instal the new Tangible Software Solutions 07.2023

This talk suggests that a return to the idea that life is forged in the overlap of generations, in ongoing relations of collaboration, might not only ameliorate some of our anxieties, but also offer a lasting foundation for coexistence. Historically, this is anomalous, yet it is mostly taken for granted as an unquestioned backdrop to discussions of evolution, life and death, longevity, extinction, sustainability, education, climate change, and a host of other matters of intense contemporary concern. The root of much of our difficulty, when it comes to facing the future, lies in the way we have come to think about generations, as layers succeeding one another. I shall contrast styles of mutual relationality in animistic or polytheistic cosmologies with those of monotheism, and suggest that the current global loss of biodiversity is paralleled by a loss of the diversity. Homer's gods, made obsolete by the Orthodox church or turned into local folklore, have adapted themselves into literary and psychoanalytic archetypes far beyond the Greek world. Among Sora of tribal India, the landscape and cosmos were entirely ancestorised and it was the dead who set the emotional tone of relations with the living Christian and Hindu conversion now blocks relations with one's own ancestors in favour of more distant gods, while emptying the immediate environment of relatable entities altogether. Among nomads of Arctic Siberia, spirits of places and animals partly survived the Soviet state's destruction of the shamans who managed relations with them, and they still regulate human movement.

Religious change erodes some relations and creates others, and conversion or enforced atheism can do this suddenly, leading to ontological confusion and emotional derangement.

How can we think that non-human entities resemble us, and that they want human-like relations with us? How does one regulate such unstable contacts with such intangible realities? And what happens to these when societies change religion? I shall examine some examples of mutual desire and neediness between humans and a range of gods and spirits, expressed through genres of communion such as sacrifice, prayer, and sexual intercourse. 'Homer made his humans into gods for their strength, and his gods into humans by making them suffer conflict, revenge, tears and bondage' (paraphrased from Longinus, On the Sublime, 1st century CE, section 9.7).

Instal the new Tangible Software Solutions 07.2023