Designing With Ancestrality

Commercial Telephone Line. Pennsylvania, 1940 | C. W. Mattison, National Archives | Public domain

À minha família brasileira, especialmente à minha tia Marlucia.
E também ao Flávio, o Pai de Santo, e ao terreiro que ele cuida.

The positivist mutilation of spirituality at the end of a world

The early 20th century was marked by the consolidation of the social sciences. In this foundational period, the sociologist and economist Max Weber explained how the new social order was structured around rationalisation – a process that organises life based on logic and efficiency. This went hand in hand with a bureaucratisation which, supported by positivism, eroded the magical, religious and transcendental meaning in our experience of the world. This (supposed) disenchantment brought with it a loss of existential meaning that flattened and desiccated the understanding of reality in industrial society.

A hundred years later, the tensions of the climate emergency, the crisis of liberal democracy, the crazed visions proffered by the tech magnates and the morphing of life into a bunch of financial assets all show that the Western world’s limited capacity for feeling has resulted in null self-regulation of a productive metabolism that has spiralled out of control and become toxic to life. In fact, in the preface to the Brazilian edition of The Falling Sky by the indigenous Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes that “Western civilization has monstrous characteristics that portend a disastrous future for the planet.”

The mythical structure of techno-financial capitalism

We are the protagonists of the end of a civilizing state (and a productive model) that apparently wants to die out in a blaze of killing. In these death throes, the fabric of modernity stretches out and reveals its stubborn mythological seams, from which increasingly bloodless technoscientific futures are desperately wrung. There is one example that clearly illustrates our contemporary escapism – the ecomodernist view that technology and the free market are the drivers of a bright future, along with the belief that it is possible to “decouple” economic growth from its environmental impact (which has led us to skew the planetary balance).

These visions – increasingly heaped with fiction – are fuelled by uncertainty, something that is on the rise thanks to the broken promises of neoliberalism, the political inability to respond to ecocide, precarisation and techno-financial volatility. All combined, the dikes that hold up the illusion of security are beginning to crack, forcing us to face an uncertainty that had supposedly been overcome by progress. What was once entirely unknown now presents itself to us with familiarity, in doing so overturning the rationalist foundations analysed by Weber and ushering a renewed enchantment into social experience. As a result, it seems that the West is reconnecting with the human impetus to search for the sacred and ineffable.

Things that exist in other worlds

Within this forced confrontation with the unknown absolute, we have a lot to learn from the ability of the Yanomami people to pay close attention to the mythical nature of things. As the philosopher Federico Campagna explains, the parameters that define our understanding of what is real (our metaphysical principles) generate a cosmos in which some things exist, and others do not. Thus, various entities (spirits, ghosts, souls, financial assets, personal success, subatomic particles) allow the existence of certain worlds to the detriment of others. This determines what is possible and reasonable and defines the boundaries of what we are capable of doing socially. It also underpins certain social experiences of time (for example, global flows of capital in detriment to the earth’s time, accelerated by industrial agriculture), and consequently frames ways of managing resources and bodies.

The exuberant wealth of Brazil encompasses the presence of spirits (in the sense that people recognise their existence). In Umbanda, the syncretic Brazilian religion, ancestors play a central role. These entities represent people who lived centuries ago and were victims of various types of violence. The terreiros (or chapels) are the communities and sacred spaces that are built up around them. Here, ancestral spirits manifest themselves in our plane of reality through people capable of embodying them and channelling their wisdom. Everything is sustained thanks to a structure of reality that gives them meaning, as well as the network of community ties, spiritual traditions, complex cosmogonic systems passed down orally, and an embodied knowledge that can only be obtained through experience.

Illustrated spirituality

Fortunately, our worldview also has interpreters of the ineffable who can help us to recover a sensory fabric capable of opening up, with humility and attention, to that which has been labelled as irrational. In fact, the state of being rational or irrational is defined by the (in)ability to allow or disallow the existence of certain things in our society. In this sense, Campagna invites us to transform the (metaphysical) foundations with which we define what is real in order to allow the birth of a different cosmogony for the creation of the universe.

In line with this proposal, the philosopher María Zambrano encourages us to approach the divine as a path to transcendence – in other words, to moving beyond what we narrowly believe to constitute our world. Poetic reason, she explains, can help us to move beyond the limits of what is representable and scrutinise the mysteries of experience in relation to that which is eternal and sacred. And this, as we know, is no easy task for those of us who are firmly entrenched in the aridity of modern existence.

At a time in history when malaise is spreading in such perverse ways, the philosophy of Simone Weil suggests mysticism as a way of focusing the attention on suffering and as a path towards connecting with the supreme good and the absolute – a vastness that goes beyond individual consciousness and the temporality of a human life. The way to put this mysticism into practice, Weil points out, is through attentive, cautious and patient observation, in a way akin to how Buddhism invites us to remain “awake” or to search for the “truth of suffering”.

The things that ancestors do

To speak in our own language of modernity, fully mindful that we exist in a limited and limiting worldview, we can say that ancestral spirits are, in some worlds, things that do things. Firstly, they open up dimensions of experience that, in turn, transcend the materiality of the here and now. In this way, they usher that which is foreign (temporal, metaphysical) into our experience of reality, thus becoming chronopolitical devices insofar as they invoke past times in the present and play a central role in the preservation of memory.

Just as they create these continuums, ancestral spirits link together the conscious and unconscious dimensions when they manifest through dreams, while also helping to bring people into synch with the rhythms of the natural worlds which they inhabit. This harnesses the wisdom passed down from generation to generation and opens up the imagination – and the resulting courses of action – towards ways of being and existing that we, as moderns, find uncomfortable.

Consequently, recognising their existence can be a way of responsibly re-enchanting our experience, of experimenting with forms of faith beyond those of the hegemonic religions, progress and technoscience, and of embarking on alternative ritual practices that take us beyond the nuclear family and consumerism. In Catalonia we find similar frameworks in the popular festivals and the mysticism of Montserrat, as they connect us to things greater than ourselves and organise beliefs, spaces and communities in situated contexts. In fact, ancestors never exist on a general level, but are always bound to a territory that they protect, unleashing both individual and collective forces.

Ancestrality for dismantling techno-financial metaphysics

The fact of recognising the existence of certain entities and not of others also organises and prioritises certain narrative frameworks that include norms, values, habits and relational inertias that feed into the struggle to define the fundamental principles of a worldview – and therefore what is good, useful and desirable. Moving towards “good living,” as the anthropologist Arturo Escobar proposes, would involve opening up our understanding of what is real, thus allowing other worlds into our own. Here, a self-aware and critical spirituality may help us to resignify what happens to us, and even more importantly, what we perceive as being uncertain. Today, some of our greatest fears about the future are related to techno-financial volatility. In terms of existential risk, for example, artificial intelligence is seen as a danger to humanity, even more so than the dismantling of our already fragile democracies in the name of the free market.

Reclaiming the capacity and the right to a metaphysical sovereignty capable of deciding what is real and what is not, free from the miseries of success, competition and techno-financial worries, can help us ensure that ecomodernism does not sever our commitment to the defence of life. Recognising the agency of ancestrality in the world can help us to ground ourselves more deeply in the present (instead of constantly rushing towards the future) while bringing us into synch with other planetary temporalities.

Ancestry in the design of eco-social transitions

Faced with the growing realisation that our social order is running out of steam (and with our failure to construct future narratives that are not terrifying), Federico Campagna asks what we wish to collectively bequeath so that future generations can build up a memory that guides them in creating a new world. Ancestors, as we have seen, weave continuities between different times and different worlds, meaning they can accompany us in the profound eco-social transition in which we are currently immersed. Because participating in these transitions also means constructing new existential categories that allow a new kind of feeling to shape an emergent future.

To design with ancestrality, then, requires transforming access to consciousness in a way similar to meditation – with heightened attention and perception, but also reworking our aesthetics, in other words, our perceptual patterns and ways of feeling. It means creating a structure in our feeling (which is pre-rational and precedes action) that helps us grieve for what is coming to an end, tapping into a collective wisdom capable of identifying which forms of life, subjectivities, desires, institutions and productive structures must be left behind. And doing so not only because they do no good to life on this planet, but because they have led us into our current mess.

It is crucial to understand that this metaphysical transformation, aided by the recognition of ancestors, entails spiritual work. This should not be understood as New Age froth, but as a rational entry point for shedding metaphysical limitations and embarking on a new practice in the same way we engage in physical, intellectual and psychological exercise. It should also be  a way to connect with our more-than-human lineage so that we too can accept the invitation of deep ecology to strive to be good ancestors.

Umbanda shows us that a communal spiritual practice can be self-managed. In this religion, anyone who wishes to set up a terreiro can do so by themselves. In Europe, the rich network of public infrastructures could lend itself to exploring Western ancestrality. Indeed, libraries today are living temples of the Enlightenment, safe spaces where certain intellects and sensibilities are exercised. We need only broaden the focus to accommodate new rituals that allow us, socially, to incorporate ancestrality, leave behind inertias that do us no good, and free ourselves from our modern optimism in the omnipotence of technoscience. And along the way, affirmatively reverse the process of disenchantment of which Weber spoke, so that we may close the door on the world he described while giving birth to a new one.

This text is the result of a series of experiences and conversations that have taken place over the years. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have shared with me their curiosity, wisdom and generosity.