October 17th, 2007
Wild Politics
I’ve been too politically discouraged lately to read much nonfiction, but last night I picked up Susan Hawthorne’s Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation, and Bio/Diversity and started glancing through it. Like all the best books, her arguments are too complex to excerpt well, but here’s part of her discussion of the meanings of “wild” to pique your interest:
These issues come to the fore when discussing “wilderness”. Tracts of land declared as wilderness areas by governments are frequently areas of traditional occupation of indigenous peoples, and it is a mistake to assume that there has been no imprint on the land of its traditional inhabitants. Wild plants used for medicinal purposes which are harvested by biodiversity prospectors on behalf of pharmaceutical companies are another case in point. The knowledge of their medical uses has almost always come from local indigenous populations. When there are profits to be made, the wild is perceived as “part of the public domain” and therefore freely exploitable; but after it has been “discovered” by the pharmaceutical industry, it becomes private property protected by US patent laws…
Wherever disengagement, dislocation and disconnection occur, there the wild is being tamed or co-opted. A utilitarian approach to politics, for example, allows for a moral disengagement, as the person justifies an action because of its end…Utilitarianism strips context from any situation. This philosophy is one of the most pervasive of the tools of western liberal individualism. Through revering utilitarianism, liberal democracies continue to regard the diversity matrix, the “other”, as their means to wealth, “freedom” and individual life satisfaction…Disconnection is what makes this objectification possible…
“Wild” also refers to rage and anger. Those of us with a politics informed by activism have much to be angry about in the real world: violence against women and children, poverty, and the increasing control of the state and transnational companies have over our bodies, our identities, our movements. Not to be wild would be tantamount to denial, apathy or resignation. Moreover, our anger can be turned to productive political ends. Wild politics activists can turn the situation around by constructing an ethic to live by; one that is nuanced enough to allow for local conditions, but which gives some guidance on how to treat one another. Wild politics provides enough leeway for humour and anger, hence steering clear of the charge of “political correctness”, and enables a broadly outlined political ethic grounded in the local, but which may be useful on the global level.
When I use the world “wild” I mean to capture the whole range of meanings, from wild as in angry or vicious, wild as in diverse, wide-ranging, rebellious; and wild in the way it is used idiomatically, comparable to cool, neat: wild, outside the barriers of control by the dominant party. I certainly do not mean to romanticise “wild nature” as a longed-for state of being. Rather, I want to draw out the political implications of “wild”.
But the idea of “wild” has also been misused, and detractors of the idea of wild politics may well point to the reconnection with the “wild” part of oneself so strongly promoted by New Age philosophy. The “wild woman” and “wild man” images of Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Robert Bly are two cases in point…Such injunctions from the popular culture to get in touch with the wild part of oneself are, in fact, misleading, since this “getting in touch” succeeds only in distancing people even further from themselves. Getting in touch through the culture of another, also demeans others. Having contacted another culture through the sanitised and commodified version offered by New Age gurus, those in search of themselves find only “plastic passions”, fake cultures, and tamed selves. The result is what I have called elsewhere “cultural voyeurism”, “spiritual voyeurism”…a commodified reality that bears little resemblance to the real world and real cultures. Bell points to the blending of different beliefs of Native Americans in the work of Lynne Andrews, who combines Lakota, Cree and Hopi as if they were one…
The search for meaning that so often ends, these days, in fake realities can be traced back to the sense of disconnection and rootlessness experienced by many contemporary people, in particular urban dwellers, but also those uprooted by war, natural disaster, political exile, or removed from families by governments, churches, or even, the seemingly innocuous purpose of education at a boarding school. Rootlessness arises because we grow up these days disconnected from the local. Global culture, from Disneyland to Coca-Cola, from baseball to the World Wide Web, influences us, distracts us from the world of our senses and from our local conditions. Overwhelmed by meaninglessness and powerlessness, we long for something more from our increasingly global culture. But my argument is that the quick fix, the appropriation of other cultures through shopping for meaning, is a dead end. It will not make western people more vital, nor help us make sense of the world. Nor can anyone do it alone. It will take commitment to relationship and co-operation across the many barriers which separate people. If enough people can make the imaginative leap, and connect imagination to responsible and respectful social behaviour, then perhaps some will be operating on the basis of a wild politics.
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Susan Hawthorne, Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation, and Bio/Diversity (Spinifex Press, 2002)
