Burning the Bull

Abstract

The environmental exploitation threatening human survival is, in part, a consequence of disregard for the aliveness of matter. This enquiry locates an abandonment of animist and traditional beliefs alongside a rejection of the sentience of other-than-human matter. The focus of the enquiry is a ritual performance at Viaporin Kekri (2018), a harvest festival in Finland which celebrates a traditional, polytheistic mythology. The enquiry uses the author’s relational encounters and subjective experience of cultural phenomena and translates this experience into writing. The enquiry seeks to understand the changing meanings of traditional beliefs as they are expressed in performance, and proposes that contemporary ritual performances might arouse our awareness of the sentience of matter, leading to better stewardship of all of the earth.

Keywords:

• animism
• Anthropocene
• ceremony
• ecology
• relational ontologies
• Finland

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I benefited from discussions with Juha Nirkko and students from MAA School of Art, Helsinki. Thank you to Grace Sims, Xan Colman, Dr Anne Colman and Professor Helena Grehan for valuable feedback. My residency at HIAP was supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, and a private donor.

Notes

1 Viaporin is the Finnish name for Suomenlinna, which was used until 1918.

2 Soundscape commissioned, improvised and performed for the ceremony by Heikki Lindgren. Throat singing, a specialized vocal technique, is the term Lindgren uses to describe the vocals in the soundscore.

3 This is the separation phase described by Turner in agrarian festivals, when all social activity moves from agricultural work to the tasks of the new season: ‘They have been ritually prepared for a whole series of changes in the nature of cultural and ecological activities to be undertaken’ (Turner 1982: 25).

4 I acknowledge there are problems with the nomenclature ‘animism’. I choose to use animism when referring to historical usage, and otherwise use traditional or folk beliefs, and relational ontologies to describe beliefs in the agency and spiritual inhabitation of materiality.

5 See Bird-David (1999: 78) for more on the estrangement of human from nature emphasized in religion and science.

6 Many now dispute the binary between matter and intelligence, notably Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (2010), and one of the purposes of this writing is to draw attention to a non-canonical work that models an alternative ethical sensibility.

7 There are several examples of social relations between animal, human and landscape in research on Finnish traditional beliefs. Instances such as whereupon being excluded from its pack, a wolf took refuge with a human. Also in the research are examples of intuitive or mythic communication such as when a human knew he would not encounter a wolf when hunting because the spirit world had conveyed this to him (Helander-Renvall 2010: 50).

8 Explanation of the burning of the Kekri bull in this ceremony is minimal in materials about the ceremony. Juha Nirkko, the senior archivist at the Finnish Literature Society in personal communications says that though burning of bonfires is a traditional pre-modern harvest festival act with the very practical element of removal of waste, the burning of the effigy of Kekri is a modern phenomenon.

9 For example, in Australia, acknowledgement of the traditional custodians of the land is a formal statement performed by non-indigenous leaders at the commencement of an event. Welcome to Country is a ritual performed by indigenous elders in Australia at the commencement of an event, giving permission for the gathered assembly to be present on the land. A Welcome to Country ritual is customarily performed by Maori leaders in New Zealand.