Riotous methodological and methodointuitive reflections on (non)religion,spirituality and the multispecies turn

Abstract

The ‘multispecies turn’ in the social sciences and humanities is informing many disciplines including animal studies, anthropology, Indigenous studies and, more recently, sociology of religion. Scholars working on multispecies relations employ various methods and methodologies, many of which are challenging modern, Western, Christian paradigms and practices that are anthropocentric and focus on logos/words/texts/beliefs. This discussion examines new and multiple ways of conducting multispecies focused research, that is critical, reflexive, embodied, affective and intuitive. It begins with an overview of the methods applied by notable scholars – Kimmerer, Tsing and Beaman – researching multispecies relations, and then includes four personal ‘riotous’ reflections by this article’s co-authors, on their own positionality and experiences of conducting such research. The discussion concludes by identifying key challenges in research on diverse worldviews and multispecies relations, and aims to generate creative and scientific responses to further decenter anthropocentrism in academia.

What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just – like flowers – through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015: 1)

Mushrooms, methods and reflexive relational rioting

In a time of polycrisis and precarity, and particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are retreating to and resting in nature as an antidote to the pummelling pressures of late-modern capitalism (Halafoff, 2021). Almost a decade ago, Chinese American anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) turned to Japanese matsutake mushrooms, as ‘guides … to possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance’ and ‘collaborative survival’. Her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, is an ethnography, expressed as a personal narrative, infused with insights gathered through historical, ecological and feminist research and interviews, and adorned with poetry, illustrations and photographs.

Tsing (2015: vii) notes that it was the ‘moral intentionality of Man’s Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature’. Or, we add, at least attempted to ‘tame and master’ (Tsing, 2015: vii) her, and all ‘others’ who were not male, human and White. And yet, as Tsing (2015: vii) points out, the ‘riotous presence’ of those who cannot be tamed, including women, non-Western and/or more-than-human beings persistently undermine the modern project, and it is our/their stories that are the antidote to the mess created by colonialism and capitalism. Tsing (2015: vii) describes her text as a ‘riot of chapters … like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain’, that ‘build an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine’ and ‘tangle with each other … gestur[ing] to the so-much-more out there’. She emphasises curiosity, ‘noticing’, surprise, imagining, possibilities and ‘adventure-in-process’ throughout the first to final chapters (Tsing, 2015: 279).

We set out to write an article, at the request of the Social Compass editorial board, which asked us to include a focus on methods for undertaking research on (non)religion, spirituality and multispecies relations in this Special Issue. Inspired by Tsing (2015: vii, 282, 286), this piece is purposefully structured as a riot of methodological and methodointuitive reflections, tangled together and unveiling ‘latent commons’ in unexpected ways through ‘playful collaborations’.

We started by asking how sociological research on diverse worldviews and multispecies relations can move beyond anthropocentricism when it is primarily focused on human society and participants? How can we as researchers include more-than-human knowing in our work? We also reflected on the constraints of our discipline: sociological research – as with many other disciplines – is embedded in a Western, Christian intellectual genealogy centred on logos/words/texts/beliefs. We recognise that alongside the multispecies turn, scholars of religion have been deeply engaged in parallel material (Fuller, 2008; Houtman and Meyer, 2012) and affective (Fuller, 2006; Schaefer, 2015) turns disrupting the cartesian binary between mind and matter, thoughts and feelings, and the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]). At the heart of this and our critique, is the need to ‘resist’ this dualism (McCance, 2013: 145–146) and embrace complexity (Bouma et al., 2022; Furseth, 2018; Halafoff et al., 2023; Yunkaporta, 2019).

This article begins by reflecting on Tsing’s mushroom research and methods. We next reflect on two more examples of multispecies research – Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants and Lori Beaman’s (2017) work on turtle rescue and (non)religious futures – before sharing our personal reflections of conducting more-than-human (non)religion and spirituality research.

By reading and reflecting together, we discovered new things about each other and our work, surprising ourselves. We hope this discussion will similarly enliven and inspire you, the readers, to explore for yourselves de-centering the human, the logical and the individual in your own work and re-centring deep knowing, storying and multispecies relationality. As Tsing (2015: 287) educes, ‘stories should never end, but rather lead to further stories’, ‘adventures lead to more adventures … When gathering mushrooms, one is not enough; finding the first encourages me[us] to find more’. ¹

Braiding sweetgrass and plant wisdom

Indigenous botanist Kimmerer (2013: ix) explains that sweetgrass’s scientific name is ‘Hierochloe odorata, meaning fragrant, holy grass’. In her community’s language ‘it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth’. ‘Breathe it in’, she says, ‘and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten’. It is used in ceremony, as medicine and to make baskets (Kimmerer, 2013: 5).

Kimmerer (2013: ix) shows us how the ‘sweetest way’ to braid sweetgrass ‘is to have someone else hold the end’, as ‘[l]inked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you’. In her book she offers ‘a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world’. She explains how:

This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most … old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth. (Kimmerer, 2013: x)

Kimmerer (2013: 7) discovered through a survey that many of her students thought ‘humans and nature are a bad mix’: they could not recount any examples of mutually beneficial multispecies relationships. Kimmerer was deeply moved by this, realising that they had not been raised with Indigenous stories and knowledges. She then contrasted the Indigenous story of Skywoman with the Christian story of Eve.

She relates the story of Skywoman, who fell from the Skyworld and was lovingly caught by animals and birds. Together they danced Turtle Island [what are now called North and Central America] and the earth into being, and Skywoman spread seeds of plants from the Skyworld’s Tree of Life ‘creating a garden for the wellbeing of all’ (Kimmerer, 2013: 7). Animals, plants and humans all lived there harmoniously in gratitude and reciprocity (Kimmerer, 2013: 4–5, 9). Eve, by contrast, was banished from the garden of Eden for tasting forbidden fruit, and ‘instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast … An exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven’ (Kimmerer, 2013: 7). Kimmerer observes: ‘Same species, same earth, different stories’. She notes that Indigenous stories provide ‘Original Instructions’ as ‘ethical prescriptions for respectful hunting, family life’ and ‘ceremonies that made sense for their world ‘(Kimmerer, 2013: 7). And that: ‘The earth was new then, when it welcomed the first human. It’s old now, and some suspect that we have worn out our welcome by casting the Original Instructions aside’ (Kimmerer, 2013: 8).

Kimmerer (2013: 9) asks ‘can we all understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future?’ She further explains how in ‘Native ways of knowing’ humans are seen to have ‘the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn’ (Kimmerer, 2013: 10), adding how:

we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out …

I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen. (Kimmerer, 2013: 10)

Turtle knowing and living well together

In her ‘sea turtle project’, Beaman (2017: 10–11) set out to better understand human–nonhuman animal relationships and also negotiations of religious and non-religious identity in contemporary societies. She was interested in finding out volunteers’ motivations for rescuing sea turtles, discovering how they framed their connections with sea turtles and how this was informed by their worldviews. She interviewed directors of sea turtle rescue organisations and volunteers from diverse backgrounds.

What Beaman (2017: 11, 18) discovered was that rescuers emphasised the importance of collaboration, cooperation and interdependence between species and among volunteers and that ‘different worldviews can nonetheless result in a shared commitment to action’. This she says is at least in part attributed to the international nature of the work, as ‘[s]ea turtles themselves are borderless cosmopolitans’ (Beaman, 2017: 13) and as the volunteers she interviewed were from a variety of diverse religious, spiritual and non-religious orientations, yet almost all ‘combined science, emotion, and a sense of awe about the world’ in their worldviews (Beaman, 2017: 21). They spoke of turtles in ‘caring, respectful ways’, drawing ‘on a language of equality’, stressing similarities, service, appreciation and humility by acknowledging the limits of their understanding – as one respondent stated ‘turtles know turtle things’ (Beaman, 2017: 21, 25). Beaman also quoted Kathleen Martin (2015), Director, Canadian Sea Turtle Network as saying: ‘There is a wisdom in those [turtle] eyes that is different from our own. That knows the world in a way we don’t. What a privilege to have been in its presence’ (Beaman, 2017: 25). Beaman found both coherence and fluidity in the social formations of sea turtle rescuers, with ‘like-minded people coming together for a cause’ in certain places and certain times across boundaries based on ‘a shared commitment, perhaps a shared ethos or worldview’ (Beaman, 2017: 23) with the ‘so-called natural world’ at its ‘epicenter’ (Beaman, 2017: 27).

Beamen (2017) concludes that in our contemporary world and in the face of environmental crisis, sociologists of religion need to ‘reimagine our research in ways that extend our focus from religious groups, to the interaction between religion and nonreligion and to the environment that supports us and with which we are intimately connected’ (p. 27). This she argues, drawing on Jacques Derrida (2012: 25–26) can provide valuable insights on how to ‘live well together’. As one of Beaman’s respondents, Ann, who was no longer a ‘church goer’, describes:

I do believe in spiritual elements, and I definitely feel it with these animals – with the turtles I definitely feel it … I feel a bond, I have a connection … when it gets more spiritual is when I think we give of ourselves to something else. It could be a person, it could be an animal, it could be an insect … that’s, you know, struggling somewhere … when you go to save an insect, or an animal, or a person you get something back from that, and it’s just a sense of peace and fulfillment that I feel within my heart, within my soul. (Beaman, 2017: 20)

We now present our series of personal riotous reflections, focused on methodological and methodointuitive inquiry on (non)religion, spirituality and the multispecies turn, before weaving Tsing, Kimmerer, Beaman’s and our reflections together at the end of this article.

Magical scepticism and the spirit of inquiry

Tyson Yunkaporta ²

I am a scientific rationalist, a sceptic and a secularist who nonetheless spends at least 20 minutes a day gathering every stray hair in the house and flushing them all down the toilet so purri people can’t use them to harm my family with black magic. I don’t experience any dissonance with these paradoxical frames existing together, as my culture respects contradictory views of reality, knowing that in the aggregated yarns of deep time and relation, reliable heuristics will emerge with great utility for prediction, decision-making and problem-solving. I can be Newton when I’m playing pool, Einstein when I’m trying to get a satellite signal and Yunupingu when I’m cutting a bloodwood sapling for ceremony. But I do struggle with my anti-colonial critique of religion, the institutional knowledge which I regard as an artificial separation of the spiritual and secular (usually followed by attempts to control secular realities with dogma to facilitate extraction and control). I recognise my academic and cultural hypocrisy in this regard and find myself unable to reconcile my Indigenous methods of inquiry, which demand respect and dialogue with all disciplines, with my oppositional framing of diverse theologies and disciplines.

I think my Aboriginal culture is not spiritual, because matters of spirit are not separable from ecology, governance, trade and technology. Totemic connections with multiple species, places, tools and entities of spirit are simply part of my ontology, kan kanam (true, really real), and simply a mundane part of my science and daily routine. I regard most other spiritual traditions as recent inventions spawned through empires. It’s an arrogant standpoint that threatens the validity of any research I undertake in the sociology of religion. At the same time, I have such confidence (faith?) in Indigenous methods of inquiry that I will persist with a narrative-driven, multispecies relational analysis here in order to excise the irrational bias that compromises my research and wellbeing. For this case study, I’ll examine my L1 vertebra.

I’ve always had back pain, but it is crippling now. My traditional inquiry over the past two decades has led me to consult people of many disciplines, including pseudo-scientific ones like immunologists, and being prescribed everything from opiates and anti-depressants to oxtail soup and Ivermectin. After a lot of respectful listening and trial-and-error, and some recent scans and X-rays, the diagnosis is that my back was broken and left untreated in early childhood. This sits alongside a number of interrelated conditions from that time in my life, like foetal alcohol syndrome, persistent untreated bronchial pneumonia, otitis media resulting in permanent hearing impairment, and a suite of other ills adding up to a shortened and unpleasant adulthood, caused by everything from cheap shoes to lead-poisoning from camps around mining sites. No L1 grinds itself to dust in isolation, and there is always a historical context if you seek to understand and mitigate a problem.

That’s the limit of holistic inquiry if you only interact with human beings. But there is more diegetic information to be found in this case study, through narrative datasets in which the nonhuman participants are voiced. Of course, in isolation these data can only demonstrate correlation rather than causation, and cannot be reasonably verified or falsified. Yet, the story exists, and assists with meaning-making around other findings, as long as the Indigenous scientist poly-angulates with multiple datasets and avoids trying to generalise ‘miracles’ at scale. There are feedback loops to consider here that are more complex.

I can’t claim any of this case study as evidence of the existence of spirit, or the sentience of nonhuman entities, but it does demonstrate the existence of consistent and inconsistent logics within the narrative fabric of human ontologies, logics that can help or hinder us in the project of organising and living by sound bodies of knowledge, embedded in authentic relation with the complex systems that form our habitat. The purpose of this informal inquiry would be to propose evidence-based ontologies grounded in place-based reasoning, potentially offering effective frames for the spiritually informed naturalism that motivates most collective action on climate change mitigation and the reversal of biodiversity loss.

Turtle was once part of my diet, but now I only ever seem to eat him at funeral feasts, so my subjective relation with that entity is now associated with grief and loss. I’ve only ever looked into the eyes of turtle while he was harpooned and dying. In my wider objectivity, turtle shell gives us the fractal algorithms of creation and the narrative patterning I use to organise understandings of Sunrise–Sunset Dreaming, which is a continental common Law that unifies our disciplines and relations in an interdependent, syndicated network of over a thousand local bioregions and territories. The same hexagonal pattern is replicated in every turtle shell and beehive on the planet.

Sawfish, whales and migratory birds and fish trace that Law in paths that connect these flows between continents. On a smaller, land-locked orbit between relations in South Australia and Far North Queensland, I was given totemic responsibilities to carry for white owl. Almost half a century ago, an Elder from the West found a whale vertebra on the beach, and the whale people told him he had to keep that until the day he saw a man carrying white owl story across the continent. They told him the man would know what to do with it, and 10 years ago he met me and passed the whalebone into my care. I often wonder if he made a mistake. I never mentioned owl to him, so I thought it was a confirmation of his judgement that he somehow just knew by looking at me. That’s not appropriate logic in Indigenous inquiry – something that may be coincidence or a mentalist trick can’t be taken as a ‘sign’ to inform decision-making. There has to be a web of related connections that can be verified by different people of cultural authority, as well as a series of communications from nonhuman entities.

My scepticism in the decade since has resulted in excessive caution and the stalling of my cultural obligations as a keeper of this object. For a long time I found no connection in Lore between white owl and whale, so I doubted and procrastinated. Tentative inquiry with the whale showed the connection between those male and female white owl sites and a third site that has been submerged off the west coast since the time the oceans rose in the last dramatic period of climate change about 12,000 years ago. The whale brought the knowledge of that owl place to the beach and died there so it could be picked up and passed on to reconnect the three sites.

This is a story of adaptation, of maintaining systems health and cultural longevity during cataclysmic phase shifts. It can’t be used to diagnose a pathology or treat it, only to inform inquiry and adaptation around the pain of change and entropy, and the scars left on the landscape and our bodies. This is a collaborative, collegial effort (as all good science is) so I took the whalebone with me this year to Turtle Island on the other side of the world, just as the whales do. I did rituals with First People there and we feasted the bone together and worked with tobacco in ceremony.

My Native Canadian friend there had a cave bear tooth she had been given to carry, to maintain the story and knowledge of that extinct entity and retrieve that lore forward to inform future systems design. She told me that when she accepted this heavy object, she developed an abscess and lost one of her own teeth. She said when you accept something from an animal to carry, it replaces a part of you. My spouse helped me see that my back problems can direct me towards the things I must change in order to accommodate this whalebone in my body and knowledge.

Meaning-making in this space can be vacuous and even dangerous if it leads you to diagnosis and treatment of problems with story that includes other narratives, so I’m proceeding with caution. If I dismiss the entire field of medicine in the pursuit of this work to heal myself, then I will have descended into pseudo-science, and that is not our tradition. We listen to everybody and take our time to act upon what is emergent. Sharing this story helps me to reconcile the exclusionary parts of my reasoning with the respectful protocols of Indigenous methodology. It also maintains the dignity, rigour and relevance of my traditional science, which I am certain must play a role in the emergent philosophies and systems of thought that will be needed to ensure the custodianship of life on this planet beyond the next few decades.

Reimagining sociology of religion: whale watching, bliss and ‘compassionate responsiveness’

Anna Halafoff ³

Similarly to the Director of the Canadian Sea Turtle Network, Kathleen Martin (2015) quoted above by Beaman (2017: 25) in her pioneering research on sea-turtle rescue, I have experienced a life-changing moment looking into the eye of a whale. In my early twenties, I finished my undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, and left my city life, in search of a deeper connection to nature and more sustainable ways of living in response to growing awareness of climate catastrophe in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I lived in Nimbin and Mullumbimby, in Northern New South Wales, the alternative capital of Australia, and also in Kulki/Cape Tribulation, in the Daintree Rainforest of Far North Queensland. I was obsessed with whale watching during those years and was fortunate to spend the night once on a small whale watching boat off K’gari/Fraser Island, in Queensland, Australia. We were awoken by the sounds of whale songs and blessed with a very close encounter with a mother and calf, swimming right beside us. I rushed to the deck and the baby arched up and looked me straight in the eye. It is an impression I will never forget and is up there with my most profound spiritual experiences, including meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and various glimpses of ‘nirvana’, or what I prefer to now refer to as ‘natural state’ – a Dzogchen Buddhist term that draws on Bon, Indigenous knowledges (Rabjam, 2001a, 2001b; Halafoff, 2022) – which I have been fortunate enough to have had meditating and in other heightened and everyday moments.

Twenty-five years later, in the mid–late 2010s, as a scholar of religion and inspired by Beaman, I began to consider what is it about whales that people, including myself, equate with wonder, awe, bliss and deep knowing? Is it that they are simply part of the natural world which inspires awe and wonder in most people, akin to the ‘reverential naturalism’ recently described by religious studies scholar Paul Bramadat (2022)? Or is there something specifically about whales that compels us to watch them, revere and protect them? Is it that they inhabit the very depths of the oceans, their vast size, and/or their relationality and willingness to connect with us?

My first piece of visual sociology research on whales focused on Olivier Perriquet’s (2017) video installation in the ‘The Dreams of Forms’ exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris held in 2017. Titled ‘Close Encounters of the Remote Kind’, it offered the viewer a contemplation on incertitude. The inconstant, pixelated, magnified, black and white forms of beluga whales swimming, created by this ‘artist-mathematician-researcher’ and projected onto the floor of the gallery, were designed to speak to the unease within the current state of the world, and to evoke a sense of mystery. Given that the image of the whale was at times discernible, the artwork was also arguably aimed to produce feelings of awe and wonder experienced in real-world whale watching encounters, and in other nature–human interactions. It certainly had that effect on me. I also noted my preliminary observations on human–whale interactions and scholarly discourses on interdependence (Halafoff, 2017).

I presented this article, titled ‘Beneath Religion: Whale Watching and the More-than-human turn in Sociology of Religion’, at the ‘Development for Species: Animals in society, animals as society’ Conference, held at Deakin University, on 18 and 19 September 2017. This event was my first introduction to Animal Studies. Briefly – theoretically I’m interested in what’s going on beneath religion – as Beaman observed both religious and non-religious people come together to rescue turtles, and the same happens on whale-watching tours. There’s something happening beneath religion that draws us to these kinds of activities that evoke awe, wonder, contemplation, peace and bliss in us (Halafoff, 2017) and an underlying ‘compassionate responsiveness’ (Lobel, 2018). This may be a positive pull towards that which we already are, the natural state of our beings according to Dzogchen Buddhism (Rabjam, 2001a, 2001b; Halafoff, 2022), but is also linked with precarity, risk and incertitude. We tend to be drawn to these experiences in troubled times, both personal and societal. The fast pace, pressures, risks and crises of ultramodernity are triggers for us to need to slow down, to take better care of ourselves and others, to come together in unexpected ways and form unexpected alliances to heal ourselves and the lifeworld, and find new ways of living and being well together. As critical feminist studies scholar Judith Butler (2015: 2018) has observed: ‘Our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of a livable life’.

What I argue is that focusing our research on multispecies relations and world repairing activities, can also shake up and expand our taxonomies of religion and to ‘reinvent the geometry’ of our thoughts and methods, ‘outside of familiar territories’ (Palais de Tokyo, 2017). Although these taxonomies of religion typically include concepts of awe and wonder at more-than-human Gods and/or Nature, they do not in my opinion pay enough attention to qualities of interdependence, relationality, stillness, reflexivity/contemplation, and states of bliss, joy and love emerging from First Nations knowledges, and so-called Eastern religions, such as Dzogchen Buddhism (Halafoff, 2017). In short our understanding of religion, and diverse worldviews, and also how we research them, are still very much dominated by Western, modern, Christian, or Abrahamic, perspectives and false binaries that separate nature from the sacred, and the heart from the mind. They are also extremely anthropocentric.

Methodologically and methodointuitively, we need also to ask how might (non)religion, spirituality and multispecies research be reimagined? Interviews and surveys with humans, while insightful, can only tell us so much. Participant observation focused on humans’ interactions with animals and the natural world, may tell us a bit more but is still human-centred. Similarly visual research that focuses on artworks inspired by connections with animals, that may even include representations of them, including sounds, beyond words, still very much depict the animals through a human gaze.

By contrast there are methods where humans imagine themselves as animals, placing themselves in animal skins, so to speak. Personally I am deeply uncomfortable with such methods, which appear invasive and colonising to me, for who are we/humans to speak for animals, when we don’t actually speak their languages/sounds? We, living in urban, modern societies are largely animally unmusical. By contrast, there is a collective of scholars, the Bawaka Collective, of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, who write with Country/Land and acknowledge Bawaka Country as author on their collective’s publications on ‘relational co-becoming’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016). As Relentless Indigenous Woman recently posted on her public Facebook page on 12 November 2022, ‘You Are Land’. We are land.

Perhaps these false modern binaries that humans are separate from Country/Land, and distinct from animals, have made so many of us forget their languages, their music, yet there are people who still know them deeply, as Indigenous colleagues Kimmerer and Yunkaporta describe above. Some humans know turtle, whale, owl, land, stars and ocean things. These are, however, always complex questions, regarding who can speak for others, how and when.

I am reminded here also of geographer Belden C. Lane’s (2001: 4) argument that a sacred space ‘is necessarily more than a construction of the human imagination’. He noted that ‘[t]he motion of wind through the limbs of a juniper tree in a red rock canyon … these, too, are a part of the dynamic reciprocity that makes up the ambient character of any desert monastery or roadside shrine’. More-than-human elements, and multiple species have agency and create our societies. This forms part of a relational naturalism (Halafoff et al., 2023), that dare I say is natural to all of us and most often deeply felt in natural places or connections with animals. According to Dzogchen, it is this relationality with our natural state, which evokes feelings of peace, bliss, wonder, ‘the heart drop’ and a ‘compassionate-responsiveness’, that then can naturally inspire us to live and die well together with all forms of life (Lobel, 2018; Rabjam, 2001a, 2001b; Halafoff, 2022).

Companion animals among us: pets as agents of spiritual discovery

Racheal Harris ⁴

I have always felt more at home in the company of dogs than in the company of my human kin. There is something about canine stoicism and loyalty that, in its simple majesty, is as certain as it is calming. In their unswerving devotion to a pack, dogs make so much more sense to me than my own species and I have often wondered what humans could learn if only we were willing to take our relationships (and often times reliance on) dogs more seriously. A similar question was one of the guiding themes of Donna J. Haraway’s (2003: 3) The Companion Species Manifesto in which she asked: ‘How might an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness be learned from taking dog–human relationships seriously?’ While Haraway’s suggested application of significant otherness differs from my own, her idea that dog–human relationships have much to teach and should be taken more seriously is of relevance to the exploration of lived religious and (non)religious practices, of which significant otherness is always an intrinsic part.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as I have explored differing avenues of academia, I have found that it is always Animal Studies to which I return, alongside sociology of religion. What interests me as a researcher in this space is how human connections with animals in the domestic sphere, and with domesticated animals more broadly, become a gateway for a deeper and more expansive form of lived religion, particularly for women. The ubiquity of daily care rituals that are enacted in the service of our animals, our favourites, our pets, becomes in itself an act at of worship. For, what is worship if not service – be it to God or any one of earth’s creatures? In service we humble ourselves and, in doing so, remember that rather than having dominion over the natural world, we are intrinsically locked in the ebb and flow of it. When similar acts of service are enacted for other humans, they can be read in multitude ways, many of which codify or legitimate traditional ideas (good and bad) of the feminine. When enacted for nonhuman animals, however, these acts of service receive little attention and, for those outside of the relationship, none of the same reverence. What if we took dog–human relationships more seriously?

For their part, animals express to us a purity of love and loyalty, one which is increasingly a rarity between members of our own species. In their single-minded focus towards devotion, they worship us as much as we do them, our shared relations are a genuine reflection of reciprocity. The simplicity of these daily rituals and interactions, I believe, is a true and universal form of contemporary lived (non)religion, and of ‘reverential’ and/or ‘relational naturalism’ (Bramadat, 2022; Halafoff et al., 2023). While animals may not pray or partake in ritual in the same way as we do, their constant presence, their sentience, the witnessing they offer, brings us closer together and closer to our respective gods.

While certain elements of lived spirituality are in the beginning stages of their evolution, others harken back to times and ancestral places which we remember in a collective consciousness, or for women, as the shared ancestral feminine. As Sharon Blackie (2016: 171) reminds us:

Women have always lived alongside animals, they are integral to our story telling and our understanding of who we are in the world. In times of trouble, not only do we seek out their kinship, but we take on their forms.

As humanity grapples with the biological crisis that has been born from our disconnection with animals, the natural world and ‘the divine feminine’, it is unsurprising that women are returning in increasing numbers to spiritual experiences which seek out the wisdom and inspiration of their nonhuman kin. In their frequently autobiographical and autoethnographic accounts, they present to emerging researchers like myself, new doorways of inquiry.

All scholarship owes something to the projects and the people that come before it. My approach to studying lived spiritualities and their intersection with the nonhuman animal stands on the shoulders of a select group of academic texts, written almost exclusively by women, which explore spirituality and its relationships with the dead and with animals in various ways. My area of expertise has arisen from a consideration of how we live in the liminal space that exists around the absence of the domestic animals who inhabit the intimate corners of our lives. Specifically, how we live after a singular and beloved animal has died. A primary focal point of my research has been exploring the types of grief conditioning which people, particularly single women, undertake when mourning the loss of a cat or dog who has been either the primary or main companion within the home. Frequently, conditioning oneself begins with the denial of the resultant grief from the death experience, because to mourn the animal other remains a socially taboo subject. As a species we are predisposed to not only police the legitimacy of the grief responses of others, but to attempt to create a grief hierarchy, in which it is only human animals who genuinely deserve to be grieved (Harris, 2019). Even among our own kind, some losses are considered more profound than others. As an academic and an animal advocate, I disagree with this social conditioning as much as I disagree with the propensity to try and police the grief of those who mourn the loss of their beloved nonhuman kin.

In denying the legitimacy of animal focused grief, humans create death-related trauma which is carried through life alongside them. The adoption of subsequent animals, despite advice to ‘just get another dog’ does nothing but compound grief and anxiety. Each time another animal dies, and due to the disparate lifespans between a dog or a cat and a human, we will lose several over the span of the average lifetime, the grief of past pet death is renewed. Each subsequent loss is a continued fracturing of our connection to the natural cycles of life and death. Such fracturing leads to a distance from a deep contemplation of the afterlife and the many spiritual practices that are inherently interwoven within it. Every relationship we share with an animal is as singular as they are, our grief is a catalogue of longing. Yet, it has a great deal to teach us.

It is the absence of the animal within our home which can often facilitate the most profound personal contemplations of what it means to die, to die well and to continue beyond the physical realm. This intersection of death and continuance is a doorway to spiritual investigation and offers the opportunity to reflect on both how the sociology of religion and religious belief are changing but also how animals are playing a more prominent role in these spaces. On the cusp of complete environmental pandemonium, we can look to the domestic space and the animals that occupy it as the first step on a journey of return to a life lived more fully in alignment with the nonhuman.

Unlike my co-author, Halafoff, I do not face the same dilemmas with anthropocentrism. Humans assess everything we do through the lens of our human experience. How could we possibly do otherwise? Our outputs are written for a human audience, so that together we might seek out similarities with other humans and through these narratives, pretend that we can or do know something of the animal mind. That our species is so preoccupied with the understanding of the animal other is further evidence of the reverence we have for their kind. I do not believe that animals hold any grudge towards us for having such a myopic focus on our own self-interest. Our contemplation of them is a vanity project, in which we seek them out in the hope of finding some better, deeper insight into ourselves. We, unlike them, are so out of place with the world. We are always clutching at straws, trying to understand the natural world which holds us throughout our lifetimes, and to understand our place and purpose within it. Animals, to my view, seem so much more confident and certain. If we did share language, I am prone to imagine that they might pity us, for our anxieties, our distance, for our lack of connection to the moment that we inhabit right now. Their gift to us, is their presence and the fact that in our provisions for them, for their comfort and care, we are taught to live mindfully, we are taught to love, we are forced into a deeper contemplation of grief, and finally an acceptance of the natural worlds and its inherent cruelties.

You are what you eat: food as a relational site for human–nonhuman animal relations in religious communities

Rosemary Hancock ⁵

I’ve been enmeshed in the world of conventional religion all my life: my father is an Anglican priest, and I grew up living behind the churches where he ministered. As an adult, I studied for degrees in Islamic studies and the sociology of religion. When I began to write this reflection, I thought at first little in this religious upbringing (personally, and academically) had shaped my personal relationship to and with animals and the natural world. Yet surprisingly – or perhaps not, given what I’ve gone on to research – some of the earliest memories from my childhood are of a donkey walking down the church aisle at a Palm Sunday service. My favourite picture books as a child were about ‘church mice’ who were friends with the church cat, all of whom played a central role in the congregational life of the parish – albeit often by accidentally disrupting a service or event with their escapades and inadvertently saving the day.

One morning, at the age of 13, I announced to my parents that I was now vegetarian and would no longer eat any meat. This decision marked the emergence of a nascent environmental consciousness in which justice for nonhuman animals was a central part: over the past three decades I have largely chosen not to eat animal flesh – and have gone through extended periods of veganism. Looking back, I think my relationship to animals was shaped mostly by those stories where animals are an essential, normal part of the religious community – not by the teaching of Genesis 1 (of which I was barely aware). My decision not to eat animals as an adolescent has been the defining feature of my personal relationship with animals. Thus, while the field of religion and ecology is large and there is much one could say about multispecies research in that remit, I want to focus on animals as (producers of) food in the context of religious community for this reflection.

Food is a key site of human–nature, and human–nonhuman animal relations: it brings us into relation with other creatures (human and nonhuman) and the natural world; and eating, cooking, and sourcing or producing food is an embodied practice – whether we grow and prepare it ourselves, or purchase it prepared and eat it sitting at our office desk. Methodologically, studying food opens a range of horizons to a researcher interested in multispecies relations: from food as material – relevant especially to the study of religion and ecology, where religious ritual and practice frequently involves food (King, 2012; Wood, 2016: Zavos, 2020), to practices of production, distribution and consumption – ritualised and not, and the cultures and values that emerge about food in any given community.

Critiques of the industrial food system are part of the foundation of religion and ecology literatures (Berry, 1977). And despite the anthropocentrism of ‘mainstream’ theology in all three Abrahamic faiths – whether the call to ‘subdue’ the earth in Genesis 1:28, or Allah making the earth and animals within it ‘useful to’ humans in the Qur’an 31:20 – there are voices in all three religious traditions calling for a reinterpretation of scripture and practice (Davis, 2009; Masri, 2009; Seidenberg, 2015), albeit often from the margins.

While it is helpful to recognise dissent within religious communities about the exploitation and subjugation of animals, as has already been outlined, a reliance on the cognitive dimensions of religion like belief, scripture and doctrine is a well-critiqued flaw in our field. Like my co-contributors, I find McGuire’s (2008) theory of lived religion an important analytic lens in my research. My experience researching Islamic environmentalism suggests that anthropocentric scripture and doctrine is not necessarily indicative, or definitive, of the diverse ways in which religious communities relate to animals.

When I started my doctorate on Islamic environmentalism, it seemed natural to me to begin with food: specifically, how Muslim environmentalists made creative use of Islamic legal norms such as the distinction between and rules about halal and haram food to construct an Islamic environmental practice that prioritised animal welfare and environmental sustainability. Their efforts run counter to the dominant narrative about eating animals in Muslim communities. Eating meat is such an accepted practice in Islam that it is assumed to be compulsory. Masri (2009) was compelled for this reason to argue for the ‘permissibility’ of vegetarianism under Islamic law. Despite the weight of both orthodox teaching and cultural norms, many of the Muslim activists who participated in my research rejected both the industrial food system and a strictly normative interpretative of halal as unethical and unsustainable. Instead, they favoured a relational, environmental practice of food procurement and consumption.

Yet these Muslim environmentalists were not engaged with animal rights debates focused on the absolute rightness or wrongness of killing animals for food, or using animals to produce food (Singer, 1975; Pollan, 2007). But they were worried about the ethical and spiritual relationship they have with the animals they consume or use to produce food, and the implications of that relationship for their own spiritual wellbeing. One Imam I encountered refused to purchase meat and would only eat what he himself hunted. In deciding when and what to hunt, he considered what was environmentally sustainable for his bioregion, what was ethical in terms of hunting practice (causing minimal pain to the animal), what his family needed (with meat-eating a rare practice) and the Islamic rules governing animal slaughter (Hancock, 2018). The Imam lives in a world where animals are Muslim – in submission to Allah – and are ‘a community of believers like yourselves’ (Qur’an 6:38). His eating patterns, and use of animals as food, is shaped by his obligations towards them as fellow believers and as ‘signs’ from Allah (Hancock, 2019).

Making sense of the food practices of Muslim environmentalists like the Imam through the lens of animal rights or vegan studies frameworks fails to capture the nuance of his relationship with animals. Whether they used this language to articulate it or not, the Muslim environmentalists in my research saw their relationship with nonhuman animals as fundamentally moral, and deeply spiritual. There was a ‘relationality’ to the natural world and nonhuman animals at the heart of their environmental consciousness that was evident in the choices they made about food.

While I think a multispecies approach to the study of religion and ecology has much to offer, I do think there is a threefold challenge. The first two challenges have already been named above: first, our field’s dependence on Christian (or Abrahamic) conceptions of religion, which are too often anthropocentric; second, the methodological conundrum of how to study animals on their own terms, when we cannot escape our human theory and method. But I also point to a third challenge especially relevant to scholars of religion and ecology: environmental and ecological paradigms as we typically conceive of and employ them have a Western genealogy with Christian roots (Berry, 2015).

How can we identify and analyse, for example, an Islamic environmentalism and its implications for multispecies relations or justice without recourse to a conception of environmentalism predicated on this history? Gade (2019) critiques the religion and ecology/environmentalism paradigm, where environmentalism is always already defined by Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs), governments, or movements and the goal is simply inclusion of diverse religious groups. In this framework, religious doctrine or scripture is selectively used to dress environmentalism in spiritually or religiously appropriate clothing. She argues we should look within Islam – and local, contextually specific Islams – to identify environmentalism as it emerges organically within local traditions and practices. I suggest we need to make the same move when researching multispecies relations and justice in the sociology of religion, religious studies and associated fields – examining how ethical and spiritual relationships with animals are understood and enacted in context and how they arise within any particular worldview.

Interweaving latent commons, tangles and all

Our review of contemporary approaches to the study of (non)religion, spiritual and multispecies relations, and our personal methodological and methodointuitive reflections, indicate that there are numerous ways of approaching this inquiry. We claim this is only right: that a multispecies methodology must be grounded in a particular personal, cultural, disciplinary and locative positionality. Ours are also deeply relational, informed by our human and more-than-human interactions.

What emerges prominently is a strong focus on autoethnographic methods of data collection. Autoethnography is seen, within some disciplines or fields, as lacking sufficient rigour. Yet in this instance it solves a methodological problem: the lack of shared language between humans and their nonhuman kin. What nonhuman beings can, and often do, is provide an opportunity for humans to consider themselves from a different standpoint. In the examples outlined above, the autoethnographic method has revealed a view towards how humans locate themselves and navigate their journey through a landscape in which they are but one part of a broader ecosystem.

In the case of sociology of religion, examining how we live with and relate to nonhuman animals as part of reflexive (non)religious and spiritual practices achieves (at least) two things. It provides an insight into how religious or (non)religious practice might be evolving towards a more inclusive and (species) non-discriminatory aesthetic; and helps us identify and document how some cultural narratives are shifting to give meaning and hope in times of ecological destruction.

At the beginning of this article, we reflected on three different scholars with three different approaches to multispecies research. Tsing (2015) and Kimmerer (2013), and the participants of Beaman’s (2017) study, position more-than-human nature as both inspiration and teacher. Beaman and later Halafoff (2017), use the submerged lifeworld of whales and turtles, and the magnetic attraction and devotion some humans find in relationship with them, to look for what is beneath conventional religion. Halafoff’s encounters with whales (in reality, and through art), similarly to Tsing’s encounters with mushrooms, have prompted her reflections on how we (humans) seek both respite in and alliance with nature in the face of precarity and incertitude.

Tsing and Kimmerer also show us how the more-than-human world prompts us to look beyond conventional religion: to make room for different and/or less familiar stories, centring more-than-human actors and the connections between us all, beyond the false binaries of science and religion. Yunkaporta’s reflection shows what going beyond religion and these binaries might look like. He takes us on a (personal) journey of trying to reconcile different stories – the medical and the traditional/Indigenous – and in doing so he reminds us, again, that the separation of the ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ from other spheres of life is, itself, a story that must be particularised. For Tsing, the mushroom is a living exemplar of an alternative methodology: one that is not grounded in human logic but is rather a surprising adventure. Just as the mushroom inspired Tsing, so Tsing’s work has inspired the very structure and nature of this article. Traces of the mushroom, then, are in these pages – in the tangle and surprise – waiting to erupt.

Kimmerer (2013) encourages us to see nature as a teacher: to study nature not to master it, but to learn how to live, together, in a complex world. Both Harris and Hancock reflect on how humans live ‘with’ animals – either in companionship (as with our pets) or (in too many contexts) in an alienated, exploitative, domination. Harris asks us to consider what we might learn about human grief and loss, and making sense of life/from death, by learning from our relationships with – and loss of – our animal companions. Hancock’s reflection challenges us to see not only how, through food, many of us are in relationship with nonhuman animals, whether we recognise it or not; but also that there are multiple differing stories of how to be, ethically and spiritually, in ‘right relationship’ with nonhuman animals.

Through our reflections, on Tsing, Kimmerer and Beaman’s work and our own experiences, we have identified some key challenges in multispecies research within the sociology of religion: the first, that we must de-centre the conceptions of Western religion that have given primacy to the cognitive over the affective, material and praxis elements of religion and spirituality; the second, that the environmental and ecological concepts on which much multispecies-affirming activism and scholarship is based comes from a particular intellectual genealogy that must be particularised; and third, that we have not, yet, worked out how to escape anthropocentrism and whatever our intentions, the lifeworld of nonhuman animals remains largely beyond the grasp of our research methods. To do so, we turn to more-than-human teachers in animals and plants, to Indigenous and Asian relational knowledges, to poetry, to storying, to meditation, contemplation and rest, to processes of death and decay, as well as germination and growth, to generate new insights – which have previously been undervalued – entangled with scientific inquiry. We hope that our reflections here are generative: that you, the reader, can see the ‘adventure-in-process’ (Tsing, 2015) of research with the more-than-human world.