The Listening Land: an exercise
Elizabeth Povinelli begins her article ‘Do Rocks Listen?’ with this vignette from her experience in Aboriginal Australia:
One hot, sticky November day in 1989, a large part of the Belyuen Aboriginal community was gathered on the coast of the Cox Peninsula, across from the Darwin Harbour, to participate in one of the last days of the Kenbi Land Claim. Five of us – myself, Marjorie Bilbil, Ruby Yarrowin, Agnes Lippo, and Ann Timber – stood back from the hustle of microphones and notepads and the hassle of nonstop questions from government officials for as well as against our side. The other four women ranged in age from 38 to 70 (I was 27) and came from a variety of Dreaming (totemic) backgrounds. We stood listening to Betty Billawag describing to the land commissioner and his entourage how an important Dreaming site nearby, Old Man Rock, listened to and smelled the sweat of Aboriginal people as they passed by hunting, gathering, camping, or just mucking about. She outlined the importance of such human Dreaming/environmental interactions to the health and productivity of the countryside. At one point Marjorie Bilbil turned to me and said, "He can't believe, eh, Beth?" And I answered, "No, I don't think so, not him, not really. He doesn't think she is lying. He just can't believe himself that that Old Man Rock listens (1995: 505).
Placing this vignette in context, Povinelli explains that in traditional Aboriginal belief ‘all matter (human and animal bodies, objects, and environments) is conceived as the congealed labor of ancestral Dreaming beings.’ Moreover, for the Belyuen community with whom she works, humans, animals, objects and environments are ascribed subjective intentionality, so that Dreamings (such as water holes, and other formations in the landscape) can listen, smell, and react. They have their preferences too. ‘The familiar sounds and smells of local people please and calm the countryside, creating within it an abiding affection for these same people and a willingness to provide the foods, goods, and signs they are seeking.’ Unfamiliar or unwelcome presences, ("im different"), however, ‘can cause Dreamings and the landscape more generally to react in a dramatic fashion’ so that for instance ‘in a usually placid harbor, waves suddenly surge up and swamp a sea hunter's dinghy; or, after women have had no luck finding crab in what is usually a productive mangrove, winds rage on the coast sending blinding sand.’ To answer the question Povinelli poses in the title of her article, for the Belyuen Aboriginal community, Old Man Rock does listen, as do other Dreamings. Povinelli suggests, however, that the land commissioner in her vignette exhibits a Western ‘deep disbelief that Dreamings can listen in anything but a metaphorical sense’ (ibid: 506).
With a nod to Povinelli’s article, Julie Cruikshank (2005) entitles her book on the glaciers of the Mount Saint Elias ranges in Alaska Do Glaciers Listen? She describes indigenous American attitudes to the glaciers, where there are clear parallels with Australian Aboriginal concepts of landscape. She writes, for example, that in Athapaskan and Tlingit oral tradition, ‘glaciers take action and respond to their surroundings. They are sensitive to smells and they listen’ (ibid: 4). Not only do they sense, but they deliberate and respond: ‘They make moral judgments and they punish infractions’ (ibid). She elaborates: ‘Glaciers… are characterized by sentience. They listen, pay attention, and respond to human behaviour; especially to indiscretion’ (ibid 25). She quotes an indigenous American named Deikinaak speaking to a man named John Swanton at Sitka, Alaska in 1904: ‘In one place Alsek River runs under a glacier. People can pass beneath in their canoes, but, if anyone speaks while they are under it, the glacier comes down on them. They say that in those times this glacier was like an animal, and could hear what was said to it’ (ibid: vi). Another source, Chief Isaac, attributed the tragedy at least in part to the victim’s poor judgment, warning of the consequences of joking about glaciers within their hearing (ibid: 74). The belief in the sentience and agency of glaciers is described as being at odds with the attitudes of European colonists, who saw the glaciers as fundamentally inanimate.
The notion that landscape formations might listen is certainly not usually associated with ‘Western’ patterns of thought. The British painter Paul Nash describes a childhood experience of entering a woodland and feeling that ‘in the wood everything seemed to be listening’ (Nash 1949: 40, cited Hogg 2019: 170). However, Nash is describing an impression, an atmosphere or fleeting sensation here, and is writing in a poetic register rather articulating an entrenched belief about the actual capacities of the wood itself. But suppose that, for a moment, and as part of an experiment, we did decide to act as if the landscape was capable of listening? What might the effect be upon our behaviour?
Go for a walk, either on your own or with a partner. Take it as a principle that the land, trees, plants, rocks and so on can hear you even if they may not react. How, if at all, does your behaviour change? It’s fine if you find yourself being silent, and fine too if the exercise becomes ridiculous and you find yourself, say, swearing at and insulting the landscape for fun. Just make a note of what you did, and how if at all you were affected by your giving, or lending, the land the capacity to listen.
I am not sure what, if anything, I am expecting to result from this listening exercise. Probably nothing. But I suppose I wonder whether this and other forms of ‘acting as if’ could support the emergence of new forms of environmental consciousness. I have no idea what these forms of consciousness might actually be like, though, or of whether or not they might ultimately be desirable…
References
Cruikshank, J. 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Toronto: University of British Columbia Press.
Hogg, Bennett. 2019. “Geographies of Silence.” In The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, edited by Michael Bull, 166-175. London and New York: Routledge.
Nash, P. 1949. Outline: an Autobiography and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Povinelli, E. 1995. ‘Do rocks listen? The cultural politics of apprehending Australian Aboriginal labor’. American Anthropologist 97(3): 505-519.