 1995:65). Since the 1970s many Evenki women live in single-parent households supported by government checks.

Evenki women also dominate in professions that require higher education (Anderson, this volume). Bruce Grant (personal communication) reports that Sovietization of Nivkh in the 1920s brought women into the Soviet workforce and education and states that “all women I knew felt that their position had been greatly improved through Sovietization.” Batek economic opportunities have changes as Malaysia has logged the forests, but gender relations have not changed, except among Muslim converts. So far, most Batek are responding on their own terms as much as possible, foraging in remaining forests, trading, growing crops, and working for wages.

Gender relations are most likely to change if contact with outsiders involves playing by the outsider’s rules (especially if those rules favor one gender over the other or deliberately undermine existing gender relations). Rather than assuming that all contact with outsiders and all economic change entail changes in gender relations, especially changes that favor men, we must look at the historical specifics.

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Anarcho-Primitivism and Christianity: Thoughts on Jacques Ellul and John Zerzan

By Andy Lewis Jacques Ellul and John Zerzan were born over 30 years apart, Ellul at the beginning of the 20th century and Zerzan in the middle. Their iconoclastic, multidisciplinary explorations of technology, sociology, history, art and language led them to similar conclusions regarding the origins and consequences of technological systems throughout history and in their own time. Of course Ellul’s Christian faith would seem to be at the center of their different conclusions concerning complex topics such as language and time. Ellul’s Humiliation of the Word for example, makes the case that language originates as a divinely liberating mode of communion. Zerzan implicates language as part and parcel of the whole move towards civilization and standardization (Language: Origin and Meaning). While Ellul’s Christianity no doubt plays a part in his different conclusions from Zerzan I would suggest that they are actually closer in their conclusions regarding language than a superficial reading may render. Many of Zerzan’s ideas regarding time and language are logical extensions of Ellul’s understanding of technique as an expanding system of logic and standardization for purposes of control and production. In a footnote to his essay, Beginning of Time, End of Time, Zerzan points this out directly “Consider Jacques Ellul, The Technological System (New York, 1980) as to whether it is time or technology that “comes first.” All the basic, society dominating traits he attributes to technology are, more basically, those of time.

Perhaps a tell tale sign that he is still one remove away from the fundamental level is the spatial character of his conclusion that “technology is the only place where form and being are identical,” p.231” While Zerzan’s critique of symbolic culture is generally overlooked or misunderstood, even within the Post-Left anarchist "$! !

! milieu, his case against civilization using material from most every discipline has become widely accepted even amongst Christian theologians such as Ched Myers and Wes Howard-Brook. Myers seminal entries in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, 2005 (The Fall and Anarcho-Primitivism and the Bible) make conclusive ties between a socio-political reading of Genesis and Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivist critique. Ellul was aware(if somewhat incompletely) of the anthropological evidence which plays a major role in Zerzan’s case against civilization. Anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee, Lorna Marshall and James Woodburn engaged in ethnographic studies that would overturn the old Hobbsian notion of the “nasty, brutish and short” lives of gatherer-hunters. Ellul shows his familiarity with the shift in perspective regarding gatherer-hunters in a 1985 essay “Economists studying primitive cultures, ethnographers, and historians of ancient civilizations now argue that those in prehistoric times, like people in many traditional societies, live in a sort of natural abundance. The human population was very sparse and scattered, with a superabundant supply of fruit, fish, game etc., and human beings had to spend relatively little time finding nourishment. Not only was survival not precarious, but the work was light. It was in this way that traditional societies were sustained throughout history.” From the Bible to a History of Non-Work 1985.

Ellul’s essay , Technique in the Opening Chapters of Genesis makes the point that technique is a product of the fall, thus overturning the age old interpretation of Adam and Eve’s as technicians with a divine mandate to engineer the world in their own image. By interpreting The Garden as a place free from the oppressive “necessity” of technique, Ellul opens the gates for a multitude of connections with Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivist understanding of humanity’s wild/ undomesticated origins. A necessary part of this shift in perception is the negative light it casts upon such sacred concepts as anthropocentrism and progress.

Zerzan is an outspoken advocate of property destruction and the actions of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front.

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Ellul was an advocate of non-power. While he upheld non-violence as freedom and violence as necessity he didn’t rule out the potential to give up freedom and engage with necessity in his own life. The best examples of this were when he attempted to procure guns for Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, (Interview p.67) and late in 1943 when he attempted to procure guns for himself and those he was living with, “We came to the conclusion that it would be better if we were armed. I got in contact with the network that provided forged documents but was never able to track down any weapons. That’s all there is to it. Had we been able to lay hands on some revolvers or tommy- guns no doubt we would have joined the maquis in Sauveterre.”(p.77) Ellul mentions that he would have likely gone off to fight in Spain had he not just recently met his wife Yvette.(p.68) Ellul’s criticism of the Left is another point of connection with Zerzan. In the rejection of technological neutrality the premises and trajectories of Leftist projects come into question. Ellul’s anarchist approach seems to have been a necessary progression in his intellectual development although his anarcho-syndicalist sympathies betray an incomplete severance with Left/Marxist tendencies.

Zerzan’s rejection of the Left was born largely out of his experience as a labor organizer witnessing first hand the complicity between unions and owners.( So…. How did you Become an Anarchist, 2001) As forerunners of the Post-Left anarchist mielu various Situationists ideas also seem to be a strong intellectual link between Zerzan and Ellul. Ellul’s respect for the Situationist project was so great that at one point he tried to become a member of the Situationist International but was rejected due to his Christianity.(citation needed) Zerzan draws heavily from Frankfort School philosophers such as Adorno and Horkheimer who questioned the virtues of progress and production inherent in Marxist ideology and Enlightenment values. Ellul’s dislike for philosophy probably kept him from fully appreciating the importance of works such as Negative Dialectics and Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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Interestingly enough it was another critic of the Left that is perhaps the most concrete link between Ellul’s critique of technological society and Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivist perspective.

Ted Kaczynski’s assertion that “The problem of civilization is identical with the problem of technology,”(interview) explicitly connects Ellul’s concept of technique with Zerzan’s critique of civilization. Kaczynski was profoundly influenced by Ellul’s sociological works. This influence can be seen clearly in “The Unabomber Manifesto” Industrial Society and it’s Future. After the arrest of Kaczynski in April of 1996, Zerzan began visiting him becoming something of a confidant over the course of the ensuing trial. Zerzan was intrigued by Kaczynski’s critique which he believed had “opened a new era of possibility” p.189 So… How Did You Become an Anarchist? 2001) Ellul and Kaczynski had a mail correspondence sometime before Kaczynski’s arrest but the details of these letters are not known. (Harvard and the Unabomber) Zerzan’s essay Whose Unabomber(1995), written shortly after the publication of Industrial Society and it’s Future mentions that some critics of the “Manifesto” were saying it’s “not particularly unique.”(p.153) Zerzan response is telling, “as if anything like that goes on in the classrooms. Ellul, Juenger and others with a negative view of technology are far from old hat; they are unknown, not a part of accepted, respectable discourse.”(p.153) Perhaps it is in this marginalized place that Ellul, Zerzan and Kaczynski most closely resemble each other. All three were bright students with promising potential within the higher spheres of society. Indeed it was Ellul who moved closest towards political collusion when he became Mayor of Bordeaux for a short time. All three have been dismissed as angry and misanthropic, but, for Zerzan and Ellul, hope seems to be one of the most powerful motivations behind their work. For Ellul hope is one of the only things Christians have to offer anarchist projects. Hope which says “Freedom exists only to the extent that this rejection of power is strong enough…. today, by our refusal, we will not permit the crack to be totally refilled so that we can still breathe free air.”(Anarchism and ")! !

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Christianity, Katallagette, Fall 1980) Zerzan breathes life into contemporary anarchist critiques via a lack of easy answers/ unwillingness to provide a program for those who want easy answers, “Genuine hope withers as we face modernity’s final stage, a totally technicized existence” (p.123 Finding our Way Home, Twilight of the Machines).

Kaczynski’s post arrest writings have made it clear just how much narrower his aims and means were than either Ellul or Zerzan.

Kaczynski’s emphasis on a revolutionary movement dedicated solely to the destruction of technological society has all the shortcomings of revolutionary movements throughout history. (The Message and The Messenger, Kevin Tucker Species Traitor Summer 2005) As anarcho-primitivist writer Kevin Tucker puts it, “Ted’s revolution is minimal. There is one target, one focus: destroy the technological infrastructure. Ted’s conviction and devotion to this point has been a major point of contention between Ted and other anti-civilization anarchists.”p.105 KT, The Message and the Messenger, ST 2005) Kaczynski labels Green anarchism as a “movement (that) may attract too many leftists- people who are less interested in getting rid of modern civilization than they are in the leftist issues of racism, sexism, etc.”(interview AJODA #61 spring/summer2006, vol. 24, no.1 ) Obviously this reflects Kaczynski’s narrow view of what his revolutionary project would be fighting for, Interestingly enough, he goes on to point out the “danger that a Green Anarchist movement may take the same route as Christianity.”(interview, AJODA #61 spring/summer2006, vol. 24, no.1) Kaczynski mentions that Christianity failed as a social revolution but succeeded as a religion, he then offers a warning, “If the Green Anarchist movement takes the same path as Christianity, it too will be a complete failure as a revolutionary movement.”(interview) Revolution is generally viewed in a negative light by anarcho-primitivists. (Kevin Tucker’s, Failure of Revolution 2010) Indeed, Ellul laid out his own critique in Autopsy of Revolution(citation needed) Kaczynski was drastically off base in characterizing the “Green Anarchist movement” as leftist, but his comment that, “The analogies between the Green #(! !

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Anarchist and Christian movements are striking”(interview) may have unwittingly anticipated a conversation that was just beginning to take shape.

Zerzan’s interest in the connection between spirit and the green anarchist milieu led him to this conclusion “Something new is in the air, with roots that are humanity’s very oldest. Quite a few see this something as a spiritual development,….This spiritual tendency intrigues me a lot and may prove to be decisive, in profound and unforeseen ways.”( Any World(that I’m welcome to) Green Anarchy, Summer 2005) One unforeseen result of this spiritual development has been Zerzan’s involvement with Christians exploring the intersections of anarcho-primitivism and Christianity.

Over the past few years he has attended Christian/ anarchist conferences in Memphis, TN and Portland, OR. Some of these Christians have been interviewed on his weekly radio show (Anarchy Radio) and there are a growing number of web sites and publications dedicated to exploring these connections.(inthelandoftheliving.org, jesusradicals.com) Many of the Christians involved in these discussions are heavily influenced by the writings of Jacques Ellul.

Sadly, Ellul’s emphasis on anarchism as the only non-political option for Christians has been ignored by most every Christian theologian, peace and justice advocate and social critic. Those Christians who agree with his anarchistic approach find themselves in search of others willing to face up to the implications. Where are the theologians, biblical scholars, pastors, priests, New Monastic’s and Catholic Workers who are willing to face the difficult questions of origins from an anarchist perspective? John Zerzan’s willingness to engage with Christians in examining the roots of the ever deepening environmental, social and psychological crisis should inspire Christians to delve deeply into anarcho-primitivist/ Green Anarchist publications. Familiarity with these ideas may spark a profoundly liberating awareness of the anti-civilization, anarchist roots of the Christian faith. Ellul’s works are a crucial starting point for Christians as they awaken with ears to hear the prophets cry which is characteristically harsh, as he put it so precisely near the end of #"! !

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Living Faith, “We need spiritual lucidity and a courage both intellectual and psychic. The shock of awareness is painful.”( Living Faith, p.272)

The Way We Used to Be -By John Zerzan How long ago did our humanness begin? Evidence keeps pushing back the dates by which we exhibited various capacities and achievements. It has reached the point, with almost certainly more revelations to come, of presenting us with grounds for a new understanding of humanity in the neighborhood of two million years ago.

This critical overview focuses on Homo erectus, who followed Homo habilis, the earliest human species, and survived for about 1.5 million years. But it must be taken into account from the start that the taxonomic framework itself, looking at life as basically taxa or species, is not only questionable but somewhat confused. D.W. Cameron points out the “explosion” in the recognition of new hominid species and the questions this introduces. Separate species vs. continuity of species is an issue, for example. Xinzhi Wu and Poirier point to “a long recognized general morphological similarity between Chinese H. erectus and subsequent H. sapiens in China,” suggesting that a reasonable classification for the populations of more than the last one million years would be to include them all within our own species, Homo sapiens. “Does Homo erectus exist as a true taxon or should it be sunk into Homo sapiens?” asks Wenke.

Perspectives, by the way, that imply the earlier and earlier emergence of human aptitudes. Taxonomic boundaries, then, are rather subjective constructs influenced by archaeological discoveries. ##! !

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There are still a few who do not see “fully modern” huntergatherers in the picture until about 40,000 years ago, but such a view is being rapidly revised. An Ethiopian site yielded this Science Daily headline: “The Oldest Homo Sapiens: Fossils Push Human Emergence Back to 195,000 Years Ago.” Even “early H. erectus,” Gilbert asserts, is “very similar postcranially to modern humans.”

Colin Tudge tells us, “There is no God-given law that says that Homo sapiens was or is the only bona fide species of human being,” adding that “the very first people who were more or less like ourselves…date from about five hundred thousand years ago.”

But so often they were ignored altogether by researchers and scholars or looked at as strictly lower forms, consonant, for example, with the Aristotelian “Great Chain of Being” ranking all creatures along a continuum, from “beasts” to “higher” mankind, to the angels, etc. Similarly, some view Homo erectus as a creature of great but unrealized potential, failing to see our very early forbears on their own terms, for what they were in themselves.

Nadia Seremetakis cited a once whole sensory state and our separation from that primal and originary experience. Who we are and what we are doing here might be enriched by considering what obtained at the beginning, and for so vastly long a time. In what Giorgio Agamben calls the age of “total management,” we seem no longer recognizably either human or animal, lost in the movement toward a techno-existence.

It is time to grant Homo erectus, using the term for present purposes, the humanness and abilities which are the species’ due–– notably ecological flexibility and premier generalist status in the world.

The ultimate origin of the hominid family is that of the first bipedal apes, roughly 7.5 million years ago, not forgetting the contrast between the quite hierarchical nature of extant great apes and egalitarian hunter-gatherers. Ape-like in many or most respects were the Australopithecines in the original hominid birthplace, East Africa, until about 3 million years ago. This is the very approximate date for the beginning of the first human species, Homo habilis, or #'! !

! “handy man.” And close to 2 million years ago Homo erectus appears, “much more human in appearance, brain size, stature and culture,” judges Donald Merlin, adding that “With this species, a major threshold had been crossed in human evolution.”

Stable social structures and home bases have indicated to many that for Homo erectus, sharing and cooperation––as with contemporary foraging societies––were key parts of an optimum survival strategy. Homo erectus lasted close to 2 million years, all the way into the Neanderthal period about 200,000 years ago, during which time half of earth’s mammal families became extinct. The persistence through time of Homo erectus is possibly the characteristic that stands out the most as we contemplate the potential brevity of Homo sapiens. Niles Eldridge reminds us that “That is, after all, the mark of success.” Erectus was remarkably successful at persevering, which calls to mind the familiar adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In balance with the world, Homo erectus’ extreme durability of over 1.8 million years offers an extreme contrast with the continuously innovating and unstable Homo sapiens species.

To Paul S.C. Tacon it seems likely that “human ancestors have been behaviorally modern much longer than has generally been accepted,” including Homo erectus. There is clear evidence, for example, of very early stone tool use to butcher large mammals.

There is now, by the way, considerable weight in the literature to the effect that early Homo was not only an opportunistic scavenger of carcasses, but also a skilled hunter. Homo erectus, well adapted for life on the African savannah, tall and immensely strong, traveling far, with large brains, rich diets, cooking hearths, pair-bonding bands, simple and efficient technology.

It is possible to see the hallmark of human evolution in terms of a release from proximity, as if estrangement from sensual interface with the natural world, rather than intimacy with it, were a desired goal. As if the loss of community and place were just an inevitable given. But it is not only that “both human social structure and human intellectual capabilities appeared quite early,” as Belfer-Cohen and #&! !

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Goren-Inbar have it. “Primal versions of fidelity and truth, not simply sex and brute strength, had become key forces” in Homo erectus society. The face-to-face bonds of early Paleolithic society provided immeasurably more connection than those of face-in-thecrowd mass society. Their world as experienced by any of its members must have been so much more multidimensional and indepth than our own social existence. Here in itself are credible grounds for Leslie White’s conclusion that “Hunting and gathering was unquestionably the most satisfying social environment man has ever lived in.”

More specifically, various physical and experiential shifts mark the arrival and maturation of Homo erectus. It was the first human species to possess a nearly hairless, non-ape-like skin and the first to have a projecting bony nose. Because erectus was a meat-eater, the species lacked the pot-bellied shape housing the bulky intestines required to digest a plant tissue diet. From the Australopithecines to Home erectus the size of the brain doubled; and while an Australopithecine male was typically about twice the size of the female, with erectus the difference narrowed greatly, to about what it is today. Overall size doubled, and for the first time humans had an extended dependency period in infancy and an adolescent growth spurt. From the fossilized east Kenya remains of so-called “Turkana boy” (1.6 mya) and earlier specimens it is clear that erectus was tall and lean, with arms and legs proportioned like ours. A body geared for endurance walking and running, like the famous Kenyan longdistance athletes of today.

Anatomical shifts suggest increased longevity; increased size alone is an indicator of longer life, by the way. Hammer and Foler report that “longevity estimates are without exception larger” than previously thought, while Swisher et al judge that the “average Homo erectus probably lived six years longer than the average Australopithecine––that is, 50 years as against 44.” H. Helmut finds that a “major extension of life potential occurred with and after Homo erectus” based on “new calculations of Hominid maximum lifespan potentials,” with erectus upper limits of 70 to 75 years. #%! !

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The species was the first to use fire, and lived in huts as well as caves. Group size increased to about 100 on average, well beyond that of non-human primates or Homo habilis. 1.8-million-year-old faunal remains obtained from different areas indicate a wide range of erectus activity, specifically that food was already being transported long distances to be shared at home bases. Complex foraging and ranging behavior happened over greater and more diverse areas, greatly surpassing any earlier hominid species.

In fact, the emergence of Homo erectus coincides with its moving out across the world, which in itself is a difference from any other primates. This dispersal and its challenges constitute another marker of remarkable sapient development. Arrival in Java is verified as of 1.8 mya, in Dimansi in the Caucasus near the Caspian Sea from 1.8 to 1.96 mya, and in China around 1.9 mya. Huang Wanpo et al push this further, concluding that “new evidence suggests that hominids entered Asia before 2 mya.”

There is so very much of the human panorama, of course, that most likely will remain unknown to us. But the capability of our distant ancestors, though discerned through fragmentary, disconnected evidence rather than a seamless narrative, is revealing and provocative.

About 850,000 years ago, Homo erectus was able to manage repeated sea crossings to the Indonesian island of Flores, 20 kilometers at the minimum. Stone tools that date from that period could not otherwise have been there. This finding was almost unbelievable in light of the previous consensus that only Homo sapiens could have practiced such navigation. As Robert Bednarik noted, “Lower Paleolithic seafarers were technologically and cognitively far more advanced than archaeologists had ever thought possible.” Nila Alperson-Afil and her colleagues have found evidence in Israel of the organization of living spaces for different activities. Although this behavior was long thought to have been exclusively the province of modern humans, this encampment is 790,000 years old. Sophisticated wooden implements have been found in Germany, in use about 400,000 years ago. It is very rare #$! !

! that wood is preserved as long, but the hunting spears of Schoningen provide “a completely new insight into the developmental stage and culture of early humans.” Beautifully carved, the long spears were made of specially selected hard cores of larch and have a perfect balance and proportion. These examples barely scratch the surface of what must have been numerous techniques––outside the relatively common surviving stone tools––involving shell, bone, bamboo and other structural plant materials, cordage, skins, wrapping, and other ancient means to desired ends.

Richard Leakey wrote: “When I hold a Homo erectus cranium in my hand and look at it full face, I get a strong feeling of being in the presence of something distinctly human. It is the first point in human history at which a real humanness impresses itself so forcefully.” A being, perhaps, from the beginning of hunter-gatherer consciousness, impressing Leakey as a person. Origins Reconsidered goes on to find in erectus the real start of “the burgeoning of compassion, morality, and conscious awareness.”

An instructive instance is the remains of a woman who lived 1.7 mya, known by the museum registration number assigned to her, 1808. She had suffered from vitaminosis A, a “completely immobilizing” condition caused by ingesting too much carnivore liver or honey; yet she survived for some months after its onset. “The implication stared me in the face,” wrote Walker and Shipman, “someone else took care of her,” or she “wouldn’t have lasted two days in the African bush.” Their conclusion: “This was the appearance of a truly extraordinary social bond.” There are certainly other cases as well, involving toothlessness, spinal cord conditions, etc., that give evidence of mutual aid and support from this time period.

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“Looking at the group structure of Homo erectus,” according to George Frankl, “we can see that it was neither patriarchal nor matriarchal and we will be justified in calling it primal community.”

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy finds that early sharing was spontaneous and automatic, and that both males and females started out “with an innate capacity for empathy for others and for nurture” which provided, for instance, a sense of emotional security in children back in the Pleistocene.

The earliest exodus from the east African birthplace of humanity happened a lot earlier than once thought, and the mastery of fire probably accompanied that exodus, also far earlier than was thought.

Boaz and Ciochon refer to Kenyan evidence of fire use “dated to an astonishingly early 1.7 million years ago.” But it now appears that fire was a crucial component of movement out of Africa, enabling settlement in colder climes and at higher altitudes. Uncooked food required massive, thick teeth; smaller teeth and thinner tooth enamel argue for cooked food, a very early evolutionary trend that continues to this day. Kingdon finds that “firing foods, or cooking, was a ‘tool’ that neutralized bacteria and toxins, released nutrients, and allowed a vast expansion in the food base by making indigestible material edible.” He also argues that fire was a likely success factor in excursions within and outside Africa, which speaks to “the possibility that it began to be used before 2 mya.” In addition to warmth and the means to thaw, cook and smoke food, fire also deterred predators and almost certainly promoted social life as a site of food sharing and familial-type relationships, including care of the young.

These feats show a depth of intelligence “noticeably higher than those usually ascribed” to those who lived so long ago. The emerging record indicates that Homo erectus exhibited analogical reasoning, though Kate Robson Brown argues that minds in the Lower Paleolithic possessed a “cognitive capacity for which no current analogue exists.”

We know that brain size surged as Homo habilis gave way to erectus around 2 mya. Some fairly recent theorizing posits cooked #A! !

! food as the chief factor in the increase. But in any case the brain’s shape may be as important as its size. Cerebral asymmetry also dates from this general period, as preferential handedness shows up.

“The largest Homo erectus brains were about 1250 ml…and modern brains average about 1200–1500 ml. in volume,” thus matching our own in cranial volume. Neanderthal brain size, 150,000 years ago, by the way, was greater than ours on average; that is, there has been an overall decline in brain volume during the past 150,000 years. There are also large variations at any given period; e.g. the noted author and playwright Ivan Turgenev’s brain size was 2012 ml., while the perhaps equally gifted novelist and dramatist Anatole France’s was only 1040 ml. in size.

In the evolution of intelligence, apparently not all parts of the brain evolved equally, nor are all parts equally important. As the erectus brain grew apace, there was little change in technics; whereas today, as brain size has actually been shrinking, technological change is immense and accelerating. It is often said that we only use about 10 percent of our brains; perhaps we use ever less overall, as our estrangement from the world and each other deepens.

Intelligence means the ability to handle knowledge as a whole; this is what humans excelled at in prehistory. It is we who are cognitively undeveloped.

And what can be grasped by examining stone tools, those most enduring of artifacts? Stones can indeed speak and reveal much, directly and indirectly, about those who fashioned them into solutions on this earth.

Of course, non-human animals also use tools. Crows, for example, use elevation as a tool, dropping nuts from suitable heights to crack them open; chimpanzees use sticks to force termites out of a log, etc.

But they don’t make tools; according to Cameron and Groves, “there is no convincing evidence to date that species other than Homo were involved in the manufacture of stone tools.

The discovery of stone tool use from 3.4 million years ago is a huge finding, #)! !

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A very early lithic technology mode is called Oldowan, from the Olduvai Gorge area of east Africa. This mode is associated with Homo habilis, the earliest human species. Oldowan toolmakers used some tools to produce others, which no non-human primate has done. Archaeologists report ever-earlier dates for evidence of human capacities in this realm. Semaw et al found that “The sophisticated control and raw material selection…strongly suggests that stone tool use may have begun prior to 2.6 mya but not earlier than 2.9 mya.”

Barham and Mitchell point to research pushing the time of earliest tool manufacture even a bit further back. They also conclude that such human practice at 2.6 mya shows “an already well-develop-ed understanding of the mechanics of flaking” or knapping. As Ignacio de la Torre noted, “The early tool makers are [now] seen as having recognized the principles of conchoidal fracture and having had the knowledge and technical skills required….” Concerning this same time frame, Sheila Mishra concluded, “The surprising thing about the Oldowan stone tool industry is its sophistication.” deHeinzelin et al referred to the “surprisingly advanced character of…earliest Oldowan technology.” On evidence, Homo habilis was an intelligent, experienced, and technically accomplished tool maker.

Oldowan tools give way to the Acheulean styles as Home erectus appears, with cranial development very much like ours. What immediately comes to mind, with the new double-edge or biface Acheulean style is the iconic hand axe: a generally teardrop-shaped tool with congruent symmetry in three dimensions. Among many other devices including picks and cleavers, the hand axe stands out for what developed into its stunning craftsmanship and beauty, and a blade that often surpasses the sharpness of surgical steel. The very sight of such a creation erases any doubt as to its maker’s aptitude.

Associated Acheulean practices strengthen this impression. Two million years ago, ancient humans in what is now Kanjeera, Kenya carried selected stone raw materials more than 13 kilometers to the site where they were worked. A bit later, in the early Acheulean, this distance increased to 20 kilometers. But it is also clear that while they ranged over greater distances in their decision-making, activities '(! !

! “occurred in close spatial proximity and as responses to immediate needs.” This speaks to a direct, context-specific immediacy, perhaps the original example of James Woodburn’s immediate return/delayed return contrast, in which the former social orientation is nonestranged, compared to the latter.

Although there is so much less surviving evidence, a great range of other non-stone life-world materials existed. Microscopic fibers detected on hand axes testify to likely woodworking. Bone tools have come down to us, and both early human species could well have made implements from shell, bamboo, etc., and leather bags, carrying skins, snares, and so many other perishable things.

The Acheulean style or level remained the norm for well over a million and a half years, all the way down to the next––and last–– Paleolithic tradition, called Levallois, corresponding roughly to the appearance of Neanderthal humans about 250,000 years ago. The unchanging Acheulean has baffled the fields of archaeology and anthropology, especially because it’s clear that limited intellectual capacity is not the explanation for this tremendously long period of stasis. A basic approach, demanding but elegant, neither died out or was changed during thousands of generations. Why cast this as a conundrum, why frame it in terms of our own cultural mania for ceaseless innovation? Evidently there simply was no felt need in all that time to craft anything more complex. If Homo erectus humans were disinclined toward complex society, why would they express themselves through complex technics, inasmuch as the two are inseparable? Their whole mode of being remained non-specialized, skilled as a whole. They crafted their tools and they crafted their face-to-face band society, the one obviously reflecting the other. As Loren Eiseley summed it up, they were “using the sum total of [their] environment almost as a single tool,”––and in enduring balance with that environment.

The ability to reason preceded symbolic culture by millions of years. Society was evidently not dependent on symbolic systems of thought, for as Paul Jordan observes, “symbolism of every sort is conspicuously lacking in the archaeological record until the arrival of '"! !

! the modern form of humanity.” It is unclear when language originated, but every other such aspect (e.g. cave art) is very recent.

A symbol is that which stands for something else, represents something else; it re-presents reality. Nonetheless, the term is used very loosely, which tends to obscure the significance of life outside the symbolic dimension. Henry de Lumley, for example, in discussing prehistory, refers to symbolic thought as an essential facet of human cognition, as a necessity for the emergence of consciousness, as synonymous with meaning or understanding. Each of these assertions is baseless.

Upper Paleolithic beads are a relatively recent case in point regarding the misuse of the term symbolic. In fine ahistoric fashion, d’Enrico assures us that “beads have many different functions in human society, all eminently symbolic,” referring specifically to some that are 75,000 years old. Robert Bednarik makes a similarly sweeping assessment of prehistoric beads: “Their symbolic significance appears generically self-evident.” Klein and Edgar have in mind beads found in Europe ca 30,000 years ago; they “required extraordinary time and effort, which underscores the likelihood that they had symbolic meaning. But there are countless activities done for their own sake, for satisfactions directly derived, and that do not represent something else. The fact of beads in no way necessarily establishes a symbolic component.

The use of ochre by Homo neanderthalensis in the Upper Paleolithic is an even more commonly cited practice that purportedly indicates a symbolic dimension. Here we are approaching the actual arrival of symbolic culture, relatively recently, but the much-touted presence of ochre, especially in burial practices, is less than wholly persuasive. As evidence of symbolic or ritualistic ideas, its red color suggests blood or death, and thus has been found on human remains.

But it is also known that ochre has anti-odor qualities, so its use may simply indicate “an hygienic disposal of corpses so as not to attract scavenging carnivores.” Burial itself, by the way, connotes respect for the dead and does not automatically include a symbolic connection. Evidence of ochre in settings other than graves has even '#! !

! less to do with symbolism or representation. Its anti-hemorrhage, antiseptic qualities are known to indigenous people today and probably to our forebears, along with its hide-curing properties and as a component in tool-hafting adhesives.

Thomas Wynn could not detect the symbolic in the crafting of hand axes, with their grace and beauty. They “did not require grammar-like rules and did not require symbolic instruction.”

Observation and practice, not symbols, account for proficiency.

Darwin argued both in The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions that it was quite possible to form concepts without words. “The earliest unequivocal evidence for the use of symbols occurs very late,” according to Shipman and Walker.

“The word prohibits the senses…. The speaking tongue kills the tasting tongue,” warns Michel Serres. But symbols began to structure social life. The more complex the representational systems became, the more distancing from reality was involved, and the more complex and stratified society slowly became.

Ultimately we arrived at our present state of radical insufficiency, so removed from the essentials of existence. The feeling of being part of everything, including the cycle of birth and death, has been overcome by a preoccupation with control or mastery over everything.

Death is denied by the lonely modern individual engaged in a life without connection, without meaning. The loss of a sense of a full life makes life unbearable and death shameful, something to be hidden. Adorno referred to “the expropriation even of his dying, [which] destroys even the appearance of life’s meaning as a coherent whole, that seals the loss of humane, autonomous subjectivity.”

Philippe Ariès wrote of the invisibility of modern death, as indicative of the loss of communal solidarity and the increasing control of experts over social and personal life. Once managed openly as a part of vivid, direct life, death becomes invisible and silenced. As we live less completely, death becomes more of a terror.

In his old age, contemplating an aged crow, Loren Eiseley gave us a healthy counter-perspective: “Neither of us had much further to go, ''! !

! and the harsh simplicity of it was somehow appropriate and gratifying.”

For thousands of centuries human life was virtually unchanged, in the vast time before overpopulation, drudge work, wars, the objectification of women, political authority. But of course there are those who lament this extended “failure” to innovate and progress.

George Dimock looks at The Odyssey to decry the absence of forward movement. He focuses on the self-satisfied, nondomesticated Cyclops, who “put hand to no planting or plowing.”

Dimock argues that this paradisical state is actually a negative condition, in that it “deprived them of the stimulus to develop human institutions.” Pain is needed for self-development, according to Dimock. Technology in particular “assists the birth of the individual…by separating him from the natural world.”

Domestication/civilization in a nutshell, in its repressive essence.

We see the falsity of such a formulation much more clearly now, as the toll of “development” mounts in every sphere of life. Grahame Clark, in fact, reversed the dominant notion many decades ago, noting, “I venture to think that Paleolithic man has more meaning than the Greeks.” That timeless, history-less past and what followed might be seen in this light: “History exists only in a persisting society which needs history to persist.”

With very early Homo we may be encountering a human animal “without any modern parallels.” However that may be––and we will never know with full clarity––that make-up, that orientation to our mother earth exerts a definite pull. Darwin writes of the Fuegian Jemmy Burton, who spent many years in England only to rapidly return to native ways upon a return voyage to South America. What dismayed Darwin should encourage us. The tie was not broken and the lure of non-regimentation remained, as it was also felt by European colonists who “went native,” attracted by indigenous lifeways.

Glenn C. Conroy opens his Reconstructing Human Origins with this: “To all creatures wild and free I dedicate this book. The success of human evolution has not been kind to you.” '&! !

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We are among those creatures. We have forgotten how we once lived, how we were meant to live. With the connection to the living world all but gone in this techno-world. Our species wars against itself; what touches our hearts now is sadness and disquiet. And yet the abundance that was persists, a beacon to guide us back toward a vivid, healed, being-present state.

COMMENTS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHO-PRIMITIVISM With James W. Perkinson What elements of an anarcho-primitivist critique do you see as most resonant with Christianity? Are there any elements of the critique that you see as being in conflict with a radical Christian theology?

It depends what we mean by “Christianity.” AP is resonant with particular elements of the tradition from which that religion arises. I see Christianity as rooted in what Quaker Sanctuary Movement leader/goatwalker Jim Corbett used to call “the Jubilee Judaism of Jesus.” This amounted to a reading of Jewish Torah (Hebrew scriptures) as rooted especially in the Exodus experience of escaped slaves, whose wilderness wanderings for forty years in the outback of Sinai were apparently intended to cull and cure the renegade band of its “slave formation” building storage cities for grain, under Pharaoh's “Food as Weapon” policy (Gen 41:36-57; 47:13-26; Exod 1:8-14). Indeed, food sovereignty became central to the re-invented identity of the “people” as a new tribal federation, naming YHWH as primal confession and marking out “holy space” with a tent and an altar that ultimately had nothing on it. This is a new “peoplehood” on feral errand in the desert. They eat manna—literally, “What the F is this?” (well, not literally, but paraphrased for the street). They invoke an Ultimate Reality that refuses to be named (YHWH is merely the Hebrew verb “to be,” which in the 1st person address to Moses at the bush probably meant something like, “I will not submit '%! !

! to your desire for a category, I will be who I will be for you— encountered only out in the future after you have left where you are and then only in hindsight—and I will not be named, domesticated, manipulated, or made an instrument of your intention!”). And they give political fealty to a vacant space between the two cherubim in the Holy of Holies, a hallowed image-shrine that literally houses nothing! So we have here an economy of “what is it?”, a politics of the empty throne, and a cultural symbology that refuses any representation, as the basis of becoming “the people of God.” This seems to indicate a thorough-going re-schooling for an entire generation—by way of re-learning a foraging lifestyle—as central to developing a different vision of ecological “stewardship,” nonexploitative economics, just politics, and truthful communication.

But for a Moses who had himself already been re-schooled for the previous forty years in this wilderness ecology—apprenticed to the land by way of his nomadic herds, learning sand-survival by way of animals and plants already adapted to desert ways—the grave concern was Canaan. What would happen once the re-shaped people settled into a highlands agricultural environment, among a people already conformed to the metropolitan lifestyle imposed on that geography by imperial Egypt or Mesopotamia? The entire disciplinary repertoire of Sabbath-Jubilee was likely a Mosaic construction designed to keep the Sinai memory alive. A round of ritualized practice re-invoked the wildlands experience of Sinai as root-experience of a “way-to-be,” alternative to empire. Every seven days, land, labor and domesticated animals were to be rested. Seven weeks after the annual spring celebration of the “Passover escape,” the Sinai mountain theophany was to be re-called at Pentecost, putting storm and rock back at the heart of spirituality and identity.

The seventh month of every year was to be devoted to Sukkoth (the “Feast of Booths”)—for seven days, living out under the stars in a loosely constructed ramada, skin vulnerable to heat and cold, rain, wind, dust, sun, and pristine air—a school-house of the cells in the primal lifeway capable of hallowing, rather than destroying, the land.

Every seventh year, the entire year was set aside for a return to '$! !

! foraging, with servant and household head, creditor and debtor, welloff and poor, “chattel” animal and pastoral herd all living “feral,” gleaning from the fallow fields like hunter-gatherer ancestors and wild fauna of old. And of course, every “jubilee year”—every seven-times-seven years—the return to “living off the land” proclaimed by blowing the ram's horn actually amounted to a threeyear-long re-initiation into this foraging land ethic (given the proscription on planting mandated by the conjunction of Sabbath and Jubilee years in succession). Thus this “school-house of the sevens” amounted to a comprehensive and continuous re-institution of wildlands memory as core to faithful identity in a situation of imperial domination and compromise.

Whether or not Israel lived ever lived all of this (the evidence is that the Sabbath- and Jubilee-year requirements were sidestepped continuously and wantonly), the vision remained normative and was regularly taken up by prophetic “wild men” and thrown down as an explanation for oppression and a challenge for reformation. And such is the role of Jesus, as outlined in the gospels. The degree to which traces of Sabbath-Jubilee shimmer through the gospel reports on this Palestinian prophet has been effectively tracked by activist exegete Ched Myers, among others. Everywhere that the word “forgivenness” appears in the English text, there lies a Greek term underneath emphasizing the “release” characteristic of the SabbathJubilee continuum. Combined with recognition that English words such as “left” likewise translate that same Greek word (as in “the disciples left their nets”—they literally “jubilee-ed” their tools of production), as well as all the explicit mentions of Sabbath occurrences—the evidence leaves a sharp impression.

Sabbath-Jubilee is central to messianic practice. And not as a seldom obtained level of saintly “aspiration” but as the very prerequisite of discipleship following! It quickly becomes a commitment lived out in the rural social movement galvanized by the upstart Galilean and radically embodied, even in alienated form, when that movement goes urban after his death! Luke has it right in his subtly but 'B! !

! “loudly” underscored rendition of Jesus' prototypical sermon (Lk 4:16-30) and of his essential teaching (the formulaic “followers' prayer” of Lk 11:1-4 distilling his message down to a clear focus on Jubilee practices of “daily bread” economics and “debt-release” relationships). In the account by the Gentile evangelist in Lk 4, the “inaugural” homily itself breaks off with a sharply punctuated insistence by the Capernaum preacher that his entire message can be summed up in Isaiah's “acceptable year of the lord”—offering good news to the poor, release to the captive, recovery of sight and breaking of yokes for the blind and the bound! (Is. 61:1-2a). The messianic movement that this rogue hill-dweller has convened is a living, breathing initiation of Jubilee liberation writ large, and as such, in cultural context, an emblematic re-inauguration of Sinai wilderness values as now an everyday requirement of living in common (and re-creating the world as a commons)—not merely every seven days, months or years, but every seven seconds, if need be (Mt 18:21-22).

While it is patent that the “religion” that emerges from this movement quickly enough goes imperial and oppressive, the “dangerous memory” conserved in its texts and practices nonetheless hides a re-combinent leaven. This pre-Christian Jewish movement of “messianic jubilation” harbors a deep code. Its pastoral-nomad precursors (Abel, Abraham, Moses) all point toward a landrelationship that is anti-urban and post-imperial. Whether enfleshed in the extant possibilities of feral-loving herder life or the more compromised struggles of peasant subsistence farming, the focus of the practice is Sabbath-Jubilee. Which is to say, the entire tradition hangs by the thread of the manna-memory—the maroonage of slaves in Sinai, the going “cimarron” of livestock in Job (Job 39:5-12), the feral-footing of the fathers and mothers in Genesis. As such, I think there is every reason to hope “Christianity” could be re-invigorated in the direction of some of its earliest practices and deepest intuitions by intimate contact with anarcho-primitivist sentiment and politics.

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Certainly, the influence of the latter has been such for me personally.

My entire way of comprehending the Christian tradition has been radicalized (literally pushed down into its “roots”) under tutelage to AP writing (especially with its emphasis on “immediate return hunter-gatherer lifestyle” as the privileged datum of history for rethinking our role on the planet). I now read the Christian tradition as encoding ancient reportage on embattled oppressed folk attempting to exit empire and work their way back towards something more “human” (and more wild). What such a reading might mean for practical lifestyle today however remains a continuing challenge. I had already years ago been re-schooled in a more communitarian and anarchistic ethic of social organization (in fifteen-plus years of living in a “simple lifestyle” Christian community, sharing income and assets—and housing, and food, and jokes and pain and struggles, etc.—on a poverty level budget). More recent “steps” I have taken— focused on recovery of a less enslaving relationship to land and flora and fauna—barely even qualify as “baby” so far. Certainly an opening out of my practice of spirituality towards recovery of at least a “talking” relationship with plants and some animals is one small step. Within the inner city Detroit environs I call “home,” it has meant aligning myself with all manner of activists utterly committed to re-inventing and re-spiriting the city from the ground, up—outside dependence on big corporations or big government, as a first small step away from industrial-scale living and towards something local and re-generative (that ultimately “undoes” the city itself). This involves everything from urban foraging to community gardening, “garbage art” creation to time-banking.

But the real issue for all of us I think is finally wrapped up in reentering relations of apprenticeship to plants and animals and the land itself—whether in serious attempts to recover features of hunger-gatherer life, re-schooling in a herding lifestyle (as in Corbett's goatwalking and cattle-herding collectives in the Sonoran desert), or perma-culture farming wherever it can be practiced. And at the heart of such efforts, for me, lies the great mystery and sheer terror of eating. I take it as axiomatic that retrieving a respectful ')! !

! sense of mutual commensality—living awake and alive to the profound fact that the entire biosphere is structured in “eating and being eaten”—must become the central concern for all of our economic practices and spiritual identities, if there is to be a future. I eat others in order to live. My body will finally feed others as its deepest offering of respect (and vitality) back to the living ecosystem from which I have taken my food. Why the universe is set up that way, I do not know. But it is. And in a sense, that is the great “Is.” As Moses saw, we will be “burned” (metabolized), but not burned up. We will “live” in and through everything that consumes us.

How to reconstruct one's lifestyle and spirituality in light of that reality is, for me, the issue in a nutshell. On that journey into recovered reciprocity, I am less than even a neophyte. But I do glimpse the way.

COMMENTS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHO-PRIMITIVISM with Lilly Mendoza S. Lily Mendoza (Ph.D. in Communication, Arizona State University) is an Associate Professor in Culture and Communication at the Oakland University just outside Detroit. She is an at-large colleague of indigenization activists/scholars in the Philippines, a former board member of the Institute for the Studies in Asian Church and Culture, and the author of Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities (Routledge, 2002; Philippine edition, 2005). Her areas of teaching and research include critical issues in intercultural communication, especially focusing on anarcho-primitivist critiques of modernity, theories of identity and subjectivity, postcolonial theory, and indigenization studies. More recent interests include indigenous Filipino babaylan (shamanic) traditions and the plight and survival-struggles of the indigenous Aeta in her Luzon region of Pampango.

I was born and raised in the Philippines. My family was different in that we were Methodist Protestants in a country that was predominantly Roman Catholic (American Protestantism never really succeeded in taking root in the culture). My father’s mother &(! !

! was one of the early converts to Protestantism following the flood of American missionaries that came to the Philippines in the late 1800s.

These Protestant missionary efforts, along with the army of American Peace Corps Volunteers, began as part of the U.S.’s pacification campaign and “civilizing mission” in the Philippines following its violent takeover of the newly independent republic at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In college, I was recruited to join Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in the university where I studied and became a “born again” Christian. My conversion was radical, re-orienting all of life to the single focus of “doing God’s will.” In many ways, it gave direction to my scattered and conflictual energies growing up colonized in that it ushered me into the certainty and comfort of absolute truths and the unwavering world of universal understandings: universal values, universal belief, universal purpose, etc. Although Inter-Varsity itself attempted to incarnate the gospel (at least) within our putative national native culture (“Filipino”), I came to understand that I was a Filipino only by sheer geographic accident; instead I took great pride in being “non-culture-bound,” an ally to the transcendent truth of God as revealed in Christ that, for all intents and purposes, was unchanging and true for all times, peoples, and places. Within this universalistic frame, the question of the U.S.’s violent invasion and takeover of my country—the massacre of an estimated half a million to a million Filipinos, the total cultural deracination that attended the U.S.’s doctrine of “Benevolent Assimilation,” the wholesale destruction of the nation’s social institutions along with the rapacious exploitation of its economy and natural resources—was, at best, if at all, acknowledged as unfortunate, but nonetheless expedient in bringing God’s sovereign plan in the world for the Philippines. To this day, the Philippines is touted as “the only Christian nation in Asia.” During the 1960s and 1970s, evangelical rhetoric often mirrored that of the Cold War. Operating on the doctrine of the “domino theory,” both missionary and Cold War Rhetoric feared the impending danger that the &"! !

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Philippines would fall into communist hands, which justified the need to contain and evangelize the nation.

From that point on, for much of my adult life, Christianity became my life’s one great adventure. I got involved in evangelism and Christian discipleship, conducted on-going bible studies among the intelligentsia in the academy, sought biblical integration of the academic disciplines, and successfully nurtured many colleagues in the academy in Christian discipleship. Yet, underneath the passionate advocacy, there remained a knot of insecurity and a profound disease in my gut that no amount of teaching of God’s unconditional love could seem to resolve. As I wrote elsewhere: I needed to make sense of things in my crazy world growing up— the jarring disconnect between my cognitive world as shaped by decades of tutelage in Western philosophy and Protestant liberalism and that other wordless world at the fringes of my consciousness intuited only by a kind of bodily knowing, a differing psychic desire, and the puzzling refusal of my tongue to entirely acquiesce to colonial English despite its imposition in Philippine schools as the official medium of instruction.

It was in a graduate course in the humanities that I first experienced, this time, a different kind of spiritual awakening. The course was titled, “The Image of the Filipino in the Arts” and it quickly became a virtual feast for the eyes, ears, and the body as our ethnomusicology professor brought into the classroom samples of the artistic productions (dances, music, weaving, basketry, sculpture, etc.) of our remaining indigenous communities that still managed to retain their cultures despite centuries of colonization and what these signified in terms not only of aesthetic sensibility but of a different mode of being, including a different sense of the body and its relationship to the land and to the community. I was stunned!

Nothing prepared me for the power of that encounter with wild untamed beauty: complex geometric weaving designs that mathematicians noted could not have been willfully conceived by the rational conscious mind, mellifluous melodies able to call up grief out of all its hidden places, polyphonic sounds and rhythms coming &#! !

! from native instruments that not only sounded but looked utterly beautiful, intricate architectural structures that used not a single nail to bind parts together, dances as diverse as their ecologies of origination, etc. As I wrote elsewhere: Suddenly, something very powerful ignited in the depths of my being. For the first time, I gained a recognition of a self separate from the self that was always wanting to be other than itself. . . like a self recognizing itself for the first time, or like looking into a mirror and finding not a degraded creature staring back but someone human [and beautiful!]. I was like a fool, bawling my heart out as I walked out of every class session, not knowing what it was that hit me from all the innocent aesthetic descriptions of the indigenous communities’ art forms and what they expressed in terms of a different way of being. Now I know that that different way of being was the way of being I had always instinctively shared but had repressed; hence, the intense internal contradiction. For the first time, here was an entire people I felt I could belong to and identify with, a legitimate human community not necessarily degraded because different (different from the invisible White colonial norm).

Intercultural communication pioneer E. T. Hall (1976), writing on the intricacies of synchronous body rhythms of both human and nonhuman groups as in and of themselves unique and complex systems of communication, gave me a language for understanding what is perhaps the most insidious effect of colonial domination: the throwing of a people out of synch with themselves so that they no longer know how to be. Early Filipino scholars speak of it in terms of a split psyche—the interior struggle of the Filipino caught between the anarchic freedoms of animist enchantment and the endless calculations of sin and redemption; between the call of the duendes and other spirit beings in the natural world and the admonition (at least for the educated) to rest one’s faith in science and empirical proof; and between the free energy exchange of unbounded selves (in the indigenous notion of kapwa as “shared being”) and the containment of the abstract individual in the Euro&'! !

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Western Enlightenment discourse on the self (cf. Norbert Elias’ [1994/2000] notion of homo clausus or the autonomous individual).

I was to learn that such dimensions of splitting were only a few in an endless litany of contrasts between indigenous Filipino subjectivity, on the one hand, and that of the modern West, on the other.

Searching for a way to make sense of the two clashing worlds so I didn’t end up schizophrenic entailed a torturous journey. Although the encounter of cultures (or spiritual worlds) need not be inherently problematic where difference is negotiated in a relation of mutual exploration and curiosity, in a dominating context where takeover and control of the other is part of the ongoing dynamic, the encounter invariably devolves into conflictual relations and becomes psychically wrenching especially for the dominated. Thus, given my Protestant upbringing, my journey began with a rationalistic moralism that effectively individualized the colonial malaise, reduced it to an inherent weakness of character, and encouraged a profound internalization of blame (as well as shame). The result was an inability to function unself-consciously, always feeling like one was constantly under surveillance. The self-preoccupation that followed became a mode of survival in a regime that perpetually called into question one’s whole existence. If the default condition, historically, of human beings is to look at the world through an ethno-culturally rooted vision, trained and coded in intimate, intricate and adaptive relationship with their environment, that of the colonized is effectively a training in reverse—into a way of seeing “from without,” by way of the surveilling gaze of a hostile Other rooted elsewhere in a different ethic of relations.

My response to the initial encounter with our indigenous cultures that still (mercifully) retain some of their wildness was not only joy but also profound grief—grief at the full-scale destruction of such vibrancy and aliveness augured by civilization’s unrelenting march into every sphere and every corner of the earth’s finite surface determined to bring to ruin any that would dare stand in its way.

Despite the fact that ninety-nine per cent of our species’ history has &&! !

! been lived differently--in diverse, ecologically adaptive lifestyles based on a mode of existence that did not presume scarcity or “economics” as the organizing principle of human life--and that up until the 15th century, a quarter of the globe still lived in that ecologically adaptive mode before the project of colonial/imperial/corporate genocide began systematically extinguishing such, today we neither know nor care to know about such alternative lifestyles. This is despite the fact that such lifestyles’ record of sustainability, by all counts, is arguably vastly more humane, less given to violence and rapacious greed and far more egalitarian than that of “civilization.” Modern ignorance (and arrogance) treats any suggestion that something worthwhile might be learned from that protracted, unrecorded bulk of our species’ history as not only preposterous but downright scandalous, so much so that any attempt to open up serious conversation about it becomes next to impossible. Indeed one wonders if the representation of that whole way of life (based on hunting and foraging, communal sharing, immediate return, and a land-based subsistence economy) only in debased, primitivist narratives or as mere “pre-history” (i.e., only a prelude to history which is the real deal) in majority of the academic, as well as in popular, discourse is not motivated precisely by a strangely desperate need to preclude its consideration as a legitimate vision of human life and perhaps even potentially desirable.

What has this meant for my own research trajectory? It has meant in the last two to three years educating myself in a whole new terrain foreign to my training as a scholar, to wit: a) Understanding the context of modernity as only one context among many from which to view human life on the planet, its meaning and significance. Truncating our analysis to encompass only its logic is to be subject to the constricting limits of a monovision. It is to have no other ground from which to imaginatively construct a different order of life in the world—one that is life-giving and that lends to the flourishing of all, not just a few, and not just of us, humans, but of all the other beings in nature. &%! !

! b) It means understanding modernity as a “regime of truth” and as a discursive formation, arriving on the scene only on the 11th hour or, as some contend, only seconds before midnight if the entire history of the species were to be compressed into a 24-hour time period, and during which brief career, had already wreaked neverbefore seen havoc on the planet. c) It means mapping its ideological and historical formations in all their varied and complex morphology, in particular, its symbolic inventions: reified time, language, writing, representation, etc. and the ramifications of these for the production of social hierarchies and new forms of domination. d) It means tracking its various mechanisms and forms of exclusion (e.g., abjected forms of rationality, alternative ways of being human, etc.). e) It ultimately means relativizing its logic by recuperating the suppressed histories of non-modern humans, their heterogeneous ways of being and their modes of communication with the ultimate goal of being able to ask deep questions about what such excavated histories have to teach us. f) And most probably, it means paying the price of momentarily being unable to speak or to produce work for publication as usual because the re-education takes energy and time.

It entails immersing oneself in a whole new idiom, the learning of an entirely different language, especially the language of those who have been silenced by us modern humans in the genocidal project of human takeover of the planet.

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Overcoming Alienation: A Beginners Story -by T. Brandon Lane Rivers We walked along a jaded river's bed; jumped from stone to wobbling stone.

All along, I wondered what you'd say if you could speak to me, just now.

There's a distance further than miles, calling us broken bodies back again.

There's a color in your eyes, lonely, filled with all our ever-gentle cries.

My thoughts splashed through rocks and over falls. A old idea, all along, flowing in our grassy banks, speaking to our shallow minds of deeper rivers.

Several years ago I began associating with and working for an organization in the North of Howard Neighborhood of Chicago.

Since then, I’ve been able to go along on an annual weeklong camping trip in the Appalachian Mountains. Ten to twenty “kids” and five to ten “adults” pile into one or two large vans and drive for over twelve hours to get to the mountains in eastern Tennessee, where a friend of ours has a chunk of undeveloped land. I scratched the above poem into my notebook while on that first trip, as a reminder; I now give it to you.

Alienation: Alienation has been seeping into the totality of our existence since the dawn of civilized life. It’s the lonely nights, checking facebook and email repeatedly to see if someone wants to talk. It’s the fear of people who look different, our fortified houses and locked doors to keep us safe. It’s our desire for better clothes or better jobs, or our &B! !

! desire to be the in the more radical community, with the most patches on our clothes, that we might convince people that we are worthwhile, worthy of their respect and attention. It’s our clinging to popular, influential people. It’s the book and internet articles we write, that others might know of our good deeds. And it’s the realization that all of these things are better than the only alternatives we can think of. Alienation is the lived experience of hell.

Karl Marx used a good deal of his philosophical energy trying to find ways to overcome alienation. Marx saw the root of alienation as separation in labor, which I at least think falls far short of encompassing why we are alienated; still, that he recognized the problem of alienation is telling. In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx states that the purpose of communism should be “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.” Marx claims that a direct consequence of the alienation of people from the products of their labor, from their life activity and from their species-life is that they are alienated from each other, that each person “is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life”.

The Judeo-Christian tradition often describes the story of “the fall” as a fall from ingratiation and unity with God and creation, to separation from God, and therefore alienation from creation and each other. Christine Smith, in her essay Sin and Evil in Feminist Thought, writes: “Living creative/liberating lives as individuals does not eliminate, of course, the problem of alienation. From a traditional Christian perspective, this is the problem of original sin-the vast, global character of structures of domination and subjugation that permeate the foundations of our life together.”

In the anarcho-primitivist milieu, rewilding is a practice based on combating the alienation present in our lives and world ever since &A! !

! “the fall” toward domestication. Though they may often try to mimic the acts of Paleolithic peoples in rewilding, anything that combats our alienation and our domestication, or encourages our interconnectedness and our authentic, unmediated love for one another can be thought of as rewilding. At various gatherings, this has included many practices beyond the Paleolithic era, including practicing yoga and natural medicine to become more in touch with our bodies; playing games to become more in touch with each other; and times of personal solitude, focusing on quieting our narrated minds, to practice experiencing.

Overcoming: For most of the kids on our Tennessee camping trips, unless they’ve been on this same trip in previous years, they’ve never left Chicago.

I have had the privilege of living in the mountains of north east China, and I’ve been able to see the Rockies and Sierra Nevada’s on this continent; yet even for me, the contrast of the incredibly flat, drained swamp that is Chicago and the mountains of eastern Tennessee can leave me speechless.

The land we were on was situated in a holler between two mountains, with a stream running down the middle from a pond that was about a mile up the mountain from where we camped. One tributary of the stream was a small spring which was high enough up the mountain that we could drink straight from it with no worry of industrial agriculture waste in the water. The area was all forested with large Cedars, Beech, Dog Woods, Ash and Birch. In addition to the land we stayed on, just a few miles away there was a local favorite swimming hole, situated high on a mountain, at the bottom of two fifty plus feet tall waterfalls.

I should explain that this trip we take is in no way presented as “rewilding”. I am the only person here who’s been exposed to Anarcho-Primitivist thought (though others may be sympathetic to &)! !

! some of the ideas). What we do on the trip, however, is directly combating alienation.

I had only been associating with Good News Partners for a few months when my first trip came up, so there were many kids whom I had never met. I have a coworker/boss, we’ll call him Miguel, who, as he puts it, “snuck in” to the states when he was 16. Since then, through marriage, and really I’m not sure how, he’s now related in one form or another to every Latino person in the neighborhood. So of the Latino people on this trip, though they weren’t all related to each other, they all introduced themselves by how they were related to Miguel; this was about half of the kids who came on the trip. The other half were, to varying degrees, all of mixed racial heritage; though most of them would be defined by US culture (and by themselves) as Black.

The neighborhood we live in is surprisingly racially diverse for a northern city like Chicago. Historically, our neighborhood has had a mostly Black population, with a large Latino presence directly south of us (on Clark, for those of you who know Chicago). Since the seventies and eighties, other immigrant groups have begun settling here, including Jamaicans and Belizeans. In the nineties and the first few years of this decade, the neighborhood was contested ground in a gang war between the Latin Kings, and the GDs (who consisted of two factions, the Belizean GDs and the African-American GDs).

The war was eventually won, if you can consider it a victory, by the GDs, who drove out almost all of the Latin Kings affiliates.

However, once there was no war to fight, many of the GDs also left.

Since then, our proximity to Lake Michigan has made the neighborhood a target of white Condo developments (now occupying most of the actual lake front), which brought along with it an increase of white supremacist violence in the form of police brutality, known formally in Chicago as the “Howard Street Initiative”.

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I say all of that to explain that people growing up in this neighborhood have come out battered and bruised from racial conflicts, and to make clear why my experience was so meaningful and significant on our camping trip. It’s certainly not the case that, because they were kids, they just didn’t notice race. The most popular theme for scary stories to tell each other around the campfire was that, since we were in the south, the KKK was coming to get us.

The kids formed into two groups pretty quickly: the Latinos and the Blacks or others. We had two very large tents set up, and that’s how they divided into the tents without any thought about it. Still, I was amazed at how well they worked and played together. The way the older kids would look out for the younger of either group, and show them what they had learned on previous trips: identifying eastern rattlers, or poison ivy; how to use jewel weed after walking through a patch of nettles; why we saved cedar only for starting fires, and used hard woods once it was going; how to cook over a fire once you had built it up, and even how to play poker using marshmallows instead.

Though, it wasn’t just that they were helping and teaching each other. What really struck me was that they, despite all of the racial baggage, interacted like a family. And it wasn’t just toward each other; they were able to invite me into this family as well.

I mentioned the swimming hole we went to each day. Those of you who know me in person will have noticed that I’m not exactly a thin person. In my vanity, dealing with my weight—seeing myself grow into the body of my father and grandfather—has been an issue my whole life. This may sound silly, but I hadn’t gone swimming since I was a freshman in high school, because I was embarrassed by the shape of my body. The first day we went to the swimming hole, all of the kids and most of the adults jumped in the cool water and had a great time. They would climb part way up the waterfall and slide down, or just float on their backs. There were two younger kids who had never swam before, so the older kids worked with them on how to hold their breath underwater, and how to breathe in so they’d float more easily. I, on the other hand, decided to just climb to the top of %"! !

! the waterfall, which was very beautifully, but mostly was something I could do with my shirt on.

On the second day, in the afternoon before we went swimming, we drove to a small school (which was out for the summer) to play basketball in the parking lot. Afterwards, incredibly hot and sweaty, we drove out to the swimming hole, and without considering it, I stripped down to just my shorts and jumped in. It was amazing. Not until the long hours of our drive home did it occur to me how important that moment was. When I say they invited me into their family, what I mean is we went swimming together. Though perhaps it sounds trivial, they made me feel comfortable with who I was, and in a sense, helped free me to experience a simple joy of the earth in a way I’d experienced as a child, but hadn’t since then.

For the sake of transparency, I should say that during the trip, there was much complaining: it was hot and humid, there were bugs, there was poison ivy, and there were no video games. There was also much bickering between the kids, and some yelling at each other.

Some of them, during the trip, would have said they were miserable.

I’m not trying to present this as a time which turned us into angels; nevertheless, the other fifty-one weeks of the year, I only hear about how great the trip was, how much fun it was, and how they can’t wait to go back.

Something happened for me, and for each of the kids, that was bigger than a camping trip, more beautiful than swimming under a waterfall, and more fun than marshmallow poker. We were able to overcome, for a while at least, the alienation that had been driven into us by US culture our whole lives. We were able to experience each other, to interact in a direct way: though still dealing with, unimpeded by our domestication and our prejudices. . Though we didn’t become angels, we did become family.

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The simple acts of building a fire, cooking a meal that doesn’t come out of a box, and eating together; swimming together in a stream; or telling stories around a campfire instead of watching TV; these are all powerful blows against alienation. These are beginning rewilding practices which protect us against the segregation of our world, and allow us to experience the life of our origins. In a world so harsh, so cold, we need the warmth of real family (in whatever form that takes); we need the comfort and counsel of togetherness, and the joy of authentic friendship. This is a lived experience of heaven, calling our shallow minds to deeper rivers.

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John Tracy – From an Essay on the Ends of Time Jesus mission was undertaken with the urgency of the imminence of “the end times”. While the church seems to think that this is yet to come, Jesus explicitly said it would occur in the life of the new testament witnesses – and it did! In 70 AD the Roman military genocide Israel and smashed the temple. Acts and the epistles clearly document the persecution that Jesus spoke of. Jesus’ eschatology involved imminent catastrophe in real, material, historical terms.

The “end times” came to Australia in the genocide of the nineteenth century and incarceration in reserves in the twentieth century and the associated destruction of sacred places. A whole culture, lifestyle, law and consciousness came to an end – just like what happened to the Jews during the time of the writing of the new testament. For many communities in Africa, drought and disease has meant the end times as starvation, illness or refugee migration wipes out entire cultures. For hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Maralinga, the end times came half a century ago.

The ecological crisis, in particular climate change has made the rich world aware of the imminence of global catastrophe. But the rich are always the last to realise there is a problem. Climate change is already the end times through drought in Africa, floods in Pakistan and the flooding of small Island nations.

The rich are horrified about the recent oil spill of the coast of the U.S. but are barely aware of the pollution in the Amazon and Indonesia by oil drilling or pipelines resulting in the end times for communities dependent on clean waterways. The hypothetical future crisis that the rich have just discovered has been genociding the poor for a long time already.

The church can and needs to, but doesn’t, address mission with an eschatological urgency that reflects the perspective of the poor who %%! !

! are being genocide by the rich. Instead the status-quo seems to reflect the perspective of comfortably numb affluence and a boiling frog gradualist approach such as household water and energy conservation, drinking fair trade coffee and participation in band aid welfare programs, things that mainly resolve the anxiety or religious obligation of the rich but offer little good news for the poor or the fragile global ecology in real terms.'

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Burying the Dead: A response to Tom Cornell’s In Defense of Catholic Worker Anarchism - By: Andy Lewis One of the Corporal Works of Mercy is burying the dead. It’s time for Catholic Workers to stop defending the tired old corpse of socialism and bury it once and for all. Cornell’s defense of Catholic Worker Anarchism treads a well worn path which seeks to reconcile the word anarchism with an essentially socialist ideology. While it’s true anarchism and socialism/ Marxism evolved somewhat closely throughout the 19th and early 20th century the times have changed and a wide gulf has emerged between socialism, indeed the Left as a whole and anarchism.

Contemporary approaches to anarchist theory and practice have taken on a much different tinge than the socialist inspired variants which the Catholic Worker traces it’s lineage to. Since the 1960’s anarchist theory has moved steadily away from the trappings of Leftism with it’s emphasis on industry, production and technological development. While stalwart defenders of socialism such as Noam Chomsky continue to identify as anarchists, it’s to be hoped that sooner or later he’ll give up the term all together the way Murray Bookchin did in his later years when he adapted the term “municipalsocialism” in place of anarchism. Indeed one would hope that Catholic Workers would either give up the dirty “A” word which has plagued them for so long and admit the ideas they espouse are essentially socialist in orientation, or embrace the growing shift towards anarcho-primitivism and a dynamic critique of civilization which breathes life into the most verdant streams of Christian theology and resistance.

Over the past five years or so young Christians engaging with anarchist critiques have steadily been adapting a much broader vision of anarchy than the tired old Leftist framework allows. This new vision expands the anarchist quest for liberation to all living beings, a vision that resonates strongly with Biblical themes of all creation yearning for liberation(Romans 8:19-21). The growing movement %B! !

! reads the Hebrew origins story (Genesis 1-11) as describing the fall of from an egalitarian hunting and gathering life way into the horror show of ecocide, genocide, patriarchy and warfare via domestication and civilization. The connections between this anarcho- primitivist critique and the Hebrew- Christian Bible are being discussed in depth at Conferences and gatherings around the U.S. The outcome of these unprecedented connections between anarchists and Christians is yet to be fully realized but it will surely have long lasting effects on the theory, theology and action of radical Christians.

The chains of the past can be broken if the spirit is willing. May the spirit which moves through all living beings move amongst us now as we embrace the new day.

Lame Ass Christian Liberal of the Year- Tom Cornell and the Old Guard Catholic Workers “ No anarchist of sound mind holds either that government does not exist or ought not to exist. As I see it, anarchists would want more government if that means courts defending the right of workers to organize, the Department of Agriculture helping to initiate independent producer and consumer cooperatives instead of supporting vertical integration of farms into ever bigger and more powerful conglomerates. Government could favor open-pollinated seed sharing instead of forcing farmers around the world to buy new patented hybrid seed for each planting to enrich Monsanto.

Government could facilitate worker buy-outs of small industries with no-interest loans. The Postal Service could subsidize journals of opinion as it once did in order to disseminate alternative ideas and %A! !

! enrich democratic debate…..” been Derrick Jensen as well).

-Tom Cornell (yes, it could have

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- By Michael Becker In the anarcho-primitivist the green political theorist is confronted with the renegade, and he hates and fears her as much as his Puritan forebear hated the white Indian. But the primitive renegade today has no surviving community of indigenous survivors to escape to. The “amenities” of civilization seem inescapable. No tie to the timeless realm of the sensuous world seems to remain. The only alternative is to attack the machine itself. %)! !

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Smashing down the walls of civilization involves liberation from even the most basic conceptual constraints that tame the wildness in humans. It is the liberation of “vital energy,” “free-spirited wildness,” and “the intense, passionate life of untamed freedom.”

The walls must be smashed because the sum of all walls is “everything we call civilization, everything that comes between us and the direct, participatory experience of the wild world.” (Faun, “Feral”). Conventionally, the green scare is thought of as Leviathan’s campaign of repression against those who smash walls. Leviathan terms smashing walls “eco-terrorism.” As usual, the truth is exactly opposite of the civilized version. Ecology derives from the Greek oiko or home. It is the same root as economics, and the affluence of original cultures stemmed from the fact that their place of sustenance was simultaneously the place of their most intimate relations, their home. But that primordial home, for green theorists is a world apart from human civilization. It is an old and basic and ferocious error. The thought of rectifying it is terrifying. In this sense the green scare is the fear struck into the hearts of the civilized, green political theorists. It is the fear that inheres in the knowledge that we can, indeed that we must, fall back from civilization into the place where we grew up as humans, the <&&4#''&&-#Z&)()*0-,&# place we belong, the home that is ?#8"'#*3")&#*(2&)#93&-# called earth.

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Reflections on Ched Myers: A Critique of Movement Building -By Andy Lewis In April of 2011, Liza and Derek Minno- Bloom set up a two day panel discussion with Ched Myers, Layla Abdel-Rahim and John Zerzan in Albuquerque, NM. (look for video on you tube sometime soon, hopefully) The lively discussion ranged over a variety of topics. Layla and John layed out slightly differing critiques of domestication and symbolic culture with a few pointed questions for Ched relating to the problems they see with holding to Christianity as a means of resisting Civilization/ authoritarianism. My guess is that many people who are familiar with Ched’s take on Sabbath Economics would be surprised by the ideas he presented at this public forum. He was much more forthcoming in his anarchoprimitivist ideas than he lets on in most discussions and essays.

We’ve seen glimpses of Ched’s ability to hone in on these topics in “anarcho-primitivism and the Bible” and “The Fall.” I’ve been waiting for half a decade now for Ched to delve into the implications which he laid out in those loaded essays and at times I admit I’m ready to give up, but the Albuquerque discussion with Layla AbdelRahim and John Zerzan gave me some hope. Ultimately that hope was squashed by Ched’s watershed program which he laid out at the Jesus Radicals gathering in Minneapolis this past summer, a program which we saw glimpses of this previous year. It’s quite clear to me now that Ched is unwilling to divorce any of the ideas/ critiques associated with anarcho-primitivism, green anarchy etc. from a peace and justice/ movement/ program focus. The problems with this focus are obvious from an anarchist perspective; peace and justice are immediately recognizable henchmen of democracy, political intrigue and ideological fomentation. His emphasis on movement building is an obvious justification of hierarchy, especially relating to the gerontocracy which is omnipresent within institutions such as the Catholic Worker, where heresy is defined as not aligning ones self $"! !

! with the founders ideology. Knowing and respecting certain elements from the history of movements is one thing, pledging allegiance is another. This brings me to the center of my disagreement with Ched’s approach. He’s consistently been unwilling to lay out his deepest Biblical critique (one which is much closer to an anarchoprimitivist critique) because he doesn’t think most people would understand it. His justification seems to be a deep connection to the public education model; I’m not sure how hiding your best ideas from people connects with public education other than the way revolutionaries, governments and clergy work to create curriculum that promotes respect for hierarchy, ideology and institutions… OH wait, I guess I can see why he promotes public education now. The ideas and critiques associated with anarcho-primitivism and green anarchy are only vibrant forms of critique so long as they are taken as open questions which require lived/ experiential/ answers. Ched’s watershed program and his insistence on melding a critique of civilization with the dead end ideological trappings of the peace and justice movement building betray a deep rooted respect for the easy answers which hierarchy and institutions have always been willing to supply.

Nonetheless I still respect Ched’s brilliant form of midrash, he is one of the only voices within the Christian peace and justice movement who has embraced these deeper questions of origins and for that I am so deeply thankful. I suppose my criticism comes from the vantage point of one who is outside the beloved community of peace and justice, very much exiled by my own accord. But it troubles me a bit to see Ched floating back and forth between democrats and anarchists, the default spokesperson for so many fringe topics within the peace and justice community.

This leads me to my last point of contention with Ched and the Peace and Justice church as a whole. It seems clear to me that there is an unhealthy preoccupation with hierarchy, programs and institutions within the peace and justice church movement. To some extent this preoccupation is due to the high regard which Leftist movements and $#! !

! organizational structure in general is held by the Christian Left. But on a deeper level this respect for authority via movement, programs, organization and hierarchy can be traced back to the hermeneutical lens which so many peace and justice Christians have used to justify the hierarchical trappings of Leftist revolutions and movements. The legacy of Liberation theology looms large over the Christian left even if it never embraced the most radical elements of this Latin American movement. I believe the most radical components of Liberation Theology are related to indigenous resistance groups which forced the Catholic Church to give up a Westernized institutional power structure. This indigenous emphasis is far removed from the Marxist ideologues who defined so much of the hierarchical/ institutional church organization relating to Liberation Theology. Total Liberation Theology may in fact be a more appropriate title for what must ensue if we are to do away with the Marxist/ colonial premises which are firmly engrained in the peace and justice Christian Left.

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How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways: Three Complementary -Theories by Peter Gray The important lessons from hunter-gatherers are about culture, not genes.

I have in previous posts commented on hunter-gatherers’ playfulness; their playful religious practices; their playful approach toward productive work; their non-directive child-rearing methods; and their children’s playful ways of educating themselves. In all of those posts I emphasized the egalitarian, non-hierarchical nature of hunter-gatherer society. In today’s post I present three theories as to how hunter-gatherers maintained the egalitarian ethos for which they are justly famous. I think all three of the theories are correct. They are complementary theories, not competing ones; and they are all theories about culture, not about genes.

First, before I get to the three theories, I must address this question: Is it true that hunter-gatherers were peaceful egalitarians? The answer is yes.

During the twentieth century, anthropologists discovered and studied dozens of different hunter-gatherer societies, in various remote parts of the world, who had been nearly untouched by modern influences.

Wherever they were found–in Africa, Asia, South America, or elsewhere; in deserts or in jungles–these societies had many characteristics in common. The people lived in small bands, of about 20 to 50 persons (including children) per band, who moved from camp to camp within a relatively circumscribed area to follow the $&! !

! available game and edible vegetation. The people had friends and relatives in neighboring bands and maintained peaceful relationships with neighboring bands. Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals.

We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions. It meant that even parents didn’t have the right to order their children around; hence the non-directive childrearing methods that I have discussed in previous posts. It meant that group decisions had to be made by consensus; hence no boss, “big man,” or chief.

If just one anthropologist had reported all this, we might assume that he or she was a starry-eyed romantic who was seeing things that weren’t really there, or was a liar. But many anthropologists, of all political stripes, regarding many different hunter-gatherer cultures, have told the same general story. There are some variations from culture to culture, of course, and not all of the cultures are quite as peaceful and fully egalitarian as others, but the generalities are the same. One anthropologist after another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy, indulgent treatment of children, cooperation, and sharing in the hunter-gatherer culture that he or she studied. When you read about “warlike primitive tribes,” or about indigenous people who held slaves, or about tribal cultures $%! !

! with gross inequalities between men and women, you are not reading about band hunter-gatherers.

Even today some people who should know better confuse primitive agricultural societies with hunter-gatherer societies and argue, from such confused evidence, that hunter-gatherers were violent and warlike. For example, one society often referred to in this mistaken way is that of the Yanomami, of South America’s Amazon, made famous by Napoleon Chagnon in his book subtitled The Fierce People. Chagnon tried to portray the Yanomami as representative of our pre-agricultural ancestors. But Chagnon knew well that the Yanomami were not hunter-gatherers and had not been for centuries.

They did some hunting and gathering, but got the great majority of their calories from bananas and plantains, which they planted, cultivated, and harvested. Moreover, far from being untouched by modern cultures, these people had been repeatedly subjected to slave raids and genocide at the hands of truly vicious Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese invaders. No wonder they had become a bit “fierce” themselves.

The hunter-gatherer way of life, unlike the agricultural way of life that followed it, apparently depended on intense cooperation and sharing, backed up by a strong egalitarian ethos; so, hunter-gatherers everywhere found ways to maintain a strong egalitarian ethos. Now, back to the main question of this post. How did hunter-gatherers maintain their egalitarian ways? Here are the three theories, which I think are complementary to one another and all correct.

Theory 1: Hunter-gatherers practiced a system of “reverse dominance” that prevented anyone from assuming power over others.

The writings of anthropologists make it clear that hunter-gatherers were not passively egalitarian; they were actively so. Indeed, in the words of anthropologist Richard Lee, they were fiercely egalitarian.

They would not tolerate anyone’s boasting, or putting on airs, or trying to lord it over others. Their first line of defense was ridicule. If anyone–especially if some young man–attempted to act better than others or failed to show proper humility in daily life, the rest of the $$! !

! group, especially the elders, would make fun of that person until proper humility was shown.

One regular practice of the group that Lee studied was that of “insulting the meat.” Whenever a hunter brought back a fat antelope or other prized game item to be shared with the band, the hunter had to express proper humility by talking about how skinny and worthless it was. If he failed to do that (which happened rarely), others would do it for him and make fun of him in the process. When Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice, the response he received was the following: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

On the basis of such observations, Christopher Boehm proposed the theory that hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a practice that he labeled reverse dominance. In a standard dominance hierarchy–as can be seen in all of our ape relatives (yes, even in bonobos)–a few individuals dominate the many. In a system of reverse dominance, however, the many act in unison to deflate the ego of anyone who tries, even in an incipient way, to dominate them.

According to Boehm, hunter-gatherers are continuously vigilant to transgressions against the egalitarian ethos. Someone who boasts, or fails to share, or in any way seems to think that he (or she, but usually it’s a he) is better than others is put in his place through teasing, which stops once the person stops the offensive behavior. If teasing doesn’t work, the next step is shunning. The band acts as if the offending person doesn’t exist. That almost always works.

Imagine what it is like to be completely ignored by the very people on whom your life depends. No human being can live for long alone.

The person either comes around, or he moves away and joins another band, where he’d better shape up or the same thing will happen again. In his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm presents very compelling evidence for his reverse dominance theory. $B! !

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Theory 2: Hunter-gathers maintained equality by nurturing the playful side of their human nature, and play promotes equality.

This is my own theory, which I introduced two years ago in an article in the American Journal of Play. I will not go into detail about it here, because I have presented bits of the theory in other posts (see, for example, my post of June 11, 2009). Briefly, however, the theory is this. Hunter-gatherers maintained their egalitarian ethos by cultivating the playful side of their human nature.

Social play–that is, play involving more than one player–is necessarily egalitarian. It always requires a suspension of aggression and dominance along with a heightened sensitivity to the needs and desires of the other players. Players may recognize that one playmate is better at the played activity than are others, but that recognition must not lead the one who is better to lord it over the others.

This is true for play among animals as well as for that among humans. For example, when two young monkeys of different size and strength engage in a play fight, the stronger one deliberately selfhandicaps, avoids actions that would frighten or hurt the playmate, and sends repeated play signals that are understood as signs of nonaggression. That is what makes the activity a play fight instead of a real fight. If the stronger animal failed to behave in these ways, the weaker one would feel threatened and flee, and the play would end.

The drive to play, therefore, requires suppression of the drive to dominate.

My theory, then, is that hunter-gatherers suppressed the tendency to dominate and promoted egalitarian sharing and cooperation by deliberately fostering a playful attitude in essentially all of their social activities. Our capacity for play, which we inherited from our mammalian ancestors, is the natural, evolved capacity that best counters our capacity to dominate, which we also inherited from our mammalian ancestors.

My play theory of hunter-gather equality is based largely on evidence, gleaned from analysis of the anthropological literature, that play permeated the social lives of hunter-gatherers–more so than is the case for any known, long-lasting post-hunter-gatherer cultures. $A! !

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Their hunting and gathering were playful; their religious beliefs and practices were playful; their practices of dividing meat and of sharing goods outside of the band as well as inside of the band were playful; and even their most common methods of punishing offenders within their group (through humor and ridicule) had a playful element. By infusing essentially all of their activities with play, hunter-gatherers kept themselves in the kind of mood that most strongly, by evolutionary design, counters the drive to dominate others.

Theory 3: Hunter-gatherers maintained their ethos of equality through their childrearing practices, which engendered feelings of trust and acceptance in each new generation.

As I have explained in a previous post, hunter-gatherers employed a style of parenting that others have referred to as “permissive” or “indulgent,” but which I prefer to call “trusting.” They trusted infants’ and children’s instincts, and so they allowed infants to decide, for example, when to nurse or not nurse and allowed children to educate themselves through their own self-directed play and exploration. They did not physically punish children and rarely criticized them. One researcher who suggested that the moral character of hunter-gatherers comes from their kindly child-raising methods is Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who was among the first to study the Ju/’hoansi of Africa’s Kalahari Desert. Here is what she had to say about the parenting she observed: “Ju/’hoan children very rarely cried, probably because they had little to cry about. No child was ever yelled at or slapped or physically punished, and few were even scolded. Most never heard a discouraging word until they were approaching adolescence, and even then the reprimand, if it really was a reprimand, was delivered in a soft voice. … We are sometimes told that children who are treated so kindly become spoiled, but this is because those who hold that opinion have no idea how successful such measures can be.

Free from frustration or anxiety, sunny and cooperative, the children were every parent’s dream. No culture can ever have raised better, more intelligent, more likable, more confident children.” $)! !

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One esteemed contemporary researcher who has implicitly if not explicitly supported the parenting theory of hunter-gatherer moral development is fellow PT blogger Darcia Narvaez, author of the blog Moral Landscapes. It is difficult to prove with empirical evidence that the kindly, trustful parenting of hunter-gatherers promotes development of people who treat one another kindly and who eschew aggression, but the theory makes intuitive sense. It makes sense that infants and children who are themselves trusted and treated well from the beginning would grow up to trust others and treat them well and would feel little or no need to dominate others in order to get their needs met.

The childrearing theory overlaps with my play theory, because hunter-gatherers allowed their children, including teenagers, to play essentially from dawn to dusk. The children grew up believing that life is play and then went on to conduct esssentially all of their adult tasks in a playful mood–the mood that counters the drive to dominate.

In sum, my argument here is that the lessons we have to learn from hunter-gatherers are not about our genes but about our culture. Our species clearly has the genetic potential to be peaceful and egalitarian, on the one hand, or to be warlike and despotic, on the other, or anything in between. If the three theories I’ve described here are correct, and if we truly believe in the values of equality and peace and want them to reign once again as the norm for human beings, then we need to (a) find ways to deflate the egos, rather than support the egos, of the despots, bullies, and braggarts among us; (b) make our ways of life more playful; and (c) raise our children in kindly, trusting ways.

There are 100,000 Bushmen in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola. They are the indigenous people of southern Africa, and have lived there for tens of B(! !

! thousands of years. In the middle of Botswana lies the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, a reserve created to protect the traditional territory of the 5,000 Gana, Gwi and Tsila Bushmen (and their neighbours the Bakgalagadi), and the game they depend on.

In the early 1980s, diamonds were discovered in the reserve. Soon after, government ministers went into the reserve to tell the Bushmen living there that they would have to leave because of the diamond finds.

In three big clearances, in 1997, 2002 and 2005, virtually all the Bushmen were forced out. Their homes were dismantled, their school and health post were closed, their water supply was destroyed and the people were threatened and trucked away.

Those who have not returned to the reserve now live in resettlement camps outside the reserve. Rarely able to hunt, and arrested and beaten when they do, they are dependent on government handouts.

Many are now gripped by alcoholism, boredom, depression, and illnesses such as TB and HIV/AIDS. Unless they are able to live on their ancestral lands, their unique societies and way of life will be destroyed, and many of them will die.

Although the Bushmen won the right in court to go back to their lands in 2006, the government has done everything it can to make their return impossible, including banning them from accessing a water borehole which they used before they were evicted; without it, the Bushmen struggle to find enough water to survive on their lands.

The Bushmen launched further litigation against the government in a bid to gain access to their borehole. Although their application was initially dismissed, in January 2011 Botswana’s Court of Appeal ruled that the Bushmen can use their old borehole and sink new ones in the reserve as well. The judges described the Bushmen’s plight as ‘a harrowing story of human suffering and despair.’ At the same time as preventing the Bushmen from accessing water, the government drilled new boreholes for wildlife only and allowed safari company, Wilderness Safaris, to open a tourist camp in the reserve.

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The Kalahari Plains Camp was opened after Wilderness Safaris entered into a lease with the government. However, the lease made no provisions for the rights of the Bushmen on whose ancestral lands the camp sites, nor were they consulted about the venture.

While Bushmen nearby struggle to find enough water to survive on their lands, guests can sip cocktails by the camp’s swimming pool.

In addition, the government has: Refused to issue a single permit to hunt on their land (despite Botswana’s High Court ruling that its refusal to issue permits was unlawful), Arrested more than 50 Bushmen for hunting to feed their families, Banned them from taking their small herds of goats back to the reserve.

Its policy is clearly to intimidate and frighten the Bushmen into staying in the resettlement camps, and making the lives of those who have gone back to their ancestral land impossible.

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ON CHRISTIAN ANIMISM – by Ric Hudgens Animism was practiced before it was “believed in”. Human beings living life immersed in a living world of “other” voices is a universal phenomenon found in every indigenous culture. By “indigenous” please understand that I mean the dominant worldview of the majority of human beings for the majority of our time on this planet.

Animism is our native belief.

Sir Edward Tylor, the founder of the “science” of anthropology, was the first to give a formal, academic (and pejorative) definition of “animism”. Tylor defined animism as “an idea of pervading life and will in nature.” Writing in 1871 in his tellingly titled magnum opus Primitive Culture, Tylor asserted that this naïve idea was a childish and underdeveloped stage in human development common only among primitive hunter-gatherers. A century later psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that the ability to distinguish the animate from the inanimate was the inevitable product of education and learning.

The consensus of the great Western intellectual tradition has been that the majority of human beings for the majority of human history have been fundamentally and tragically mistaken about the world in which they lived. It is not a coincidence that the academic disparagement of “animism” as the primitive belief of primitive peoples arose simultaneous with the rise of industrial and technological civilization. Before nature can be bound it must be gagged. The world must be silenced so that only the human voice can be heard; and only the human will can dominate.

In 1997 philosopher David Abram wrote The Spell of the Sensuous, a sophisticated philosophical work that questioned this Western prejudice against animism. Abram drew upon a broad survey of oral, indigenous societies, weaving these insights together with the B)! !

! phenomenological philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Abram’s first book and it’s recent sequel Becoming Animal (2010) should become foundational reading for anyone concerned with life on this planet: human and (in Abram’s wonderful phrase) “more-than-human”.

Abram deconstructs the Western philosophical tradition prior to Descartes (now a standard philosophical whipping boy) back to Plato and Socrates, the wellspring itself. Abram’s insightful conjunction of Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and embodiment with indigenous stories and myths often labeled “animist” is an eyeopening, ear-opening, sense-awakening tour-de-force. Many who have read it can testify that unlike most books it can actually change the way one experiences the sensual world.

Abram presents a compelling argument that even human understandings of time and space are rooted in our experience of the physical earth. Past, present, and future are literally connected with things “beyond the horizon” and “underneath the ground”. Time and space are not conceptual categories we impose upon the world. We derive them from our experience of living on this planet, moving across its surfaces, experiencing death and decay back into the earth.

From this perspective time and space begin to lose their distinctiveness and blur into “time-space” which is not a category or a structure, but a perspective upon life itself.

What Abram does not address in detail is that modern conceptions of time and space arise as part of the industrial-technological project of gagging and binding nature under the domination of humanity. Isaac Newton’s “discovery” (i.e. invention) of absolute time and absolute space was foundational to humanity’s technological dominance and denuding of the more-than-human world. Even western cosmology has had an imperial agenda.

Christianity’s involvement in, support for, and defense of these A(! !

! developments cannot be doubted. One can argue that such a history is not in continuity with the biblical sources or even the divine intention. One can also argue that there have always been dissenting voices in Christian history questioning, protesting, and sometimes resisting these developments. However, the condemnation of Christianity as a willing accomplice in the gagging and binding of the planet cannot be questioned.

To thoroughly hear and be convinced by Abram’s arguments is to become self-conscious of our sensual withdrawal from the world around us. We have created cultural and societal practices (primarily through our use of technology) that reinforce this separation.

The French surrealist writer Rene Daumal wrote that “we must first become human before we can become anything superior.” Abram’s work raises profound questions about our ability to achieve even this basic level of life: becoming human. In the modern world we have in fact become less than human, less than we used to be, less than we were meant to be. Surely, when the Jesus of the Gospel of John (John 10:10) says that he came to bring life and to bring it abundantly he meant something quite different from what we see in our society today. When we gag and bind the more-than-human world we gag and bind ourselves. We gag and bind the God who created all of it.

I am not convinced that “animism” is alien to the biblical tradition.

Nor am I convinced that the arguments of David Abram cannot be incorporated into a “Christian animist” perspective. The promise in this perspective is that the more-than-human world would once again enfold the human world; and the human find it's essential place within the more-than-human. The ungagging and unbinding of the more-than-human world would not necessarily be a simpler world.

Including more voices is always complicating. But perhaps we are not called to live a simpler life but a more complex life. Perhaps we are called to live lives that listen and hear once again the more-thanA"! !

! human world, which has never stopped speaking in spite of our selfwilled deafness.

One theologian who has been exploring the shape of a new “Christian animism” is Mark Wallace. In two recent books Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature (2005) and Green Christianity (2010), Wallace has begun to outline the biblical and theological ligaments of this perspective. Wallace is trying to rethink the Christian faith as an earth-based religion. Our Christian faith should celebrate the bodily, material world as the place of God’s indwelling and care.

Christian animism is the belief that all of creation is filled with and animated by God’s presence. The animist worldviews of first world peoples may not be fundamentally opposed to classical Christianity.

Christian animism affirms God incarnate in human flesh in a “green Jesus” and incarnate in creation by a “carnal Spirit” who indwells both human and more-than-human. Wallace points out that the Bible and the Christian tradition possess rich images and stories about God as an “earthen” being (God in the wind, the water, the fire). And perhaps when the Psalmist proclaims creation as declaring God’s glory and singing God’s praises it is not being metaphorical!

The complementarity of the philosophical work of David Abram and the theological work of Mark Wallace provide the possibility for some new trajectories in radical Christian praxis. Native American writer Charles Eastman (also known as Ohiyesa) wrote in his autobiography The Soul of the Indian (1910) that “Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and that the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.” Perhaps it is not Christianity and animism that are natural enemies. Perhaps Christianity is the enemy of the civilization that has gagged and bound the voice of God, incarnate and alive within the entire, living, animate, inspirited world that God created.

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From: The Historical Context of the New Testament -By John Tracy The time of the stories of the new testament lies between two major events in the Middle East, the Maccabees revolt of the second century BC and the Roman-Jewish wars of the first and second centuries AD. In 166 B.C, two hundred years before the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, there was a rebellion in Judea that overthrew the Hellenist (Greko-Roman or “gentile”) Seleucid empire that continued in the colonising tradition of Alexander the Great, that is it imposed Greek social structure, economy and religion onto Judea at the same time as outlawing indigenous Hebrew culture, especially the Jubilee year of restoration (Leviticus 25), Sabbath laws and the land covenant of circumcision. Idols of Zeus were placed in Solomons temple in Jerusalem.

The indigenous Hebrews launched a guerilla war against the colonising Greek army and economy as well as Hellinised (civilised) Hebrews collaborating with the Greek regime. The gentiles were expelled from Judea and indigenous self-rule was instituted in Judea, Galilee, Samaria and other regions of Abraham and Joshua’s covenants, in the form of a priestly dynasty – the Hasmoneans. The old testament books of Maccabees tell the story. The festival of Hanukkah or “the festival of light” is a celebration of the rededication of Solomon’s temple after its defilement by the colonising Greeks. Jesus attended this festival and declared himself the messiah at it (John 10: 22 – 30).

Rome invaded the Holy land in 63 BC, after a hundred years of indigenous self-rule. However Rome did not outlaw Hebrew culture and law as the Greeks had done, instead it ruled in collaboration with the Hasmonean priests. The priests accepted Rome’s money to A'! !

! refurbish and expand Solomon’s temple. The temple itself became the centre of Roman tax collection and the priests compromised indigenous law, especially the Jubilee, in order to maintain peace with the Roman colonisers. This arrangement is the religious and political status-quo of the new testament.

Thirty years or so after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, in the 60s AD, indigenous Hebrews again launched a guerrilla war of independence, in this case against Roman domination. The Romans were evicted, self rule was instituted in Judea, Galilee and Samaria, based in the religious authorities in Jerusalem. Revolutionary Hebrew coins (“freedom coins”) were minted to replace the Roman economy and land and wealth redistribution occurred in line with tribal Jubilee law, as documented in the book of Acts.

In 70 AD Rome re-invaded and smashed the Jerusalem temple but Hebrew guerilla resistance continued for a hundred years.

The new testament was written during and/or after the revolution of the 60s and the whole new testament was written in the time of guerilla resistance and Rome’s persecution of the Hebrews as a result. That is, the events of the revolution and ongoing guerilla war would be well known by the bible writers and those to whom they wrote, it was the social context of the new testament. Domination by and liberation from the colonial empires of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome is the social and historical context of the whole bible.

What can be solidly argued from the biblical texts is Jesus identification with the old testament prophetic tradition of resistance to empire.

What can also be solidly argued from the biblical texts is Jesus’ direct engagement with the issues and debates of his own time regarding the attempted fusion of God’s law and Caesar’s law by the priests (Pharisees and Sadducees). For example – there was a popular Babylonian born (Hellenised) Pharisee named Hillel at the time of A&! !

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Herod the Great, that is at the time of Jesus’ birth. Hillel was instrumental in abandoning the Jubilee law, the restoration of land to traditional owners and the extinguishment of debt. Such an arrangement is of course not compatible with the Roman colonial economy and was a direct threat to Rome’s capacity to extract wealth, which is why the Greeks outlawed it. Jesus proclamation of the Jubilee in his first announcement of his ministry was a direct engagement in the social debate of indigenous self rule and colonial domination. His constant attack on the pharisees must be understood in the context of the Hasmonean collaboration with Rome.

But unfortunately Christendom has established a tradition of interpreting the bible through the lens of Hellenic imperial Rome and as such betrayed the tribal indigenous perspective of the bible writers.

Even radical biblical archaeologists like John Domonic Crossan, whose work I would still recommend to anyone, interpret the new testament through the lens of Roman history, culture and debates within the Hellenic empire rather than the sociopolitical realities of Africa and the Middle East upon which the bible stories are founded.

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Chaos by Andy Lewis “God seems to take special delight in precisely those things that are most wild, particularly in the chaos creatures Behemoth and Leviathan.” Out of the Whirlwind, Kathryn Schifferdecker Why do so many introductions to anarchism begin by exalting organization and orderliness while dismissing chaos and disorder as immature and having little or nothing to do with anarchy? There’s a deep rooted bias against the insurrectionary, “bomb throwing” elements of anarchism in favor of a tamed emphasis on organization, order and structure. It seems that this caveat is an easy way for grown up mature anarchists to separate themselves from the immature delinquents that roam the streets at night motivated by a base level disdain, their immaturity only overcome when they grow up and are able to articulate/ domesticate their rage while praising the virtues of order. But this move toward the grown-up world of anarchism is all too often a move toward complicity with the very forces anarchists oppose. This love of order reflects a deep rooted respect for authority and social hierarchy. Chaos is found in Genesis 1:1-2 in reference to the void, Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg suggests that the Hebrew words tohu and bohu, both of which relate to formlessness, void and chaos could be understood as referencing the “murmuring deep.” She understands the murmuring deep to be “vital, this murmur may be the very substance of what human beings share.” Indeed, chaos is better understood in this deep midrash sense as an elemental part of life, ever present but rarely acknowledged except in the most primal moments of existence. In Alphonso Lingis’ estimation we find this chaos most palpably “in the drifting and nameless light and warmth of infancy, in the nocturnal depths of the erotic, and in the domain of dying where rational discourse has no longer anything to say.”

Chaos so often associated with fire, the element which illumins thoughts of mystery, fear, intrigue. Fire shines light on the dark hidden places it lives off of vapor as though the spirit of life were AB! !

! being consumed. Perhaps fire and chaos are inextricably linked in their elemental states, they are at least complimentary.

Chaos is the void, darkness, which fire illuminates, the burning bush, the chaos speaking out to Moses in the form of a burning bush, Jonah swallowed and brought to the depths of the sea by the whale, Job enlightened by the chaotic whirlwind, the soil from which Adam was created. Clearly the elements reflect the underlying Chaos of life.

Wild and Chaos are two enemies of organization, structure. The groundwork of domestication lies in the desire to control, and harness the forces of wildness and chaos. Perhaps the root of all privilege lies in the authoritarian urge to impose structure and order.

Technology imposes its own orderliness and structure, the totalizing effect of which trumps all other projects of structural imposition.

But as the totality or singularity of techno-order becomes more and more complete, the forces of chaos become increasingly volatile.

Civilization itself is a case study in what happens when orderliness and structure win out over chaos for a brief period of time. The backlash is inevitable. As Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies shows . What a tragedy that our atrophied senses so often forget the primal thrill of chaos in favor of the dead structure and order of mass society. The grace and beauty of an unmediated encounter with wild nature is what’s inspired words from the lives of Thoreau, and others for centuries. But those words are of course mere hints of what that experience was in embodied presence, a lived experience that snaps one back into t30*#0#*'0/&+1#*30*# the real world where chaos and "%'#0*'"43(&+#)&-)&)# wildness abound. This is no utopia, )"#"8*&-#8"'/&*#*3&# the threat of death is real, but the essence of life is palpable.

4'(20.#*3'(..#"8#,30")# Embracing the wild energy of chaos (-#805"'#"8#*3&#+&0+# can reconnect us with the )*'%,*%'&#0-+#"'+&'# community of all wild beings. We can reawaken with new eyes and "8#20))#)",(&*1:# AA! !

! new ears. But of course opening one’s self to chaos is never safe. So if you want anarchy and Christianity of the domesticated variety so be it. There’s an encounter wildness which cannot be avoided; primal darkness will confront all of us at one time or another, perhaps late at night the chaos of creation will whisper in your ear and you’ll be taken to the depths like Jonah. These experiences seem to coincide with the spiritual experience of death and rebirth or resurrection.

Chaos is the bedrock of direct experience, theologically speaking, it’s the canvas upon which wild elements interact. All attempts at order, social, religious, political or otherwise are inherently grounded in abstraction, the symbolic becomes the primary mode of experiencing life, always a step removed from direct, elemental experience. To a certain extent culture is tied to order and structure. Ritual is perhaps the most basic component of that cultural impulse to maintain structure and standardize experience. Of course it must be noted that many band and tribal societies have ingenious ways of acknowledging the importance of chaos through their generally low regard for imposed structure. Adaptability to the chaotic reality of life is the true genius of band society. As a result of this openness to chaos, there’s a general lack of regard for the trappings of order such as social hierarchy, institutionalized ritual, group consensus, etc.

Moreover band societies tend to favor the individual’s freedom to come and go as one pleases. Any social interaction/group dynamic is based more on affinity than the abstracted elements that impose social cohesion in more complex social systems. In tribal societies, which tend to have more trappings of order, there are still many vivid reminders of the chaotic wildness which lies just beneath the structure. Trickster, shamans, and witches can play an important role in undermining the urge for ever expanding structure and organization, which is always a temptation for societies with any dependency on agriculture. (KT the witch and the wilderness). The stories of Trickster which abound in many tribal societies show how playfulness and humor are absolutely crucial if one is to maintain an openness and attunement to chaos.

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In an embodied or “sensuous” frame of reference, chaos may have originally referred to the space on the horizon. The word chaos has its origins in the poem Theogony, written around 700 B.C. Ralph Abraham speculates its original meaning related to “the gap between the sky and the earth.” This conflation of void and chaos is referenced throughout various Midrash writings. Are Heaven and earth joined or separated by the void of chaos? The Church fathers determined that the void and chaos were not retained in any way during the process of creation. One might suspect that refuting all traces of the formless void would go hand in hand with the construction of a codified religious hierarchy and institutional structure. That which is formless cannot be contained, molded or shaped, much like the ambiguous shape shifting presence of Yahweh.

The term Yahweh probably references the sound of breath, another expression of just how deep this formless yet sensuous void reaches into the Christian faith. Perhaps Jesus’ enigmatic, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is a poetic reference to the chaos and void which never should be repressed.

There’s no escaping the fact that the void and chaos of creation is an integral part of our context, although it may be an uncomfortable one. Chaos is certainly a central element of resistance in the face of ever-expanding order and confinement. If we are to grow as people into the wide open glory of life we would do well to embrace the freedom of chaos.

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“What shall I do when I am lost?”

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.”

In Who Shall Be the Sun, David Wagoner writes from the voice of an Indian Elder to his grandson, when asked “What shall I do when I am lost?”

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Anarcho-Primitivism and Christianity: In Defense of Wildness

by Dave Grace The engagement of ideas between Anarcho-primitivism (AP) and Christianity presents the vitality of a primitive lifeway as spiritually imperative amidst the inner and outer decay of civilization, a decay which still pervades much discourse in spirituality and ecology discussions.

Anarcho-Primitivism is a critique of the origins of civilization. As the Hebrew Bible was written in an agricultural context which was cultivating the first cities, Christianity’s origins are being revisited as a counter-narrative of civilization resistance. In this essay, I’m considering some foundational sources for the developing connections between an AnarchoPrimitivism critique and Christianity so as to understand its unique importance and crucial offerings. While considering the writers, my central concern is to highlight anarchic qualities which are firmly rooted in wild nature, as differentiated from those who either speak of wildness in name only or not at all.

The former tame their conclusions, so as to attempt to defeat civilization’s ills by carrying them forward, while the latter attempt to legitimize the fundamental oppression of domestication/civilization. These latter two perspectives often fall within Jacques Elull’s notion of necessity, as the coercion into domestication by the inherited human condition of civilization is either not seen as possible or desirable to overcome.

I’m considering a few writings which deal with human origins and vocation to make distinctions based on three categories and consider the varying degrees of concession to necessity: Those which claim wild origins and seek wild vocation; those which claim wild origins but hold a relativistic view of human vocation; and those which claim domesticated origins and seek to maintain a domesticated vocation. I’m )#! !

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focusing on highlighting the connections that are made between wildness and spirituality to illustrate an alternative vision and practice for human health, wholeness, and freedom that is offered by AP and Christianity. The spirit of wildness that AP and Christianity share simultaneously is informed by wild origins while forming wild vocation. This direct reciprocity with origins, a wild quality, is a foundation of resistance to civilization’s concessions, in preference of primordial wild communion.

Wild Origins and Vocation AP and Christian writings which focus on wildness and anarchy have a strong spiritual basis. The focus is primarily on full human development which is free from domination or domesticated relations with humans and other species, an experience likened to reception of divine gift. AP critique suggests that such conditions are wild conditions, as witnessed in gatherer-hunter society. From a Christian perspective, Jacques Elul illuminated wild human origins in Technique and the Opening Chapters of Genesis, where he demonstrated that gift is primary in Eden as it’s free from all alienation, including cultivation and work which are things of the Fall and therefore necessity. Though banishment from the Garden demands necessity, the biblical narrative continues to hinge on wildness as the basis for God’s offering of liberatory resistance from civilization to humanity, as seen in the Sabbath-Jubilee covenant as detailed by Ched Myers.

By virtue of coalescence in the Fallen conditions of the Neolithic, Christianity’s contribution to wild origins and vocation become a matter of hermeneutics, in which there is a long history of disagreement between interpretations, even between self-identified Christians. Some, such as Paul Shepard, critique Christianity as confined to a force of domestication due to its connections to agriculture and civilization in its historical forms. Without finding Christianity meaningful, Shepard focused on wildness using a broad interdisciplinary approach for references. In the Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, )'! !

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Shepard posited a hunter-gatherer lifeway as optimal for allowing the highest expression of human mental and physical capacities in reciprocity with other species, which he argues is much more in accord with a totemic worldview than Christianity.

However, Anarcho-Primitivism has laid bare the infiltration of civilization’s values on Christianity and is helping to open a way to reclaim its wild origins. In the Land of the Living is a journal of Anarcho-Primitivism and Christianity which catalogues a diversity of viewpoints on Christian identity as resistance not religion. Andy Lewis clearly articulates the imperative for resistance in stating that “religion is quite simply a conciliation for the breakdown or loss of whole, healthy community” (Ilotl Vol 4.).

AP and Christianity writings conclude that spirit is felt as wildness. The AP critique is insistent upon wild origins and vocation, citing the vast majority of human existence as being lived as gatherer-hunters in band society for two to three million years prior to domestication; the overturning of Hobbesian views which lift up progress and civilization as grand achievement; and the realization of the general health and egalitarianism of non-technological, non-agricultural lifeways. Though AP is a new critique of civilization, it is inspired by the long chain of resistances echoing from primordial urges for wild-freedom throughout this period of domestication which began about 10,000 years ago. Freud’s Civilization and It’s Discontents divides freedom-inspired resistance into two categories: those which are compatible with civilization and target reform or those which find origins in an “original (undomesticated) personality” and are uncompromised by civilization (50). This “original personality” was echoed by Theodore Kaczynski’s thesis of the irreformable nature of Industial Society and It’s Future and remains the impetus for much anti-civilization thought and action.

AP and Christian writings are seeking to develop what seems to be the universal memory of original condition of )&! !

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wholeness as an open seam for wholesale resistance to civilization. Mircea Eliade described these memories as yearnings for illud tempus: the original condition that’s free from time and history (265). AP critique considers time and history as inherently oppressive in their demand of wildness repression. John Zerzan is a well-known for articulating the AP critique and has been involved with making connections with Christianity. Zerzan considers these yearnings for wholeness a direct consequence of the loss of wild communion with nature.

His work exemplifies AP’s celebration of wild origins and focus on reclaiming wild vocation. His collection of essays in the Origins reader outlines his critique of symbolic culture as the basis of civilization and loss of original wholeness. These essays detail the perceptual fall that set the stage for the physical one with division of labor leading to domestication What’s so significant about positing symbolic culture as central to civilization are the implications for any potentially healing actions. Civilization is then more pervasive than the structural problem it presents, as it manifests an underlying spiritual problem, which Zerzan argues is the sway held by the symbolic over nature in human perception. A critique of symbolic culture calls for a needed perceptual, spiritual rewilding hand-in-hand with a physical one.

Wild Origins, Relativistic Vocation Other writers are celebrating wild origins but instead of seeking to reclaim a wild human vocation, origins are used to inform and redirect civilization’s progress. Pandora’s Seed by Spencer Wells takes a scientific perspective to describe the problems of civilization and concludes by suggesting a huntergatherer mythology. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael takes a similar route by suggesting an indigenous-type mythology in response to the colonialism and conquest of agricultural societies over non-agricultural societies. These writings are accurately considering the futility of civilization but are then conceding to necessity in that they affirm history’s demand for acting in its continuation. In their conclusions, human vocation is left )%! !

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merely as abstraction. Such conclusions make considerations of origins just considerations which paradoxically result in homage to history.

Domesticated Origins, Domesticated Vocation Wes Jackson in New Roots for Agriculture realizes fundamental problems of agriculture but urges for continued dependence on domestication for creating polycultures of perennial grain crops, as part of an overall goal to maintain civilization. This is a project that’s currently underway at the Land Institute in Salina Kansas, which he founded in 1976.

Wes Jackson is associated with the more popular Wendell Berry, who are both looked to for inspiration to the New Agrarianism movement. Their popularity signals the extent of the proliferation of a view of domesticated origins in Christianity to legitimize domesticated vocation.

Duke’s Divinity School faculty Ellen Davis and Norman Wirzba have contributed much theological study to domesticated origins and vocation in concert with the New Agrarianism movement. Ellen Davis wrote Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: an agrarian reading of the Bible explicitly for this purpose. Norman Wirzba has written much about God as gardener, not in the sense of creator of wild nature and divine gift, but God in the image of civilized human pushing dirt around the suburban backyard, as seen in his article the gardening way of God’s keeping. This is surely necessity imposed on wild origins and wild vocation. Necessity surely requires agriculture to maintain this human population and culture, but perpetuation of the false notion of wholeness in agrarianism will never yield wildness.

For AP, domestication is a central critique of civilization’s origins which has been taken up by many. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond attributed the development of Western Civilization’s global dominance not to intelligence or differential value but to chance geographic location, having origins in the Fertile Crescent which facilitated agriculture which in turn led to conquest and colonialism to )$! !

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spread growth-dependent civilization. He previously described agriculture as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” (1987).

An AP perspective of wild origins and vocation critiques the foundation of domination which is considered structural necessity in agriculture and civilization. Christianity as resistance demonstratively shares the anarchist critique of power as well as the primitivist critique of technology. The AP and Christianity discussions offer a strong reference for civilization resistance.

Falling one degree to concession to necessity, perspectives which claim wild origins while not claiming wild vocation signal an unwillingness to give up aspects of technological society or belief in necessity to stay attached to it. The scientific worldview offers such reasons to not claim wild vocation, as it depends on technology and assumes a sort of redeeming intellectual progress has come from it.

Arguments for domesticated origins and vocation do not challenge civilization and as such are defending their necessities. The agrarianism argument for Christianity is pervasive because of its cultural accessibility through Biblical agricultural metaphor and agriculturalists, the recent, generational memory of agrarianism in the West, as well as the seeming practicality of being self-reliant, coupled with the promise of wholeness through productivity earned by labor.

With its history, reactions from the West against Christianity have been warranted. However, Christianity has a rich anti-history that is coming to the fore of discussions with the AP critique. In this way, AP and Christianity offer a strong basis in wild origins and vocation while providing trenchant critique of civilization traced back to the point of its origins.

What remains to be seen is if domestication and civilization will be more critically analyzed both within Christianity and the larger base of perspectives bearing nature affinities.

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Excerpt from Savages Again/ Fuck Joseph Campbell -by Paul Shepard Joseph Campbell has argued, rightly, that death was a metaphysical problem for the original hunter. He concluded, wrongly, that it was solved by planters who made sacrifices to forces governing the annual sprouting of grain. It was control, not acquiescence to this great round, that the agriculturists sought. In the dawn of the modern world, the Neolithic, says Wilhelm Dupre, “the individual no longer stands as a whole vis-à-vis the life-community in the sense that the latter finds its realization through a total integration of the individual—as is the case by and large under the conditions of a gathering and hunting economy.”

Unlike agrarians and pastoralists, foragers do not perceive nature as simply a larder in which the animals are mere objects in a game of power and wealth. It would be wrong to see this play as a ravagement. Subtlety, restraint, cogitation, and cooperation are its guiding principles. Ferocity has its place, not as a melody, but as a chord. The beleaguered modern tycoon who says of his work, “It’s a jungle out there,” is in error about the real jungle. His metaphor is a self-serving misrepresentation of the wilderness that made him possible. From the time of Vasco da Gama, Westerners have been fascinated by indigenous punishment for crimes and by cannibalism (although cannibalism is primarily a trait of horticulturists). Being subject to ordinary human shortcomings, hunter/gatherers may not always live in perfect harmony with nature or each other. Nor are they always happy, content, well fed, free of disease, or profoundly philosophical. Like people everywhere they are, in some sense, incompetent. Melvin Konner, Harvard-bred anthropologist, who spent years studying the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert of Africa, wrote of the superiority of their lives to their counterparts in Cleveland or Manchester—and then pulled the covers over his head by saying, “But here is the bad news. You can’t go back.” One can )A! !

! only be grateful for Loren Eiseley and Laurens Van der Post, writing on the same Kalahari Bushmen, and for their anticipation of what Roger Keesing calls a “new ethnography” that seeks “universal cultural design” based on psychological approaches. “If a cognitive anthropology is to be productive,” he says, “we will need to seek underlying processes and rules.” He concludes that “the assumption of radical diversity in cultures can no longer be sustained by linguistics.” Which is to say that linguistic differences are merely one of the freedoms made possible by the genome. We are free to create culture—and have done so in hundreds of ways—but there is a catch.

The biological function of culture is probably the versatility that it offers to a traveling species, whose environment differs widely and whose experiences are diversely assimilated and built upon, and who need to keep their sense of identity. For thousands of years culture helped set small groups of people apart from each other by embedding their customs and skills and by semi-isolating linguistic and genetic groups. The catch is that, given a natural world and a human nature, not all cultures work equally well. The most rewarding theme was that it was the small-group foraging people who developed the general human niche during the evolution of the genome— the genome which in turn would expect just that sort of small group.

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It’s That Time Again

by Derek Menno-Bloom Our little Austrian Blue Heeler walked through the cottonwood trees. The river flowed to the north of us like a rich chocolate milkshake as the mud and water ran together. It was ten in the morning and the air was still cold, but not a wintery cold. It was the kind of cold that reminds you of drinking hot apple cider when you were younger. It was the kind of cold where you swore you could smell the leaves changing color and dying as they fell to the ground.

As I took in the smell of the season my memories became so strong I was no longer living in the moment, but in many different times from my past; it felt like time travel. I had such sensory overload from the feeling of being in two times at once—here where I breathed in the smell of the cottonwood and back in the creek behind my childhood home in Pennsylvania, surrounded by fragrant oak trees, taking one last swim before winter set in and forced me to the banks and the warmth of a fire. The trees of my present blew back and forth as my skin became numb from the cold and visions of the past. I closed my eyes and… *** I watched Liza’s back as she paddled our red canoe down the Delaware River. It wasn’t even six thirty in the morning; the sun began to peek its head above the horizon. It smelled like when we raked leaves as kids and then jumped in them only having to rake them all over again. A thick fog loomed just above the water as the canoe slowly broke through it. The polluted river looked somehow pristine—like a fairy tale of a pre-industrial age; it was easy to imagine that we were living 100 years in the past. The light that shone on the clouds from the low sun now reflected onto the water and turned the fog a shade of mystical red and purple, like the flesh of a plum. We could barely hear the boat move. Everything was so quiet. There were no cars or planes destroying our communion with creation and silence. We didn’t dare speak as beauty started to "((! !

! change us, to calm our souls. Our civilized ways, our urges and anxieties, seemed to fade if only for a few minutes. The cold air went up our noses as the trees spoke to us visions of the past: visions of a people who lived with the earth and its cycles, who believed that this river was part of them along with the air they breathed. We could almost see the Leni Lenape fishing in the morning. It seemed that they didn’t know stress or depression existed as they laughed and hunted their food while exchanging their spirit for the flesh of the fish. Their lives seemed so simple and peaceful. Liza and I looked at each other for a while. Our eyes said that we loved each other, that we loved this moment.

We canoed on the river for over a hundred miles, over several days, paddling all day, stopping to sleep and cook when we were tired on small, wooded river islands at night. We felt like two Huckleberry Finns as we laughed, ate and trespassed on many people’s land.

Even though we weren’t freeing a slave or helping one escape, we were freeing ourselves from time as we awoke and slept with the coming and going of the sun. *** I opened my eyes. I was back amongst the cottonwoods. Liza and I continued walking as our dog Frankie herded us from behind. We found a little patch of white sand by the river bank. As we sat there Frankie fought with the sand. He dug and dug and barked and squealed. We looked at each other knowing it was probably the first time he had ever seen or walked on sand. We hadn’t had him long. A friend found him on the West Mesa abandoned with his sister. As I looked at the water run by I wondered how dark and hurt someone must be if they left this little puppy out to die.

Liza and I were reading while Frankie fell asleep exhausted from his battle with the sand. While I was reading I put my hand in the sand, picking it up and letting it go; creating my own hourglass. I breathed in deeply feeling hot sand slip through my fingers… *** Low pressure moved in from the east on a coastal wind. The little town slept as we lay side by side on the chilly sand under a lifeguard "("! !

! stand in the predawn hours. We inhaled the salt water air; the ocean seemed to be getting ready for winter. Far in the distance lightning was striking the water. There was a spider web of light as a backdrop to the water. Loud crashes of thunder followed the lightning, assuring us that nature was wildly powerful. We felt humbled.

I spoke about my family, my Grandpop’s passing, how we had to sell his shore house because we couldn’t afford the taxes, and the years of memory holed up in that place that I was afraid would pass too.

She sat and listened to my pain, my memories. The energy and beauty from the coming storm mixed with our emotions. Every part of our bodies wanted to kiss, but instead we ran. We ran as fast as we could into the cold ocean water screaming and laughing as the moon shone on our wet skin. I fell in love that night… *** Frankie started biting me. I nicely asked him to stop and he fell back into the sand. Liza talked about what the river might have been like before it was dammed and polluted with nuclear waste, how free and wild it must have been. There was a strain of cold in that layered autumn wind that cut through our skin, to our bones and loosened memories that stuck there… *** My parents, Liza and I went to visit my grandfather while he was on his death bed. It looked as though his bones were vacuum sealed inside his skin. He seemed ready for something I couldn’t understand.

He had fought in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, but he rarely spoke to me about it. The only war story he ever told me he made comical, somehow, saying that a German soldier shot the heel of his boot clear off and that he walked for miles with a bottomless shoe. Other than that story I think he choose to not be known as a war hero to me. To me he was the most humble and nonjudgmental person I had ever met. He was always so gentle with my Grandmother. Many nights at his house my father and I would argue about politics—I was on the radical side, talking about anarchy and "(#! !

! the crimes of the U.S and my dad was conservative, talking about tax reform—but my grandfather just listened, read or slept in his old blue velvet reclining chair. He never spoke a word. Deep down I wondered what he thought about my ideas.

The night we left we said goodbye to my Grandfather for the last time as the almost bare trees scraped the house. Before I got in the car I told my Grandmother that I would see her soon. She stood there crying. Behind her in the lawn I saw the big weeping willow tree that had been so dear to me in my childhood, rock back and forth in the night wind.

On the car ride home I asked my Mom and Dad to go on a detour. I blindfolded Liza and told her I had a surprise for her. When we got to the destination she could almost tell where she was because of the pine trees alone. I took the blindfold off and she immediately remembered her childhood. We had both gone here, to Camp Sankanac as kids. The hundred foot pine trees stood tall and reminded us of all the bonfires that kept us warm those nights, all the laughter and lack of stress we had as we crossed the river and the rope course’s monkey bars and the late night teenage conversations under the stars. We grew up with the forest here. *** We soon had to go. As we left the cottonwoods blew the rest of the cotton they had into the air around us. We felt like little kids running around as bubbles were being blown on us. We loaded Frankie into the milk crate lined with a red and black flannel blanket and tied it to my bike with bungee cords. Liza and I held each other and just took the fall in as we breathed deeply. I did not travel back to another time or memory, but I stayed right here looking at Liza, our dog, the river and the bosque, knowing that one day this would be a memory that I would travel back to.

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In Huckleberry Finn, the young title character (and narrator) recounts his adventures on the Mississippi River in the company of Jim, an escaping slave who is trying to get to a free state so he can buy his family’s freedom.

Throughout the book, Huck’s conscience is bothered by the fact that he is “stealing” someone’s property in helping Jim escape.

At one point, he determines to turn the slave in, and writes a note to his old owner. The novel continues: “I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.

And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we afloating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.

I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “ ‘All right, then, I’ll GO to hell’—and tore it up.” "(&! !

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A Holy Queering: Rewilding Civilized Sexualities -by Chelsea Collonge & Liza Minno Bloom The ideas of civilization and the acts of colonization that seek to domesticate and control that which is inherently wild and good in God’s creation, depend on a mass of binaries—complexities of the natural and social world systemically and robotically reduced to digestible “opposites”. The opposites—male/female, straight/queer, white/black, rational/erotic, human/animal, among others—are assigned values in ways that serve to justify domination. Hierarchy first splits, then ranks; in the aforementioned set, it is clearly the first part of the binary that has been valued and the second that has been devalued.

As those who identify in some way with the Judeo-Christian tradition, we belong to a legacy that has participated in the construction of a dominant culture that legitimates these binaries and therefore devalues sexual and gender multiplicity, non-white peoples, non-human animals, women, the erotic, the body and unmediated creation in general. The oppression has been naturalized by the nation-state and claims of divine ordination. We also, thankfully, belong to a legacy of renewal, re-wilding, resurrection and total liberation. This is what we hope to reclaim and understand together. We believe this process involves examining and dismantling all aspects of ourselves and our world that have been infected by the logic of civilization, including our sexuality.

There are, of course, myriad places to look to witness the ongoing effects of colonization and its civilizing projects. Sexuality is one area that often goes uninterrogated, especially by Christians, and, we’ve noted, by green anarchists or anarch@-primitivists. We understand colonization and its civilizing projects to be fundamentally about controlling sexuality—sexuality of indigenous peoples, of colonizers and their families, of animals (domestication/breeding) and of plants (agriculture). Controlling "(%! !

! sexuality in such an all-encompassing way can only occur if the uncontrolled, the wild, sexuality is somehow devalued. Colonization includes many technologies to devalue wild sexuality. A major goal of missionaries, for one example, was to normativize sexual practices among indigenous populations; this is, infamously, where the term “missionary position” comes from. This desire to control sexuality is part of the larger colonial goal to steal and control land and resources, and to destroy cultural multiplicity. We argue that the goal of rigidly defined, normative heterosexuality stems not from the love of God, from Jesus’s life, or from the holy Spirit, which is wild and loving, but instead from racist, repressive societal codes that demonized non-European peoples by devaluing their sexual practices and deeming them savage with the ultimate goal of justifying mass land theft and cultural and physical genocide. As Waziyatawin puts it, “Theft of a homeland can only be justified through the dehumanization of the original occupiers. It can only be justified through a self-declaration of authority by the thieves.”

This theft and genocide is ongoing today. Colonization is ongoing today. Therefore, the devaluation of wild sexuality, the claim that it is “unnatural” with a self-declaration of authority by land thieves, is ongoing today. Decolonization requires, among many things, illegitimate settler states and corporations to give up their authority over the lands and first peoples of the Americas. This is essential to the emancipation of all land and peoples. But it also involves understanding the logics of colonization that we, ourselves, as “radicals”, have internalized and enact. This means a thorough examination of our practices, our beliefs, the means through which we find our own authority legitimate, what we deem natural and why.

As will hopefully be made clear through the examples that we share in this series of articles, the civilizing logics of colonization work on both the colonized and on those who benefit from systems of colonization. No one, without intentional and constant decolonizing work to the contrary, is exempt from having their thoughts and actions shaped by the abovementioned binaries of civilization. "($! !

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Writing within the context of the U.S nation-state, which is a settler colonial state, it is important for those of us of European descent to locate ourselves in a history of settler colonialism and begin the process (if we haven’t already) of self identifying as settler colonialists. We don’t mean to homogenize or assume whiteness among readers, and we recognize that not all of us will identify as settler colonialists—which is based in Euro-supremacy and is distinct to those of us of white people of European descent living in the Americas. Some readers come from legacies of imported colonialism: slavery, Diaspora, or other movements of globalization.

Both of the authors of this piece are white, Euro-american, with lots of class and settler privilege. The process of self-identifying conditions our respective quests to better integrate our Jesus-based spiritualities, our activism, our desires for justice and renewal, our goals of allyship, our sexualities, and our healing processes. We are also both influenced by the theories of green anarchy or anarchaprimitivism.

For us, and for to whom this applies, being able to self-identify as a settler colonialist means (among other things): 1) recognizing that you are part of an unjust and ongoing occupation of land, 2) that you participate in a dominant system of thought that depends on making the continued destruction of indigenous lands and cultures seem inevitable, and 3) that that same dominant system of thought sets you up to be the “rightful inheritor” of those lands and cultures, since indigenous people are “inevitably disappearing”. Settler colonialists self-identifying as such is absolutely vital to disrupting these trends and to the process of declonization, mentioned above. Since colonization is a two-way street—working on the colonized and those who stand to benefit from colonization—a process of decolonization, of breaking apart the myths and smashing the binaries of civilization, will benefit everyone, including, of course, the land and non-human animals.

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In this sense queering becomes a useful concept for those of us Christians and radicals concerned with the character of the oppressive and seemingly inescapable civilized or colonized world order. To queer is to deconstruct logics and systems that are presented as inevitable, that are presented, perversely, as natural, thereby erasing the sinfulness that went into constructing them. In this series of articles, we are interested in queering the concepts of sexuality and gender that are presented as natural and inevitable to us as Christians, and examining how they help to justify and maintain the ongoing project of settler colonialism. To reiterate, our project is not to try and make people queer (an adjective) but to queer (a verb) what we believe to be natural, right and good in terms of Christian sexuality and to explore how those beliefs may uphold the civilizing project of settler colonialism.

As people concerned with the domestication that we have been subject to and enact, whether or not we are anarch@-primitivists, we can look to our own Judeo-Christian Scriptures for inspiration for rewilding, rather than try to appropriate indigenous peoples’ spiritualities and sexual cultures (if we are not indigenous). Queer theology is an emerging field in Christian scholarship that seeks to share wisdom from the spiritual experiences of those who are sexually marginalized, in order to renew all our sexualities. The radical, superabundant love at the heart of the Christian story is mighty queer in the way that it challenges “natural” boundaries. (For a good primer in queer theology, see the new book Radical Love by Patrick Cheng.) For example, the incarnated Jesus destroyed the human/divine binary, just as the risen Christ dissolved the boundary

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! between life and death. In his ministry, the historical Jesus deliberately transgressed social boundaries, relating intimately with people who were of the “wrong” sexuality and/or gender, in order to enter freely into relationships of love. If sexuality is energy for relationship, for abundant life (John 10:10), then Jesus resisted the societal controls that exist to channel this energy into economic and power arrangements, as these are foreign to the human heart’s purpose: to be wild and free (Gal. 5:1).

Jesus’s own social status and identity were also more queer than we can realize from our Christian perspective, which has elevated celibacy to a place of spiritual superiority. In Jesus’s culture, celibacy was seen as highly unnatural; he was a man who voluntarily declined to “own” other human beings through the institutions of patriarchal marriage and fatherhood. Could not Jesus have been referring to himself when he said, “For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”? (Matt.

19:12). Notice how Jesus gives not one but many explanations for the existence of eunuchs, or sexual minorities. God’s creation is more diverse and abundant that we can possibly explain or regulate.

"()! !

!

The Beginning of Wisdom: Heartbreak at the Bayview Cafe

By Jack Donovan I got to know an esteemed anthropologist when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Pacific islands of Micronesia, in the island cluster called Chuk or Truk. I’ve mentioned him before -- Tom Gladwin. He was known as an important authority on the culture and people of the Truk islands. From 1947 to 1951, right after World War II in the Pacific, he had worked and studied there as a staff anthropologist for the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands which had been assigned to the U.S. after the war.

By the end of that tour of duty, he had produced an authoritative anthropological and psychological study which he titled, Truk: Man in Paradise. For Professor Gladwin, the Truk Islands were paradise and he was himself Man in Paradise.

He loved the people and the place. He returned often from his post on the faculty of Harvard University to reconnect and to continue his research. In the late sixties he published another highly regarded and authoritative book on how island navigators use memorized patterns of waves, currents, winds and stars to sail thousands of miles to other tiny islands scattered across the Pacific.

He was definitely the authority out there. So he was disturbed in the 1960s when he began to be aware of some changes in the culture and people – conflict and division over trivial material possessions and minor status positions that were unprecedented apparently for the 2500 years or so that the Truk Islands had been lived upon by people. As an anthropologist, advocate and adopted islander, Tom became aware that something was heading the wrong way and paradise was changing for the worse.

Jesus doubtless grew up with such an awareness. But it was nothing new for him and his people. Class divisions, material avarice, anxiety and fear, ""(! !

! imperial domination, colonization, poverty, disenfranchisement – this was Israel’s story – expulsion from paradise for so long, and so frequently repeated, that The Fall was a common topic.

Jesus had perhaps removed himself from it all for some time, or had even been removed about the time of his Bar Mitzvah – to live and study out where John the Baptist was – in the wilderness of Israel – where the ultra purist Jewish Essene community had secluded itself – or perhaps training with the Sicari, the underground Jewish insurrectionists of the day who sought to drive out the Romans. It seems Jesus hadn't been in Galilee for a while because upon his first return he wasn't readily recognized even in his hometown of Nazareth.

But like Tom Gladwin drawn back to the hope and beauty of the land, Jesus returned to Galilee when he heard that his cousin John had been arrested, or perhaps been betrayed in the course of all the political and economic conflict, for the term the gospel actually uses is not “arrested”, but “delivered up”, suggesting betrayal.

So Jesus returns and turns up at the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee with four disciples – Andrew, Simon Peter, James and John, and maybe more. And the scripture tells us that those in the synagogue were amazed at his teaching.

What did he teach that was so amazing? According to the report in Mark’s gospel, Jesus was teaching “the good news”, that the kingdom of God was near at hand and that the people should believe that it was near at hand and should repoint, redirect, themselves to enter it. That would have been amazing to hear.

Who could believe such a thing in their times? Who can believe such a thing in our times?

"""! !

!

Most amazingly, as part of the good news, Jesus proclaimed the jubilee year of God's grace, when debts were all to be forgiven and all the land was to be restored to every member of the community.

Jesus proclaimed that Isaiah's prophecy time had come, with restoration for the blind and crippled and impoverished and imprisoned! He may have even proclaimed the angel's words to his mother – that the fullness of grace and truth was with them all in the power of God's holy spirit.

Amazing!

And he may have used the words Paul later quoted, that The Way is a way of faith and hope and loving care, and that this is God's way. And he may even have dared to say, “On this day, this prophecy is fulfilled and I am the way, and the truth, and the life. So take care, keep watch, and believe in the good news.”

What a day. But how unlikely to be fulfilled!

This morning’s gospel reading indicates that the people were amazed not only at what Jesus said, but how he said it: “as if” he had the authority, the knowledge and the enforcement power, to make such a claim be true!

“Yuh! As if...! In your dreams, fella!” And yet, what wholeheartedness, what confidence and conviction. He spoke not as one paid to read the scripture, but as one who lived it!

And then -- wonder of wonders! -- he proved it! He proved that his faith and proclamation was justified, that God's life-power of grace and truth was present and available.

What did he do? He spoke to the man of unpure spirit whom everyone else abjured. And what did he say? He whispered, “Be at peace. Be calm. Be free.” ""#! !

!

And the man could not resist God's embrace of grace in the hands and eyes of this teacher and he was cleansed and set free by the light of love.

The people there said the man of impure spirit obeyed or that his spirit obeyed or that some occupying army of spirits obeyed. But no – the man was simply cleansed and filled by grace. It was not obedience they saw, but liberation and entry into the state of blessedness. For the kingdom of heaven, in grace and glory, had come near enough that it touched him and he was not destroyed, but only the prison-walls that enslaved his soul were destroyed.

Now the sabbath worshippers were amazed at what Jesus said and how he said it. And, perhaps, given that his fame spread through the land based on their word, perhaps they were amazed at why he said it.

Why had he said it? They would have sensed in his eyes and touch and voice: He wanted people to have peace and joy. And he wanted people to have the way to peace and joy, by faith and hope and lovingkindness. And he wanted people to have the powers of grace and truth to empower them on the way. …....................................................

Tom Gladwin kept returning to the Trukese Islands and in the passing of roughly two generations of islanders he saw the bad changes become very bad. The old integrative sachem practices for medical and spiritual health gave way to missionary priests and American doctors. Divisions of wealth and poverty and power and powerlessness were established for the first time ever. Social breakdown was rampant – alcoholism, violence, unprecedented anxiety, and the world's highest suicide rate among young adults.

So on a trip back in the mid 1970s, Tom called together all the islanders who had been his respondents and field assistants over the years. He held ""'! !

! a reunion of his team in the Bayview Café, overlooking the little harbor and its breakwater and the vast blue lagoon full of high green islands ten and twenty miles distant.

And still seeing himself as the authority and still seeing himself as the one who would have to come up with the solution, he said, “Something has gone very wrong. Everyone seems in conflict. What's happened?”

And his normally chatty friends and colleagues, who he knew loved him like a father or brother, were silent – terribly uncomfortably silent – looking away from him out onto the sparkling waters and the boats coming and going beneath the windows of the Bayview Cafe.

And suddenly he knew. “Anything to do with the elections?” he asked.

Back in 1947, Tom had been assigned responsibility to implement democratic elections on each of the thirteen big Trukese islands to replace the old traditional way of a few select elders choosing the island chiefs. It had been just after the World War. The U.S. had liberated Truk and all the islands from a cruel and oppressive Japanese occupation. Democratic elections were the American way. Tom had been proud of his work and of his workers.

And they said, “No, Mr. Tom. Not the elections. You did a great work.”

And he knew they were lying to him, out of respect and love.

And gradually that day at the Bayview Café, they talked about the old days and Dr. Tom Gladwin realized what he had known as an anthropologist, but had ignored as an American – that all decisions on the islands had always tradditionally been carried out by consensus, with every villager having a say under the watchful eye of the village matriarchs, the village grandmothers.

And that included the selection of the island chiefs – a job nobody really ""&! !

! wanted, it turned out, because the matriarchs were so tough on making sure everybody always had a say.

But the elections brought winners and losers – and the winners believed that winning meant keeping everything they could just for their families and friends and themselves.

Consensus is not easy work. But it had always worked. It worked for peace and prosperity for all. It was the truest fullest democracy. And now it was gone with winner-take-all elections. Life had gone to hell.

Yes, Mr. Tom, Tom’s friends finally admitted. That’s what has happened.

Professor Gladwin carried that pain all alone for several years. Then it came out at a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that President Kennedy's administration, under the guise of implementing the United Nations mandate to bring economic and political independence to all trust territories, had established a secret national security policy to bind the islands to the U.S. by creating economic dependency. The purpose was to keep the islands permanently as strategic military outposts, including for nuclear testing and for nuclear submarine bases.

The subtle replacement of the independent subsistence economy of the islands with a cash economy funded by the U.S. Government was coupled with the political divisiveness generated by the elections to embroil the islanders in deep worry and conflict.

And Professor Gladwin also came to see that these two factors were greatly exacerbated by a population explosion from excess food, loss of real work, western medicines, and most tragically by submission to the Roman Catholic diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C., successfully lobbying the U.S. Congress to forbid any family planning or contraception education. ""%! !

!

Tom was not the only one at fault. It was a perfect storm of imperial destruction. Jesus would have recognized it clearly enough. Why did Mr. Tom not see it early on?

When I visited him in the 1980s, he blamed the destruction on his own arrogance, all the more grievous for his being an anthropologist, one trained to honor the integrity of different peoples and different cultures.

In one brief lapse, he had not bothered to question whether his American systems were improvements in that setting over the islanders' traditional systems.

He had valued hierarchies and individual competition and exclusions and winners and losers. The islanders valued communal responsibility and inclusion and sharing so everybody won and flourished as individuals and as community.

Sadly, his authority had more force, though less truth, than theirs.

The psalmist might say that Tom's temporary arrogance of superior knowledge about good and bad had blocked the flow of God's grace and truth and that’s what destroyed paradise. Professor Tom had not realized that God would teach him a new thing through the island life and he did not begin to have that wisdom till his heart got broken in the Bayview Cafe and by then it was too late.

Jesus would have realized. He was humble. He always started with a question.

He knew a deep truth, but he did not presume to know the other person’s truth.

What do you seek, he would ask. What do you need? What do you want?

At the least, the inquiry gets the respondent thinking.

Jesus asked, and did not get driven off by confrontation with, an impure or wayward spirit. He had faced his own demons in the wilderness for that representative forty days and perhaps for 20 or so years before that – and ""$! !

! he had asked his demons that very question – What do you want? And he had trained himself to know that their demands and needs were not the one true thing needed – and he cleansed them of their obstructions and removed them as obstacles to the flow of truth and grace.

And Jesus did not cease to be awed by the power of God and to have faith in that awesome power, that it would always bring a higher teaching and do a new thing to make life good.

Tom Gladwin did learn to have awe for the wonderful powers of life and creativity that God gives all peoples. We don't always use them well, as the history of Israel and its neighbors testify so powerfully, and our own history, and as Tom saw in himself. But propelled by what he learned, Tom went on to publish what I have heard became a major analysis of the destructiveness of imperialism and unexamined presumptions of cultural supremacy.

On an individual basis he was redeemed by his own grief and his willingness to learn the great lesson that the study of humankind and its systems provides.

The bible itself is a textbook for such study and the gospels are the guidebook for how to make our systems work for good and for doing God's will on earth as it is in heaven.

As always, for the powers that be, for the 1%, or even the 10% who benefit from complicit maintenance and defense of the 1%, the study of God's anthropology as taught by Jesus is a great threat.

I cannot see that the 1% and their 10% followers really stand in awe of God or in love with God's children. I do think I see why they would remove anthropology from the main course of human study.

""B! !

!

I believe that the scripture readings we’ve heard this morning can be understood to say: The beginning of wisdom, of seeing and doing the right thing, is to be in awe of the new things God can and will do by pouring that divine amazing grace into all beings. The beginning of wisdom is to reverently fear that we may know a lot less than we need to know, and can know, to live as wisely as we could.

The beginning of wisdom is to humbly and hungrily study the wonders of God in creation – to question injury, to praise goodness, to thank blessedness, to follow God's way of boundless grace.

The beginning of wisdom is to realize every being is sacred and to help every being toward holiness as time and place and conditions allow.

And the beginning of wisdom is at some point to accept what Jesus said, that just as we pay attention and become our own authorities on reading the signs of the weather, we should grow up and with the guidance of scripture and reason and experience and love, become authorities on reading the signs of the times and on deciding for ourselves what is right.

May we work together to make our decisions good for all the earth.

Thanks be to God.

""A! !

!

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I don’t believe in “creation care”. Creation care is too little too late.

We are past the time when any of the changes that advocates of creation care recommend will make any significant difference in our environmental situation. Recycling, changing light bulbs, riding bicycles, or starting a garden will not be sufficient to address the magnitude of the challenge before us.

Creation care is a moralistic cover for our ongoing complicity in an evil system that is wreaking havoc on this planet. Creation care doesn’t recognize the depth of the mess we’re in. We are, as psychologist Bill Plotkin has asserted, an adolescent society that has not yet come to grips with what being a mature human being in this world requires. We use more energy to live our lives each day than any society in human history. We have created an extractive economy that utilizes nonrenewable resources which have taken thousands of years to develop, and then expends them in a matter of decades.

Governments and corporations are working together now to do whatever it takes to keep this economic system going. We will drill deeper wells, cut down more trees, fight more wars, and cause more and more chaos in the environment; all for the sake of economic growth and having more.

But we don’t have to monitor the ozone layer, measure melting glaciers, or count species depletion to know the destruction all of this is causing. We carry the environmental crisis in our bodies. We carry it in our bones. We talk about “environmental illness” as if the environment is killing us; but the environment is not our enemy. We are killing ourselves. The problem is not out there and the solution is not out there. "")! !

!

I don’t believe in creation care because the creation doesn’t need our care. The planet will survive even if the human species becomes extinct. The natural environment is astonishingly robust and

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resilient. We are horrified by the strip-mined mountains in West Virginia, the landfills in Calumet, or the polluted beaches in Louisiana. We should be. We should be angry and we should work on as many fronts as possible end these violations of the earth. Yes, these things are horrors and we human beings are responsible for them. But nature will recover. We get fooled because the natural world works differently than we do. The time of the earth is not human time. Nature is not interested in speed.

"#(! !

!

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Thank you to everyone who contributed to this issue and everyone who has supported this journal with actions, thoughts, prayers and love. Please make copies of it if you can. Many of the essays have been posted on the Jesus Radicals site,www.jesusradicals.com. Other recommended sites include, www.green-anarchy.wikidot.com (the best archive of h/g related anthropology), greenisthenewred.com (prisoner support links and check out" shit the FBI says"), survivalinternational.org (up to date information on supporting struggles for survival), feralchristian.org, http://johntracey.blogspot.com, inthelandoftheliving.org The piece by Karen L. Endicott is from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers which I highly recommend; sometimes you can find cheap used copies of this amazing resource.

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