Relating with More-than-Humans

“[This book’s] chapters document and analyse a wide variety of ritualized practices in which privileged connections with more-than-human entities pertaining to the natural environment – plants, animals, minerals, the essential solvent for life on Earth, the Earth itself, and Nature as a whole – are put into effect. In doing so, they emphasize the growing importance of such entities in contemporary ceremonial. In complementary fashion, and to my mind more significantly, they also bear witness to the key role ritual plays in bringing these beings to body and mind.”
— Michael Houseman, Anthropologist and Professor Emeritus, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université PSL, France
Within the social sciences, other-than-human being’s agency has often been denied and interbeings relationships have not been fully addressed. However, many indigenous worldviews and Western contemporary spiritual practices are shaping a very different reality, with various attempts to share the world with non-human beings, animate or inanimate, creating forms of relationships to “the living”.This edited volume documents how humans deal with non-human entities in a large variety of cultural contexts. It focuses on ritual processes and how ritual creativity is mobilised to invent new ways of relating with more-than-humans. Comprising nine case studies, the volume is divided into three main sections that address successively daily interactions, political implications, and spiritual engagements. Cooperative interactions, kinship relations, senses of belonging, traditional healing techniques, non-human beings’ legal personality attribution, transformative experiences, and phenomenological relationalities are examined in various locations: West Africa, Buryatia, Estonia, Finland, France, Mexico, Nepalese Himalayas, Sweden and Wales.Jean Chamel  is Senior SNSF Researcher in the Institute of Geography and Sustainability at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Yael Dansac is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
Chapters "Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World—An Introduction" and "Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.