Imagination and the More-Than-Human

By Mark Fettes.

A few months ago, at the COP15 conference on biodiversity in Montreal, Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis gave a talk.

Davis has spent a lifetime working in partnership with Indigenous people around the globe. His message at COP15 was the same one that he has been delivering for decades: that our ways of imagining the world shape who we are and how we act. “A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective deity will be a profoundly different human being from one brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined.”

Over more than two decades working with the Imaginative Education Research Group and more recently with CIRCE, I have noticed that people interested in imagination often frame it as an unambiguous good: a way to overcome fossilized habits of thinking and open up new possibilities for human flourishing. And of course such “waking up,” revelatory possibilities are real, as Maxine Greene, for one, has famously articulated in her essays on “releasing the imagination”.

Yet it seems obvious to me that imagination is equally implicated in the darkest aspects of human potential. To look at another human being and see something other than human is an imaginative act. To look at a 1000-year-old tree and see so many board feet of timber is an imaginative act. To believe that “the environment” is an inexhaustible source of materials for our needs and a bottomless sink for our waste is an imaginative act.

The temptation is to see all these as “failures” of imagination. But as Wade Davis says, the important question is not one of right and wrong; it is “the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people”. Imagination is of crucial importance because it shapes what we do. If we ignore imagination, or try to sanitize it, to claim it for our own purposes, we miss how it is rooted in a world of action and relationship that extends far beyond our conscious awareness and intentions.

In a chapter in the new edited collection Cultivating Imagination in Leadership, Sean Blenkinsop and I explore the implications of seeing imagination “as fundamentally more than human—as embedded in land and the intricate dance of ‘all our relations’.” This is a way of wresting imagination away from the self-enclosing tendencies of modern culture. In a sense, it implies the opposite of imagination as the free play of possibility. Rather, it can be a means of attunement to what the world is continually saying, all around us. It can open the gate of belonging.

Play and story are two ways in which imagination manifests itself in a culture. Modern Western culture has been playing at separation and self-sufficiency for a few centuries now, and most of our uses of imagination reflect that history. There is a risk, in wanting to see only the “positive” sides of imagination, the ones we agree with, that we reinscribe this human-centeredness. If there is a central theme linking all the diverse branches of the new CIRCE website, it’s an invitation to see imagination as a much vaster, wilder, more dangerous and more promising capacity than this.

In the hermeneutic way of thinking, understanding is held relationally. Our hope is that this blog will become a place of relational thinking and exchange, of generous conversation and playful exploration. And a place of both light and shadow, where “acts of true teaching and learning,” as David Jardine puts it, can be sung “in ways that lift and open the heart despite its sorrows.”

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