Disrupted coping and skills for sustainability: A pluralist Heideggerian perspective

Abstract

What is the ontological significance of sustainability crises – and the struggles to overcome them? Drawing on Heideggerian perspectives – in dialogue with Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theories – I argue sustainability crises become meaningful at the level of everyday experience when they disrupt the flow of ordinary skilled practices and their orientations towards the future. Such disruptions trigger what Heidegger termed ‘anxiety’, which implies an erosion of life's coherence, meaning and purpose. Developing skills to ‘cope’ with sustainability crises may enact alternative ontologies that restore what anxiety threatens; ‘skills for sustainability’ potentially disclose new worlds, meanings, values and goals. I illustrate this through vignettes of individuals transitioning to organic farming in India. I show how disruptions to farmers’ skilled practices triggered anxiety while also prompting the development of skills for alternative agricultural practice. These skills enabled new ways of experiencing worlds, non-human entities and the telos of everyday activity.

Introduction

In this paper, I consider experiences of sustainability crises, what they do to the meaningfulness of everyday practices and how they might prompt different styles of being-in-the-world. Drawing on Heideggerian perspectives, I argue that crises of sustainability become meaningful in everyday life when they interrupt the flow of what Dreyfus (1991) calls ‘skilful coping’ – the everyday, engaged, skilled practices through which one apprehends the world. This is particularly the case when interruptions are so profound as to upset the future-oriented, normative and purposive dispositions which animate skilful coping – dispositions Heidegger calls the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’.

Heidegger provides a springboard for understanding the social and technological conditions that shape meaningful everyday activity – and the conditions under which its meaningfulness is unsettled. Heidegger's later works also provide clues for how these conditions evolve historically – which prove valuable in understanding socio-spatial differences in the organisation of worlds. Mindful of totalising tendencies in Heidegger's approach, however, I also engage aspects of Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) theoretical framework, to consider how to make sense of ‘worlds’ that are criss-crossed with multiple, competing interpretations and imperatives. The perspective I develop is Heideggerian in its attention to the (disrupted) temporalities of socially organised practices and their ontological implications, yet modified to accommodate ontological pluralism.

Through this lens, sustainability crises acquire ontological significance. They not only represent ‘existential threats’ (as confrontations with species-level mortality) but they may also interrupt people's everyday normative horizons: their capacity to ‘get on with things’ with an understanding of a future they are working towards (Myers, 2014). Such interruptions raise the prospect of what Heidegger (1927) calls ‘anxiety’ – a confrontation with the groundlessness of everything that gives life meaning. It raises the prospect that the future possibilities one ‘presses into’ through their everyday activity might be meaningless if collective futures are in doubt. Yet, such disruptions to one's modalities of experiencing and engaging with the world open the possibility of ‘ontological metamorphoses’ – radically new ways of being-in-the-world (Heikkurinen, 2019).

The contribution of this paper is chiefly theoretical – to develop a Heideggerian perspective on sustainability concerns at the everyday scale. To illustrate my theoretical argument, I present two vignettes from my research on organic farmers in India. Indian farmers’ responses to crises of agricultural sustainability illustrate the ontological reconfigurations that may occur due to sustainability-related disruptions. Through these vignettes, I show how ontological reconfigurations are rendered possible through new skills that open up alternative futures – skills which form part of networks of practices that give meaning to the way one ‘presses into possibilities’. I argue that sustainability can be understood not just an ‘empty signifier’ (Brown, 2016), but a skillset that discloses new possibilities of being and ways of repairing ruptured ‘for-the-sake-of-whichs’. Yet, the postcolonial context of India is marked by diverse ontologies and an incomplete hegemony of capitalist being-in-the-world. This necessitates greater recognition of ontological pluralism than in a more traditional Heideggerian perspective. Thus, I also demonstrate how ecological anxiety's emergence often relates to incompatibilities between the diverse ‘worlds’ that constitute everyday life and that building new ontologies involves taking up diverse practices and skills that are often marginalised within capitalist ontologies.

Skilful Coping, Anxiety and Dislocation

Ontology refers to one's understanding of existence – the kind of entities one regards as real, significant or valuable. From a Heideggerian perspective, it also incorporates the tasks and goals regarded as worth pursuing. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1927) attempts to ground human ontology in everyday practice. He contends we primarily understand the world and the entities within it not through passive, detached reflection – as much previous Western philosophy assumed – but through active engagement. We primarily encounter things in terms of how they can be taken up in the service of engaged, purposive activity. Entities are ordinarily experienced as ‘equipment’, understood in terms of their useful and meaningful characteristics, relative to everyday, engaged concerns. This contrasts with the context-abstracted ‘objects’ of Cartesian philosophy. For Heidegger, entities can and do show up as ‘objects’, but only in relatively unusual circumstances in which we withdraw from the more ‘ordinary’, absorbed and pragmatic mode of encountering. Such withdrawal is typically prompted by disruption. When we engage with entities as equipment, we do so in a more-or-less unreflective flow of action. Only when equipment fails to behave as expected do we stop to reflect on their abstract properties and experience them as ‘objects’.

The engagement with the world that Heidegger describes is skilful. Dreyfus (1991), in his commentaries on Being and Time, refers to it as ‘skilful coping’. ¹ Preceding any cognitive understanding of what things are (knowing-that) are embodied skills for how to engage or ‘cope’ with them (knowing-how). Heidegger contends that through such everyday engagement, Dasein (‘being there’, his term for human existence) takes a ‘stance’ on what it is – not through consciously held identities or beliefs but in the implicit understanding of its capabilities, expressed in dispositions and comportments. Skills are ontologically constitutive in the sense that they always implicitly express an understanding of entities – in terms of their potentials to express Dasein's stance on its being – and of Dasein's own potential to ‘press into’ possible futures.

This ontological primacy of skilled practices over detached reflection suggests human existence is innately meaningful and purposive. ‘Taking-a-stance on being’ is future-oriented: we experience entities in terms of their potentials to serve future ends. These include achievable ends, which Heidegger refers to as ‘in-order-tos’ – the ‘tasks’ of everyday life. Yet, ‘in-order-tos’ are (pre-)organised around and subordinate to more open-ended, meaningful ends, which Heidegger calls the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ – a more general understanding of what life is all about. A chef may take up entities as ‘ingredients’ in-order-to prepare a particular dish, but for-the-sake-of their professional reputation.

The world of engaged coping is marked by contingency and is irreducibly social. The ‘equipment’ we encounter in everyday activity has uses, which make sense with respect to specific tasks and an overarching understanding of how they fit within a meaningful way of life. Its meaning is thus contingent on social context. Heidegger refers to this context as a ‘referential totality’, ultimately structured by the for-the-sake-of-which. To use Heidegger's most famous example, for a carpenter to use a hammer ‘as’ a hammer requires an understanding that one exists in a world in which hammering can be in-order-to achieve a meaningful task (building a house) and for-the-sake-of a meaningful life (creating livelihood or a space of dwelling). Neither the in-order-to nor the for-the-sake-of-which implies ‘comporting oneself towards a plan that has been thought out’ (Heidegger, 1927/1962: 185); the perspective implied is that as we go about our daily affairs, the meanings to which our lives are in service have always-already been laid out and are expressed through our activity. These meanings, however, did not spring from the void. We take them up by observing and repeating what goes on around us, taking cues on what is expected of us. Heidegger (1927) calls the social influence that shapes the field of significant, meaningful activity das Man – rendered in English as ‘the one’ in the sense of ‘what one does’ within a given situation. In most of our everyday engagements, we simply do ‘what one does’, and in doing so we organise our activities in ways that are more-or-less meaningful.

Although our everyday mode of being is primarily meaningful for Heidegger, it is not always and inevitably so. Heidegger (1927: 228–235) also discusses a condition he calls anxiety. Heideggerian anxiety entails a loss of the coherence provided by the purposive organisation of worlds. In a state of anxiety, things are experienced as existing and their relations to other things understood – but their ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ has been lost. Heidegger sees promise in anxiety, since it allows a letting go of inherited ways of being and living more authentically in the knowledge that one can – and must – manifest meaning through their activity.

From the early 1930s, Heidegger (1933, 1954) began exploring how the understanding of being expressed in everyday practices is not static but historical. He contends the styles of skilled practice that become normalised across epochs lead to unique ontologies. In On the Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger (1954) considers different ‘styles’ of being in the history of the West and critiques the current ‘style’, which he refers to as ‘technological’ (Technik) – and which others would later describe as ‘technicity’ to specify the ‘technological’ as a mode of being. This style of being-in-the-world engages with all entities (including human beings) as a mere ‘inventory’ (Ge-Stell) of interchangeable resources (see Wrathall, 2021), ultimately in service to maximising efficiency, technological progress and economic growth. This is both nihilistic – since nothing is special, everything interchangeable – and ecologically corrosive (Hoły-Łuczaj, 2018). Technicity marginalises or subsumes other modes of being, disenchanting the world to render it readily available for exploitation (Cooper, 2005). In various ways, Heidegger's later works grapple with the question of alternative modes of being to technicity, though without providing a definitive answer.

Human geographers have taken up aspects of Heidegger's perspective to theorise disruptions to everyday practice. Jackson and Everts (2010) draw on Heidegger's framing of ‘anxiety’ to conceptualise how existential threats may lead to institutional responses, with spatially and temporally reverberating effects on social practice. They note, however, that in Being and Time, Heidegger does not provide a clear account of how anxiety emerges and are compelled to depart from Heidegger because they see his conceptualisation of anxiety as ‘individualistic’. If one exclusively reads the passages on anxiety in Being and Time, it is easy to read it as an individual (even solipsistic) withdrawal. This, however, would be inconsistent with Heidegger's broader philosophical stance, in which Dasein is always engaged with a socially organised world. Yet, without prompts from Heidegger on how the state of anxiety might emerge from social being-in-the-world, we are left to speculate. One possibility is that anxiety emerges when pragmatic everyday ‘skilful coping’ (informed by socio-culturally normalised practices) is no longer producing its desired effects or culminating in a meaningful life. Like broken equipment, the contingency and groundlessness of the referential totality is experienced by Dasein precisely when it has failed to order experience and activity in a way that gives life meaning. This may be experienced either individually or collectively by people occupying similar positions whose activities have undergone a similar corrosion of purpose, but always with reference to meanings imbricated in socially organised practices.

Extending beyond Heidegger, I would add another possibility for anxiety's emergence: namely, from conflict between diverse everyday practices. Life often involves uneasy compromises between the logics of different ‘sub-worlds’. Getting on with one's family life may require compromises with professional goals, for example. Anxiety is likely to result when these compromises can no longer be sustained. This implies ‘disruption’ to purposive, future-oriented ‘getting on with things’, but not necessarily the dramatic ‘rupture’ implied by an ‘event’ (as suggested by Jackson and Everts, 2010). The effect is a gradual disaffection with one's orientation towards the world and ambivalence about how to proceed meaningfully. The possibility of incongruences between ‘sub-worlds’ does not occur to Heidegger, in part due to totalising tendencies in his philosophy. These are particularly apparent in works from his ‘middle period’, where he posits the history of the West as a series of changes within a unified understanding of being (Heidegger, 1933). Such a perspective is also latent in Being and Time, where das Man is presented as though it speaks with a singular voice: there is no consideration that ‘what one does’ might always be ambiguous and experienced differently as a function of social position (see Nancy, 2000: 7–9).

Here, there is benefit in bringing Heidegger into dialogue with more pluralist understandings of the ontological stances that make up social fields. Several scholars have sought to develop more ‘pluralist’ readings of Heideggerian ontology, including Nancy (2000), who shows how engaged ‘everydayness’ is itself marked by encounters with difference. In this paper, I find value in engaging Heidegger with the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), for the theoretical tools they develop for understanding social phenomena in fields marked by ontological pluralism and constant dislocation. Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) concept of ‘dislocation’ suggests multiple ‘logics’ pervade social fields, which are often mutually contradictory. Laclau and Mouffe detail how certain logics, or ‘discourses’, prevent others from fully constituting themselves as ‘social objectivity’, giving rise to political contestation and social dynamism. The concept of ‘dislocation’ draws attention to how the dispositions that make up social life are often at odds with each other – and that at critical moments, the contradictions between them might be brought into focus and form the basis for new social and political trajectories.

Yet, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) depart from Heideggerian ontology in that they theorise dislocation as primarily semiotic in nature – as a disruption to the functioning of signifiers. They articulate a discursive understanding of the social, in which language has ontological primacy in structuring social reality, whereas Heidegger awards such primacy to engaged ‘skilful coping’. Laclau and Mouffe follow the semiotic tradition of interpreting discourse as a system of differences, rather than the Heideggerian (or Wittgensteinian ² ) interpretation of language as a system of reference – in which the meaning of language is inseparable from its embodied, worldly applications (Inkpin, 2017; Dreyfus, 1991: 101). This leads Laclau and Mouffe to a preoccupation with representation, signification and its failures. Taking a more Heideggerian approach to dislocation would consider how different activities that make up social life often involve different forms of purposive comportment. Here, I draw on the Heideggerian tradition's focus on the purposive orientations of everyday practice, and Laclau and Mouffe's more pluralistic ontology. The ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ may be highly ambivalent as a result of competing commitments expressed through multiple practices. Where these come into conflict to the extent of upsetting our ability to skilfully cope and experience meaning in our practices, this may prevent what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) term the constitution of social objectivity. This, in turn, may result in anxiety, and its possibilities for ontological reconfigurations. If we accept the premise that social practices are diverse and express diverse ontologies, ‘dislocated coping’ and corresponding anxiety must be common; yet, as I argue below, this is particularly evident in postcolonial contexts, where ‘technicity’ has only partial dominance over other ontologies.

Sustainability, Disrupted Coping and Ecological Anxiety

Heidegger's focus on how disruption and anxiety unsettle future imaginaries and prompt ontological reconfigurations resonates with social science debates on sustainability. Sustainability crises often call into question whether our collective futures remain viable. Yet, the way in which disrupted futures are inflected in the present is not uniform. In some cases, sustainability crises immediately disrupt ongoing, future-oriented activity, prompting individual and collective change – as when natural disasters draw attention to climate change. Yet, sustainability crises are also experienced even when everyday practices have not physically been interrupted, but have nonetheless been unsettled by factors that draw their future non-viability into view – such as increased awareness of scientific projections (Brown, 2016) or disruptive activism (Axon, 2019).

Scholars have suggested this creates a conundrum for enacting sustainable change. Van der Gaast et al. (2022), for example, suggest the disruption to long-term future imaginaries enacted by sustainability thinking have a different temporal register to that of everyday activity, which is goal oriented and short term. Even where long-term future imaginaries are brought into dialogue with present action, they contend, this is easily forgotten in the face of disruptions in the present or near-future, which demand immediate responses. While this distinction between short-term, goal-oriented futures and longer-term imaginary futures is analytically useful, from a Heideggerian perspective, these two futures cannot easily be separated. The everyday temporality that van der Gaast et al. (2022) describe relates to what Heidegger calls the ‘in-order-to’ – how everyday engagements fit within goal-oriented projects. Yet, ‘in-order-tos’ are structured by a more open-ended ‘for-the-sake-of-which’, which gives them coherence and purpose. Within the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’, the distinction between short- and long-term futures collapses. As purposive, meaningful activity, everyday skilful coping has already been organised by the for-the-sake-of-which, which entails short- and long-term future projection. Thus, while van der Gaast et al. (2022) locate ‘disruption’ within the short-term future of goal-oriented concerns, I distinguish between two categories of disruption: those that interfere with the in-order-to, preventing task completion, and those that unsettle the for-the-sake-of-which, dislodging the purposive orientation that gives meaning to tasks. These two types of disruption may overlap: repeated or sustained disruptions to everyday tasks may call into question their value. While disrupted in-order-tos may trigger reflexive adjustments to practice – discussed by Heidegger (1927) in his discussions of faulty equipment – disruptions to the for-the-sake-of-which trigger Heideggerian anxiety. Disruptions enacted by sustainability crises – in evoking questions about the capacity of society and human life to endure – are in the latter category.

These themes intersect with recent research on ‘eco-anxiety’, particularly that which considers its social and existential implications (Pihkala, 2020). Explicitly adopting a Heideggerian perspective, Myers (2014) contends that ecological threats such as climate change call into question the material, social and ideological structures that give life purpose, meaning and coherence. Prospects of disastrous futures call into question the value of these structures, and by implication the everyday skilled practices they animate and the purposive and normative ends of these practices, resulting in Heideggerian anxiety. There are several ways of responding to eco-anxiety of this kind, some more conducive to sustainable change than others. Myers (2014) contends that many respond with denial, often taking the form of what Heidegger (1927) calls ‘clinging’ – individual and collective refusals to relinquish the former sources of ontological coherence that anxiety threatened, continuing with old routines as if there were nothing to worry about (see Norgaard, 2011). Denial, however, becomes less tenable when the experience of sustainability crisis moves from the discursive realm into more direct and frequent disruptions to practice, or when concern for ecological decline is part of the context in which one has grown, as is true for youth in many parts of the world today (Hickman, 2020). Denial is more likely when anxiety is triggered by persuasion alone. When everyday skilful coping faces more direct or persistent disruptions, or when concern for disastrous futures becomes part of ‘what one does’, the ‘background’ of everyday practices is more likely to show up as dysfunctional and in need of change. For this reason, environmental activists have sought to disrupt problematic environmental practices or utilitarian ways of being-in-the-world (‘technicity’) to prompt new interpretations, new forms of concern for longer-term futures and new ways of understanding humanity's place in the environment (Axon, 2019).

For Heidegger (1927), anxiety contains the possibility of letting go of ways of being inherited from the past and engaging authentically with the requirements of the present historical moment. Ecological anxiety is similar: it ‘calls’ those it affects to confront the non-sustainability of current practices (Myers, 2014). Yet, there are various ways one may do this. One would be to accept dislocated futures and make piecemeal adjustments to rolling crises – ‘coping with the apocalypse’. Since brighter futures are not assumed in this mode of being, ontological insecurity persists: any for-the-sake-of-which has questionable value, yet may still be meaningful through a disposition of stoical acceptance (Zizek, 2010). Tsing (2015) takes a different and more generative approach, in exploring examples of multi-species collaborative survival projects in the midst of capitalist ruination. For Tsing, the chance convergences of human and non-human actors that find possibilities of life amidst general decay present alternative ways of being. These alternatives are not grounded in assumptions of progress but in contingent assemblages of multispecies ontologies. Where this perspective is unsatisfying, however, is in how (a) its critique of progress overlooks the possibility that human activity might always seek to find future-oriented purpose – what we require are alternative ways of future-making besides capitalist growth (Heideggerian ‘technicity’); and (b) worldmaking might involve more than a chance convergence of actors, but a set of inter-related practices that not only make for workable survival strategies but also coherent understandings of what life is all about. Human activity strives towards (meaningful, purposive) ‘worlds’, not just (contingently assembled) ‘ecologies’.

An alternative approach would be to develop a different mode of skilful coping – a set of ‘skills for sustainability’ – which have the effect of disclosing the world in a different way, opening promises of new ‘for-the-sake-of-whichs’ and new future imaginaries. If a sustainable future depends on fundamentally different modes of being – as Heidegger (1954) suggests in his discussions of technicity – this must rest on different styles of skilled practices that disclose different worlds. Ecological thinkers have found resources in Heidegger's later works, both to critique contemporary ways of being as reductive and environmentally harmful and to gesture towards alternative modes of ‘dwelling’ and ‘skilful coping’. Particularly influential has been Heidegger's concept of poiesis, or ‘allowing things to be’, which he found expressed in ancient Greek philosophy (Glazebrook, 2013), and of releasement, which entails the renunciation of the will-to-dominate (Heikkurinen, 2019). These styles of being-in-the-world, in which entities are nurtured into expressing their unique essences, rest on skilled practices of care, support and meditative contemplation, rather than dominance and extraction. They resist technicity's reduction of all beings to ‘resources’ through an openness to the diverse ways entities may present (Cooper, 2005). While these provide loose templates, a more pluralistic and empirically grounded Heideggerian perspective should recognise the possibilities of alternative, place-specific modes of being that are expressed through skills and practices that remain marginal or dimly expressed within the scope of ‘technicity’. Disruptions to routinised practices may trigger both reflections on possibilities for innovative new styles of skilled practice or may (re)activate skilled practices that had been dormant, marginal or undervalued within the dominant mode of being (Rinkinen, 2013). Indeed, the very persistence of such plural ontologies may continuously dislocate the primacy of technicity wherever it cannot subsume them.

What the above implies is that sustainability is not only meaningful at the level of discourse and representation. Sustainability's everyday meaningfulness lies in disruptions to the telos of everyday, purposive activity, which undermine the value and coherence of worlds (i.e., generate anxiety) and in the experimental engagement in alternative styles of ‘skilful coping’ that reinstate the coherence of existing worlds, or disclose ‘new worlds’. Such new worlds may entail different ways of interpreting and experiencing entities, as well as alternative tasks and purposive dispositions towards life: new for-the-sake-of-whichs.

Transitions to Sustainable Agriculture in the Indian Context

Recent research on ‘eco-anxiety’ has focused heavily on climate change. Yet, agriculture and food are also significant sources of unease about the future and ontological coherence. Concerns about the health and ecological impacts of food industrialisation are major inspirations for alternative food movements in the global North (Blay-Palmer, 2008). In the global South, where agriculture remains the primary source of livelihood, questions of agricultural sustainability are more immediately experienced as existential concerns – calling into question people's capacity to sustain themselves, their families, and way of life. In what follows, I consider how rural people in the global South make meaning of agrarian situations marked by uncertainty, precarity and ecological decline; and what it might mean to disclose alternative worlds which offer space for hope. Global South contexts also demand greater recognition of plural ontologies, given that the incomplete hegemony of capital (Chatterjee, 2008) means technicity is not completely entrenched as a mode of being. Moreover, multiple intersecting forms of gender, ethnic, caste and religious differences, as well as new (sub)nationalisms result in a greater diversity of practices and corresponding ontologies.

In an earlier study, I spent time with organisations in India that were promoting transitions to non-chemical farming (Brown, 2018). One such organisation worked in districts which, since the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1970s, had pursued highly chemically intensive agricultural practices. The organisation sought to convince farmers to shift from what they called ‘chemical farming’ and cultivate skills in ‘natural farming’. When working in villages they would attempt to ‘prick the conscience’ (to use the words of one activist) of rural people to persuade them to change, telling them to consider the impact of their chemical usage on their children. ‘What are you going to give your kids to eat? Poison?’ one activist said. The strategy was both ethically problematic (relying on shame to persuade) and misguided. As Smith (2009) notes, policymakers and those crafting development interventions tend to treat people's current practices as though they are ignorant and amoral, overlooking how thoughtful, ethical and pragmatic everyday practices can be. Similarly, the activists in my study assumed farmers’ agri-chemical usage was motivated only by greed or laziness, overlooking that farmers’ agri-chemical use was part of ‘what one does’ – the local das Man. Their way of ‘getting on with things’ was not a guilty aberration but was both culturally conventional and purposive, informed by its own normativity. Farmers were not only using chemicals to become rich but for-the-sake-of being good parents – raising money to pay for children's education and other expenses. A common motivation for resource-intensive agriculture in the global South is to educate children so that they will find non-agricultural employment and escape the hardships of agricultural labour (Verkaart et al., 2018).

Nonetheless, disaffection with dominant farming practices is real. Conditions of significant distress have prevailed across much of rural India for some time (Reddy and Mishra, 2009). Excessive agri-chemical use and other intensive agricultural practices have become associated with indebtedness, declining profitability, ecological deterioration and increased rates of human disease (Brown, 2018). Moreover, activists’ claims regarding the adverse impacts of agri-chemicals on food taste and human health, while scientifically contentious, resonate with some rural people's lived experience (Nichols, 2022). These factors have made many within agricultural communities receptive to alternative, non-chemical approaches to farming (Brown, 2018; Münster, 2018). Münster (2018: 751) contends that when farmers experiment with these new approaches, it has ontological significance:

Through tinkering with alternative technologies and practices they are performing an alternative rural reality of mutualism and abundance.

This performance of alternative realities occurs in various ways. When farmers prepare microbe-rich bio-inputs, for example, they learn to see soil not just as a passive receptacle for fertiliser but a vital community of diverse organisms (Münster, 2021). By developing relations of care with non-human others – such as cows, whose manure and urine is used in the preparation of bio-inputs – farmers are enlisted in an ontology of mutualism and togetherness (Münster, 2017; Vlasov et al., 2023). Such ontologies may draw not only on scientific knowledge but also on diverse – often latent, marginalised – cultural and religious understandings that become woven into practice. The cultivation of skills in organic farming may draw on these diverse ways of being to disclose new agrarian worlds. From an ontology in which agrarian systems are seen in terms of inputs and outputs, a new perspective emerges, recognising a dynamic community of human and non-human actors. Within this community, human activity is not only meaningful insofar as it maximises efficiency (as in ‘technicity’) but insofar as it contributes to facilitating (the restoration of) ecological abundance. Skills disclose these new worlds not as a singular act but as carriers of meanings and purposes that precede any particular performance – of ideas and interpretations of being, developed within collective structures. Skills are always-already for-the-sake-of making possible particular forms of living and being – and the meanings of natural farming skills have been developed through social movements and the practices of preceding farmers, scientists, activists and other members of dynamic communities of practice. By exploring how farmers move from one set of meaningful practices (chemically intensive farming for-the-sake-of upward mobility) to another (natural farming for-the-sake-of restoring community and ecological health), I illustrate the paper's claims about the significance of disruption to purposive activity to the disclosure of new (potentially, more sustainable) worlds.

In what follows, I draw on a more recent study, conducted from 2018 to 2020 in the state of Himachal Pradesh, in the Indian Himalayas. This study focused on people attempting to develop skills for alternative livelihoods through involvement in government-sponsored training programs – including in organic farming. The research involved an initial set of interviews at the training site – which explored reasons for enrolling, experiences of training and plans for the future – and then more extensive interviews and ethnographic engagements approximately one year later, which focused on some of the social and personal impacts of acquiring and attempting to apply these skills. In the case of organic farmers, interviews considered why trainees wanted to shift to organic cultivation and challenges of transitioning. Rather than assuming trainees’ prior ‘unsustainable’ practices (‘chemical farming’) were amoral, I start from the assumption of an existing set of meaningful practices, whose meaning is nonetheless dislocated by unexpected changes, prompting experiments with new styles of skilful coping. Here, I present two vignettes from this larger study which illustrate how acquiring skills in organic farming both (a) expresses a set of concerns that may be understood as Heideggerian anxiety and (b) have the effect of disclosing new ways of being. In the cases presented, it is important to resist individualist interpretations: it is not as if the singular skilled performances of these individual practitioners should be regarded as, by themselves, disclosing new ontologies. The point is, rather, how they pick up and bring into focus ontologies latent within marginalised practices – which typically have longer histories – and potentially become ontologically significant insofar as they resonate with others and become socially normalised.

Kamala: Skills to Mend Dislocated Coping

Kamala's ³ everyday engagements were compelled by a variety of concerns. My interactions with her suggested three were particularly prominent. First, she was concerned with finding viable agrarian livelihoods. Like most women in rural Himachal Pradesh, she had grown up immersed in agriculture, engaging in farming alongside her parents since childhood. The harsh realities of precarious sources of subsistence made her attentive to new ways to increase agricultural production and income to support her family. To enhance yields, she and her family farmed using chemical fertilisers. She was also alert to new crops to adopt that might increase their income. Second, Kamala was concerned with the health and well-being of her family – having been socialised, as is typical in North India, to have a strong sense of familial responsibility, which only increased after her marriage and the birth of her two children. When asked about her hopes for the future she did not – as many male interviewees – describe a personal agenda, but said, rather, ‘taking care of children and the elders’. Third, Kamala was engaged with Hindu nationalist concerns. She had grown up in a context of rising Hindu nationalism and regularly watched TV programs that suggested much was wrong with the modern way of life and that a return to ‘Indian traditions’ was necessary. Kamala became involved in a Hindu nationalist organisation, through which she taught classes for local children about aspects of ‘Hindu culture’. In this way, various social logics embedded and normalised in the local social context – from patriarchal gender norms to politicised Hinduism – shaped the concerns and priorities that Kamala picked up as purposive orientations towards practice. These concerns ‘called’ Kamala in ways they might not have for others. Men in Kamala's village were unlikely compelled to take up concerns for familial care in the same way. Hindu nationalist concerns, though increasingly woven into the logic of everyday practice across much of North India (Narayan, 2021), still often are experienced as more compelling by upper caste Hindus (like Kamala), whose privilege they often justify and reinforce.

These purposive orientations informed and organised Kamala's everyday skilled practice. Being a good Hindu nationalist, a good mother and a good farmer went hand-in-hand and were not neatly separable: they were interwoven considerations as she went about her routines. Ruptures began to appear between them, however, when the Hindu nationalist broadcaster that she regularly watched began airing programs implicating agri-chemicals in a range of diseases. Sections of the Hindu nationalist movement have been drawn to organic farming discourses in recent decades, particularly for their opposition to ‘Western’ agribusiness and veneration of cows and Indian agricultural traditions. Hindu nationalist promoters of ‘natural farming’ often valorise traditional agrarian ways of being and knowing which they claim have been marginalised by colonialism and globalisation, hence in some ways encouraging alternative ontologies, though often in ways that can be exclusionary for those not seen to belong to their ‘Hindu nation’ (see Münster, 2021; Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). Given that their claims of marginalised agrarian ontologies are not entirely without basis in people's lived experience, it is unsurprising that they have generated a response from some farmers, like Kamala, for whom these articulations dislocated everyday coping. Like broken equipment, aspects of Kamala's world that seemed normal began to stand out. She started to notice the number of people in her family and community who were suffering from serious illnesses and that many young women were having failed pregnancies. She experienced these health conditions as resulting from agri-chemical usage, which called into question her for-the-sake-of-which: if she was working to secure the well-being of her family, how could this be legitimate if her source of livelihood was making them sick? While this could have been a momentary thought experiment, it became a persistent concern for Kamala, because Hindu nationalist activism was already part of her everyday practice at a time when Hindu nationalist critiques of agrichemicals were becoming more strident. The more she tried to align her political practice with her social and economic practices, the more uneasy she felt. Anxiety arose because of incompatibilities between the imperatives of different practices that made up her everyday life. Yet, Kamala felt that many of those who criticised chemical agriculture could not provide alternatives: they could not give her credible answers when she asked how non-chemical farming could deliver an adequate livelihood. Thus, instead of giving rise to a new mode of being, these critiques of chemical agriculture just led Kamala to feel ill-at-ease within her present one. ‘We had knowledge [of the problem]’, she lamented, ‘but no option’. In the absence of an alternative way of being-in-the-world, anxiety persisted.

A turning point came when one of Kamala's family's contacts told her about an upcoming organic farming training at the local agricultural extension centre. She enrolled in the training, in which she learnt both the theory of organic farming and participated in hands-on demonstrations of the preparation of biological fertilisers, pesticides and seed treatment, as well as key practices like mulching. Attending training and acquiring these skills meant that Kamala had gone from having ‘knowledge’ of the link between agri-chemicals and disease to ‘an option’: a set of capabilities for a different way of living, which would allow her to feel more comfortable with her everyday practice. Much as Münster (2018) described elsewhere in India, her capabilities in natural farming made her experience the world differently. Things ‘showed up’ for her that previously were not significant. While she used to wash her cows’ urine away with water, she now had practices to collect it, experiencing it as a vital input, full of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which she can use in preparing biofertilisers. Similarly, other forms of organic ‘waste’ – such as crop residues – no longer appeared as ‘waste’ but as valuable materials for mulching.

A year after her organic training, Kamala had incrementally gained experience and confidence that these capabilities could provide a viable way of being that was compatible with her social roles, serving and caring for her family. Her skilled practices quickly became normalised in her community; part of a new sense of ‘what one does’ (das Man). She notes that ‘farmers learn through practicals’ and that the most powerful aspect of her practice was its ‘demonstration effect’ (see Jeffrey & Dyson, 2020). Her skilled practices ‘disclosed a world’, not just in the sense that they gave people an ‘option’ but also by demonstrating a way of being in which concern for environmental toxicity is an embodied practice and social expectation. When Kamala hears discussions within the village about disease, she is quick to tell people that diseases are increasing because of chemical usage that they should also enrol for training to learn how to farm organically. Many, she says, started following her lead, gaining faith (vishvas) both through observing others’ success and knowing that free training is available. Not just discursive persuasion but observation and mimesis of skilled performances were gradually shifting prevailing ways of being in the village.

Lakshman: From Theoretical Knowledge to New Ontologies

In Kamala's case, organic farming skills enabled the restoration of an ontology that was under threat of decoherence. It was ‘restored’ rather than ‘transformed’ in that although organic farming skills facilitated new ways of seeing, the basic dispositions she brought to her practice remained those preceding: concern for livelihood, family and Hindu nationalist values. Yet, can new skills also inaugur new ontologies, new styles of being-in-the-world, new ways of experiencing and valuing reality? To explore this possibility, I offer the vignette of Lakshman, a man in his 40s, whose acquisition of organic farming skills were more disruptive to his basic ontological dispositions and opened possibilities for different ways of being. If Kamala's story relates to questions Heidegger posed in Being and Time – on how the purposive dispositions inherent in everyday practice can become ‘unstuck’ through anxiety – Lakshman's story speaks more to the concerns that Heidegger engaged in his later work – on how dominant ontological ‘styles’ might be fundamentally problematic and the need to inaugur new ontologies.

Lakshman's case foregrounds the importance of in situ practical learning experiences. I suggest that – in keeping with the Heideggerian perspective – new skills may form alternative ontologies and ways of valuing through meaningful encounters with entities in their situated contexts (see Greaves and Read, 2015). Such encounters are often marked by resistances and failures which spotlight the inadequacies of current modes of being-in-the-world. This suggests the skills required for ontological metamorphoses cannot be imparted exclusively through theoretical classes – practical encounters and transformations of practice are key.

Lakshman grew up with his family close to the Bhel Valley – a locality in which farmers have practiced commercial and chemically intensive agriculture for generations. Lakshman's family had accumulated surpluses through such agriculture which allowed them to invest in education and occupy a relatively privileged social and economic position within their locality. Lakshman himself had attained Masters qualifications. He also spent more than five years living and working in the Middle East. Tired of life abroad, however, he returned to his home village with the intention of starting new agricultural livelihoods. To this end, he had two advantages acquired while abroad: savings to invest and what he described as a ‘world-view’ – a capacity for seeing connections between events in his village and broader issues in the region and the world. Lakshman was interested in demonstrating that although he was returning to agriculture, he wouldn’t be ‘just farming’. He would be farming with a different sensibility to that of others in his village – more innovative and with greater awareness of the issues in contemporary agriculture.

Lakshman distinguished his mode of farming by adopting organic techniques, constructing polyhouses for growing off-season vegetables and starting an apple orchard. He took training as an agricultural educator and hosted training camps on his farm. Lakshman's acquisition and performance of agricultural skills thus were not only for-the-sake-of improving his agricultural production; Lakshman was also developing his reputation. He sharply contrasted his engagements with skill programs from those of his peers. ‘Most people are just chasing subsidies’ he said, referring to the practice of acquiring training certificates to claim government hand-outs. He asserted that in future, trainings should only be offered to ‘those intent on doing something [jo kuchh karein]’, like himself. Lakshman was also actively networking with influential social and political actors in the region, suggesting a possible interest in seeking political office, or other leadership roles.

Lakshman's acquisition of organic farming skills did not stem from anxiety in the same way as Kamala's. His projects put to work a set of pre-existing meanings and were for-the-sake-of achieving social and political goals whose legitimacy had not been called into question. They were part of his efforts to (re)establish a meaningful social identity after a substantial time spent outside the village. The ontology expressed in his activity was one in which there are meaningful differences between innovators who will ‘do something’ (‘jo kuchh karein’), and those who do not – a view resonant with capitalist ‘technicity’. The meaning of the skills he acquired was subsumed to an instrumentalist for-the-sake-of-which and the opportunities to develop and apply his skills were structured by socio-economic privilege. Yet, in the process of putting to work the skills he acquired, Lakshman encountered resistances from non-human entities, which created openings for different ways of doing, seeing, being and valuing.

Lakshman's first attempts to apply what he had learnt in training were in the manner of following a set of instructions derived from guidebooks and lectures. Yet, he soon discovered that to practice natural farming skilfully requires a heightened attentiveness to local ecology and responsiveness to unique local conditions that cannot be ‘read off’ from a manual (see Ingold, 2000; Patchett and Mann, 2018). Even when using the biopesticide formulae he had been provided, discontinuing use of chemical pesticides led to significant loss. In the early summer, insects proliferated to such an extent that bio-pesticides alone could not control them. Insects consumed the flowers of his leguminous crops, dramatically reducing yield. During the following season, Lakshman was more aware of the breeding cycle of local insects and so developed a strategy. He sowed the crop later, so that by the time insect populations were at their peak, the flowers would not yet have grown.

This time we have also planted chickpeas and there are no flowers on them yet; we planted them late. So that when the insects come and attack, there will be no flowers to eat. So, they will not come here and lay eggs. And when they won’t lay eggs, it will not be spoiled.

By shifting the timing of sowing, the insects that did appear could be easily removed.

Losing his first organic crop disrupted Lakshman's ability to get on with things – and was an embarrassing blemish on his image as an innovator. If his skill acquisition was initially subsumed to his project of re-establishing himself in village society, his loss called an aspect of this project into question, prompting reflection on his style of coping. In developing new skills – including an increased disposition towards attentiveness and responsiveness to local events – Lakshman was also learning to see the world of insects and local ecology differently. Insects have imperatives of their own and the appropriate orientation, rather than to manage/kill them through sprays, was to adjust his skilful coping so that his plants could flourish despite them – an ontology of negotiated co-existence (Münster, 2017; Vlasov et al., 2023). This was a shift from Heidegger's ‘technicity’ to ‘poiesis’ – a mode of being in which entities are to be nurtured, allowed to come forth and express their own unique essence (Heidegger, 1933, 1954). Lakshman noted that he is now more attentive to local ecology: to when leaves and flowers are budding in the forests – as signs that insects will be proliferating soon. Knowing whether this inaugured a fundamental change in ontology for Lakshman would require a longer-term engagement; yet, clearly, the experience of disruption prompted reflection and opened possibilities for new ways of doing, seeing and being-in-the-world.

Lakshman stated that these skills and strategies – of attentiveness and adjusting the timing of sowing – were not taught in the organic farming training. However, he was adamant that even if it was taught, it would not have been enough. Some things, he said, must be learnt through experience – specifically, through loss:

[These things] can be taught, but even if you teach me, I will not listen to it. When I take a loss, then I will believe it… There will be a loss the first time but the second time I will take care of it… [Loss] is a big teacher! Because we don't want any loss a second time.

Loss was a disruption to Lakshman's style of skilful coping profound enough as to prompt experiments with new ways of being. His experience highlights that theoretical knowledge – of the type one could ‘read off’ as a set of instructions – does not become meaningful until the object of knowledge is encountered in practice. His experience also highlights Heidegger's (1927) point that we tend to reflect on the properties of things – and of our practices of engaging them – only when there is an interruption to the flow of ongoing coping: when something has gone wrong and needs correcting – in Lakshman's case, after taking a loss. Disruptions draw attention to practices and how they are not working, which provides scope for adjustment. The skilled practitioner is not only one who engages in a flow state but one who is capable of reflecting on that flow state when resistances are encountered and making necessary adjustments (see Ingold, 2000). This is true of how we make sense of everyday problems but can also be true of entire ‘styles’ of being. It is only at the point when one encounters resistance and failures in one's ordinary mode of skilful coping that the question of one's interpretation of being arises. Attempts to teach a different style of ‘skilful coping’ through theoretical modalities of instruction or purely discursive interventions have value insofar as they provide a resource that can be drawn on when skilful coping breaks down – but it is not likely to result in a new style of being-in-the-world until that breakdown occurs.

It should be added that, compared to Kamala's case, it is somewhat more questionable whether the practices Lakshman enacted would reverberate socially within his local milieu and disclose an ontology capable of becoming socially embedded. His position of relative economic privilege allowed him to experiment and absorb losses in ways likely unavailable to poorer farmers – reiterating observations of the broader sustainable farming movement in India – and indeed, elsewhere – being dominated by well-off farmers (Brown, 2018). On the other hand, due to his influential position within local social networks, it is possible that the alternative style of being he disclosed through his farming practice might be made available to others who experience similar disruptions and are similarly receptive to alternative styles of being.

Conclusion

There are at least three ways in which a Heideggerian perspective can enrich understandings of sustainability at the scale of everyday practice. First, where there is a tendency in policy circles and some sustainability research to assume current, ‘unsustainable’ practices are unthoughtful, amoral and hence potentially mutable through rational dialogue (Smith, 2009), Heidegger's (1927) perspective highlights how practices are always inflected with normative, socially embedded meanings. Everyday ‘skilful coping’ (Dreyfus, 1991) puts to work a set of purposive dispositions, pressing into the future in ways that reflect prevailing cultural understandings of ‘what life is all about’. As such, without significant disruption, such practices tend to resist change – not just because they are habitual or easy but because they are part of ongoing projects of meaning-making and identity construction. My research on farmers transitioning to organic farming suggests that condescendingly telling farmers to ‘think of their families’ before using agri-chemicals neglects that ‘chemical farmers’ practices are already purposive and meaningful – concern for children's futures are often already embedded within them. Attempts to shift practice must be more attentive to pre-existing meanings.

Second, Heidegger's (1927) examinations of disruptions to absorbed skilled practice and his notion of ‘anxiety’ help explain how conventional practices might change as they become less adapted to circumstances. They suggest that more than discursive interventions, concerns for sustainability may become meaningful where they unsettle the future-orientation of everyday skilful coping and the ontological coherence this provides (Myers, 2014). While intellectual reflection on sustainability may not be without consequence, changes in the orientation of skilful practice (which, from Heidegger's perspective, is the foundation of ontology), disrupts existing understandings of being. These may take various forms, from dramatic disruptions – such as natural disasters or ecological collapse – to more subtle disruptions, such as the experience of Heideggerian anxiety. The latter involves the erosion of the meanings of practices as their future projection has been gradually recognised as unviable. Anxiety may be triggered not only by significant events (Jackson and Everts, 2010) but also by factors that gradually erode the purposive orientations of practices: their ‘for-the-sake-of-which’. For Kamala, anxiety arose when repeated confrontation with perceived health effects of chemical agriculture made her question the value of a livelihood that was intended to secure her family's future; for Lakshman, it arose when failures made him question his project of constructing an identity as an innovator. In both cases, disruptions and anxiety led to recognition of the unsustainability of current practices and a quest for a meaningful way forward.

Third, Heidegger provides a toolkit for exploring different ways of being-in-the-world, both in the possibilities for authenticity latent in anxiety (Heidegger, 1927) and in specifying alternative modes of being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1933; 1956). Anxiety causes interruptions to the taken-for-granted status of current reality. What seemed an unmoving normative foundation for practice is experienced as contingent: the ‘equipmental totality’ may be seen to be failing to provide life with a meaningful orientation. One may tinker with it by searching for new ways of being that provide a more stable foundation. In the case of ecological anxiety, one may seek to develop practices that address manifest problems and hence allow them to get on with their daily purposive activity more-or-less as before: restoring a broken for-the-sake-of-which. This is what Kamala did by developing skills in organic farming. These skills enabled her to preserve her normative horizons (caring for family, preserving culture and identity) which were until then under threat from anxiety. Developing these new skills disclosed the world a little differently – with materials previously seen as waste ‘showing up’ as vital inputs (see also Münster, 2021) – while not altering fundamental dispositions. Yet, one may also respond to anxiety with radically new orientations towards being – in which those things ones’ life is ‘for-the-sake-of’ may also be re-thought, developing new goals and valuations of the kind of activities that are worth pursuing, which in turn reworks how entities ‘show up’. Lakshman's experience gestured in that direction. His experience of loss unsettled his project of entrepreneurship and reputation-building and suggested possibilities for different ways of being-in-the-world, with a more open, nurturing, non-interfering stance towards non-human entities. Such a stance resonates closely with what Heidegger (1933; 1956) in his later works described as poiesis, a disposition of ‘allowing things to be’ (see Glazebrook, 2013; Heikkurinen, 2019).

There are, however, limitations to directly imposing Heideggerian perspectives on social observations. In particular, there are totalising tendencies in Heidegger which do not accord with the complexity of actually existing social reality. There may, therefore, be merit in bringing Heidegger into dialogue with theorists who recognise the pluri-vocal nature of what Heidegger describes as das Man (‘the one’). Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) theory of dislocation suggests different logics permeate the social field, constituting each other even as they contradict each other. I suggest remaining with Heidegger in thinking of these ‘logics’ not so much as semiotic ‘discourses’ (as Laclau and Mouffe do) but as imperatives of practice – of the different temporal, purposive compulsions driving aspects of our socially embedded lives. As Kamala's case illustrated, life is often cross-hatched with contradictory compulsions – in her case, between performing social expectations to make an agricultural livelihood through chemical farming; and the expectations on her as a good Hindu (nationalist) to respect nature and tradition by farming without chemicals. These contradictions caused different interpretations of entities to emerge, and ultimately an experience of anxiety which drove a search for alternatives. This suggests an alternative perspective on Heideggerian anxiety as emerging when the contradictions of social life call into question one's stance upon being.

The postcolonial context of the present study spotlights how alternative modes of being also have their conditions of possibility in a pluri-vocal social field. After an experience of anxiety, what one ‘picks up’ to construct new ontologies are often existing practices whose status under conditions of capitalist technicity had become marginal. Such marginal practices are more visible in postcolonial settings, where the dominance of capital/technicity over the social field is incomplete. Practices of care, religious and nationalist compulsions, as well as more incipient ontologies emerging from more-than-human encounters (as in Tsing, 2015), were taken up by the participants in this study as they attempted to find new ways of getting on with things. While Kamala and Lakshman occupied relatively privileged positions within local networks of influence, future research may consider how more marginal ontologies are taken up in response to ecological anxiety – a topic discussed in the Indian context in recent research on Dalit environmentalism, for example (Prasad, 2022).

Thinking with and beyond Heidegger in the manner outlined above suggests an approach to theorising sustainability as emerging from disruptions to the temporal orientations and meanings of everyday practices. Such theorising may entail sensitivity to the potential modes of being expressed through experiments with new styles of skilled practice or in the revival of old styles (Rinkinen, 2013). In suggesting styles of ‘skilful coping’ affect how the world is disclosed, the Heideggerian perspective moves beyond representational interventions and gestures towards possibilities of sustainable modes of being emerging within everyday practice.