Adrian Ivakhiv on Relations and Pagan Religion

Lately I’ve been reading an excellent blog called Immanence. The author - philosopher, artist, scholar and professor of environmental studies Adrian Ivakhiv - regularly waxes insightful on everything from cinema and pagan religion to ontology and the flux and flurry of the strange universe we come from.

The following excerpt is from a recent debate between Adrian, Graham Harman and Levi Bryant on the many ways we can think about the nature of the kosmos (sheer brilliance in my opinion):

“What exactly is gained by calling these things "objects" that isn't already there when we call them by their (everyday, human-given) names and recognize their temporary, processual, and at the same time very specific nature? The latter is what Latour tries to do when he makes sense of the (planned but never built) Aramis transportation system in Paris or the pasteurization of France; it's what Haraway does with cyborgs and primatologists, what Cronon does with Chicago and White with the Columbia River, Tsing with Indonesian rainforests and Whatmore with global wildlife networks, Helmreich with microbial oceans, Protevi with the Columbine massacre and Hurricane Katrina, and DeLanda with the last thousand years of germs, languages, and cities. …[U]nless one puts an object in its context, one doesn't know the object; and when one does, that object becomes a meeting-point of so many other processes and flows.”

His book, Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (2001) is an enthusiastic discussion of human encounters and experiences of landscapes and places, where people inscribe their environment with meaning, and where people become canvases for the processes of nature. From the publisher:

Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.

In 2006 Adrian sat down with Krista Tippett, the host of a popular public radio program called Speaking With Faith. In it Adrian talks about his work on religion and sacred geography, and provides listeners with a sobering and imaginative perspective of the human love of the natural world.

Here is a transcript of Tippett’s introduction to the program, taken from the Speaking With Faith website:

The word "Pagan" is derived from a Latin word for country dweller or peasant. As early Christianity spread rapidly in the urban areas of the Roman Empire, Pagan became a negative term for those considered too backward to embrace monotheistic faith. In our day, Paganism and Neopaganism are umbrella terms for an array of new religious movements that revive ancient polytheistic ideas of Europe and the Middle East. Religious scholars and sociologists believe that Paganism and Neopaganism are on the rise globally, numbering perhaps from 1 to 3 million adherents. But many people who identify as Pagans privately are reluctant to do so in public. Others embrace Pagan ideas and rituals on a selective basis. And there is some overlap between Pagan faith and New Age spirituality, which touches as much as 20 percent of the U.S. population.

My guest today, Adrian Ivakhiv, is a professor of environmental thought and culture at the University of Vermont and the author of a scholarly study, Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. I spoke to him in 2006 As a young man, he was drawn to a defining impulse of Pagan traditions, their strong emphasis on ecology, the natural world, and a sense of place. This ecological emphasis runs across the vast spectrum of Pagan beliefs, which often revive practices from agrarian times and places, notably witchcraft or Wicca, the Celtic priestly order of Druids, and the Norse tradition of Asatru.

And Adrian Ivakhiv has also traced the pre-Christian roots and modern revival of Pagan ideas in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. His parents were World War II Ukrainian refugees to Canada. They raised him in churches and schools of their Eastern Rite Catholic tradition, a hybrid of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Adrian Ivakhiv's cultural identity, as he tells it, was also a hybrid dislocating experience.

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE RADIO PROGRAM (53mins): HERE

Also check out an interview with Adrian about Martin Heidegger and Environmental Philosophy: Here