Megaliths, material engagement, and the atmospherics of neo-lithic ethics: presage for the end(s) of tourism

Abstract

Climate change spells the end of tourism, and tourism is just one, and one of the least important, things to be so very near its end. This situation has emerged because of the global dominance of forms of material engagement that completely misunderstand the distribution of agency in the world. Framing the world as just an external human ‘resource’ diminishes the many forms of agency that elude, transcend, effect, facilitate and subvert human intentions. Even archetypically inanimate objects, such as stones, are actively constitutive of worlds, thoughts, and lives, including human lives, in myriad transformative ways. This lithic agency is illustrated in terms of the attraction that draws some to visit stone circles, and the atmospheres created by, and felt in, such places. This rather different understanding of a ‘visitor attraction’ and its ontological and ethical implications exposes some of the inadequate presumptions of our dominant form of life and its destructive atmospheric consequences at local and global scales. The paper employs Material Engagement Theory (MET), originating in archaeology and anthropology, as a way to understand the differences between the reductive assumptions of the Anthropocene and the redemptive possibilities of what it terms a neo-lithic ethics.

Keywords:

• Ethics
• Anthropocene
• atmospheres
• megaliths
• material engagement theory (MET)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term Anthropocene, which still awaits formal recognition as a new geological epoch, is commonly used to refer to that period where human agency (especially, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change).has become the dominant force impacting the Earth’s geology.

2 Even many modern ethical systems that explicitly regard themselves as environmental would also, on various grounds, e.g. their lacking a telos (Taylor, 1986) or their inability to ‘flourish’ (Attfield, 1991) deny rocks, mountains etc. per se, any ethical standing (see Smith, 2001 for a critique of such positions.)

3 Povinelli draws upon extensive anthropological work with Indigenous Australian cultures to develop a convincing critique of the tripartite Western ontological distinction between a) human agent b) animate beings and c) inanimate things. She argues that this Western construct has facilitated neo-liberal exploitation of the world. This division appears in many forms, for example, divisions between ethics / politics as a) a specifically human realm, b) biopolitics, as in Foucault, or in animal ethics) and c) an apolitical and amoral ‘geo-logic’. It also occurs, of course, in Heidegger’s (1995) famous, account of world-forming (human) Dasein, the ‘world-poor’ animal and the ‘worldless’ stone.

4 In this MacKay exemplified many others interested in agricultural improvement and / or wanting to turn a profit by demolishing monuments that had survived thousands of years. See, for example Burl’s (1979) account of the massive destruction of stone circles, monuments and barrows around Avebury from the 17th century onwards.

5 “UNESCO World Heritage status is both a considerable benefit, and a difficulty. Such status arguably attracts a greater level of visitors to Orkney’s World Heritage Sites, than would otherwise be the case.” (Orkney Volume, 2017: 20)

6 Which, of course, is why Moore (2015) argues that we should refer to this epoch not as the Anthropocene, which suggests that humans per se are generating this global change, but the capitalocene.

7 Which is not to say that some do not try to account for certain atmospheres through scientific discourses. For example, Brennan (2004) provides a rather reductive and unconvincing argument about the production and communication of certain atmospheres based on pheromones.

8 This emphasis on the exceptional nature of human agency is even present in explicit forms of materialism, like Marxism, where “the living, shaping fire” of human labor is regarded as the ‘active’ motor, of the historical dialectic that transforms a “slumbering” nature (Marx in Smith, 2001).

9 Leopold, of course, did not actually consider mountains capable of engaging in economic calculus or political debate, rather he asked us to consider the anthropic limitation of our Western way of thinking of ourselves as exceptional, as being above and outside of the ways the more-than-just-human world works. His work exemplifies what Cohen (2015, p. 9) refers to as, “an ecological project of thinking beyond anthropocentricty”, of “assuming a world irreducible to its human relations and not existing for any particular purpose” whilst stressing “alliance, continuity, and mutual participation over elemental solitariness and human exceptionalism”.

10 Though there are many myths and stories of walking megalithic stones.

11 In this sense MET is also closely aligned with various philosophical notions of a materially extended and distributed mind, for example, the work of Andy Clark (1997).

12 For a critique of Butcher’s ‘arguments’ see Smith (2009). As I pointed out in that article, Butcher explicitly associates himself with those circulating around an organization at one time known as the Revolutionary Communist Party that produced a magazine called Living Marxism (LM). “LM morphed, after losing a libel case concerning its accusation that ITN journalists had distorted the truth about film it shot of severely malnourished prisoners of war in Serbian concentration camps (Vulliamy, 2000) into several rather more innocuously named organizations, most notably the ‘Institute of Ideas’, launched in 2000 by previous editor of LM Claire Fox (aka Clare Foster) (lobbywatch, 2007)” and the ‘spiked’ web-site. Those contributing to these sites continue the LM tradition of contrarian politics, attacking environmentalism, supporting genetically modified foods, denying global warming and decrying anything that might constrain or oppose corporate capitalism. They were, for example, associated with this producing a notorious documentary for UK’s Channel 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Butcher’s book explicitly acknowledges the Institute of Ideas as inspirational and he has produced many articles for the spiked website. https://www.spiked-online.com/author/jim-butcher/. George Monbiot (2018) recently revealed that spiked has been surreptitiously funded by the Koch Brothers. It is, perhaps, not entirely surprising then that an “article in 2016, when Spiked received $170,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, attacked the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in which the Koch brothers have a major interest.” (Monbiot, 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mick Smith

Mick Smith is full professor jointly appointed between Environmental Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston Ontario. He is the author of An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity and Social Theory (SUNY), Against Ecological Sovereignty (Minnesotta) and (with Rosaleen Duffy) The Ethics of Tourism Development (Routledge).

Siobhan Speiran

Siobhan Speiran is completing her PhD on intersections of animal welfare and conservation in ecotourism in the School of Environmental Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston Ontario.

Peter Graham

Peter Graham teaches at the School of Community and Public Affairs and the Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability at Concordia. His PhD thesis entitled Traces of (Un-) Sustainability: Towards a Materially engaged ecology of mind was successfully defended in 2019 and is forthcoming as a book published by Peter Lang.